I recently read a book called The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Reading business books is one of my slightly weird hobbies as a musician. What I enjoy about them is that people in the business world tend to try to approach problems in very analytical and rational ways with an aim to be effective. I feel like in the creative disciplines we are afraid that if we apply any kind of analytical rigor to our processes that we will lose the magic juice. I actually think that poverty, time famine and exhaustion make you lose the magic juice much more quickly and so have been looking to the world of business ideas for things we can bring to our musical process and be more successful both creatively and financially.
The Lean Startup is a pretty awesome thought system for thinking about launching an enterprise under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Sound familiar musicians friends? Creative work is one of the most uncertain disciplines out there. The innovation of the lean startup process is that it seeks to apply the scientific method to business. This means that you come up with an idea, or hypothesis and then you test it to see if what you thought was going to work in fact does. You then try to create what the author calls validated learning. The idea of validated learning is just to say, we thought doing this would cause X to happen but when we did it actually Y happened. We’ve learned that our idea was incorrect, let’s build from that by trying something new. The goal in Lean Startup is to take this build / measure / learn loop and make it happen as fast as possible.
What I began to wonder was: how could we apply this to both the business and creative aspects of music making? To this end I reached out to a good friend of mine Chris Sattinger aka Timeblind. Chris has been a mentor to me in many ways and we spent a lot of time together when I lived in Berlin. He is uniquely qualified to answer these questions because in addition to his formidable musical talent he is also a startup guy himself who has worked in various web startups over the years as a developer.
I interviewed him via email. I’ve included his responses below and added a few comments in italics to set up concepts that I haven’t already introduced and give additional thoughts. One of the concepts is the idea of a Minimum Viable Product or MVP. This is a product that has zero bells and whistles but exists in a rough form to get in front of customers and start to measure their response and get feedback. Based on the response to the MVP you either persist or change course. The goal is to find out if an idea is wanted before you spend a ton of time making it and finishing it. No one cares about the paint job on a car they don’t want, or the mix down on a song that doesn’t connect with them.
MS: How do we use the minimum viable product concept in music? Chris you mentioned the production speed dating concept as relating to this and I think you’re right. From when you introduced this idea to me in Berlin years ago this has actually become an important part of my, and then Dubspot’s process that we teach.
A further extension of MVP is the idea of deploying raw ideas quickly to platforms where you can get feedback, for example someone like Skream playing unfinished tunes on pirate radio and using that platform to get feedback via call ins and text and IM messages. Soundcloud might be too public and permanent feeling a platform for this but the same could work there. Also playing them out at shows, which is something I already do but never thought of in this context.
Comment: After doing this interview I learned in a conversation with producer Dubbel Dutch that a lot of Jersey Club producers are using Soundcloud in this way, putting tracks up with titles like “Should I finish?” or “Who wants to collab?” Definitely an innovative use of this concept and a great way to avoid spending lots of time on stuff no one likes, a key concept in Lean Startup.
CS: Dubplates are the original MVP ! Or we would press up 30 white labels, send those to some DJs and then use the reaction to decide how much to press and how much to market it. The same goes for bands playing new songs out at shows or playing new songs on special radio shows.
There is a hierarchy of Dons and Trainspotters. Records make their way out from the inner circles to the broader public.
Mark Ernestus invited me over to his studio and played me some of the tracks from his Ndagga label and the remix he had done for Konono No 1. It wasn’t even mastered yet. That made me feel special of course and then I go and tell people about it, and this is a great way to make music feel special and get distributed through personal communication by people who really care about it. So its a marketing/distribution tactic, but a good honest one.
Startups often do these mailing list sign ups. They put up a one page website and you can sign up for a beta. That’s just to gauge reaction. They want stats showing how interested people are. If sign ups aren’t strong they won’t even bother to finish the beta.
Comment: This is sometimes called a ‘smoke test’ and is done in all kinds of businesses. Today infomercials are used in the same way, to gauge interest and response to a product before mass production.
Labels could do the same thing. Post a page with one track and let people sign up, then they can get a free track when it comes out. Let those people get the free track and leak it themselves. They get a status reward, you get an incentivized node in the music network.
But really music is usually ahead of technology. They are more desperate, there’s more competition and the market is tighter. Look at Jamaica where money is tight and people have to be much more imaginative and creative and loud to get attention.
Or look to third world street markets. That’s where people get imaginative.
Comment: Small batch production is the idea that if you’re putting ten dolls together you don’t screw on the left arm for all ten, then the right arm for all ten, you assemble one doll completely at a time. It minimizes errors and wasted time and resources.
MS: How does the small batch size recommendation relate to current music releasing practices? As someone about to release an album I’m acutely aware of how long it’s taken and how much effort and money have gone into this distinctly large batch format. I am starting to think that continually deploying a single track at a time to something like soundcloud with an itunes buy link may make more sense. I see people who are earlier in their careers doing this out of necessity and it seems to work.
CS: Album ? That’s like a photo album, right ? I think iPhoto has those
Make a video and practice your pony dancing.
Comment: In Lean Startup the focus is on measuring the success of each attempt and being sure to measure useful data. My question is trying to determine if there are better ways to measure musical success from a business perspective than sales.
MS: What are good metrics to measure for musicians? Track sales seems like one. Positive feedback and engagement on social media? Plays on SC and YouTube? Plays by DJs and radio? How do we track and measure the success of a track?
Measure how honest and warm somebody is when they tell you they liked it. Check humidity levels in the club, sweat running down girl’s backs. See if the track makes you feel happy when you are feeling down.
Tracking sales is similar to tracking user signups – its kind of a vanity statistic. In startups you only use those if you want to brag in a press release. It doesn’t mean so much. Are you creating real value ? Is it something people really like and want in their lives ? Are you building trust and love within your community ? If you are, then you are going to make money. You are going to get booked, do remixes, get asked to do that special project. Long after you’ve dried up and become old and boring people will still book you. When people are 60 they will pay $1000 to go your renunion tour because they love that one song but they didn’t even buy the single back then.
Music is a network and a single product is only a way to beam your message and your energy into the network. Recorded music as a product is in deep strategy decay.
Music or product alone won’t get you all the way there. You have to represent something that people want to make a part of themselves.
A special thanks to Chris for sharing his brain, learn more about him and his work as Timeblind here. I also started a thread on the excellent question and discussion site Quora to discuss this topic and am happy to continue the discussion in the comments here or over there.
