The Chaos Bazaar: an analysis of Bandcamp sales

Saw this just now and feel like there are perhaps a few crossover points with some of this discussion. It’s a long read but talks about how each company has positioned itself and what that might mean in the future, plus some suggestions for improvement.

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This seems like a fantastic resource thank you @RobertaFidora I’ll take some time to read it fully

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Be really interested to know what you think. It goes into quite a bit of depth about what each company emphasises (or doesn’t) and how listeners respond to that. It also touches on your earlier point of Spotify’s profitability, their priorities and their end goal as a company.

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Thanks for the read! When I read up to this point and I was struck by this idea which might be connected to Resonate:

“Bandcamp is antifragile, since by leveraging the diversity of its users’ behaviors, it captures multiple local optima of pricing rather than seeking a single global optimum”

In particular, while discussing “listener tension and lack of control over spending” yesterday I was suggesting this option, which now seems like it could even make sense as an avenue to antifragility:

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Thanks for linking to this interesting read! I’m working on an article about jazz musician Maria Schneider and have referenced the article when talking about ‘whales’ (customers who spend the most among all other customers).

I’d like to include a bit of my draft here in case you find it relevant to Resonate :slight_smile: The Resonate whale might be one who doesn’t watch the credit spend tick during (low-cost) exploration:

What Schneider means when she says it’s “hard to get people to come to your own place” is that the ‘plagues’ she discussed in 2017 make directing traffic to your own website expensive and intrusive. She suggests that some potential customers just refuse to leave social media to check out what she’s selling.

These people wouldn’t be her best customers anyway. She understands the whale type of customer, the one who enjoys it the most and pays far more than anyone else.

The online data publication Components addressed the same concept in their report “The Chaos Bazaar”, which mostly deals with Bandcamp but includes these Spotify insights (emphasizing again):

Spotify’s model ignores even the basic principle that 20 percent of buyers usually account for 80 percent of purchases. Instead, the value of each Spotify user is capped at a monthly subscription price.

Spotify underserves all whales. In this theory, there is pop music—where you want to treat everyone the same—and everything else, where you want a less normal distribution. Spotify’s cost structure matches pop music, and it doesn’t suit everything else.

It’s not just that in jazz, Schneider needs whales as customers. She definitely does, but it’s more like the fact that every single one of her customers would look like a whale in pop music. Willingness to pay $20 for a discrete musical experience already puts you beyond what Spotify will accept from you in one month.

And so would streaming-to-own 10 songs on Resonate, etc. make you seem like a whale to the Spotify listener

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Thanks for sharing! Loads of really great stuff to think about (and, as a side note, I looked up the PRS view on streaming because it seems like some organisations are still working out how to navigate this longterm).

The Titanic analogy in the link was quite something too. When is the article going live?

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Thanks @RobertaFidora for the great analysis in this article which I’m enjoying so much and returning to so often. We have so much to learn from the Bandcamp experience and potential.

I love the way the article transitions from forensic analysis of behaviour into an impassioned rant about the craziness of insisting on a commodity price point for all music, globally, and the crass act of appropriation that led to it (also described as the ‘Titanic’ moment in @will 's article about Maria Schneider). @will thanks too for your additional compelling evidence… “willingness to pay for a discrete musical experience”. I’d add that recognition of having made that contribution is also important - it forms a bond or relationship of trust, not just a ‘sale’.

We quoted a related article from Midia: New artists, does it pay to be streaming first? in our business case to our EU project sponsors:

I feel Resonate needs to do more to support this relationship-building: I think our crude ‘buy now’ feature isn’t enough and we need to take off the ‘upper limit’ of donation to an artist. There are several ways we could do that, and, as suggested by @agaitaarino, give the listener better spend control in the process. We’re getting some good underlying secure infrastructure and tools in place to help with this.

I think we could do with more ‘local community’ emphasis too (not necessarily just geographic… could also be cultural, maybe socio-political). Somehow we need to let people hear and control their own, ‘local’ music from the ground up and not be subject to this: Spotify and streaming services are breaking cultural music on a worldwide stage - RouteNote Blog

(always speaking for myself here …not for the co-op!)

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@Nick_M thank you for linking to that midia article! I had read it last month and mentioned inverting the funnel to a colleague, but forgot where I had seen the concept. Awesome that you used it too.

