5 ways Spotify and Soundcloud could bring recognition to unknown artists

Dixon at DGTL; chose the photo, because it is cool

Any talented musician should get heard worldwide without an agency or resources, if the online tools are already in place. Spotify and Soundcloud already have 90% of them.

The catch is that the missing 10% is an ingredient spread over many smaller startups. With one collaboration between the great music startups, even jam session artists in local pubs could build loyal fans all over the world.

The graveyard of music tech startups. Although they failed, some of these had genuine solutions for the music world.

(I am tossing around these ideas purely for fun. I once listed for myself companies where I’d work, if money were never an issue. Those companies happened to be Vivino, Babbel, Peakon, Epidemic Sound, Soundcloud, and Spotify.)

Crowdsourced radio shows

On Soundcloud and Spotify, you can build your own “Station” — to discover tracks you like, you simply “Station” a song so that it automatically plays similar songs continuously. These are referred as their “radio show” features.

BUT, people have complained that these Station features lead to the same artist played over and over and over. (Mostly Rihanna, in this case.)

Interestingly, an old school radio show already took care of that problem, by using online voting. A nice example of how the digital world still has much to learn from the bricks-and-mortar world.

Jelli radio from 8 years ago was an early pioneer in crowdsourced radio

Imagine a couple of users set up a collaborative station — say, Trip Hop Mixes Station. Right as a song ends, hundreds vote immediately to decide between You are My Chocolate by Savage, Time is the Enemy by Quantic, and Toulouse by Nicky Romero (suggested by the algorithm). The dedicated fans would immediately veto away Toulouse as it does not belong in trip hop.

This step alone would give visibility to lesser known specialists in the genre, and not just repeat mainstream EDM for those who are not interested.

Residential music producers

A while ago, a group of Swedish entrepreneurs realized that the hassle of music licensing was getting too much for video production houses.

So they streamlined the process by directly and wholly owning the library of music sold to production houses. (Rather than merely be intermediaries.)

It saved the producers the problem of royalties, and it gave the musicians a regular and definite source of income (they get paid a monthly fee, and also a one-time fee for every track, guaranteed whether or not it gets broadcasted).

How Epidemic Sound explains its own business model

Immediately, this startup — Epidemic Sound — raised a large following of in-house residential music producers ready to offer music to businesses who need it.

This would easily integrate much better into Spotify and Soundcloud.

Imagine you are a hipster pale ale company looking for a deep house track for your new advertisement. You put on a Jan Blomqvist track on Spotify or Soundcloud and you“station” it. Eventually, as the stream switches to more obscure tracks by more local deep house producers from Dusseldorf or Rotterdam, you see that one of them is a “Resident”.

Press click and book him!

In 24 hours, you get an appropriate deep house track for your ad, and money is deposited in the bank of the up and rising DJ.

Direct booking service

Now, look at the previous scenario, and imagine you were a promoter of live events instead of a pale ale entrepreneur.

Again, just press click and book him for your event.

You hear a track you like, you check the guy up on Spotify or Soundcloud, and immediately press a link to go on a page with descriptions, pictures, prices, messaging box, and a calendar. Spotify or Soundcloud ensure cancellation protections, and DONE.

(This was the idea behind the short-lived Sidestage, whose founder is now on a new stealth project.)

Gig-discovery feature

Suppose you finally discovered some relatively unknown artist who fits exactly your preferences. You want to keep up with him and follow what he does.

We already have BandsInTown and Songkick for getting alerts when your favourite band performs in a concert or a festival in town.

But why isn’t that functionality already integrated into Spotify, for example? Well, Spotify used to allow third-party apps on its platform, and you would automatically get a notification through Songkick. Now, you have to manually import your Spotify list onto Songkick. (Spotify was turning into an app marketplace, and Apple/Google probably didn’t like that)

Soundcloud and Spotify just need to get their platforms sync’d with any of their preferred concert/gig discovery engines ASAP. This would not even be an innovation, but be back to as things were before.

Imagine the converse, you open a concert discovery engine, see the gigs that are happening in your area, and directly listen to a track by that artist on Spotify or Soundcloud without leaving the engine. These are simple but powerful things that could be accomplished by sync’ing streaming and concert discovery together.

Direct distribution service

It’s not complicated.

What if you could just tell Spotify and/or Soundcloud to publish your music on Apple Music, iTunes, and Deezer?

You pay 0 for it, but they keep — say — 10% of revenues?

I can’t imagine it would be too much to ask. This was one of the concepts behind Soundrop, an online “listening room” site. The “listening room” concept fell apart, and the founders rebranded as a music marketing startup.

This way, small-time musicians just worry about making the music and forget the headache about splitting fees and getting the accounting work done.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

So step by step, here is what an ideal collaborative online music platform could do to make any decent artist instantaneuously famous.

The various ways to win over a musician

1. Fans build crowdsourced radio stations for each of their preferred genres.
2. A musician who knows her stuff in that genre starts suggesting her own works in those crowdsourced stations, having already uploaded them online.
3. As she begins to get noticed, she can apply to be a “Resident” producer on the business-to-business platform.
4. She gets a monthly income, one-time fees for producing tracks for ads, and gets booking for events in and out of the city.
5. Her gigs automatically get listed, with the gig discovery engine being sync’d with the booking platform.
6. With money regularly coming in, she can start focusing on new songs and labels.
7. These songs and labels get distributed directly through the platform onto Apple Music, iTunes, and Deezer.

The pattern here is of a fully integrated social platform across the world for musicians to find the fans they can most connect with, without the hassle of heavy marketing, royalties, fees, compliance, and exposure.

Did you see a pattern behind my ideas?

Most of my suggestions relate to business models already implemented by various music startups all over Europe.

They fell apart, because the collaboration between music apps was forbidden by the big app marketplaces, who did not want the major music apps to become app marketplaces themselves. (Except for the example inspired by Epidemic Sound, which operates business-to-business sales, rather than consumer apps)

If one day, Spotify and Soundcloud were to find a way to allow legally the syncing of other apps on their own platform, we would see the rise of the Dream Music Platform.

Perhaps, if sync’ing of 3rd party apps is not possible, consolidation or in-house development could be the answer? Do you all see a way to make it happen?