Bi-Weekly-ish newsletter of Marcel A. Wiebenga - Issue #4

Marcel Alexander Wiebenga

Hey reader, and welcome to issue number 4 of this newsletter!

Some people emailed me that the link, from the previous issue to the excellent BBH document on Crypto, NFTs, Creator economies, and the metaverse was broken. Mea Culpa, and here’s a working one.

This issue includes the Simpsons and Balenciaga, the future of audio engagement, and some insights on the workings of the music industry by way of the Wu-tang!

Happy reading. If you like this newsletter please forward and if you have anything you think I should include here, do let me know. I love hearing from you.

Enjoy your Friday!

1. Simpsons x Balenciaga


In all honesty, I was under the impression that Balenciaga was a Russian shoe brand trying to break the “who can make the craziest shoe” world record. Well, I was wrong. First off Balenciaga is French, secondly they do a lot more than creating stupendous shoes.

For their F/W 22 line, they collaborated with the creators of The Simpsons to premier a one-off episode amid an event at Paris Fashion Week. The 10-minute episode features all of your favorite characters from Springfield and a gaggle of cameos. Youtube commenter Franciso Borges describes its relevance the best:

“This has got to be one of the finest examples of branded content ever made. A master class in marketing, done creatively and with respect to the heritage of both brands. Balenciaga’s dialogue with the mainstream feels no longer like irony but a sincere, unambiguous weirdo embracing popular culture. And we’re all here for it!“

I love standing corrected!

The Simpsons | Balenciaga

2. Loudness wars 3D, the quest for immersiveness.

Culturally we as a species are getting louder. The pace and intensity of an average movie are increasing at an astonishing rate, and the same can be said about music. The average song waveform is becoming more and more like a block, with the current consuming formats leading to louder standardizations. This begs the question: “Where does this stop?”. There has to be a cut-off point before all of us end up in an eardrum exploding, epileptic frenzy.

Last week I was invited for a 3D immerse sound experience at Amsterdam company Future Phonic. Future phonic is an immersive sound experience studio that delivers sound in a 10.4.1. format. Meaning there are speakers in front of you, speakers in the back, on top, and around; there are speakers literally everywhere. The result is a genuinely deepening experience of sound that is becoming more and more available to the public, with Apple music already offering spatial audio on its music platform. This technology is still in its early development, resulting in stereo records being remixed in this 10.4.1. format with somewhat tacky results, not unlike the first days of 2D to 3D movie experiments, randomly chucking spears and other objects at you for effect.

Soon though, we’ll see this format as a creative starting point, resulting in a sound that will not be louder in an attempt to be more immersive but will be more immersive because it’s… well, more immersive!

3. If what you say is true the Wu-Tang and the Shaolin could be dangerous… and broke! 👐🐝

I’ve been deep-diving into the youtube channel of Spencer Cornelia these past weeks. Spencer is a licensed real estate agent in Nevada who likes to uncover financial truths. On his channel, he explains why athletes with 100s of millions of dollars go broke (spoiler alert, it’s because A. marrying without a prenup B. marrying without a prenup, and C. marrying without a prenup) and why your favorite artists are equally broke.

Spencer perfectly outlines the workings of the music business through the history of the Wu-Tang clan and why the business side sometimes tore the group apart.

How The Music Business Tore Apart the Wu Tang Clan

4. Someone is beating Spotify at it’s own game.

Through the newsletter of Niels Aalbers, my attention was drawn to a Rolling Stone article about someone in the Netherlands who’s beating the Spotify marketing and payment system.

Stef van Vugt is a Dutch DJ/Producer who did what many people drunkenly said they would do. He created a 28-hour Spotify playlist called “Sleep Fruit Music” filled it with nighttime rain sounds, each clocking in at 31 seconds, just enough to count as individual plays, and marketed the hell out of that playlist. The playlist currently has 640K followers and amasses approximately 10M streams a day, raking in between 20K-30K USD in daily streaming revenues. More than stream queen Lady Gaga herself.

The article states that Sleep Fruit Music’s streaming numbers have been worrying to members of the music industry because the popularity of these rain sounds diminishes the money available to go to artists who have recorded actual songs. Spotify has a divide-one-pie payout model, meaning there is a finite pool of funds for artists that comes in from the streamer’s ads-and-subscriptions revenue. Their fraction of overall plays determines each act’s allocation. Rain sounds amassing millions of streams divert money to Sleep Fruits Music at the expense of traditional musicians. Stef van Vugt states:

“We do a lot of things in, I would not say, a grey area, but we like to experiment and do crazy stuff and see what the boundaries are of music exploitation and music marketing.”

To me, it seems the problem isn’t with Stef creating and marketing musical pulp that gathers money. He’s simply beating the system at its own game. The problem is in the way the Spotify payout models have been designed from the ground up. I don’t understand, and I can’t find a logical explanation online, why a play is a play as long as it breaks the 30-second barrier, as opposed to a payout that is done per second, which is the case with TV and radio royalties. The only vague assumption that I find is that it over-rewards stars at the expense of everybody else, and I would love to find out how that would work. Another problem is Spotify’s pay-for-play principle, where artists are allowed to market their tracks by putting them in “Discovery mode” at a reduced per-stream payout, once again favoring heavy budgeted stars at the expense of everyone else.

Traditionally the music industry is a place where the artists get the proverbial shit end of the stick. If anything, Stef van de Vugt’s antics give us a peep into and make us wonder about the inner workings of that stick.

That’s it for this (bi) week, thanks for reading all the way through. Enjoy your Friday, enjoy your weekend.

Marcel

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