Digital Music Infrastructures (Music Pool Berlin Community Evening)
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Goetzke, Andrea
Kirn, Peter
Dryhurst, Mat
Seitz, Daniela
Eitel, Eric
How do digital environments shape the way we experience music, and also how we live, produce, and survive as artists? What do we think about infrastructures as they currently exist, are they supportive to our (maybe different) visions of music culture, and what are our ideas for them in the future?
 Hello everyone. I welcome the panelists on stage. I don't want to be here alone. Okay. Okay. Getting organized here. Yeah, digital music infrastructures is the topic of this conversation that I look forward to have with a great group of people here on the panel. So, yeah, I would like to, over the next hour, look with you into the digital environments, the platforms, and the facilities that we use as participants in music culture. And in the description to this, we wrote that by infrastructure, we understand a very broad set of arrangements. And I look forward to hearing what you understand exactly by infrastructures or how you view this. So, for me, it could be the design of an interface to the overall business model of a platform that then shapes how the services are delivered that we are using, for example. And I think one thing that is important to note maybe is that we're probably looking through an independent cultural lens because we are all artists or cultural producers who are maybe working more with kind of underground culture, as you say. So, yeah, over the next hour, let's talk about how do digital music infrastructures shape our practice? What do we think about the status quo? Are the structures supportive to our maybe different visions of music culture? And then, also, I'm interested to hear about all your different initiatives that you are involved with that we also spend some time talking about. And I briefly introduce all of you. So, you don't have to say your bios every time. So, we have in the middle Daniela Zeitz, who is cultural manager and curator and co-founder of the Cream Cake event platform and label. And, yeah, I think you work with lots of artists who operate outside of traditional music industry structures, also lots of young people, and I've discovered lots of great artists through your work. So, that's great. Then, just right next to me, or left, is Peter Kern, musician and creative technologist, co-producer of the Meablip open source synthesizer, publisher of Create Digital Music, a new site with a focus on music technologies. So, you think and write about digital technologies in connection to music almost every day. So, and then, on the very left, Matt Dryhurst is an artist and you release music research and artworks. You collaborate with Holly Herndon a lot, with the Pond label, you're a lecturer at NYU, and you've developed Saga, a project that I'm going to ask you more about later. And you are an advisor to the streaming service Resonate that we've heard, so those of you who have been here earlier, we've heard a little bit about that already today. Yeah, welcome. And, yeah, as an introduction, I would like to hear from you, well, all of you, when I invited you to the panel, all of you responded quite interested and enthusiastically about the topic, saying, oh, yeah, this is really a good, like an important topic. And I would like to know why, why did you say that? Do we have all microphones now? We have two. We have one. Two. I can start. Yeah, I mean, it is funny because when you asked me what I think about music and digital infrastructures, we just founded a festival in Tokyo, which is called Infra. And so it is playing with this obvious idea of how you provide infrastructure for people who don't actually use the actual infrastructure, who is traditionally based. And so for us, it is always this question of how we do things in general, and how you do things, you're going to establish your own infrastructure. So how do you operate your business? How do you curate a program? Or how do you support your artists? And who is benefiting from this? So with Creamcake or 3HD is another project we do. And Infra now, it is like a totally different scene, which hasn't been on the main spotlight for years. And we create this platform for them and support them and establish for them a sort of structure and possibility to perform. And then... Hey, yeah. So on the topic of infrastructure, I deal with it a lot in my work. I think what Daniela has built is kind of like a perfect case study in a way for a new form of independence. And so when I think about infrastructure and music, the only infrastructure I've ever really cared about has been the independent musical infrastructure. And one of the things that I think is quite disappointing or urgent at this point is the need to kind of redefine what we understand to be independence in an era of platform capitalism in this era where you can listen to a punk record on the same page as a Rihanna record, and most people are experiencing these things in those ways. And of course there are independent initiatives happening, but generally they tend to be, you know, not necessarily in the same form that one would understand independent music to be classically. And so I think Creamcake is like a really good example of that. Yeah. So that's really the big question for me is like what does being independent today mean beyond the kitsch of independence that were often sold and that has been subsumed into just general commercial discourse? Right. I'm already... My mind is already off track because that's already a lot of interesting ideas. But I mean, I guess I'm kind of... Well, I meant to follow up on what Matt's suggesting. I think there's probably not a clear dividing point between independent and whatever a non-independent artist is. Certainly I'm happy to be a non-independent artist if someone wants to give me a big EDM deal of some sort. But I mean, I think, yeah, I think even as you talk to artists who you would have traditionally thought of as kind of commercially successful or on major labels, a lot of the things that they say are quite similar to things that you hear from very independent, very underground artists. Everybody's kind of contending with the same vehicles for communication. And I mean, I'm kind of interested by the thing that a lot of other people see as a problem. So people come from this kind of traditional industry model, I think because it is based on this very particular form of scarcity and maybe a very particular form of control and control of distribution tend to see this growth in production or the growth in the number of people making music and the ease of kind of using technology to play music, they see as somehow a problem. Me being biased and having always kind of made most of my living off that sort of production side of things and not just listening and distribution, I always kind of saw it as something positive. But it seems like the structures that we have for communication somehow don't match up with that reality. So the reality of people producing more diverse and kind of more music doesn't match up with internet distribution and communication methods that are themselves becoming more scarce, everything from media to mechanisms for kind of discovery. Okay. So that's for the start and I think I would like to go deeper into your different perspectives over the course of the conversation. I think before we go deeper into discussing the actual issues, I'd be interested and also to get everybody on the same page to quickly look at what do we understand by infrastructures? What are we actually talking about? And I think like you age from your perspectives, imagine you're like on a lookout point overlooking like a city or something. So this being you're in the infrastructures you work with, like what are the building blocks that you see there and what maybe what are the things that you find that you like and what are the things that you don't like when you look out of the window? Do you want to start, Daniela, maybe from your perspective, maybe also working with the kind of producers you work with? I mean, I think infrastructure is definitely you can think