Karen Allen - Author of "Twitch for Musicians."
For over 20 years Karen has been working at the intersection of technology and music.
LP chats with Karen Allen, author of "Twitch for Musicians." For over 20 years Karen has been working at the intersection of technology and music. She's obsessed with livestreaming and wrote a book with best practices before COVID was even thought of.
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Karen Allen: Nice to meet you.
Lawrence Peryer: Nice to meet you as well. Thank you for making time. I really appreciate it.
KA: Absolutely, yeah.
LP: So I am very intrigued and excited to talk to you about your work around Twitch. But I would to start a little bit by just, you know, learn a little bit about your background and where you're from, get some context. Where am I talking to you from? Where are you right now?
KA: I'm actually in my husband's warehouse. It's a bit noisy in my neighborhood right now. There's a lot of construction going on in the houses around me so I figured I'd just go to my husband's warehouse. It's usually pretty quiet around here.
LP: Yeah? What part of the country are you in?
KA: Los Angeles.
LP: Los Angeles.
KA: Yeah.
LP: How are things down there?
KA: Well, the coronavirus is getting worse. We're definitely on the uprise when it comes to infection rate. So it's a little freaky right now.
LP: Yeah.
KA: But, yeah – I mean people are still going out. You know? The bars just closed down again.
LP: Yeah. That seems pretty [scary 0:01:58]. Yeah. We – so I'm up in Seattle and we've been lucky. King County's been sort of stable. But the rest of the state is a mess. It gets rural pretty quickly outside of Seattle and we've got a couple of areas that are, you know, it's – I've not ventured into some of the neighboring counties, but it sounds absolutely horrifying.
KA: Yeah. You know, once you get out of the real like lefty areas of Los Angeles county, you know, nobody wants to wear a mask and that's how it spreads, more than anything, is you know – got to wear a mask. People don't want to do it. So yeah, it's – you know, everybody, or obviously all my friends, are entertainment or [unintelligible 0:02:42] business people. So our lives are all fairly decimated.
I've had friends lose jobs. I'm watching industries collapse. And it's just, you know, it's really hard to watch people be so cavalier about that.
LP: Yeah. I want the liberty get myself and everyone around me sick. I want that.
KA: I would like the liberty to earn a living. You know?
LP: Yeah.
KA: I would like the liberty for my husband's warehouse full of gear to be went out to events, which he does for a living. That would be really nice. You know? So it's, I don’t know, it's hard to watch people not – it's hard to watch people politicize science.
LP: Right.
KA: You know? This isn't politics. This is basic, you know, germs. Germs don’t care if you're left or right. They're – they just do what they do. So yeah, it's been really tough watching that.
LP: Yeah, it's – I mean I think we all knew for a while, certainly commentators talked about it, that there is this notion of like being a post-fact era. I could have my set of facts. You could have your set of facts. And we can live in two completely separate realities. There was no objective fact anymore. Which that alone blows my mind. But to see the repercussions of that in a situation like this, like the true practical repercussions.
Forget before, when it was sort of philosophical about what it was doing to society and what it was doing to our politics. But now we're actually living that way. I just refuse to not believe that this thing requires me to wear a mask, therefore I'm right. Like that's – it's a scary, scary notion.
KA: Yeah. Yeah, I mean look, I blame Trump and Facebook. I put it squarely on their shoulders. I mean Twitter to a large extent as well, because I mean Twitter could definitely be doing more to clean up their bots. But I mean Facebook's digging in, you know? They're like we don't have a problem [unintelligible 0:04:44] problem. It's like no, you're actually part of the problem. Like it's a real issue. And I blame Trump for dividing the country and not brining people together.
I mean it's one thing to be divisive during a campaign because that's the whole point is to get people to vote for you. Most politicians at that point go, okay, well, campaign's over, you know, we're all in this together now; let's see what we can do. There's at least some, you know, front of that, you know, some initial OK, that part is over, we know that, you know, we have to be divisive, we know we have to stand firm on one side or the other.
But now that we're actually all like in our seats, you know, let's move our agenda's forward to the extent that we can, you know, collectively. And it just haven't been that at all with him. At all. So that's been incredibly shocking. It's been incredibly shocking to watch the Republicans not, not stand up to that. Really, really shocking, that they just go along with it. And you have to wonder like what, what's in it.
Like if they had outed Trump during the impeachment, they would have gotten Pence and Pence would have greenlit their crap as much as anybody else would have. So it's not about getting bills passed. It's not. It's – there's something else.
LP: When I wear the – when I put on my little tinfoil hat and the conspiracy theorist in me comes out, I'm – I can convince myself that through whatever cabal he is involved with, with Putin, he's just got a filing cabinet with a folder on each one of them. And there's one that says Lindsay Graham and there's one that says Mitch McConnell.
KA: It's got to be, right?
LP: It's the only thing that makes sense. Why would you have – why would you be so – to your point, you're, they're not attached to an ideology, they're attached to him.
KA: Yeah.
LP: Yeah.
KA: Because I mean Pence would put, Pence would put extremely right wing Supreme Court judges in. Pence would be, you know, hand and hand with corporate oil. Like he's a Republican. This is what – he would pass everything and he would be a lot more – I mean I can't stand him, but at least he wouldn't be embarrassing. You know, this is really embarrassing as a country, like how far we've fallen.
I mean our allies don't – aren't even on our side anymore. We are really out there alone and the only ally we have right now was Russia. And they're actually our enemy. You know, Putin wants to destroy us. Like it's really scary to see that. And it's really scary to see the people, a majority, roll over when stakes were so high.
LP: Yeah, it's [unintelligible 0:07:26]
KA: Yeah. That's why I blame a lot of this on Trump. I mean he's the one who came out and said this isn't a big deal, and you know, the WHO wasn't correct and CDC isn't correct, and you know, you know, defying Fauci right in front of his face during press conferences, saying things like, you know, just use bleach on your skin; I mean all these ridiculous, ridiculous things. So all of his base are like, it's not that big of a deal, it's just a flu.
It's not just a flu. And the people who are surviving, they're going to have like really serious lifelong health problems. Like it thickens your blood. You know, I don't want thicker blood.
LP: I'm happy with the viscosity of my blood.