@RobertaFidora appreciate your response too, didn’t know that PRS had a position on streaming! If I finish that Maria Schneider article in time, it’ll go live on a brand-new music career education blog called Artist Earnings next Tuesday (Apr. 20).

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I’m glad we’re adressing this article together as I think it raises a lot of crucial points about what Resonate will face as a business model for artists.

I won’t go into the details of why because I’ve done it already on this topic

But I think ultimately the reason we all come back to the paragraph about the anti-fragility and chaos embracing nature of Bandcamp is precisely because, as it stands right now, Resonate isn’t yet “chaos embracing” and anti-fragile.

Sure on one side it breaks from this aspect

It breaks from it by refusing the idea of regular payments / subscription, which means not all users will pay the same price and not all users will support music in the same amount.

However, contrary to Bandcamp, Resonate’s current S2O model is still very much "seeking a single global optimum” since it is still based on putting a price value on the listening experience no matter what that experience feels like (in other words : if someone listen to a track in full, twice, they pay the same, even if one person loved it, and the other just felt it was a nice backing track for doing homeworks). On Bandcamp, maybe the first would have paid for the song, and the second not at all. On Resonate, they both contributed the same amount.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because there’s a fundamental thing we need not to forget about Bandcamp as a good comparaison point (and one of the reasons I love the service as a user) : The listening experience is free. As such, it means I have absolute control over where I spend my money, who I give it to and why. I’m not tied to someone’s estimation of “what has value” and “what doesn’t”, I as a user decide where, when and how I spend my money, and I personally think that’s absolutely fantastic.

This reflexion brings me to this point made by Will

I must say, I kinda disagree. First, let me say that I don’t like the use of “whales” in business terminologies in general, it’s usually mentionned as a way to pinpoint the users we want to milk out of their money to compensate for the ones we can’t, and it pushes businesses to think in sort of rather unpleasant way about how to catter to this specific demographic rather than fostering a business that’s healthy as a whole for all people, even those who don’t pay much. It might make sense for Bandcamp to think of things that way, they’re still a private owned company that sells a bunch of stuff and get a cut they don’t entirely deserve. For us, a cooperative, collectively owned by musician streaming service with a focus on ethics and fairness… I’m not so sure.

However, let’s forget about all that as I don’t want to be annoying and needlessly picky about words and let’s focus on the facts instead.

20% of people account for 80% of purchases. Ok. Why does this mean in any way that the Resonate “whale” doesn’t watch the credit spend tick during (low-cost) exploration ? And more importantly, what is low-cost exploration. Because once again what the Chaos Bazaar article shines a very interesting light upon is that low-cost is different for everyone, which is highlighted by the fact people spend most and more on local / national groups. This could also be explained through simple currency matters (a local band might put the pricetag according to the local realities of their economy). But this sort of fluidity is not allowed with the S2O model, because while it does allow for some sort of adjustement, where on Bandcamp the adjustement is mostly “painless” (wether I pay or not, I still have access to the music, even if it’s not in as good of an experience as If I buy it), in S2O territory, adjusting your experience effectively mean the end of it (if I don’t want to pay for something anymore, I have to stop listening to it).

These are fundamental flaws with the S2O approach and I think they’re the reason why I, @Sam_Martyn, @agaitaarino and many more people are trying to find better approaches so that we get that kind of fluidity back.

I remember I once imagined a streaming service where you would just pick at will the amount you gave each month within a list of all the musicians you’d listened to during this month (the “subscription” would effectively act as a monthly “money pot” where the user single handedly decides what to reward by themself). If they chose not to reward anyone specifically (which I assumed most people would do), it would end up being just a basic user centric service.

The goal of this was exactly what we’re discussing here : give back control and allow for chaotic spending. What if I decide that of all the music I’ve listened to this month, there’s just 5 things I’d like to pay for more than others? In Resonate, short of buying those 5 people’s with the “buy” link, I don’t have control over that. And the “buy” link is… in the end sort of similar to going on bandcamp or on their label’s store so why not just go there instead?