about how can you bring something from A to B. It is like the really like the traffic thing. So how would you start having like a very talented emerging artist who is putting their sounds online on SoundCloud? How would you give the him a chance to spread his music and find an audience and get paid and have a good experience and actually approach different types of experiences through the career. And so I think in terms of that, when we do events or when we curate our music program, we just invite people who are just uploaded songs. It doesn't matter if they are like huge, if they have a following fan base or whatever, we just invite them and they're really happy that they will never think about that they can come to Berlin and play a show. And so that's like the first step of creating like this, like very simple, it's just one email, you know, it takes me five minutes. I'm hearing this track, I'm hearing another one, I was like, wow, is it go to the Instagram? There's like a lot of, like the aesthetics to this scene also and I'm like, wow, just invite this person. And then over the time, when you do promotion and when you are like building your events and then we talk to the artists and we give them like more knowledge about like how does this work and that all comes to like the learning of from step one to step B and then when we do the label, it's the same, like an artist, he put out some stuff on SoundCloud, I'm just asking him if he wants to put out something with us and then it's always like very transparent and very fair communication because I haven't done it too, you know, so I'm looking for some music contracts from my friends, I'm going through them like classic ones or still from independent music scene, but then I'm like, oh, this is too much, this is too much, so I'm making it down to the really essential points for like a music contract with a label you could provide and then I'm having a Skype meeting with the artist and then we go through each point and then it starts being like open and fair from scratch, you know, and that's part of it, you know. And I hear from a lot of friends that they just got the contract per email and then they didn't want to sign it or they didn't know what this paragraph means or why is it like 10 pages long and then they didn't sign it but the record still came out and so this contract is still bonding for some reason, you know, so it didn't really help the cost of not signing it and so we just don't work like that in this very traditional way of how this classic industry is, but what I really like is adapting it to like very DIY thing, you know, and learning it and then I'm saying like, I can do this by my own, it doesn't really matter of having this huge old school structure and just adapt it in a very professional way. So from this I hear like what you mentioned, you use just the kind of building blocks so you have SoundCloud where you find, which is the first point of emerging for someone and then you have like the label, your own label with the contract with terms of collaboration and you mentioned festivals also, no? You mentioned like where you want to place the artist, something like that. Yeah, I mean where you want to... So where the artist would be playing later, just as a way to look at what infrastructure like comprises. Yeah. How's that? Sounds good. Do you want to build on like... Yeah, I mean in terms of infrastructure it's quite easy, right? It's like how do you get this thing to people, right? And there's two lines of that, in the one sense it's like how do you get it to people's ears remotely and then there's how do you get it to people in space, which is something that's becoming increasingly difficult in expensive cities. So there are two parallel things, the latter one happens to represent at this point in time the closest thing to an income that most musicians have and principally for me around these issues of infrastructure it's saying well how much kind of agency does one feel within those structures, right? So you bring up SoundCloud for example, SoundCloud provides a service, it does a few things really, really well, it allows you to do many, a few things with that, right? And so these infrastructures where you go from a scenario of like the old distribution industry, which in many cases was very limited, you're talking about passing physical things around, it's an infrastructural issue to me to say well why is it now that our level of engagement with this media when we receive it is actually somehow less than it once was. You have fewer options to tailor or customize someone's experience of this music there. That's an infrastructural problem, right? That's a design decision that has been made by an increasingly smaller and smaller pool of designers with these monopoly platforms, right? Similar, this what used to be somewhat, I mean very much connected but somewhat disparate live and recorded or distribution music infrastructure, you're starting to see these two things blend into each other even more so now, right? Where there are fewer places for people to play, right? So these are getting more expensive so these kind of areas of congregation that one used to go to a place like a London or a New York or whatever to make a name for yourself and to develop a culture on the ground there that's becoming increasingly difficult for people who don't have independent money. And so in order to participate within the live music infrastructure, you know, if you have a band where are you going to rehearse? So who gets to rehearse enough to be in a position to be supported by the festival networks which are now increasingly influenced more and more by the design decisions of the distribution platforms, right? So if you end up being on a Spotify playlist which I might add requires a certain kind of music, certain kinds of music thrive in playlist cultures where other kinds of music certainly don't thrive, you have a better chance to participate in the live music infrastructure, right? So these kind of questions for me are really pivotal because now I tour the world playing music, I'm very fortunate with my partner Holly and we go to these festivals and it's very interesting to see over time and be like, ah, yeah, like DJs, low overheads, no one can rehearse. The joke for me is, you know, DJ culture is kind of like the ultimate complement to the Silicon Valley ideology that you make profit by curating the work of others, you know? And DJ culture obviously has a wonderful, venerated history but it's kind of interesting to be like, oh, this works really well because it seamlessly flows into playlists, it seamlessly flows and you see even as a performing artist on stage, the seamless transition from one artist to the next, like you move your record bag and another person brings their record bag there, this kind of seamless user experience of the festival environment works in terms of generating money and works for a certain agenda but the question is in the case of Cream Cake, I'll just use as an example because you're here, what if you wanted to do something else? What are the affordances of that infrastructure at that point in time? And over time what I fear, I see down the line is what comes to represent a monoculture that has all of the trappings of the abandon of yesteryear so we get to pretend that we're raving and all this wonderful history and it's like, well, this stuff happened because people had space and this stuff happened because people had control over their own infrastructures which increasingly, even within our communities, is a conversation that people put down, they say you're old fashioned. So it's like, no, actually I think we should reserve the right to be critical of sand cloud as much as we can celebrate their accomplishments but these infrastructural issues are of pivotal importance and end up having aesthetic ramifications, hard aesthetic ramifications for kids who, and I teach students who've grown up with this and know nothing else. So anyway, I'll show up talking about it but infrastructure for me, it's an aesthetic issue actually when you get down to it. I can't problematize that any better than that just to broaden it and say, not that we