KA: Yeah. Well, I mean I just, you know, you're more liable to strokes and heart attacks and, you know, we're bad enough with our diet. You know, heart disease, It's like the number one killer in America. We don't really need thicker blood, we don't need, you know, permanently damaged lungs, we don't need damaged kidneys, you know, especially when you're young. And looking at the rest of your life and all the health problems that are going to come up, I mean you may skate out with it not killing now but it's definitely going to shorten your life.
LP: Well, in terms of the vulnerable populations, whether it's the elderly or people with preexisting conditions or low income people, it elevates this, you know, this notion of how the Republicans get people to vote against their own self interest by being divisive. It elevates it almost to the level of performance art. Like the very people who are the most vulnerable are the ones who are running around with [unintelligible 0:09:11] like I don't need to wear a mask or –
KA: They just make it about the Constitution and you're basic right to freedom as an American. Everything just drives it right back to freedom. Your right to own a gun, your right to freedom. You know, it's – people are talking about COVID in terms of the Constitution. This has nothing to do with the Constitution. This is everything to do with don't get sick. It's just, it's really mind-blowing to see it.
LP: Yeah. Well, and your point about Trump and Facebook, for me it's inseparable. The two are inseparable. His rise is inseparable from Facebook and the changes to their platform. But you know – and I think what they share in common, you were starting to allude to, is the obstinacy in their reactions. Like let's not have a dialogue, let's dig in. And let's just say, no, no, we'll be proven right in the long run. Our way is the right way. It's – yeah, a toxic platform.
But the body rots from the head, you know?
KA: Yeah, yeah. No, you're totally right, you're totally right. So yeah, it's kind of horrifying to watch the whole thing happen.
LP: Yeah. Well, I'm sorry to lead our conversation down that avenue initially but I also have found that in doing these interviews, it's been very important to acknowledge not only what was happening in the COVID situation but certainly what's been happening since the George Floyd murder. I'm trying not to shy away from asking people how they are, how they these things are impacting them.
It would just feel disingenuous. But I also think it's helpful for people to hear how their peers and colleagues and other people that they might admire or, you know, or are learning about, are dealing with these very real human situations. So thanks at least to being, for being open to sharing your thoughts. I appreciate it.
KA: Yeah. Yeah, sure.
LP: So one thing that stood out for me about your background that you're probably going to think it's ridiculous given all the things you've accomplished. But I couldn't help but want to learn more about being a digital music strategist at the RIAA during the time period you were there. That to me is just like Ground Zero for so much fascinating churn as well for like really setting the stage for the subsequent, you know, 20 years.
Could you tell me a little bit about how you came into that role and what the role was?
KA: The role was very undefined. Which is why it was called Internet Evangelist. So this was late '90s to early 2000s. They hired me and sued Napster six months later. So that was my timeline. That was my, you know, trial by fire, basically. So prior to that, I worked for a company called N2K. We had a website called Rocktropolis. And it was one of the very first sort of music magazine style websites. And I basically did a lot of the content for that. So I knew all of the – knew a lot of managers, I knew a lot of the digital, the new media departments at the record labels, as they were called at the time. New media.
Yeah. So N2K ended up merging. We all got laid off. And I started putting the feelers out for a job, and one of – a friend of mine, one of the labels gave my name to Hillary Rosen at the RIAA, because they were just at the very beginning at the whole MP3 download peer to peer revolution. And we were trying to figure out what to do about that and how to approach it. And they wanted to have someone from the – from the digital side of it, basically the digital company side of it, the startup side of it, sort of in-house, but also someone who understood the record business.
So it was a really good match for me. I started my career in artist management and then pivoted pretty quickly into digital music startup. So had a, you know, really good balance of both going into that. And she called me up one day and flew me out to D.C. and I sat with her and [Carrie Sherman 0:13:35], a few other people, and had a good, you know, two or three hour interview with them. And they offered me a job.
So yeah, and you know, it was – they just needed help on a lot of different levels. So I worked with the marketing people, I worked with the P.R. people. I worked with legal, definitely with – I'm not a lawyer. But I work with legal in litigation and also in licensing. And I was just sort of the person to help them understand what was happening and to guide them through it, and also to help, you know, guide music startups through the RIAA.
So part of what I did was, you know, I went to every conference; it was in every digital music forum, you know, digitally that was out there. The full list and a bunch of others. And we're just sort of like the eyes and the ears of the RIAA, just sort of telling them like this is what's really happening out there; this is what we need to be paying attention to. And also sort of being, you know, the person in the room for the RIAA to respond to everything that was happening in these forms.
So it was really, really fascinating. The very first thing I did there actually was rebuild the website, which is the best thing I could have done. Because I didn't know a lot about the RIAA when I started. And when you build a website for a corporation, you end up learning every little tiny fact about that company. Because I did build – I had to build sections for each one of them. So that was extremely, extremely helpful.
And then sort of moving forward, you know, we had Napster – gosh, there was, I think Pirate Bay might have been around during that time. LimeWire. And then the DMCA was being written. You know, and as I was leaving, Sound Exchange was being formed. I mean it was just an extremely pivotal, fascinating time. I learned a hell of a lot about the legal side of the business, I learned a hell of a lot about politics. At the end of the day RIAA, we're lobbyists. That's why they're in D.C. It's a lobbying organization that also does the Gold and Platinum program.
But at the end of the day, you know, they're there to stick up for the rights of the sound recording copyright holders, which is the labels, but which I knew would not only be the labels. It didn't take too much to look down the road and see that artists would be releasing their own records and record labels would be less and less needed in the whole equation of an artist's career.
So as much as there was a fight at that time between artists saying very publically Napster's okay, put the music out there, whatever, and the record labels saying no, pay us, I knew that would flip at some point, where everything that the RIAA was fighting for was actually the same thing that the artists were going to benefit from, once we got past the reliance on the record labels. And it's completely true. It's completely true. I mean everything that we were fighting for then was literally should there be a copyright digitally.
The Napster argument was not how much we pay you. It was whether we should pay you. You know? Whether we should license this, whether there should be a payment for an MP3 – there was an argument then that, you know, it's – it's freedom of information and freedom of speech, and therefore it shouldn't be paid at all. I mean that was the argument that was going on when I was there.
And that would not have played out well, you know, where we are 20 years later – that argument would not have played out well for all the independent artists. I mean Chance the Rapper is doing pretty well [unintelligible 0:17:40] did pretty well. You know, all of these independent artists who actually be able to make a living, you know, selling their downloads and being on the streaming services and having claim to, you know, being able to monetize their copyrights online. That happened while I was there.