This is why I have a very different idea of the Resonate whale. To me if the Resonate whale is just someone who doesn’t mind the “credit ticking” everytime they discovers stuff, they’re not a super useful consummer as whale goes. If that’s so, the service is kind of okay to them (they can get roughly 4000/5000 listens of new stuff / month for a Spotify-similar pricetag I think? the number is not super essential though) as a listener, but it’s not great to the musicians. Since Resonate’s initial payment (let’s call it “Discovery payment”) is sub or similar-ish to Spotify level, it effectively means musicians make less or as much from people discovering their work on Resonate than they do on Spotify. Which in turns, effectively means at least in my view that the Resonate whale is not the one that only listens to new stuff on random all the time.

Here, I’ll allow myself to describe where I think Resonate stands as a business and as a service to both musicians and listeners. First let me say, Resonate is NOT the best service for Discovery (that’d be any sub based streaming service), it is also not the best service (as of now) for direct artist support (that would be Bandcamp or Patreon). So where does it stand ? Well I think it stand in the space we never discuss, right there in the middle : It’s the best service for a sort of “scattered” support to all the music you might listen to from time to time, but don’t feel invested in enough (yet or ever) that you want to back that enjoyement with a 10€ album buy on bandcamp or a subscription on Patreon or by buying merch.

I don’t know you people, but I’ve got TONS of artists like that, waiting in money hell in my Bandcamp wishlists, in my Soundcloud timelines etc. Those artists, before I can make the move to buy their stuff, get nothing from me and I think that’s kind of unfair.

I really don’t personally desire a service where everytime I discover some new music I have to pay a fee however small, but more importantly, as a musician, I really don’t desire a service were listeners have to pay me a fee for discovering my music, I don’t think that’s fair to them, and I don’t think I’m particularly better off with, if I’m really concerned about making 0,003€ out of any kind of listen, I would publish my music on Spotify.

So what I want, or what I’m interested in is not the “Discovery money” it’s the “3rd or 4th time” listen money. The money where I feel they like my work enough that they might give me a minor fee that’s rather painless to them, but put together, it’s already more than a die hard fan on Spotify listening to my album 30 times.

I’d love to be able to give some relatively well scattered amount of, say, 30€/months to all the musicians I listen to several times and appreciate, but don’t connect to enough that I immediately feel the need to buy their work (much like my “dream sub based” model mentionned above). They’re a huge crowd and they deserve some of my money too, and that’s what I feel Resonate ultimately is there for, that’s what I feel is the soul of the service wether consciously or not.

That’s also the only way, in my opinion, to justify the contradiction stated above about the fact that Resonate still, like Spotify, put a fixed price on listens (even if that price is evolving over time, it’s still a fixed evolution). It kind of solutions that contradiction by suggesting to the listener something along those lines “ok, this is typically the kind of music where I can’t, by myself, evaluate how much I want to allocate to everyone, so just go by the numbers of how much I listened to them, and spread that around until I know how I want to directly support them and fix my own pricing”.

Ultimately as a musician, I must say I’m really uncomfortable with the idea people use some of their credits to discover my work. I would love it if the first listen of a track was always free (with an exception for longer songs with a fixed minute limitation where you start to pay because again, we need to avoid screwing long form music). I think part of the reason why the Chaos Bazaar explanation works so well is because once again “the experience of listening to music” is free on Bandcamp, and then the artist fix a price for an improvement of that experience, and the listener can up that price by whatever amount they desire. That’s what makes it anti-fragile and fluid. I would love it if we could implement some of that “non-transactionnal” part of the experience to Resonate.

It is super important to remember that it’s not because we want musicians to get paid better, that the answer will be to put a price tag (higher or lower) on every little musical interraction between listeners and creators.

I hope this was interesting enough to warrant the long post.

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I squirmed uncomfortably at this part because I definitely do this too. I almost feel guilty that I can’t offer more support, so the middle area you’ve described aligns with my experiences as a listener and that place where you maybe can’t afford to buy the album/s and merch in one go but you don’t want to go to services where you know the artists is getting virtually nothing for their work.

In terms of the first listen being free, that does make sense. It reminds me of old school mailing list stuff - you sign up and you get a song for free - I still do this on my own website.

@Nick_M I love a diagram and this one is particularly good. It’s hard with the “buy now” option, to know what language both encompasses the points you’ve mentioned but encourages action without being overly transactional. I’m always a fan of looking at how people interact on a local level too and often the most interesting stuff is going on way below that “look how we’ve plucked this from obscurity and massively scaled it up whether it wants to be or not” narrative which is more about them being the hero than serving any community.