have to go into all this stuff this evening but I think that sort of, if you think about your musical experience, especially kind of coming from a traditional musical background, this extends from sort of early music education, and I've even taught keyboard skills and things, to this sort of instrumental musical experiences and experiences of playing music with other people. We used to have a culture where everybody was involved in, or not every, most everybody was involved in some kind of communal music practice. So trying to then turn music into something that's in the hands of a few people is something radically different and that's why for some of us it's actually very deeply disturbing how often people from kind of this mainstream industry model repeat this idea of music making is too easy, too many people are making music. So they're trying to protect some kind of very specific elite that they, not to be overly accusatory, but that they grew out of a very strange reality, the birth of recorded media. We seem to be returning back to something where everybody is making music. But then the question is, is the value of that music going to be measured based on this sort of strange remnants of this old system grafted on to some kind of new internet culture? That's a lot of deep, kind of disturbing questions in some level. But I would say, you know, at the same time, we can also consider some of those other infrastructure elements. You know, if you look at the musical output of a country that has public music education, even on the digital side of things, it's very different than that from a country that doesn't. So part of what seems to be tempering kind of access to the global music market is not just unequal access to the sort of recording distribution side of things, but also unequal access to music education or instrumental education and differences there. So I think as we kind of hopefully widen to a more global music community, it'll be interesting to see kind of how we contend with that and contend with different music educational backgrounds. I think that's enough. Yes? I'm very good at English, but you talk so fast I cannot follow you. All of us or just me? All of us, okay. There's a recording. That's, yeah, we're all exciting each other and probably it's like just like injecting caffeine into one another. So let's slow down. We can slow down. It's slow down. It's also great to listen to the recording at low speed, which also sound later, which will also make each of us sound much more authoritative. But other than the meantime, let's slow down. It's also an infrastructural question. Yes. So that everybody can use that. You remember to do that. I did have a coffee just before. Go ahead. Let's try to slow down. All right. So we've got, I drew a little picture of the infrastructural map and I would like to, so we've looked into the, a little bit of a mixture of what's currently there with Spotify, playlist, fast, big festival circuits, SoundCloud here, spaces to perform the control that we have over the artworks. And from here, I'd like to, to draw a bit more into this before we get into the conversation. I hope we get it all together in the end. But I like to, because all of you are active in some way or the other to, to make, to be an active in this space and to, to maybe change some, some of the things. And I think from those things we can learn also what's maybe in addition to what you said, what's maybe a problematic or what needs to be changed. And that, so I would like to add this stuff and then we can do the overall discussion. And Daniela, you've already started to talk a little bit about what you, how you, do you operate with Cream Cake, but maybe you could elaborate a bit further on what are you, so you, you are trying really to be, to build your own independent network and what you talked about the label and that type of contracts and so on. What are the points that you are, want to change or that you are doing differently than the others or some of the others? So, so who, who does know Cream Cake is an event series. It is, it started as a club night or like a really like music night. We do shows at home. We do another show at Behrkain, but we also worked with How and Kavi to have more like an overlap of different interdisciplinary art forms. So for instance, we work with like performance art, music and then visual art. And then we build like installations around it and check out different environments and how music and art comes together. And so that, that's it for, for the beginning, right? So we, we, we are booking artists. We are trying to pay them always as much as possible, which is also really interesting because no one actually really knows that when, when you offer someone a fee, I'm also restricted in some ways of how much I can pay this person because of entrance. And then there is like a lot of rent, maybe orders, like a different infrastructure behind that too, you know. So I think it is always problematic in terms of India, why culture you start with emerging artists and they are really newcomers in that way. And then they, they make a good record. They might become more powerful and then we are not able to pay the fees anymore, for instance, because we, we, we don't, we don't have that money yet, except when we are applying for funding. So for instance, with 3 HD festival, it's much better because we got like funding from city tax and we always get funding from music board. And that really helps also to support the artist in a much more sustainable way because if you are doing a club night, you won't make a living from our team. And also the artists when they play once, once a month, they will never make a living from this, you know, they have to play like each weekend and then four times. And then there is the club who can offer this kind of shows now. But if you are not really considering yourself as like, as like someone who plays club music, then there's a total different infrastructure. Then you connect more maybe with new music venues or you, you, you go into gallery context and then there's no entrance and then you don't get a fee and then the sound system is shitty. And it's in a whole other story. So there needs to be like a fundamental funding for, for this type of scene because it's so interdisciplinary that it is connecting on so many things. And I think that is like a, it's a challenge for, for us to open the stores also and, and really hard work to, to really get more funding for, for, for the people behind, behind the project and also for the artists we would like to support. And that's like everyone needs to do this hard work until you might be not like so independent music scene anymore because, because you're going to be mainstream or you're going to be a mainstream festival. But to that point is really a long way. And I think that is, it's also good because you really learn, you just learn everything by yourself, you know, and you will make mistakes and you will experience so many different things, which is really amazing. Because if you think about it before, you wouldn't have done anything. You would just have signed a contract and then you give someone else the power to make the decisions and searching for the wedding song or the live song and really pushing the superstar or the pop star idea of the mainstream culture. And that's really something we never looked, looked for. Do you find the dependency on funding problematic and being independent? Definitely, like the, the, the funding is always like you write an application for, for, for, for like a festival. You really do like concept based work. I mean, you sit there two weeks writing and then it's all in the hands of the Shuri members. Like it's, it's, it's, you don't, you don't really know them. They're also in a different age group sometimes and they don't really know the context. So these people who make the decisions are not the ones who are going, going out or going to explore subculture in that sense, you know, they're coming more from an academic background, very intellectual background, often very white male academic music background. And then it's like, if they don't try to, to, to get into the context, then