LP: Given the line you must have straddled just in terms of your network and web of relationships – so you have – you're employed by basically the industry's lobbying organization, but you're really – you're their conduit to what's happening on the ground in terms of new innovation, new ideas, new companies. I would have to think that there were some days where both camps treated you slightly mistrustfully and then other days where they must have relied on you very strongly to be sort of that channel between the two.
Like was there a tension? Did the RIAA folks ever believe you were too far on the other side as an advocate? And did the external community ever say, oh, here comes the lady from industry to tell us why we're, you know, why our ideas are never going to work? What was the – what was the dynamic there?
KA: I think more the latter than the former. I definitely pushed the RIAA on some ideas. But I don't think they ever felt that I wasn't working for them. Again, because I always – I started my career as an artist manager, and I cared about what was going to happen with the artists, and I knew that eventually they would own all their own sound recordings.
Everything I fought for at the RIAA I was actually fighting for, for the artist. So we were fairly in lockstep with each other. The rest of the industry – obviously there was heated debates, many people could attest to, across many conferences and online forums. And you know, that was trickier to navigate, because I agreed with a lot of what they were saying. We just hadn't found a way to get there yet. And there's thing that Jim Griffin calls jungle economics, which is when, you know, your industry is so entrenched in one way of doing business and you know you have to grab, you know, the next, the next rope, but there's nothing there yet.
You know, there's a big like cliff, basically. There's nothing to land to. It's really hard to grab that rope. So you're sort of in between two things. And he was right about that. Because at the time the industry was making all of our money still on CDs. And they were trying to map that same construct into the digital world and it doesn't map exactly. It just doesn't. There's new ways of monetizing, there's new ways of distribution, there's new ways of consumption, and you can't map that one to one.
And we hadn't figured out what those new ways were yet. So there was a lot of chaos basically going on. And you know, very impassioned, very impassioned opinions on both sides, none of which I necessarily disagreed with except the fact that everything should be free. I very strongly disagreed that everything should be free.
But the idea that would be – well, at the time we called it the Celestial Jukebox, where you'd pay a flat fee per month for unlimited access. That's Spotify. That's Title, it's Apple Music. That actually came to be. It's actually right now what's kind of like saving the industry. So I mean we have like record, you know, not where we were before, but it's definitely up from where we've been and it's thanks to, you know, people actually paying for Spotify and paying for Apple and, you know, paying for Deezer and so forth, paying for [Sovin 0:21:40].
But yeah, yeah, it was tricky during that time. I think I always tried to respect the people in the room. Even though I disagreed with them. And I think that served me. There's only a few that I would say never had a good relationship with, but you know, by and large, you know, we'd be at the panel and have it out and we'd go to the bar and hang out, you know, and might talk like human beings. So yeah, but I definitely, that definitely thickened my skin when it came to, you know, what's professional and what's personal and also how to have an argument with someone so it doesn't get personal, so you stay on topic. I think that's a really tough, tough skill to learn and it's a valuable skill to learn.
And sort of back to what's going on, into Facebook, what you were talking about with politics, it's something that people aren't good at. You know, because you can talk about, you can hotly debate the topic and stay on topic and be OK But once you call someone an idiot, now it's personal. Right? And that crosses a line and people are naturally defensive and then they go harder, and now you're not even arguing anymore about what you're arguing about. You're just having a personal fight.
So you never really want to let it get to that point, and that's a big lesson that I learned during that time and actually a skill I learned during that time that I try to stick to. It can be hard. You know, when someone's calling you an idiot, it's tough to, you know, it's tough to keep your cool. But you know, it's also kind of what why they're calling you an idiot. They're just riling you up.
LP: Yeah. Generally it means there's not much more to – there's not more no merit of the argument so I'm just going to attack you.
KA: Yeah. And you know, how can you think this? You're so stupid. You know, on and on and on. It's not a good way to argue. I don't think with anything. You know, and I think even like marriage counselors will tell you that the couples who argue and stay on topic are the ones who are going to make it vs. the ones who start personally attacking each other and saying your mother is ugly and, you know, all those things.
LP: Yeah.
KA: Yeah, no, it was an interesting time for sure. I learned a hell of a lot.
LP: Well, I think the other interesting thing, and then I'm happy to move on from this era, is that, you know, so many of the arguments, while yes, they were business arguments, they were also in a way religion arguments, or you know, cosmological view of the world arguments. So you talked before about music should be free or information wants to be free. All those sort of early Internet tropes that, well, even tropes is too loaded of a word, right?
Because there are people that truly did and truly do believe that. It was a political/philosophical position about the nature of information and digitization and distribution, and so it's very easy for those conversations [unintelligible 0:25:02] one thing, it's simply a business negotiation about [terms 0:25:05], but if it's about whether there should be a business negotiation about terms, much harder.
KA: Yeah.
LP: Yeah. So the through-line on everything you did and have been doing over the last 15 or 20 years, it seems to be that it has to do with really bridging that gap between, between businesses and business ideas, and the reality of what's happening in the marketplace, how to bring those two together, how to help the startup or the company or the artist or the idea generator, sort of find their place in the commercial landscape. Is that a fair take?
Do you have point of view on how you think about what you do?
KA: Yeah. I mean I would add that I'm just mostly interested in what's new. I'm not so interested in what's established. Like subscription services right now kind of bore me. They haven't really changed. They're established. It's a going concern. I mean I think if they were to bring in social features, that would be a game changer to make it interesting again.
But like I'm not interested in subscription services. I was super interested in V.R. a couple of years ago because V.R. was really in an interesting space. I'm interested in live streaming. And I've been watching it since 2016, because I saw the potential in it and I saw it as a massive game changer for the way that artists can build and grow and monetize directly an audience with nobody's help. You know?
Which was completely, completely separate from anything we've seen so far. And before that, you know, I worked with a mobile entertainment forum, before there was an app marketplace, and that was all about getting entertainment onto cell phones. And again, we didn't have the app store, we didn't have Android as a platform yet. So –
LP: Sort of the walled garden era.
KA: Yeah, yeah. Which it's easy now. You want to get on cell, you Google an app. You know, here's the API, here's the SDK, go do it. You know, it's really simple. Back then you had to – are you going to be on carrier or off-carrier? You know, you have like five different provisioning companies to even like put the whole thing together on top of what you were building. You know, it was incredibly complicated to do these things.
