HIFI Labs Offers Creative Tools to Artists
Artists are at a crossroads: freer to maneuver than ever before, yet surrounded by contradictory forces that encourage short-term tactics. Tech has done wonders for artists, but can make it challenging to map out the road ahead. Artists rarely have full ownership of their work and relationships, and without that, it’s nearly impossible to create wealth and find sustainability.
Founded by a mix of creatives and executives from the music and tech industries, HIFI Labs questions this status quo, insisting that talented artists at all levels should have access to crazy, cool, never-been-done tech and long-term strategy to bring their visions to life. This may mean harnessing holograms that perform on city sidewalks, crafting exquisite livestreams, minting interactive NFTs, hosting lively educational panels designed to inform and inspire, or staging wildly creative virtual festivals garnering millions of unique views.
For example, in the past year, HIFI Labs created the top livestream in the world — a decentralized global event called Friend Fest existing across multiple platforms including Minecraft, Twitch, Zoom and their own 8-Bit festival world. They created multiple other top 20 livestreams including the A.G. Cook collaboration, Appleville which featured Charli XCX, 100 Gecs, Clairo, and the first ever battle of the bands on Discord. They built a custom virtual livestream environment for innovative music company 88rising.
Through it all, the focus and purpose of HIFI Labs never changes: to develop and nurture more talented artists to cut their own, steady paths. To do this, HIFI Labs has two, complementary approaches. Its Idea Lab functions as a creative studio, turning inspired visions into tech-driven activations, projects, and engagement. The lessons and tools that emerge from these projects, often with big names and brands, inform the Artist Lab’s work, which aims to support emerging artists the way an incubator does startups.
“For us to help build a new reality for the music industry in which artists are owners and founders, we realized we needed to develop artists based on these principles and the new tools they would require to break through — hence the intertwined Artist Lab and Idea Lab,” explains HIFI Labs CEO & co-founder Joe Barham. “We’re building tools and digital experiences for artists of all sizes, while giving emerging artists access to resources, coaching and advice, all in an effort to help them create the best possible art, break through the noise, and retain more ownership of their work than ever before.”
This innovative model evolved over several years in discussions between Barham, an artist manager and music and tech leader who was Head of Music at Patreon at the time, and his HIFI Labs co-founders, Stacy Jones, Mike Walsh, Howie Diamond and Clayton Janes. They were kicking around the idea of starting a Y Combinator for music, but Barham had his doubts.
“I was critical of the idea that a musician’s art and career could offer a traditional ‘exit’ to an investor: you don’t have an IPO as an artist. But it was abundantly clear there was a need for holistic artist services, tools, and education that would at once build musicians’ brands and businesses and allow them to retain ownership of their work and fanbase,” Barham explains. “While we were inspired by startup incubators, HIFI Labs focuses more on the solutions set, which I saw from my time at Patreon needed to extend beyond platform economics. Even the most artist-first platform must maintain some block between artists and fans. We seek to eliminate that block altogether.”
Barham’s teammates at HIFI Labs, Taryn Haight (Head of Strategy) and Adrian Ayala (Head of Marketing and Strategic Partnerships) had similar experiences at the large labels, live music companies, and agencies they worked for: “You throw a lot at the wall but don’t get a chance to provide holistic long-term solutions,” as Barham puts it.
HIFI Labs looked to disrupt this short-term mindset, one that flows from a misalignment of industry incentives and keeps artists focused on the next release or tour instead of building a resilient, sustainable, highly creative career. Once they’ve signed on with a label, artists may have to relinquish control not only of their creative output, but also of their entire digital presence, to the point where they may not even be able to access or update something as simple as their website.
“We’ve seen artists backed into a corner,” notes Haight, who headed up strategy at Paradigm and worked at Warner Records, Ninja Tune, and Ultra Music. “They feel desperate, that they have to take a label deal. Yet artists can be sustainable on their own when they see beyond just their next music release. We’re helping the artist to zoom out and see longer-tail opportunities like podcasts, content deals, virtual activations or gaming. We don’t have our own agenda, except to see the artist succeed and embrace more options.”
“When you work at major labels and big agencies, you quickly learn that creativity will always be bounded by basic ROI, things like streams or ticket sales or viral posts,” Ayala says, drawing on his experience at Warner Music, UMG, and Live Nation. But lots of projects we work on are not about that basic standpoint. We get to shake shit up.”
“Another area we are excited to explore are what the movements in blockchain, notably with NFTs at this time, will lead to for artists,” states Jack Spallone, Head of Product and Crypto at HiFi Labs and formerly co-founder of Ujo Music. “Crypto is proving to be an interesting net-new revenue source for artists but we recognize the larger movement happening with web3 and the de-platformization of artist-fan relationships. In a world where user identities for artists and fans exist on a blockchain we can expect a much more accessible ecosystem for applications to exist connecting the two.” Spallone continues “We’re choosing to invest in this space because we feel strongly it’s an area that will be a huge asset to all artists in the near future. More importantly though, we feel it is paramount to develop these solutions alongside the artists themselves, so we’ve created a structure that allows us to look at these problems and develop solutions while hand in hand with the artists and communities they serve.”
In addition to stunning creativity, HIFI Labs is dedicated to artist education and wellbeing, giving both practical advice and industry insights through more personal learning opportunities. For example, HIFI Labs is creating community-based modules to promote better mental health and greater resiliency among artists, based on evidence-based research and tried-and-tested materials developed for startup founders by Drs. Kari Sulenes and Taryn Marie Stejskal.
These pieces all come together to support the whole artist who’s hoping to create over the course of a lifetime. “We filter for long-term success. We want to help artists find a strategy that will honor their vision for their whole career, not just for a single or one album,” Barham reflects. “We want a system that’s more transparent and honest with artists, not merely a different business model. We distill important information that’s not accessible, including all the creative things you can do with new tech that’s just starting to evolve. Once artists realize how much power they have, it will change everything.”
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