we, we have also like a problem, you know. So this is like a challenging thing that you are approached, approach different new things, but you should never stop. I think that is like the, the, the, but we always had, we always kept on going and it's growing. And like, because Berlin is so wonderful in terms of like rent and, and, and, and the, and the fees and everything, like the whole structure is still like, is like such a wonderland bubble place, you know, which has allowed us to do this in a certain extent, you know. And, but, but otherwise it's not, not gonna, it's not in a, in, there's no funding system in America in that, in that sense, you know, or, but it's interesting because now we, for, for infra, for instance, we got money from Art Council Tokyo, and we got another, we got another fund, but it's not, it's not enough for, for going abroad and work with like a Japanese collaborator on like a five days festival, but we still want to do it because it is actually a wonderful idea. And now I'm applying for funding for the Norwegian government for the Finnish Institute. And now you're collecting money from all these types of European cultural funds, which is amazing that this infrastructure exists in America. For instance, it's not there, you know, or in other countries. And so you will start trying to, to, to find money. I mean, what's also interesting in terms of like infrastructure because there's like a lot of money in cooperation. In music, for instance, if you, if you decide to work with a cooperation that is might helpful or can be like the, the, the point where money comes in, but then it's like the, yeah, then we grew up in, in Europe and in Germany, for instance, and I come from like museum background, and you never have sponsoring of a corporation in institutions, you know, that's not what, what, what we are having. But the tendency, for instance, if you look at the British system, there is fundraisers, there is a different financial structure towards like where private people give you, give you budget, or if you look at, like, I mean, there's like red bull, Ableton, native instruments who are actually giving money, but then they also brand the, your, your events. So that's also like a question of the, of the cooperative structure in general, if, how, how you could approach them or if you want to, you know, that's the decision making. Do you want to work on a cooperative level and with who and what's the purpose for, for, for the cooperation? So, well, yeah, I mean, just, I would say, I mean, I was sort of laughing about the United States, but I would say, you know, that, that still counts as, I think that still counts as an infrastructure, right? So this is just a, this kind of a different infrastructure. I think the United States is really lacking in ideas like cultural diplomacy, just a, just a little bit, seems to be getting worse fast. But, you know, I think there are things that maybe you, that coming from the states that I would take for granted that are not existing in the United States, and that there's, there's a culture of, I think there's a culture of public giving. Sometimes that can, I mean, that can be less problematic, even than some of the other things that we've talked about. There is a, there is a culture of kind of how to fund raise with private partners. Well, there isn't good federal arts infrastructure. Sometimes there's quite good local arts infrastructure. So it's, so it's not, you know, the, the, it's, it's a, it's a complicated situation in the United, in the U.S. And, you know, I would also say, it's, there are certainly challenges to working with certain governments to, at least, and I think ethically as well. Obviously that, that will impact your agenda in the same way that working with certain corporations would. That was, that was it kind of on this sort of funding infrastructure question. You had something there? Sure. I'm spacing on the name, but there's a great book that University of Santa Cruz published talking about the legacy of German arts funding for the American avant-garde, like post the Second World War, and it's a remarkable book and I'm, I need to, if you're curious about it, please get me afterwards, because I'll get my phone out and find it. But the argument within that is that most of what we understand to be the American avant-garde, your cages and so on and so forth wouldn't really exist if it weren't for the support of, and particularly things like jazz music also that, you know, the Swiss and the French and still to this day do a huge job in, in supporting. So yeah, so taking most of what we understand as music doesn't exist without taking that funding somehow. You know, there's a, there's a mythical period of time that suggests that it could exist by itself, but it most likely didn't in most cases, or at least for the people on the margins. We were supposed to slow down talking. I actually tried to slow down. Are you okay? Please say if it's, we have, they may be, we may be reminded if it's. I expect that reach all the time. Okay, so just to, huh? Just, just to kind of back this up for a second, I guess, I, because just personally, I have, I'm terrible at solving most of the problems that we've just described, even for myself individually, when it comes to figuring out how financial infrastructure is meant to work, figuring out sometimes how to get paid, sometimes it's not my strongest skill, nor is business planning. But I would say maybe to kind of look at the larger picture here, I, I think one fundamental question is, what is, what really is the value of music? You know, and what will the value of music be to a society? And whether digital tech, I mean, digital technology is involved because the sort of microprocessor, light speed communication revolution is involved in everything right now. But, but that's not, I think that's not the point so much as figuring out what this, where this value is. And I'm okay, I'm even okay with some of that value coming from something like advertising. I have no problem with this sort of global capital system getting involved with music as long as we can make it work for ourselves. I pay my bills based on advertising, so I don't see advertising on websites as being fundamentally evil, as some people do, because if I did, then I would also see paying my rent as somehow fundamentally evil, and I don't. But that's because I've been able to kind of take that system and make it work. It seems that, but just expecting the sort of world to organize itself around music making is wildly unrealistic, and the reason is that cultures tend to view musicians as dangerous a lot of the time. And the monetization of music is something that often gets marginalized, almost nearly all of the time. So we really have to kind of figure out some way to go into the system that's geared against us, because people are mistrust, mistrust what music does for society, because it seems to make people go crazy and consume a lot of drugs and alcohol and have sex. And that's not just a, that's not just a kind of a, like a Berlin club notion. This is something you can see repeated in lots of texts from centuries back from cultures all over the world. And you can kind of do an ethnomusicological survey and find that there are many, many times that musicians start to be distrusted or marginalized from society. And that the kind of the main internet businesses right now are also really not organized around music and have not found a way to make much money off of music. So even as the industry complains that Google and Microsoft and Apple are getting rich off music, that's really not true. If nobody is making money off music on the internet and then nobody has a real clear idea how to do that, the problem is they've started the cycle where they kind of put music further and further and further to the side. So if our problems seem a bit intractable tonight, I think this is part of why. You know, because we have to remember that the natural tendency of what we do is for things to get marginalized. But that doesn't mean that the natural value of music is small. I think that the actual value of music to society is really great. And the problem is that we've had