So yeah, I like being at the beginning of, of a sector of technology. Because I like to see the potential in it and what it can really do, how it's really different, and I'm really interested in what the content is going to look like for that. Because I think it's too easy for us to try to do what we've done before on an entirely new medium. What ends up happening is the medium dictates what the content is and it takes a while for us to figure out what's successful, and it's hardly ever what was successful on the other mediums. If you know what I mean.
LP: Yes. I love that line of inquiry. It was highlighted for me during the start of COVID, you know, situation where, you know, I'm sure as you've seen, you know, whether it was webcasting, live streaming, artists using social tools; these things have been around now, you know, in the case of webcasting 20 years or more, in various forms. And it seemed like outside of sort of promotional usage these things hadn't found like their killer app or their killer use case.
And you know, now one of the early things was how the artists all started to take to Instagram and started to do things where even nine months ago, if you were a label marketing manager or something and you were trying to get your artists to be, say, more authentic on Instagram in the lead-up to a release, you couldn't get them to do the candid things or do something from home. You know, it all felt so, for the most part, right, we can all find other use cases.
But it was – it just felt so promotional and so like everything had to be through hair and makeup. And now, you know, we – I think you don't go back. Now artists have seen that. It's not that scary to pick up the phone and post something candid or speak directly to the audience or interact with another celebrity. Or to your point, like develop new conventions around these types of content. Like it just like, you know, a sitcom or a dramady or the one hour drama are all sort of conventions that evolved out of TV; there will be conventions that come out of the live streaming realm and come out of the social storytelling realm that were sort of driven by this new necessity.
And I agree with you 100 percent. There will be new content. And they won't go away. When we get back to whatever we're going to get back, where concerts are available again, you can congregate and all these other things, I don’t think these new methods are going to disappear. It's going to be another thing now in the artist's toolbox, it will be another creative tool, another promotional tool. So to me that's something really positive that came out of all this, is the way artists were sort of encouraged or slash forced to keep being artists, right?
Like they needed something for themselves to continue to put stuff out and to feel creative, feel engaged, to have fun with their fans, to promote. And I don't think they're going to forget about these [unintelligible 0:31:12] once the other stuff is back. I would argue we might see some artists that explore this realm more and don't go back to old ways of doing things. So it's going to be very interesting. I think the next, you know, two, four, five years, it's going to be very, very interesting to see how artists use the sort of digital streaming realm to augment what they do in the physical online phase [unintelligible 0:31:39].
But I'm curious – in your world of sort of being really immersed in live streaming, you talked about social in the context of the streaming services and how that's something that's missing from the subscription services. What's the difference between live streaming and what artists can do in social?
KA: So the streaming that I mean is like with Spotify. Like I think Spotify is a really flat service. And music is social. I think that's the big thing that Spotify and Apple and Title are missing with this. We like Facebook because its social. Facebook is a news feed of what our friends are doing. How cool is that? You know? And a place for us to talk to each other and to stay in touch. How cool is that? That's why Facebook is successful. Twitter is sort of that for people you don't necessarily know.
Instagram is just a very like visual version of that. So that's – and those are hugely popular backbone of the Internet kind of services, right? So music is social. So why doesn't Spotify or Apple or Title have intrinsically social experiences in music? And not just the ticker of what my friends are listening to, because that's completely out of context. I don’t know if they're recommending that or if they're just listening to a playlist.
I have no idea what any of that means. But if there was a news feed, you know, within Spotify, of songs that I'm super into, or things that I think people would like; if there is a way for me to figure out which of my friends were also massive Radiohead fans, so we could all dork out on Radiohead together, you know, or any other band – there's just things that are just so blatantly missing that are not, by the way, blatantly missing in the Korean and Japanese versions of these streaming services, which is mind-blowing.
I was in Taipei last fall for a conference and was hanging out with all, of course all American music people out there, and they were showing me these apps and they were mind-blowing. It's like why don't we have that here. It would be so much more fun. Spotify is for me, Spotify is really intelligent radio. That's really what it is for me. It's really intelligent radio. But it's not a way for me to hang out and listen to music with my friends, you know, in the moment or a time shift. It doesn't matter. Right? But my favorite thing ever to do is sit around and listen to music with friends, you know, and like turn each other on to things.
And there's really no way to do that. Or to do it well. So that's what I – that's why I say like they're missing a whole – that's a massive growth area for them. I think bigger than podcasts. Podcasts are nice. You know, they need to diversity outside of music. Good for them. But that's how you grow. That's how you make it sticky. You know, we all hate Facebook for various reasons. Very few of us actually leave it. Why is that? You know? Because it's social. Because we still want the news feed on our friends.
For me, you know, a lot of my industry is on there. There are Facebook groups that I'm a part of, that I get a ton of information out of. So that's why I can't leave. There are these sticky things that actually are very valuable. I mean Spotify doesn't have any of that. It's just, you know, there's just sort of like learned – it learns [unintelligible 0:35:25] I mean that's hard to walk away from and maybe I've built a bunch of playlists and that's hard to walk away from. But that's pretty much it. It's a pretty disposable service in every other respect. But if they had grown this social aspect of it, that is a whole other reason to stick around for it.
So that's – I mean that's kind of where I think they should – and I've told them that. But –
LP: It sounds like a lot of what you're saying is the difference between useful and fun. Spotify is very useful. It's helpful to have it in your pocket. You can look up a song anytime you want. You can, you know, I like some of the things they do. I like a lot of the things they do around the playlists they make for me. I do discover music. It's useful. But I don't spend any time doing anything with the app. It's not fun. It's actually counterproductive in terms of managing things like podcasts.
It's nowhere near as easy to find the podcast episodes as it is on the native podcast app. Like there's the product – I talk about this with a lot of folks I talk to here. The state of sort of product innovation in steaming services in the West in particular is really, it's really bleak. You know, when you have, when you assume that basically everybody has basically the same content, you know, it's not even differentiated the way the video services are.
We can talk whether podcasts are going to be that differentiator. But the products themselves are just not fun, they're not that exciting to use. They're just a portal to the Celestial Jukebox. They just have different front ends to Celestial Jukebox. And yet it does seem like a missed opportunity.