@will This looks excellent, thanks! Yes, I had no idea and I’m signed up to PRS. :grimacing:

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@LLK, the quality of your writing has been my favourite particular thing about this forum so far. I can’t lie that it was high on my near-term bucket list to engage with you on an interesting topic here. Cheers!

Your critique of the term ‘whale’ is noted:

it’s usually mentionned as a way to pinpoint the users we want to milk out of their money to compensate for the ones we can’t, and it pushes businesses to think in sort of rather unpleasant way about how to catter to this specific demographic rather than fostering a business that’s healthy as a whole for all people, even those who don’t pay much.

I agree that your perspective on the term aligns better with what I’ve seen of Resonate’s core values. You make a persuasive claim that the role of whales is a square peg in the round holes of this co-op.

Regardless, I personally embrace the whale :whale:

I refer to this 2018 post by Eric Feng to summarize of why I embrace it. It’s because you can “foster a business that’s healthy as a whole” by funding it first from your highest-margin transactions, which come from whales. This is him, not you, so I’ll use italics:

[A] company’s best customers are many many times more valuable than their average customer. If you can find a business model that allows you to take full advantage of that disparity, you unlock economic value for everyone: yourself, your current best customers, and all the rest of your customers who one day could grow into your future best customers. Direct and indirect purchasing working together. Rinse and repeat.

Rather than ‘milking people and fostering ‘unpleasant’ marketing behaviour, whales’ value can open up an experience to even more people. In Maria Schneider’s case, top customers have powered a career that can eschew corporate streaming, advocating for art music and artists, while winning 7 Grammys.

20% of people account for 80% of purchases. Ok. Why does this mean in any way that the Resonate “whale” doesn’t watch the credit spend tick during (low-cost) exploration ? And more importantly, what is low-cost exploration

Thank you for identifying a point where I didn’t define well enough to be helpful in this thread. I think that, when I wrote “low-cost exploration”, I meant the listening that happens on the first few play counts, which cost much less than the final ones. I thought about “low-cost” in relative terms from the first ninth Resonate play, but I ignored what the phrase would mean for different people’s spending.

I agree with your subsequent critique of S20. Apologies for going slightly out-of-order, to address this final time you discuss the whale concept:

Which in turns, effectively means at least in my view that the Resonate whale is not the one that only listens to new stuff on random all the time.

I did not claim that the highest-spending Resonate listeners “only listen to new stuff”: making the first few plays on some tracks is not mutually exclusive with repeat listening of any track. I suppose my hunch was that someone who explores many new tracks might end up with more total tracks listened-to nine times, than someone who explores fewer tracks.

Okay, back here:

Since Resonate’s initial payment (let’s call it “Discovery payment”) is sub or similar-ish to Spotify level, it effectively means musicians make less or as much from people discovering their work on Resonate than they do on Spotify.

That statement on its own is tautological, but I agree with where you take it in this later quote:

So what I want, or what I’m interested in is not the “Discovery money” it’s the “3rd or 4th time” listen money. The money where I feel they like my work enough that they might give me a minor fee that’s rather painless to them, but put together, it’s already more than a die hard fan on Spotify listening to my album 30 times.

Couldn’t agree more: the meaning and transactions that sustain us lie in the repeat-listener relationships. But the flipside of that is what you related back here:

I don’t know you people, but I’ve got TONS of artists like that, waiting in money hell in my Bandcamp wishlists, in my Soundcloud timelines etc. Those artists, before I can make the move to buy their stuff, get nothing from me and I think that’s kind of unfair.

I claim no, it’s not unfair: you’ve decided that, for now, they’re beyond the boundaries of how much resources you’re giving to artists. If that changes, you’ll move them up your queue. And this process is personal for everybody, impossible to prescribe via a platform (except to flatten all to the lowest common denominator, as corporate streaming does).

I think that you acknowledge this reality here:

I’d love to be able to give some relatively well scattered amount of, say, 30€/months to all the musicians I listen to several times and appreciate, but don’t connect to enough that I immediately feel the need to buy their work (much like my “dream sub based” model mentionned above). They’re a huge crowd and they deserve some of my money too, and that’s what I feel Resonate ultimately is there for, that’s what I feel is the soul of the service wether consciously or not.