a disconnect with how the kind of businesses are built around it and the way that the music is valuable. And then on top of that we have the industry coming in and saying there are too many musicians, which to me is a bit like saying that there are too many people good at math. What we actually need is more people to be making music and people's musical skill level to be higher. We shouldn't let the kind of this economic disconnect become an excuse for saying that everybody making music is a bad idea. Maybe that's a good point to start talking about resonate, I find. Just as an example, I hope you don't mind that we've not talking only about digital infrastructures so far, but the topic has broadened. But I think it's good. I think it's okay. Because it all kind of connects together space, money and so on to the question of how can we organize our independent music cultures. And so talking about financing, so you described how you try to make this culture you're interested in possible through finding ways to finance it. And so you're an advisor to the streaming service that is newly building up. That does a few things differently. Do you want to describe? Sure. Peter Harris who started the resonate project is in the room. And we have 20 minutes. So resonate, I guess to botch a small description is a platform cooperative. The nature of a platform cooperative is, I guess if you were to boil it down, you say think about a platform that you use and then imagine if that was owned by the people that use it. It's probably the easiest way to describe it. So there's a platform cooperative alternative to Uber, for example, where the prices are not determined from above by a few people who you don't get to communicate with. They're determined by the people who use it, by the drivers who use it. These are small projects right now, but they're increasing in number and scale. So resonate, you could consider resonate an equivalent to right now, an equivalent to say a Spotify in the sense that everybody who participates in resonate, both the audience and the artists own a share and a stake in resonate. They collectively get to determine what features are added to the platform. And because it is built on the blockchain, which is something that many of you will probably, it's a word you'll probably hear a lot at this conference today. There's also lots of cool things that could be built on top of it. And so, going back to the idea of agency I was discussing before, one could say that it starts out as a streaming service. There's so many other applications that can be determined by the community in order to speculate on new revenue streams, or speculate on just cool new interactions around music that actually take music beyond this stagnant wave form that's compressed and shot around the world. All of these things become possible when we have collective ownership over that platform. Try convincing Spotify to make a change. You have to contend with their shareholders, because ultimately, and Sanclad at that point, right? So, and to speak to Peter's point, I agree with you on a level where I say, when it comes to advertising, I would never judge someone for taking money. I'm actually, for my community, generally, like a bit more diplomatic than most people about things like Red Bull, or Ableton, for example. I think there's a place for that, because in many cases they are reinforcing or filling a gap that has been left by this kind of decimation of the music industry in the last 10, 15 years. And I think it's a very complicated issue. That being said, try imagining an Apple commercial, or any of the digital infrastructures, these monopolies that exist, with the kind of goodwill or the momentum of youth culture and subculture removed from them. They'll start looking very dry and very kind of dusty. And the opportunity to me is to say, if we are the ones creating the value, and in my mind, initiatives like yours, Daniella, are creating the value, because I've seen this multiple times. What you're putting on now, through economic pressures, end up being grabbed by legacy labels, which then in turn will influence the major labels, which then in turn will influence what you hear on an advertisement in the middle of Karlsruhe. What you're doing is you're providing incredible value, and traditionally independent musicians have provided that value. If we start to acknowledge that value and take ownership over it, and this is the funny thing, we have more tools available to us now. The costs of doing this are so much lower than they ever were, and the goodwill and the ability to find people to help you build these things is increased tenfold from when the original independent pioneers built the original independent music industry. If we are to do that, who is to say that there isn't a financial incentive at the end of the day? But I do know that companies do profit from music, maybe not directly, they take a loss on it. So Apple paying however much for a Drake exclusive, they take a loss on that, but they benefit greatly from having that as part of their arsenal, and they understand that that is a huge part of their ecosystem. It's a huge part of how they sold, sell their products in the first place. So the speculation for me around projects like Resonate and other things like Saga, which we don't even need to go into, but other projects I've been involved with and things that Holly and I do as part of our practice, is to say, well, what are the new kind of boundaries or frontiers for this kind of independence? If we were to foment a consciousness of a new form of independence, what kind of power do we have? And the answer might be nothing, but it's really worth asking that question, because at this point in time, it's cheaper to do it. We can get in touch with as many people as possible, and yet this conversation seems to be somewhat lacking. And the answer might be that through a blockchain system built, through a service like Resonate, musicians may not end up selling their songs, but they might end up selling moments. The live experience might expand and syndicate to 50 countries worldwide, and the song format itself might change. The economic structures around music have modulated the song format for as long as we know. Radio songs were shortened in order to work better with radio advertising. There's all different ways the song can move that we might be able to monetize, but we don't have a fucking say at it when it comes to working with Apple, Spotify, or these platform monopolies. So it's not for me to answer the question, but all I'll say is we're not going to get any further unless we start taking more control over this, and I think Resonate is a great first start in doing that. One thing, or one service that I've been thinking about in context of this topic is Bandcamp, because I've always found that Bandcamp has kind of a not super cool image, but in a way it's like I think the only real platform that is working profitable, or that actually has music as a business model, because you can stream there after a few streams, you have to buy the song, which makes sense, so you can listen for free, then you buy it, you support an artist. I think it's quite a good site. I'm always wondering why people are not using it more. People use it, and you also get the email address also, by buy. Just as something that already exists. I really like it too. It's a good platform. It's also been around for a long time, and they also take a cut. I think it's like 15%. What's really funny is if you have a song online for 99 cents, and then Bandcamp gets a cut, and then PayPal gets a cut for the transition, and then you look at your exo sheet, and then you have millions of little tiny numbers, which adds up to 30 euros in the end. This administrative process of how this is monetized, also when you register your artist at GEMA, and then we do the GEMA procedure, and then they collect all the tiny little coins together, and then in the end it's like 150 euros, and it's really a lot of administrative work in this kind of old system, so it is kind of trying to monetize money with this kind of, okay, this is one euro, but how then this infrastructure works is quite weird, I