You talk – you know, you could look at Tik Tok, it's sort of the exact opposite. Right? It's like part of it is it's not music first. It's entertainment first and then music there to augment the experience. And I think if you, you know, when you start from that really precious music [version 0:37:25] mentality, I think it leads to a lot of very narrow [unintelligible 0:37:32].
So, so talk to me a little then about – how does one become an expert on [unintelligible 0:37:44] musician – how did you –
KA: Hours and hours and hours and hours.
LP: Yeah.
KA: Of doing it. Doing it. Yeah. I did it. I did it. So I started live streaming in 2016 on YouNow. So that's when the light bulb turned on about this kind of live streaming, is different from any other live streaming that I've ever seen or have worked with, with my clients on. Completely different. I actually call it community live streaming as opposed to live stream broadcasting, which is what the industry has been doing to this point, is live stream broadcasts basically. [unintelligible 0:38:28] sort of television feel, you know, not a lot of interaction, Coachella, Lollapalooza, that sort of thing. If you're lucky they'll have a Twitter feed going on next to it. But probably not. It's really not – it's a singular experience for many people at the same time. Which is a singular experience.
And the community live streaming that we see on YouNow, you know, 200 services in China all do the same thing, but it's basically – it's live streaming with a really thick layer of community across the top of it. It is – it actually gamifies community, which is the part that I thought was really fascinating, and then it monetizes that gamification. So it takes a real freemium gaming concept towards live streaming.
And I first ran into that with YouNow. And then I started streaming on YouNow. Because I couldn't quite understand where the monetization came in. So if you're not familiar, I'll give you the two sentence overview. Basically – turn your camera on, you live stream whatever it is that you do, it shows in the video players, there's a chat along side it. People are in the chat. You can read the chat while you're live, so you can verbally respond to any of the chat comments.
So people will talk to you. And then they can do things like subscribe to your channel. They can buy virtual currency and spend it on virtual gifts, and those gifts usually show up as animations on your screen that everybody can see. And then of course there's lots of ways to take money off system through your PayPal, your Venmo, you know, selling your records or whatever it is.
So that's, that's the basic thing. But really the heart and soul of it really is this give and take in the chat. The fact that I can talk in the chat to the person who is streaming who will then read that and respond to me, you end up feeling as though you are in the same room. Especially if the person who is streaming is in a very casual environment.
You know, it's not like you're on a stage with lights and there's smoke and, you know, they're getting a comment every so often, like if it feels, it feels like you are hanging out in the basement having a few beers and playing some music. And that’s how it should feel. And there's the community between the streamer and the viewer, and there's also a whole community amongst the viewers. They all get to know each other, they see each other in other similar streams, they end up having complete conversations in the chat that have nothing to do with the streamer because they're just hanging out with each other.
And then there's a whole other community amongst the streamers. They kind of help each other grow in lots of ways. So there's actually three community dynamics happening within live streaming, and I've seen this across the board in any sort of community live streaming platform. And that would be LiveMe or YouNow or Twitch. Anything that's like dedicated to live streaming. I kind of put YouTube and Facebook and Instagram outside of that a bit because that's live streaming services nested within a larger social network.
And just the basic operation of a social network is different from the basic operation of a live stream community platform. So having that nested in there, you sort of have the limitation of being within a social network. You don't have all the – you don't have as many ways to discover streamers and for streamers to promote each other that you would on a dedicated live stream platform.
So what really knocked me out going back to 2016, when I started on YouNow, what really knocked me out was that people were not only showing up and chatting and talking, which is not a big leap, right, for the Internet. People do, they've been doing it since AOL chat rooms, show up and talk to each other. What got me was that people were paying. People were subscribing for 5 bucks a month. They were buying their virtual currency. And this was kids. This was teenagers mostly on YouNow at the time, and they were doing content on YouNow that was very similar to what they might do on a YouTube channel.
And these weren't kids that had the YouTube channels. They're like, they were what I like to call native streamers, meaning their first public, you know, content creator venture for them was on the live stream platform. They weren't coming from a huge Instagram following a huge YouTube following. So no one knew who they were. They built this community completely organically and people would actually pay them. And I couldn't understand why would teenagers pay for this when it's basically what they could see for free on YouTube, which they definitely were not paying for.
And it wasn't even as good as content as you could get on, you know, Spotify or Hulu or whatever. And we were having a really hard time at the time getting people to pay anything for Spotify. Like they will pay 5 bucks a month for one channel on YouNow, one person who goes live three times a week, which they might not even catch all those shows. But we can't get them to pay 5 bucks a month for Spotify. What is happening?
So I started streaming. Like I'm not going to figure this out until I do it. So I started a channel, which is basically an advice channel. The premise was that, ask an adult, if you want to ask an adult a question that you don't want to ask an adult in your life for whatever reason, then you can ask me. And you know, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a counselor, I don’t even have kids. But if you just want to bounce something off like another adult who's lived a little longer than you have, then hit me.
And it was sort of an open forum for let's just hang out and talk. And you know, whatever you want to talk about. And it took off. And after that first session I completely understood what people were paying for. And I understood how you could build a community. I understood – YouNow was and is set up wonderfully to help people grow on the platform, better I think than Twitch is set up, honestly.
They have features that I think definitely help me grow my audience like off the bat, that Twitch doesn't have in place. But basically it came down to feeling like you are seen and heard, and listened to. And there were other people in the chat that were similar to you. You know? Live streaming I keep saying is content wrapped in community. The community actually outpaces the content a little bit. If you're good at creating community around yourself, people will come back.
Community always stays fresh. Content gets stale. So keep your community fresh. Those are the principles that are happening on a live stream platform that are not happening on any other place. And when people feel that they're getting something of value, they will give something of value. And if you have low monetization, low engagement options for giving value, they will do that. And then you have the high monetization, high engagement options. And the people who are, who become your fans, you know, will do that.
But the first thing people pay for on a live stream platform is improving their experience. And this is the big difference. They're actually not paying for content. They're paying to improve their experience first and improving your experience is spending some money on some virtual currency and then making a little animation happen on the screen with my name on it. That's fun for me. You know, it shows my appreciation to the streamer, but that's fun for me.
It's fun for me to do that and then to get the thank you and to get the acknowledgement and see my name up there. That's fun. On Twitch the subscriptions are fun because the creators get to make their own emoji, and Twitch does not have universe emoji. They have their own set of emoji and its' very gamer and inside jokey. So all the normal ones you'd want to use aren't there.
