Ground control to Major Tom: Bringing humanity to the experience

LET’S CONNECT

On average, Millennials spend US$163 on music. Unsurprisingly, 64% of it goes towards live music events. In a time of social isolation, concerts allow us all to connect with music’s unique DNA as an intimate, communal and socially empowering experience. To date, digital music platforms have struggled to infuse that power of connectivity into the online experience. Our reactions to music are often visceral and physiological. We now have access to devices on our wrist capable of monitoring our body’s functions. There is the potential to capture our physiological responses to songs — the goosebumps, the sudden release of endorphins and serotonin — and connecting this data the categorization of our music. What if our wearables were to aggregate, in real time, the top 10 songs making people’s heart race? What if Apple Music showed the happiest places on Earth by using the iWatch to capture the body’s release of endorphins as certain songs are played? Imagine if we could discover playlists based on their physiological effect. Obviously the technology isn’t quite there yet, but it will be soon. Samsung launched SimBand in 2014 — a sensor technology for wearables that’s capable of measuring your daily steps, heart rate, blood pressure, skin temperature and how much sweat you’re producing. While the device is currently intended for medical researchers, it’s only a matter of time until it becomes consumer facing, and with it, the potential to digitally re-create the human connection felt during a live concert experience.

Millennials invest in experiences that elevate them from pure consumption to co-production. HitRECord, Joseph Gordon Levitt’s open-sourced production company has stretched the frontier of audience engagement by democratizing the creation process. The platform invites anyone to create and develop mixed media. Once-passive viewers now play the role of creator and producer. Last year, HitRECord became TV’s first paid crowdsourced entertainment. And this year, its first season is available on Netflix. From conceptualization to market release, the show has proven that audiences can be fully integrated at all levels of the creative process to produce desirable, paid-for content. Digital tools make it possible for the listener’s role to be more than an end-user; listeners can be integral to the music-making process as a collaborator, producer or sounding board. Take Medium for example: to raise awareness and get more perspectives about the Senate’s upcoming vote for the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, the blog-publishing platform hosted their first Town Hall meeting online. This two-day, live-blogging event invited the public to connect with thought-leaders in criminal justice to post questions and share their reactions and responses to entries and panel discussions. If digital tools can help the public feel a sense of ownership over something as complex as the criminal justice system, why can’t the same principles be applied to deepen engagement with the music making process?

For audiences, a sense of deeper involvement offers higher levels of engagement, investment and feelings of ownership. It not only increases motivation to pay for the music, but empowers championing its success. With user-generated content growing at an unprecedented rate, why aren’t digital platforms empowering it at-scale? What if Rihanna’s next album was made possible by a kid from Tokyo contributing a beat, an artist from Reykjavik creating the album art and an aspiring lyricist from London? Come launch, labels would have the opportunity to activate collaborators as grassroots promoters to seed the album among their personal social networks. By making the experience more participatory, platforms invest in people and as such, people will be more likely to invest in them.

Music makes people come together — an insight that has been put into action by Smule, whose explosive success was recently bolstered with a USD $26 million VC investment. Smule’s karaoke app Sing! brings singers face-to-face to record music together. With 25 million users to date, the experience of collaborating across time and space is clearly powerful. Today’s technology allows us to deepen people’s engagement with music in entirely new ways. What if Google Music used Google Cardboard, their virtual reality technology, to bring together audiences with their favorite artists to record singles? Imagine being instantly transported to a small, intimate studio with Adele where you could record a single together, or perform at a live concert with Coldplay in front of thousands of fans onstage. It’s experiences like these that will tap into new revenue streams — ones that allow artists to connect with audiences in ways that are far more purposeful than firing off a series of backstage tweets.