Agreeing with you again, Resonate does offer a way for this “huge crowd” to earn more money, if you happen to be present on this platform instead of corporate streaming. And the kind of listener who has that marginal money and wants to spend it, will be well-suited to join Resonate–whereas corporate streaming didn’t let them. They look like a :whale: from Spotify’s eyes.

The last full paragraph of your post (“Ultimately as a musician…”) is insightful, especially regarding the "improvement of that experience: I’ve nothing to add!

To keep the thread well-oiled, I’ll drop some food for thought on your closing bit:

It is super important to remember that it’s not because we want musicians to get paid better, that the answer will be to put a price tag (higher or lower) on every little musical interraction between listeners and creators.

What if you consider the moment of applying the “price tag” to be when you buy credits, not on each play? Then, you’d conclude that Resonate puts a price tag on buying into the community, and you can listen while continuing to buy into it in lumpy fashion when you convert credits.

Thanks again! I am happy to get closer to the topic of The Chaos Bazaar, if that’s what we need.

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Edit from yesterday because I was too tired to reply:

Thanks for the long and well considered answer ! First let me say I mostly agree with everything you say (even that I sometimes make tautological arguments! Which I think is out of fear of not being completely clear and transparent as to what is my point but still, I’ll try not to if I can help it).

Ok now let’s talk about Whales. (apart from them being magnificent mamals first and foremost, thank you whales and sorry). For the people who don’t care about why I don’t like the word, I’ll hide this under a TL;DR arrow.

Semantics about "Whale" as a business term

Super quickly because as I mentionned above, semantics can be tricky to discuss and my gripes are mostly semantics.

The whales terminology as I know it usually comes from B2B ecosystems where trying to track down big customers usually under the form of a super large company can help secure a massive contract (or regularly massive contracts plural) that basically sets them for years instead of trying to multiply smaller form contracts with the uncertainty that this kind of “day to day” approach entails. So the whale metaphor is really that of a business hunting for a particularly big and dreamy type of customer much like Achab, hoping his “Whale” hunt will finally put him at ease. It slowly shifted in meaning as the internet of “free things ! except you’re the product” started taking over. This time the “whale” worth hunting for wasn’t the big corp with massive stability and huge regular contracts, it was “that one particular type of guy, that’s ready to spend tons of money because we got him addicted enough to our platform that he just want more and more quickly and can’t wait for it, while the 99% of the rest is fine with the free service and serves more as a substantial data set to either sell outside the platform or lure whales in more effisciently through behavioral analysis of why some users don’t become whales.” I’ve lived this first hand with game devs, for whom the Whale Hunting is very real and in many instances, looks very much like Achab both in nature and in tragic ending. So I’m just not fond of the narrative overall, even less about the wording/metaphor which isn’t there to translate something like “oh they’re a whale they’re a majestic and mysterious being”, but more to say “There ! MY whale ! The chase come to an end finally ! My troubles are over !”.

As I said semantics, but it’s a pet peeve of mine that I don’t like to use words and metaphors I don’t like the origin of and have seen used more in contexts that make me wary of them than in contexts that I’m enthusiastic and hopeful about.

It’s really no big deal, so I apologize in advance for using up so much of everyone’s time for my own little crusades.

On to the interesting bits. I think there are three different things (and equally interesting things) we’ve adressed here using a pretty similar definition (whale, sort of), which kind of make it difficult to understand things.

The first “Whale”

This is a particular artist’s Whale (in this instance Maria Schneider’s whale), separate from the needs of a specific platform to thrive, this is effectively an individual who, through managing cleverly and with a lot of work, managed to find inside the maze of multiple services (social media, spotify, bandcamp, and probably so many more) an audience, then capitalized on it by cementing her relationship with her listeners, which is how she powered her career. It’s in essence how the current system model goes : you’ve got tons of services, and it’s almost a job onto itself to manage them all so well that you manage to get your “whales” into the “good end” of that maze which is where they can pay you regularly and to their heart’s content through an interface that push them to do so. Interestingly that’s also how Spotify justifies its existence : As a universal door for you to find those whale customers more easily. (evidently that’s a farce for all the reasons we know else we wouldn’t be here) The only way other people benefit from this is because Maria Schneider releases more music and so, if we kinda like that music, good on use that people help her sustain herself (it’s great !). But it’s a mild advantage to the community as a whole, it’s just that Maria Schneider did a good job.