think. For instance, we put out an appeal last Friday. It is four euros for four tracks, so each track one euro. We uploaded it through an aggregator, like digital distribution company, and it is on iTunes, but in iTunes it's just 2.99, because if the consumer buys it for a whole package, as the whole four tracks, they give discount, and they don't even ask you. They don't say, are you okay with this? And now this EP is in 270 shops, and it all has different price. And the only one who actually, I put everything correct, I wrote featured, always small, I wrote the artist's names, how it is supposed to be written, and in some platforms it's totally wrong, and you're like, how does this information come there, you know, and then I'm really like, oh, no, I'm not going to think about it. I mean, I'm googling, and then I'm finding the EP somewhere totally random, and some communities, and they're rating it, and they are talking about it, and this is really interesting how it goes everywhere, and without you knowing, and then your researcher is like, wow, this is funny, but it is small money in the end, and it's how it is working also on Spotify, this is also really interesting that they're really bigger labels, or independent labels, so they curate now this playlist, you know, there's like more playlists, there's like, so it's so funny, and also the smaller artists retweet this playlist, and they say, I'm in the playlist now, and I think it's really nice how they are curating the playlist, and it makes you money, then they put like a little mainstream music, then a little more smaller artists, and then they try their artists also to get money from it, and then it's like, this is an interesting idea, the playlist Spotify is a thing now, and it's not getting you so much money, like you won't, as a small label, you won't benefit so much, but there are people paying, and people pre-ordering, and that's really nice, you know, and this is, it's a good thing. I mean, how could you make them pay more? I mean, like in the event situation, it's really also restricted towards a price, you know, you cannot, it's also different access, if you say, please pay 12 euro or 18 euro would be even better, you know, but it's like a different thing if you go out every weekend, pay 18 euros at the door, then you don't have so much money at the end of the weekend anymore, so it's like, how, where does this money come from? We say it comes from the consumer, and we try to change the consumer behaviour in the sense that they are giving more music, more money to music, how we could do that, but I also really like the resonate idea, because it's such a good idea, and how you, when you sign up, and how the platform is talking to you is actually already really different, you know, like you feel welcome, and you feel like someone is taking care, and if you are really using like digital, like music distribution or anything like else, you really think like you talk on like a mobile hotline, you know, you're waiting for 30 minutes, no one is talking to you, no one is, yeah, yeah, with the distributor, but we don't have like a contract or anything like that, but it's like, if you use like digital aggregators, and then it's like taking, yeah, yeah, then you need to get a deal with like digital distribution company, then they take a cut, then you might end up doing vinyl, then you have more budget into your music, so. I'm wondering with some of those like Spotify you mentioned also before the Spotify players influences the festivals, and so with some of those players being so large and dominant already, what do you think like alternative approaches coming up now like Resonate or so, what's the chance even for them to come because of the network effects and everything that's in the favor of those who already have all the repertoire at this point, what do you think about? Well, I mean, there's always some room for competition, so I maybe I'm more hesitant to just vilify somebody like SoundCloud or Spotify. I mean, I think the reality is a lot of people, a lot of artists have gravitated to Spotify and SoundCloud and Bandcamp for different reasons because they were able to find some sort of traction there, you know, they were able to find some kind of solution, they were able to kind of get some of their music out. So I agree with all of the criticisms that are here, but then you'll hear me gripe about them too, but I have at least some optimism, so talking to people about some of the positives from those services. There should be room, there should be lots of room if there's so much music being made and so much music being consumed, there should be room out there for some new ideas. Now, unless, and this is a Silicon Valley problem, unless there's a kind of a tiny number of tech companies who determine all of the funding and the direction for the whole industry, that's obviously not so good. But I mean Bandcamp is a good solution and I think both of your initiatives are good examples too in that, you know, we can talk about kind of solving affordable housing globally, and then we can also talk about kind of like solving affordable housing in Kitesberg, you know. We might have, and the impact of solving affordable housing in Kitesberg is just as real, maybe more real because we might get somewhere. So Bandcamp, for instance, became hugely, hugely successful in a business that had never existed before, which was people going and buying independent video game soundtracks. And so now there's a whole economy around that and there's a whole group of listeners and the music sounds kind of like nothing has ever really sounded before because this is a totally new culture that didn't exist before. And there's a little healthy kind of little underground composition market too, so that you've got everything there. So I think, you know, as we continue to kind of focus on our own human scale and continue to do some of the things that we do, well we may not solve the overarching problems. Part of the reason that some of us are not necessarily venture capital funders is that we may be better working on that scale. And there's some exciting things happening there. Disagree, sorry. I mean, I agree. It's interesting you mentioned independent video game soundtracks, right? I have friends in the independent video game industry and they sell stuff. You can make independent video games and live a healthy life. And in fact, in many ways, culturally, because there's a lot of money involved in that and a lot of goodwill. And again, a fomented sense of identity in opposition to a dominant industry, a dominant kind of dumbed-down industry. There are use cases all over the world, right? Like you can look at different industries where people are paying for this stuff. The thing that where I agree with you and I disagree with you simultaneously, I agree with you on the DL, because when you're talking about network effects, platform monopolies and venture capital, and the fact that if you speak to anyone in Silicon Valley and you talk to them about music, they see it as a problem that's been solved. Because in their mind, also, music is not something that evolves. It's a wave file and then you have bands and it looks like a band from the 70s. It's like, no, no, no, if we were to start being a bit more ambitious with this, of saying, well, no, you can have that. If you want that representation of music, by all means, stream it, put it on playlists, whatever. We want to be something different. There are markets out there. And so while I agree with you on the one hand, I also demand we be more ambitious. Because there's also like a kind of diplomatic acceptance of the current state of affairs. While I think has rationale to it, I also think can also somewhat placate a sense of urgency around this. Where for me, it's not necessarily music will always exist and it will always have some degree of value. For me, my interest in music is in its relevancy. And when I see the way that these platform monopolies represent music and you go to the festivals and it's the same thing and the same thing. And then, oh, it's the 80s now and it's the 90s and so on and so forth. And we just blissfully forget that we're