So for non-gamer people, creators, you know, create their own emoji. And it's worth it. It's fun for me to use the emoji because I want to express myself in the chat and the best way I can do that is through pictures, not through words. You know. So you know, I am paying to improve – I am subscribing to improve my experience first, and then secondly I acknowledge that the creator is getting cut in on that. So I can also feel good about supporting somebody. But I'm supporting them in a way that's fun for me. That's the first stage.
The second stage is when you start paying for gift subscriptions, which means that you see other people coming into the chat who are becoming fans and you gift them a subscription. And that is – you kind of get a warm feely from that. But it's not, it's not like I'm going to get emotes out of that or more emoji out of that.
It's really me now becoming a patron of the creator, and that's where we get into the high engagement, you know, high monetization type things. On Twitch you can also tip to – for song requests. And I've seen tips as low as 2 dollars. I've seen tips as high as 100 dollars. You know, to play one song. Live. Not to buy a song, to play a long. Pretty standard tip amount is 5 dollars. You know, 5 to 10 dollars tip to play one song.
And we go back, you know, to 2016. Well, we couldn't get anybody to 5 dollars for a full month of Spotify. You know, people were, they still are, sharing Netflix's passwords. You know, super, super high, you know, premium content is hard to move. But if you can make people feel like they're a part of something and give them fun low monetization ways to improve their experience, that also benefit the creators so they feel like they're doing something good for the little guy, that's powerful.
It's extremely powerful. And that's what's happening. And it's happening so well that artists who – native live streamers had little to nothing going on, on Instagram, Spotify, YouTube. I was there in 2016. I watched all these artists. I would go to their YouTube. I would go to their Instagram.
They had nothing going on. Under a thousand followers. Under 500 views per video on YouTube. If they were even on Spotify. Even if they – if they had even put a record out. You know, it was definitely under that two thousand category. Like nothing going on. You had never heard of these people. And these were artists that were either making a nice side hustle or doing it full time. Supporting themselves full time doing nothing but streaming.
So we've gone from, you know, reliance on an entire industry to artists being able to put out their own records through TuneCore and CD Baby and so forth. And now we've gotten to the point where you don't even need that. You don't even need to put records out. You know, you don't even need to be on Spotify to be able to support yourself. That is to me the watershed of this whole thing. That is the massive game changer, that is what I like talking about. And this is exactly where I live in my career.
When I see these big watershed game changers come along and I've got to figure out, OK, so what does this mean to everybody, you know – the thing with Twitch is that it's so complicated to put a channel together. It's not easy; like on YouNow you go live through the website. You basically just, you know, allow access to camera and boom, there you go. It's really, really easy. And all the monetization is set up, all the alerts are set up, already through the platform.
Twitch is not like that. Twitch is a lot more like YouTube. YouTube is where you put the video that you made and people go to watch it. And that's pretty much the beginning and end of YouTube. They don't do anything else, anything else for you, besides run some ads on it. And that's kind of like Twitch. You know, if you want alerts on your screen when somebody follows you or makes a donation or rates you, that's not Twitch. A different service does that.
You know, if you want to, you want to create your stream, you would use OBS. Twitch finally in the last year has their own live stream production software. It's called Twitch Studio. It's nowhere near as advanced as OBS. But OBS is the gold standard for a live stream production software, by the way that you can use on anything, you can use on any live stream platform. OBS is the standard for that.
And it's tricky. It's trick to learn. And then, you know, you've got, you've got to figure out, OK, so then how do we make the sound good? There were just so many layers, it took me two months to put Marina – Marina V is my client – it took me two months to put her channel together. And I'm good at this. I've never Googled tech help so much in my entire life as I did doing this. And I'm actually really good at this stuff.
So I just thought, you know, it's too hard. It's way too hard, but it's also too good of an opportunity for DIY artists. Like they're just, they're going to tap out. It's too complicated. So that's why I decided to write a book and to make a course to make it easy for them to learn, and I started writing it a little over a year ago. So it was spring of 2019. The book came out in August of 2019. And then I put out the second edition in February of 2020, right before the pandemic hit.
Fortunately I would not have had time to do that if I hadn't, hadn't already. But – and nothing had changed even in that six months. And I'm like, OK, I've got to update some stuff. You know, that's just completely outdated now. That's how fast it moves. But yeah, there's a lot to know. There's a lot to know. And the book covers in the very beginning like everything we just talked about, which is how is this different, how is creating content for this different than every other platform I'm on?
How does it – how is it complementary or not complimentary to everything I'm doing on Facebook and Instagram? Should I skip one for the other? Basically what am I doing here and what is this? You know, and then I get into, OK, this is how you put your child together. The meat of the book, honestly, is it's a tech tutorial. It's 80 percent tech walkthroughs with screenshots and click here and do this.
And you know, this is how you're going to set your own coding, you're going to set up your OBS. You're not dropping frames and your audio sounds good and this is how you're going to connect your alerts and these are the ones that you definitely need and the ones that maybe you don't need and here's how to run some loyalty programs and here's how to run your chat bots. Because you can automate your chat in lots of ways, with pre-programmed messages. And you can also automate responses to messages through chat bots.
And those are really powerful. So how do you do those? And then the last chapter is basically, OK, now that you have a channel built, like what do you do? You know? The camera's on, what do I do? So what do you do during the show and what do you do between your streams? So that's a lot of what I cover. And I wrote it for Twitch because – not that Twitch paid me, they did not. I just think, and still do think, that Twitch is the best place for DIY musicians because there's already a healthy music community there.
And it's just, it's easier, it's like – it's like moving to, you know, to Austin, if you want to be a roots rocker. You know, it's like moving to Nashville if you want to be a country artist. Like you want to go where there's an existing community set up to support you. That's what Twitch is. There's an existing music community. They all support each other. And there are people there who are watching this, already audience, you know, versus doing it on Facebook where the only people on Facebook who are going to show up are the ones who are already following you.
And then the same for YouTube. The only ones that will watch your YouTube stream are the ones who are already watching you, that you already can promote to. And you can actually start from zero on Twitch and do okay. So that's why I wrote it for Twitch. I mean interesting now, people are streaming everywhere. So I still support Twitch but I say now, like look, if you have audience on Facebook, stream on Facebook. Go where you have audience. It's hard to build audience. You know, if you're big on Instagram, stream on Instagram.