OK so it’s my understanding that in a way, Resonate wants to break away from this logic of the musician having to do all the heavy lifting and back and forth between services that don’t explicitely help them much if at all to build a relationship with their listeners (we’re more often fighting the very logic of those platforms than being helped by them). We want to help them build those empowering listener-creator relationship more easily.

Right now I don’t think there’s much in the sense of that on S2O as it stands but having spoken to @richjensen @Nick_M and @Hakanto and having heard them talk quite a bit about it, I’m confident it’ll come in time.

Then there’s a second whale which we’ll call “The Spotify Whale”. The Spotify Whale has been kind of problematic in our conversation because it’s only been defined through outside services, ie. a regular customer of another service is a whale to Spotify. I think that assertion (which sparked this whole debate) was a bit confusing because if I think about it : no, the regular Resonate user isn’t a whale from Spotify’s eyes, much in the same way the regular Bandcamp user isn’t a whale in Spotify’s eyes. Those people spend money on artists and Spotify don’t care about that, they want people to spend money on them, ALL the people, regularly, and forever. The Spotify “whale” as of now is the podcast and radio industry (which they’re currently trying to destroy and gain monopoly over) that could steer the money they have to pay each year away from unsustainable royalty payments for all the songs they can’t afford and make way better margins of profit for them. But more likely, the Spotify “whale” is either a GAFAM buy out or becoming a GAFAM thanks to complete monopoly of all audio consumption on internet.

What I guess you meant is, “a Resonate user is any artist’s whale compared to a Spotify user listening to their music” and presented like that absolutely yes, granted that said user listens to their music a bunch of times. Correct me if I’m wrong though.

So finally the 3rd whale which admitedly is the one we’re interested about (but we can’t separate it from the first 2), is Resonate’s whale, more precisely : who is Resonate’s “ideal user” the one that benefits and gets most out of the platform, pays the more for it, and should we build the platform for that person specifically or with a lot of more fringe/less benefitial users in mind?

As I said above, one of the problems I have with Resonate right now, and why I think this conversation absolutely belongs in the “chaos bazaar” is that as is, Resonate is solely built for its “whale” ideal user. A strange ideal too : someone who wants to spend music to help musicians, but still wants to use a streaming platform with a much narrower catalogue, which is not ideal for discovery (as soon as you’re the type of person who listen to hundreds or thousands of songs, and I assume the Resonate whale can absolutely be like that, the fee for music you might not care about is super high for the user, and not super rewarding for the artists), and doesn’t help musicians you really like much more than the combo Spotify/Bandcamp where you listen for free (from the artist’s perspective, even you pay Spotify for ease of access to infinite music) but support directly the bands you like the most.

Which is why I was advertising for a slightly different kind of ideal user. And here let me apologize for misunderstanding what you meant by “low cost exploration”, we obviously agree on what the conscious Resonate user equates to / is looking for. It’s just that for me .002$ per discovery out of a 10€ money-pot (for example) isn’t low cost for a lot of people on earth, and also, that I don’t consider listening to a song for the 3rd or 4th time “discovery” anymore, there’s an established bond at that stage for me. These are the two reasons I commented on that.

My view coming from there is we should try to extend the appeal of Resonate as a discovery tool (first listen is free, if the song is more than x minutes, the first y minutes are free) so that the ideal user is not only someone who doesn’t care about the credit ticking / 0,002$ discovery price tag, but so that no one has to care about it, period. Then what it effectively does, is it stops asking some particular mindframe or social type out of the user to be a “whale” or an ideal Resonate customer, and it makes it a simply great discovery tool, with a twist that you’ve got credits to listen more and more to things you like (and you know you like them : you’ve listened to them), even if they’re not things you’d outright buy. The “listener tension” topic is to me, something we can absolutely not afford to ignore in building this platform as the tension that money creates is unavoidable, and ignoring it or not trying to mitigate it will only take people who would want to get invested into the platform away. Removing some of that tension, Resonate still “dictates a price” but it dictates a price on an interraction that’s currently undervalued and kind of lost in a void, which is “just enjoying a track”, not “loving it”, not “being a fan of the artist”, not “being an artist’s whale”, just you know, enjoying a track and paying kind of a better price for that fact. This system seems more inviting to me, and it gives back a sense of agency to Resonate users. I know I’ll definitely be able to get more people on board (people willing to pay money for music!) with something like that than with the system as it stands. Then in that scenario what’s interesting is this “mass” of “mildly interested” people can become a substantial amount of revenue cumulated for artists, without being “whales” which I think is the point of all this discussion.