living in this new technological age where anything could happen. I agree with you and I also think, no, if we were to start being a bit more ambitious and a bit more insistent on this, there's a market out there. And you can look at other markets to see good examples of that. And so ultimately that... Or for example, the independent video game market. Where there are huge amounts of money, huge amounts of money transacted. There's a site called Humble Bundle, for example, that a friend of mine had a game sold through where... I'll botch the figures, but an abstract amount of money is spent on bundled video games that go out through a newsletter. And there's a story behind that and there's an identity behind it. And I think there's so much goodwill within musical communities that we could form a similar sense of urgency, but we're not going to get there through satisfying diplomatically our relationships with Spotify or SoundCloud or whatever. But you know what I'm saying, I'm just kind of like relativizing it. There are opportunities out there, that's all I'm saying. And again, to bring it back fundamentally, it's an aesthetic problem. Because music, if you take away the relevant... Music's power to represent people on the margins, to insert new things through these time-worn cultural mechanisms into greater cultural discourse, if you remove that, you've lost it. That's what music is for me. I can listen to 1,600 people making techno records at home, I don't care. It's not coffee table music, it's more than that. And so if we start ceding this to playlist cultures that, for example, don't represent the labels, try finding a Warp Records page on Spotify. You'll find their playlists, but try finding a page that's problematic for me. And I think we could do better. Do you see any... When you talked about Resonant, but do you see any example where you would say, oh, this is actually a good... Sure. I think... You brought up Bankcamp, I think Bankcamp is a good, honest service. It's an honest, it's kind of like a storefront, right? You go in there, you pay money, they take a cut, you get money. It's great. For me, my personal interests, again, it represents music up until a certain point, and I think we could do better. The way that people interact around music now presents all these wonderful opportunities for monetization and experimentation that kind of stops short of Bankcamp. Bankcamp is a place to listen to linear music and transact as if you were buying a record 20 years ago, except now it's more convenient. That's fine, and that's great for a certain expectation. So I like Bankcamp and I use it, but I think we can think bigger. And that's where the blockchain comes in and so on and so forth. What else is there to this? Okay, I see. So, okay, we have one minute. What? I have an even simpler enemy than Matt, which is, I just think this. Spotify is run by some musicians. They're musicians who are happy with them. They listen to feedback from musicians. SoundCloud, I think the same is true. There are even people at iTunes where the same is true. There's tons of problems with them. Plenty to criticize and let's keep criticizing them. But Facebook, the problem is Facebook. Facebook has now become the gatekeeper to where everybody sees their information. It's everybody's new dopamine dose for the day. It's absolutely destroying the world. And I think I can say that without fear of offending anyone at Facebook, because it wouldn't even matter. If I pissed off, you know, if I went and pissed off Apple or SoundCloud or Spotify, I might be worried about my future as a musician. But I can literally stand here and say like, Facebook is Satan, and it wouldn't have any impact on my music life, because Facebook is totally uninterested in music. And I think if we tear down one thing, let's tear down the hegemony Facebook has on all of our lives and the way that we would get music if you could find music on Facebook which half the time you can't. Thank you. Yeah, I think I agree with that. Daniela, I think it's also good because you mentioned on the Twitter once, because when we are... Facebook is actually really important to us because that's where we put our events, that's where we are inviting our community and that's where the community sees the events. And I always think that we never got to get this limit anymore that we are not allowed to invite any more friends because our percentage of attendance is always right. So I haven't been at this point so far. But then other people saying like, sorry, can you just attend because I'm not allowed to invite anyone else anymore. And I think that is really crazy how this gatekeeping works. And you mentioned on Twitter once that we do email rounds and really, I mean, we write emails and ask people to come or if they would like to come, you know, and then you need the email and the personal contact and invite people as the type of connection. Yeah, maybe as a closing, I think that's a good closing thread. I think, Matt, I found in your profile a link that you have got a group together how to get away from Facebook events. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe we can use this as a closing to the... Yeah, exactly. Well, I see, to build off both those points. For me, Peter mentioned the dopamine thing. My kind of analogy for Facebook is it's like a bar forever, right? It's like dopamine spikes and they keep you in this one space. And I'm like, I went to bars so I could meet people and then leave the bar or find like a better environment. And the thing is the network effect of Facebook dictates that people will leave and the last... the one thing they miss is they don't hear about events. I'm like, that's torture, that's really wrong. So if we were to try and build an alternative, a simple alternative to Facebook events that allow people to find out about things without having to go through Facebook, that could actually have a wonderful effect of weaning people off that thing. And so, yeah, so we put a first group together and we've actually written a grant for it to try and move forward. If anyone's interested in it, we're hoping to build it sometime this year once the album is done. Yeah, but it's these kind of little gestures that could actually ultimately have a really big impact. And that's not to even mention the dangers of having, particularly in marginal communities, queer communities, political activists communities, the danger of having all that information publicly available on an advertising network, which not to glow or kind of play a violin, we lost a lot of friends in the Oakland Fire whose families were being called by trolls on 4chan because while they were looking for the missing, people were posting public cell phone numbers of their mothers and fathers onto a Facebook event page. Underground culture doesn't need that, right? In whatever circumstance, and after, as a result of that tragedy, there were other spaces being shut down by the police because they had a paper trail from Facebook events to say, oh, yeah, well, if this person went to a party there, they also went to a party at this space. I guess they're having underground parties there. It's just a bad, it's bad vibes, you know, like, so anyway, so that's a really good, it's a really good maybe place to start in weaning people off these networks. Okay, I think that's it. I think we'll have to wrap up here. Thank you for the conversation. And we didn't do our Q&A with the audience, but the Q&A we can do if you have a bit of time over a drink because I have a bag of drink tickets here, which you can collect from me here, and I think there are some from the, they are sponsored by the Berlin Music Commission and the Club Commission, very generous. And the only thing is I don't know exactly where we are going with them. So there's a networking area, which I haven't been to yet, and I don't know if the colleagues from the Club Commission or Music Commission actually know where to go so that we can go over there together, but I have some tickets here, and Réka is over there, and she has the other ones. Yeah, she's waving there. So, okay, well, thank you very much, and yeah, let's continue over a drink. Thank you.