LP: Do you see a version of what you do being less about push for musicians and more about live streaming for artists? Like is it –
KA: I feel like everything I've been doing has always been about live streaming. It's just for this, for this use I've been focusing on Twitch, for artists. Again, because I think for indie artists it really is the best. But yeah, I am a live streaming advocate. I'm not necessarily a Twitch advocate. I could be writing a different book in a year, you know?
LP: Yeah –
KA: Tik Tok shows tremendous potential. Tik Tok live streaming shows tremendous potential. It works a lot more like YouNow than it does like Twitch. And if you have the hit, as an artist, on Tik Tok, stream on Tik Tok; it's monetized, it's really fun. Like all the little gamification, you know, social gamification things you need are on there. And by the way, they're not on Instagram. Instagram has no monetization or they may have by now but it's very, very little. There's nothing fun about it. It’s a very flat service. The only reason to do it is because you have audience there, right? But you know, the best you can do is say here's my Pay Pal. But there's no – that's throwing money into a vacuum. Throwing money into my Pay Pal while I'm streaming, like I won't even see that. Right? Unless I have my Pay Pal page up and I'm constantly getting notifications.
But that's very distracting. There's – you're throwing money into a vacuum. And some artists do really well with that, and that's great for them. But I think if you're doing well on that level, you could be doing, you know, five times that, if you actually have these gamified, fun, interactive monetized tools that services like YouNow and Twitch and Tik Tok have.
LP: There's something I want to go back to that you said, which was that you use the analogy of, you know, going to Austin or Nashville, and which is why you'd go to Twitch, because there's already a supportive community there and a sort of network of people there that want to see you be successful. What was the born of? Is it because gamers naturally pivoted to music, or were there pioneers on the music side who sort of set up [unintelligible 0:58:17] were sort of the first people to build a music presence there?
Like why did Twitch resonate for music?
KA: Yeah. So I mean the music category on Twitch doesn't have a lot to do with gaming, honestly. I think some of the first streamers on there were certainly gamers who also do music. But I think the initial wave of growth, say over the last four years, before the pandemic hit, the organic growth, has been people who are musicians and most likely not gamers.
Or, if they're gamers, they're very casual gamers. They're like Mario Kart gamers. They're not League of Legends gamers. You know what I'm saying? This sort of became a little pocket that people discovered and told their friends about, and then, you know, more musicians came on. And there have been dedicated music live stream platforms. There were four in the last year that went under because of, from what I could tell, lack of interest.
I think it's extraordinarily hard to have a music live stream platform, especially with artists that you've never heard of. I think that the only reason it has survived on Twitch is because it is completely incidental to Twitch's success. It could – meaning you could not be there and it would not move the needle at all on Twitch's success. It sort of has been nested within this gaming platform, right? So – and I think it works on a gaming platform because gamers are really about creative content and they're generally very creative people.
So you know, podcasts are big on there, Cosplay is big on there. ASMR. Like sort of anything sort of in that creative realm plays well on Twitch. Music in particular because it's more universal than Cosplay. It's more universal than ASMR. You know? And it's sort of fun. And the artists, you know, they're not doing concerts. They're hanging out and playing a song and talking to people, hanging out, playing a song, talk to people.
And if you can be a good creator and a good entertainer, then you'll do well. And that's kind of what bore out to be what succeeded there. But you know, a lot of people on Twitch don't realize that there's a music section, until – I think they know now because there's, you know, there's a navigation for it, the top level navigation. But you know, to this point, and a lot of gamers didn't realize that there was music on it.
But that shows you how big Twitch is. Twitch is so big. They have so many users that it can sustain, you know, a small category like music. And to the level that there are enough viewers that the people who are there can make a little money with that. And I think absent it being nested into a platform like Twitch where it had four or five years runway to really develop over time, like a dedicated live stream platform could never get another [V.C. 1:01:45] to have four or five years runway. No way, no way.
They get two years max. You know, it's really hard to build. But if you can be in the space where it can be nurtured by this larger entity and over time, before this even, before the pandemic, Twitch had been taking notice of music and putting musicians on the front page and, you know, assigning partner relationships to musicians and kind of playing with this whole idea of what if you were to expand beyond games, and this looks like it's a natural organic interest area for users.
How can we foster that? How can we feed that and grow it? You know, that's sort of been their attitude towards it so far. Absent, you know, having this sort of incubation period, I don’t think it would have survived. You know, because every other dedicated platform that has come along, which have all been good, by the way, and one was even owned by LINE, the Korean company.
And they had a really, really great staff and established artists on there and everything. And they couldn't make it. I think it's only because it didn't matter if it made it, that they had enough time to truly grow those organically and to make it a thing on its own and not have the economic pressure, right, of having to succeed or not. That's why, that's why it lives there, honestly. I think if that hadn't been there and the pandemic hit, I think everybody would be pretty much on Facebook and YouTube and StageIt.
LP: What's the nature of your relationship with Twitch? Do they know you? Do you talk to them? Do you get leads? Do you get, you know, what's the, you know, the diplomatic protocol?
KA: I've been very friendly – yeah, no, I've been very friendly with the music department for a little over a year. When I first started getting into this. You know, someone I've known for a very long time is, you know, over there in licensing and, you know, we were talking a year ago. Just sort of meet people over time, for sure. I ended up managing, you know, one of the bigger musicians on Twitch. So sort of met people through her.
Went to TwitchCon a couple of times and met people that way. Then just people that I've just known from the industry have gone over there. So you know, we've just sort of been talking through that. But it's a very, it's a very friendly relationship.
LP: Yeah. Well, do me a favor. Before I let you go, and you know, you're graciously going over our allotted time – if you can, take out your virtual crystal ball for me, and you mentioned early in the call that your, you know, where you get excited is the new and the innovative and once something kind of hits it mainstream, if you will – I don’t think you used that word, but you know what I'm getting at.
KA: Yeah.
LP: Something hits its critical mass or its adoption, and you're looking for the next [unintelligible 1:04:41] – where are we at in the arc with live streaming? Are we closer to the beginning, the middle, or is it now settling into a steady state?