Using your own positive definition of what “Whales” can be

In my view here, that would be exactly what happens : User who are OK spending credits on the artists they listen to more, therefore representing a substantial amount of artists payments on the platform, make it possible for all to enjoy discovery in a much more casual way by making it sustainable for the first listen to be free, while still eventually paying a fair amount whenever these more volatile user happen to like something. That’s a good “Whaling” system in my book and it’s not unethical in the least.

Here, I’d love to get some insights from @Nick_M about current listening data : If we took the current payments numbers, and we took away the amount paid on the first listen for all the songs (so we’d say : this listen was “free of charge”), but then we add that same amount to the second listen making it worth [2nd+1fist listen] in terms of value. How would it impact artists in terms of payments? Would it be marginal? Would it be a lot? (we could even multiply the numbers by various factors to check how it would scale as the platform grows) I would really love some numbers on that.

Now on to your last point :

First let me say : I absolutely consider the moment of “applying the price tag” to be when I buy the credits. But it doesn’t deter from the fact that this pricetag doesn’t buy “access to the community”, otherwise it would be fixed and redistributed amongst all creators and administrators equally. This pricetag is buying, precisely, credits, so an virtual currency that I can spend on artists. And much in the same way I don’t want people to spend some of that money on me just because my music is available on Resonate, I’d love to have a little more control over how I spend it on the platform. What I like about the Resonate Community is precisely the community : talking to you, talking to other people, having a say in how things work, trying to find a structure that fits the misfits that want a space away from Spotify etc.

What I don’t buy when I buy Resonate credits is immediate financial support of whoever releases music on it and I end up listening to at random. I might listen to some music and hear lyrics that make me dislike those people a lot, or cultural appropriation that I feel is inappropriate, or any amount of other things I’m likely not to appreciate. Music is a language but it doesn’t mean the conversation is always nice and ends up well. And I want to be able to not support than, in any way whatsoever. And the more Resonate will grow, the more likel it is to be the case.

With these kind of systems, it’s a bit all or nothing : Either we find a way to sustain everyone exactly the same in a fully horizontal way completely separated from listens/popular appreciation (“There are 10 000 songs on Resonate / There’s been 100 000 listens this month / each song gets 10€ for contributing to the catalogue”) which is a system I would absolutely be curious to hear about actually, OR we say “music is a relationship and the transaction should be from listener to creator according to how they individually appreciated that relation”, in which case I think it’s unfair to put a pricetag on “hello what’s your name?” and we should allow for some free of charge way to get acquainted (and from then on, decide where that relationship go by using the platform’s credits).

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A bit of an old conversation in the link below, but this pull quote caught my eye and I think there might be some points to cross reference with the Bandcamp piece.

“In Rainbows’ absolutely didn’t kill the idea that music should be paid for. What it did do, though, was show that the idea of setting a single, one-size-fits-all price for an album was long overdue a rethink. Not just because a lot of people wanted to pay less or nothing, but because plenty of fans wanted to pay more.”

Link to the Trent Reznor case study mentioned here:

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@RobertaFidora thanks for bringing this in! One of the most interesting “The Chaos Bazaar” subplots for me was in the amounts that people paid for pay-what-you-want releases.

There was also how many releases on aggregate were PWYW, and how ‘generous’ PWYW buyers were.

But:

I’m too young to remember the In Rainbows thing :relieved: and

this roundup of reactions to In Rainbows brought even more perspective on PWYW, seemingly corroborating the stuff seen in the Bandcamp data. There’s some generosity but people still pay close to the price, except in outstanding circumstances.

