Diagnosing the problem is easy – streaming is fundamentally broken and opposed to artists’ interests and no one likes it. But finding a solution? After going viral with a rant about streaming, James Blake has revealed his answer – but it’s one we’ve seen before.
This was the original viral post:
There’s a lot to unpack there – like what we mean by music (recorded music?), what we mean by free/paid (buying the recorded music?), and what we mean by brainwashing (the way value is marketed by streaming services?). Plus there’s the fact that the before/after narrative here requires that you were an artist that had access to money from the music industry in the past. But I think it’s fair to say that this is a criticism of all-you-can-eat streaming platforms, and that’s very fair.
The latest development is that Blake was contacted by Vault, yet another platform hoping to make direct-to-fan downloads a thing:
Vault is in a pre-launch state—there’s a sign-up for artists to join a waiting list—but you can go ahead and access James Blake’s page, which has three downloads so far. This isn’t James Blake’s service, per se—it’s unclear whether he has any investment stake, but he appears to be there as an artist, not a founder. But we get James Blake’s music alone in screenshots and on a usable page.
And we can already see that at its core, Vault is a subscription-based service for unreleased tracks. An artist has a page; then, to unlock it, you’re prompted for a subscription. That unlocks downloads and some kind of (currently undefined) chat. (James Blake’s page is set at $5/mo.)
It does indeed look Substack-ish. There’s not so much as a music preview, though, so you have no idea what you’re getting until you pay.
So this will probably save music – is what they’re telling us:
Wait, a monthly subscription for unreleased music… with community features.
You mean like Bandcamp subscriptions, which offer subscriber-only downloads and a community page? (And some extras not seen here.)
Or there’s Patreon, of course, which offers effectively the same download features.
Or Discord, which also offers chat stuff behind a paywalled server, including music.
Which also sounds like a “hangout for fans to get exclusive music,” which is what Endlesss was doing. (I’m not sure I could identify which chat-service-with-audio was which from the screenshots, even.)
Or there’s Gumroad, which also offers downloads and a subscription service to unlock more for a monthly fee.
Or you mean like Drip.fm, a fan-oriented subscriber-only download service based on subscriptions? (Funny enough, I was with the founder when he was working on that… a decade and a half ago.) The one whose demise in 2016 prompted Cherie Hu to write this story for Forbes?
Drip.fm’s Closing And The Challenging Future Of Sustainable Creative Technologies [Forbes]
Seems like you might want to get off Twitter and read that.
Don’t cry for Drip, though, it was bought by Kickstarter! You know, Kickstarter – the company that could save music! Oh yeah – speaking of, what happened to Kickstarter? Well, just last week, we learned that probably what happened was that Andreessen Horowitz thought crypto was the solution:
Here’s Fortune’s Jeff Roberts for a nice trip down memory lane, which to be extra cruel, I’ll link on AOL (erm, “Aol.”?), a company that will save mus– you know:
If you were in New York circa 2012, you’ll recall the city was having a tech moment—the Flatiron district was buzzing with VC energy while startups like Etsy, Tumblr, and Foursquare threw rooftop parties and gave out swag. This was also the era when Kickstarter, possibly the coolest of the East Coast cool kids, was on everyone’s lips. The crowdfunding platform, which launched movies like Veronica Mars and the VR headset Oculus Rift, was going to change everything about art and entrepreneurship—until it didn’t.
Today, Kickstarter is still around, but it’s about as hip as cronuts, Lena Dunham, or other artifacts from that era. So what caused the startup to lose its appeal? For the most part, the it choked on its own purer-than-thou ambitions that went side by side with a slacker work culture.
Why Kickstarter’s $100 million ‘pivot to blockchain’ didn’t pan out
Sorry I got distracted by Eurorack or something but I’m sure Etsy and Tumblr have very happy endings for creative people, and they aren’t flooded with AI or allegedly mining stuff you posted there for AI.
Anyway, I digress – we were talking about how direct-to-fan exclusives will save music or whatever. Wait… famous British electronic musicians, exclusive tracks for download… this sounds familiar. You mean a little like when Radiohead released In Rainbows in 2007 as pay-what-you-want via their blog? (And wound up selling quite a lot of vinyl of the release they gave away on digital. So they were onto something… and of course now we have an entire platform to do that on with tools like Bandcamp.)
Or… Aphex Twin, doing exactly the same thing, via SoundCloud and other tools. (Fans are also doing that – see archive.org.)
But, to be fair, while we’ve seen this idea before, we’ve never before seen the idea coming from James Blake. So, maybe you can pretend you’ve never heard these words before (or play some James Blake in the background for variety):
Imagine!
It answers this! Vault becomes like a vast electronic net, between fans and artists – a betwixtnet, let’s say. A World Wide Net. Who’s on there, apart from James Blake?
That’s incredibly exciting, or maybe it will be.
I’m sorry, I’m being unfair – as other pitches of Vault tell us, this is like a “Substack for Music,” by which I assume they mean you go and try to click on something and it asks you for $5 a month.
I forgot Substack; Substack offers podcasts and downloads.
Look, don’t get me wrong. (Or do get me wrong; I have now evolved into an angry troll, muttering about dialup and BBSes as I inhale vapors from my coffee maker and shout predictions about the end of the world into one of those 80s Darth Vader voice-changer toys.)
Direct-to-fan downloads were a great idea, are a great idea, will continue to be a great idea. You make a track, you give it to someone, and they listen to it. But if you’re going to try to build a platform around that, you are marching into a haunted graveyard, a haunted graveyard full of zombies, and even the zombies have grown listless and bored. You’ve got to give us something.
Speaking as a person who grew up in the wilds of the Kentucky suburbs, I am also ready to hear about new ideas that come from people who aren’t white, male, European/American, famous artists, or all of the above. This “golden age” of music value was already deep in extracting resources from BIPOC artists. That’s an understatement – we’re talking a music industry built on daylight robbery when it isn’t grave-robbing. It has always been weighted against people from the global south – and I don’t mean that as a political statement; ask anyone outside western Europe and the USA about dealing with something as simple as Bandcamp PayPal payments.
It’s just hard to take Vault seriously. The UI/UX is nice enough. The concept – for all my cynicism about its failures – isn’t wrong.
But there is so much more to talk about. If you really want to be independent of platforms, then signing up for a new platform is unlikely the way to do it.
Watch this space; I’m not just here to troll. I’ve had a lot of great chats with folks doing good work on building open, self-hostable solutions for stores. We can also talk about ways to work with existing platforms that are more sustainable.
As for Vault – look, I’m not rooting against you. Maybe this year is your year. But I mean, maybe someone cursed the thing with a Billy Goat years ago? Because, generally speaking, these things keep losing.