KA: No, we're in the beginning of the hockey stick, for sure. Look, what I – when this book came out in August, I went to the CDB DIY Musician Conference and I had my little stack of flyers and walk around – anybody who wasn't already in a conversation with somebody else, I would say, hi, have you heard of Twitch? And hand then a flyer.
And you know, 90 percent had never heard of Twitch. The 10 percent who did knew because they were a gamer, had no idea there was music on it. People I talked to in the industry were like, oh, Twitch, that's a gaming thing, right? There was like zero visibility. So the things that I was talking about, even eight months ago, nine months ago, was the very beginning. What is live streaming? What is Twitch? What do the two have to do with each other and why does this make sense for music?
That's not a conversation I have with anybody anymore. The conversation I have now with people is what do we do? Do we do something on Twitch? Do we do it on Facebook? Do we charge? You know, what do we is the question now. So I think we're at the very beginning of this hockey stick and I think, you know, the longer that people don't wear masks, the longer we're going to have a coronavirus issue where we can't bring people together, you know, in large gatherings, which means concerts are really going to be a completely different experience and be very reliant on live streaming.
I actually think that concerts are going to come back. I think they'll come back at 25 capacity. I think that people will be sort of like cordoned off in different parts of the venue or it will be a drive-in or whatever it is. And I think that a live streaming experience is going to be coupled with that. And I really think that the live stream experiences are going to be geo-fenced.
Some people can tour. You can actually tour. But you can play Phoenix, you're going to play to, you know, a quarter of the people you'd normally play to and then everybody who is in Phoenix can live stream that show for 15, 20 dollars. But if you want to go in person, you know, it's a lot more, obviously. And there's probably like by default some sort of VIP experience that goes with that.
LP: So sort of inverted blackout restrictions; the way sports would block out the home market, you would block out everybody else and say tonight I'm only in the Phoenix metropolitan area.
KA: Tonight this live stream is only here, you know, and it becomes this sort of, everybody in Phoenix has that sort of like, hey, we're all in Phoenix, we have something in common, you know, in we're all in the same city, it's the same time, it's the same storm outside, it's the same whatever – you know, there is a sort of sense of community that you go through with that, which is going to have a really big impact on the chat, I think.
But I think we're going to be in the sort of hybrid state. I mean we – as an industry we can't just not do this. You know, there's going to be solutions. We're already seeing drive-in tours, right? We're seeing like parking lots at airports, you know, being turned into drive-in theaters and so forth. There's like a lot of innovation going on. But even with that, that's only so many cars. Right? That's only so many people. That's only so many concessions.
Even that, you know, is kind of a break even proposition. So there has to be this sort of like live stream element to pad those numbers. And why shouldn't there be? You know, and some people honestly are kind of realizing live streaming's kind of awesome. You know, you get to see the show, you talk to people, you get to hang out. You don't have to pay for parking, you don't have to be in traffic, you don’t have to – you can definitely see. And as a short person I appreciate being able to see the show. You know? And not be bobbing through and like dodging all the tall people. That's great.
A lot of people are finding that the live stream experience is actually kind of fund and it's pretty good, you know, and it's worth it to them, especially some of the artists on stage who are doing this weekly, you know, and making tens of thousands of dollars, weekly. Not leaving their house at all. That's pretty phenomenal. I mean there are definitely artists who are making more money than they ever have; if they can sustain this throughout the year, they will have made more money in one year than they ever have on the road.
LP: Yeah.
KA: So –
LP: Yeah. There's great implications too for both artists and attendees in terms of people who might have disabilities or who it's difficult for them to get out or – like there's a whole audience for which the in-venue live concert experience was either out of [touch 1:09:24] or not appropriate or just a bad fit. And those people now get a new way to experience the community around music and the live performance.
So yeah, I appreciate the sentiment that –
KA: But that's the thing though, that's the thing. If you don’t have some level of community, we are back to a live stream broadcast.
LP: Right.
KA: And a live stream broadcast is just television. And television is not worth paying 20 dollars for. And that is why live streaming to this point has not taken off. You know, we have very, very services that will – people will pay for live streaming, and it's generally jam bands. It's generally jam bands who can pull that off. But to this point, no one's really felt like paying 15, 20 bucks to watch a concert, you know, somewhere else in the world where they are not.
And I think that's entirely valid because there's nothing really special about that. But if you can find a way to bring in this level of community, and it's difficult the larger the artist is – but if you can do that, then it becomes worth paying for because people will come back and back and back for community; they will not come back and back and back for content.
You know, BTS just had massive live stream. Twenty million dollars, right? And you know, they – I didn't watch it but there had to have been some crazy – because the fans want to be social with each other. That's part of the fun. You know? I think we all had our little, you know, fan girl, fan boy moment with a band with love when we were 12, right? And half of the fun was the other people who loved the band as much as you.
You know, and then the other half of the fun was the band was so great, I want to know everything about them. And I want to look like them and dress like them and know all the songs and know all the lyrics and everything. But half of the fun, honestly, was the other people. So if you can build that other people un-component in, that's what it's all about, that's the power of the platform. Otherwise just put it on demand on YouTube or throw up a video premiere. You know, pre-recorded, you know, as a live broadcast. Because I don't see what the difference is if you're not going to throw in some level of community.
LP: Yeah.
KA: So that's the creative challenge. That's what I'm really interested to see what people come up with now that we're sort of out of the panic mode and out of the let's just try whatever mode, and people are a little more, a little more careful and strategic about what they do next. You know, managers aren't just saying yes to every opportunity. They're a little more careful about, OK, so what's the audience and what's the money behind this.
And you know, it's not just like let's just put something out to get people through this horrible hump we're in. We're sort of in a – we are beginning the new normal. And the new normal will be anything but normal in terms of what people do creatively with their live streams, which is super fun, because there's so many things you can do, you know, if you're creative with it.
There's so many things you can do. So that – that's the part that I'm actually excited about for the rest of the year, is to see like what kind of crazy, insane stuff do people come up with, just to have a bunch of stupid fun on their live streams and see what that means to their bottom line at the end of the day.
LP: Yeah. Well, I hope we can stay in touch over the course of the next several months. And if you find some interesting stuff, please share it with me. I'm looking forward now to sharing your enthusiasm for this. You're a great advocate for the sort of genre or for the medium, and I really appreciate you making time to talk to me and educate me about this. So thank you.
KA: It's been a really fun conversation. Thanks so much.
Karen Allen
Author and Consultant
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