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I simply don’t have time to read all the posts in this thread thoroughly, less so the original Bandcamp study. I am trying to survive as a working musician and time is money.
I use Resonate and Bandcamp. I have been on the frontline fighting for sustainable income from music for many, many years.
The two biggest issues with Spotify - which Bandcamp addresses, are 1) Spotify heavily promotes ‘trending tracks’ and hides less immediately popular tracks. The algorithm does this because Spotify is an economic engine, it is not a music distributor or music fan. Music is simply the product they use to make income, it could be soap powder. Using a pervasive algorithm to promote one type of song over another heavily impacts and handicaps any artist making innovative music, left field, or less popular forms such as jazz.
2) Spotify does not pay artists for their specific individual streams. It is an aggregator like PRS or ASCAP. So if my track is streamed ten times a day, 9/10ths of my income is probably going to Drake or Taylor Swift. Any purchase on Bandcamp goes directly to the artist!
Finally, I have a real issue with this term ‘whale’. Music is at it’s best when it is not overcome by marketing or business speak. Music is listened to and purchased by people. They might be fans, or hardcore fans, or devoted fans. In my opinion they are never
‘whales’ or ABC1.

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Yeeeeessss. Words are powerful. They color how we think. What some people call “whales” are the people you’d win to know by name, hook up with before a gig and grab a beer with.

The argument that were brought up were sound though, and I doubt it was meant as derogatory, but I find it a cold way to treat the most precious enthusiasts out there.

I work in the video game industry and my days used to be filled with words like brand, ROI, hook, monetisation, replayability, etc… (I work with a cooler bunch now… Still happens, but much less) - To a player, your brand is a universe, your hook is a cool feature that’s fun to play with, your replayability a means to escape and recharge. The biggest, most passionate fans will fall in love with your creation, build true emotional bonds with it, and will smell the business machinations from miles away, will hate you for disrespecting them and your own work, and will ultimately turn their back on you for abusing their trust and intelligence. I believe the same goes for music.

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really appreciate your comments here @chriswhittenmusic and @CPacaud ! Thank you, great reminders of the motivations we share as artists here

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Yes to your sentiments-I too am trying to survive as a working recording engineer and composer and its a lot to keep up with, let alone read all of. I think your points are right, shall I say, on the money.
Perhaps part of the battle is educating the public about what is really happening so they can make informed decisions. Musicians and music consumers alike. Most people have no idea how musicians are not getting paid, and that includes the musicians. My eyes roll so far back they are in the last week every time I see a musician post on social media asking me to help them get more Spotify streams. Its effort in the wrong direction, unless they’re signed to a major and have the right things in place. Sadly they just dont know this.

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I agree KallieMarie.
It goes without saying I am grateful for Resonate as it currently stands. However, in the other current discussion, I had no idea stream to own really meant stream to stream for free.
I’m a creator, but also a consumer. Is it still the case you can’t be both on Resonate? that seems a bit mad.
I just want to post some hard truths which by no means are meant to be criticism of the hard workers here.
One thing that Resonate needs to achieve to become more widely used (like Bandcamp) is more creators and more diversity of creators.
At the moment I have to ask for help to upload my music (my EPs). This is a barrier to my participation. I have yet to understand any way I can see how many times my tracks are streamed and to see any income for myself I am generating. That’s a huge barrier to my participation.
Bandcamp is so easy and so transparent.
The trouble is, Resonate received a lot of very positive publicity in mainstream media about two years ago(?). The fact it still isn’t easy to use by creators or the public is a huge negative I think.
I see lots of threads about technology, privacy, co-operative philosophy, ethics etc, which is great, but it really needs to get on and deliver what it was promoted as two years ago - an easy to use music delivery service that was fair to creators.
No harsh criticisms of individuals implied or intended.

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I was introduced to Cade Diehm of DesignCongress this week, a contributing source for this article. In a follow-up email he sent along these links for consideration by the Resonate community:

Thanks again for meeting yesterday, that was a very stimulating
discussion with a lot of alignment.

For your review, here’s a compilation of some of our 2020 work that
informs our ongoing research, and would be extremely relevant to your
goals with Resonate:

This is Fine: Optimism & Emergency in the P2P Network - A New Design Congress Essay
Design Ethics? No Thanks @ IxDD Budapest - _.TV

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