Why the music industry needs us now more than ever

Well, the indie music industry anyway.

I doubt very much the majors need us at all. After all, they already bought into most of the other streaming services.

Full disclosure: I’m founder of a startup and that’s what I’m writing about. Instead of some long clever piece that leads up to the last paragraph where the author then reveals they work for a startup and the whole piece is essentially a pitch for it, I’m laying it out up front. But considering that when I eventually exit I’ll essentially be giving the whole thing away, I hope you can suspend judgement for a moment and just trust me that my heart’s in the right place and that if you care about the future of the music industry, you should read this.

What’s the issue?

The eventual consolidation of streaming music portals.

This is a meme that’s been buzzing about music and tech news for the last year or so. Many analysts closely observing the space have been speculating for a while now that due to record losses being suffered from the major players in the game (Spotify, Deezer, Pandora, etc.) that we’re going to end up with a very troubling Triple AAA Threat — Apple, Amazon and Alphabet (AKA Google).

Some quotes:

The prospect is of a digital-music world dominated by the big tech companies. A prospect that’s already being raised by some of the streaming services trying to figure out the economics.

“The music industry is going to be a miserable world if your only path to your fans is via Apple or Facebook or Amazon or Google, because those are not music services,” said Pandora’s chief operating officer Sara Clemens.

Her point was that those companies’ bigger priorities are not how to make money for musicians and the music industry, but rather selling devices (Apple), selling advertising (Google, Facebook) or selling memberships (Amazon), with music likely to be a loss-leader.

That’s from a very recent piece in the Guardian, reporting from the MIDEM conference in Cannes.

Then there’s the incredibly astute Cortney Harding who writes in this just-published piece:

In all fairness to Guvera, they’re not the only streaming service that’s struggling right now. Deezer called off an IPO last year, and Spotify has yet to pull the trigger despite multiple rumors of an offering. Spotify also came under fire during a panel at music business conference MIDEM, where a prominent VC pointed out the despite being the biggest player in the space, they still lost a couple hundred million dollars last year. She went on to explain that this was why VCs tend to avoid the music space.

And while more users have been adopting streaming technology, the numbers don’t suggest the massive uptick that these services might need to survive. There’s a decent possibility we could be left with streaming services that are all part of much larger companies [emphasis mine] that essentially subsidize them as loss-leaders for other products or services.

While she doesn’t explicitly mention the Big Three, they’re the only ones in the space capable of swallowing up the standalone streaming services.

Rumors have been flying around that Amazon is close to launching their own $9.99 monthly subscription model, completing the trio of enormous tech companies who know f***all about the music business. Leaving consumers with giant warehouses of available files and almost no personal touch or connection to the originators of all the content being consumed.

Which is why the indie world needs Resonate now more than ever.

Here’s a list of reasons why:

• We’re a cooperative. Everyone involved (fan, musicians, workers) shares in decisions and in profits.
• We’re open source. Not just our software, but our whole operating philosophy as a company.
• We believe the music industry is an ecosystem. It’s not just a play button and a series of genre, or algorithmically-tagged, tracks.
• We have this crazy notion that artists deserve living wages in exchange for all of the content they produce.
• We believe fans crave connection just as much as the content they consume.

And perhaps above all, we believe that the indie industry stands more to gain by cooperating with each other than competing.

Which is why we’ve got an open innovation model that will allow us to extend into countless directions beyond clicking a play button, so whether you’re an artist or an app developer, we want to work with you.

I’m not going to sugar coat it. Building something like this is insanely hard work.

We’ve made tremendous progress… recruiting hundreds of musicians, a bunch of amazing indie labels, an incredibly diverse group of dedicated tech and design talent from around the world (all of whom are volunteering) and a growing mass of dedicated fans who can’t wait to use the service when it launches.

But it’s not enough — we still need a lot more help, because it’s incredibly complex and we’re up against giants with mind-numbingly deep pockets.

So if you’re concerned like we are that the streaming world is going to consolidate into the Three Boring Tech Giants, then… check us out, spread the word and help us build it.

Or… just go back to what you were doing and we’ll see how bland and tasteless things become when Silicon Valley eats the music industry.