 Hello everyone. I welcome the panelists on stage. I don't want to be here alone.  Okay. Okay. Getting organized here. Yeah, digital music infrastructures is the topic of this conversation  that I look forward to have with a great group of people here on the panel. So, yeah, I would like to,  over the next hour, look with you into the digital environments, the platforms, and the facilities  that we use as participants in music culture. And in the description to this, we wrote that by  infrastructure, we understand a very broad set of arrangements. And I look forward to hearing what  you understand exactly by infrastructures or how you view this. So, for me, it could be the design of  an interface to the overall business model of a platform that then shapes how the services are  delivered that we are using, for example. And I think one thing that is important to note maybe is that  we're probably looking through an independent cultural lens because we are all artists or cultural producers  who are maybe working more with kind of underground culture, as you say. So, yeah, over the next hour,  let's talk about how do digital music infrastructures shape our practice? What do we think about the  status quo? Are the structures supportive to our maybe different visions of music culture? And then,  also, I'm interested to hear about all your different initiatives that you are involved with that we  also spend some time talking about. And I briefly introduce all of you. So, you don't have to say your  bios every time. So, we have in the middle Daniela Zeitz, who is cultural manager and curator and co-founder  of the Cream Cake event platform and label. And, yeah, I think you work with lots of artists who  operate outside of traditional music industry structures, also lots of young people, and I've  discovered lots of great artists through your work. So, that's great. Then, just right next to me,  or left, is Peter Kern, musician and creative technologist, co-producer of the Meablip open source  synthesizer, publisher of Create Digital Music, a new site with a focus on music technologies. So,  you think and write about digital technologies in connection to music almost every day. So, and then,  on the very left, Matt Dryhurst is an artist and you release music research and artworks. You collaborate  with Holly Herndon a lot, with the Pond label, you're a lecturer at NYU, and you've developed  Saga, a project that I'm going to ask you more about later. And you are an advisor to the streaming  service Resonate that we've heard, so those of you who have been here earlier, we've heard a little bit  about that already today. Yeah, welcome. And, yeah, as an introduction, I would like to hear from you,  well, all of you, when I invited you to the panel, all of you responded quite interested and  enthusiastically about the topic, saying, oh, yeah, this is really a good, like an important topic. And I would  like to know why, why did you say that? Do we have all microphones now? We have two. We have one. Two.  I can start. Yeah, I mean, it is funny because when you asked me what I think about music and digital  infrastructures, we just founded a festival in Tokyo, which is called Infra. And so it is playing  with this obvious idea of how you provide infrastructure for people who don't actually use the actual  infrastructure, who is traditionally based. And so for us, it is always this question of how we do things  in general, and how you do things, you're going to establish your own infrastructure. So how do you  operate your business? How do you curate a program? Or how do you support your artists? And who is  benefiting from this? So with Creamcake or 3HD is another project we do. And Infra now, it is like a  totally different scene, which hasn't been on the main spotlight for years. And we create this platform  for them and support them and establish for them a sort of structure and possibility to perform.  And then...  Hey, yeah. So on the topic of infrastructure, I deal with it a lot in my work. I think what Daniela  has built is kind of like a perfect case study in a way for a new form of independence. And so when I  think about infrastructure and music, the only infrastructure I've ever really cared about has been  the independent musical infrastructure. And one of the things that I think is quite disappointing or  urgent at this point is the need to kind of redefine what we understand to be independence in an era of  platform capitalism in this era where you can listen to a punk record on the same page as a Rihanna  record, and most people are experiencing these things in those ways. And of course there are independent  initiatives happening, but generally they tend to be, you know, not necessarily in the same form that  one would understand independent music to be classically. And so I think Creamcake is like a really good  example of that. Yeah. So that's really the big question for me is like what does being independent  today mean beyond the kitsch of independence that were often sold and that has been subsumed into  just general commercial discourse? Right.  I'm already... My mind is already off track because that's already a lot of interesting ideas. But I  mean, I guess I'm kind of... Well, I meant to follow up on what Matt's suggesting. I think there's  probably not a clear dividing point between independent and whatever a non-independent artist is.  Certainly I'm happy to be a non-independent artist if someone wants to give me a big EDM deal of some  sort. But I mean, I think, yeah, I think even as you talk to artists who you would have traditionally  thought of as kind of commercially successful or on major labels, a lot of the things that they say are  quite similar to things that you hear from very independent, very underground artists. Everybody's  kind of contending with the same vehicles for communication. And I mean, I'm kind of interested by  the thing that a lot of other people see as a problem. So people come from this kind of traditional  industry model, I think because it is based on this very particular form of scarcity and maybe a very  particular form of control and control of distribution tend to see this growth in production or the  growth in the number of people making music and the ease of kind of using technology to play music,  they see as somehow a problem. Me being biased and having always kind of made most of my living off  that sort of production side of things and not just listening and distribution, I always kind of saw it as  something positive. But it seems like the structures that we have for communication somehow don't  match up with that reality. So the reality of people producing more diverse and kind of more music  doesn't match up with internet distribution and communication methods that are themselves becoming  more scarce, everything from media to mechanisms for kind of discovery.  Okay. So that's for the start and I think I would like to go deeper into your different perspectives  over the course of the conversation. I think before we go deeper into discussing the actual issues,  I'd be interested and also to get everybody on the same page to quickly look at what do we  understand by infrastructures? What are we actually talking about? And I think like you age from your  perspectives, imagine you're like on a lookout point overlooking like a city or something. So this  being you're in the infrastructures you work with, like what are the building blocks that you see there  and what maybe what are the things that you find that you like and what are the things that you  don't like when you look out of the window? Do you want to start, Daniela, maybe from your  perspective, maybe also working with the kind of producers you work with?  I mean, I think infrastructure is definitely you can think about how can you bring something from A  to B. It is like the really like the traffic thing. So how would you start having like a very  talented emerging artist who is putting their sounds online on SoundCloud? How would you give  the him a chance to spread his music and find an audience and get paid and have a good experience  and actually approach different types of experiences through the career. And so I think in terms of  that, when we do events or when we curate our music program, we just invite people who are just  uploaded songs. It doesn't matter if they are like huge, if they have a following fan base or  whatever, we just invite them and they're really happy that they will never think about that they  can come to Berlin and play a show. And so that's like the first step of creating like this,  like very simple, it's just one email, you know, it takes me five minutes. I'm hearing this track,  I'm hearing another one, I was like, wow, is it go to the Instagram? There's like a lot of, like the  aesthetics to this scene also and I'm like, wow, just invite this person. And then over the time,  when you do promotion and when you are like building your events and then we talk to the artists and  we give them like more knowledge about like how does this work and that all comes to like the  learning of from step one to step B and then when we do the label, it's the same, like an artist,  he put out some stuff on SoundCloud, I'm just asking him if he wants to put out something with  us and then it's always like very transparent and very fair communication because I haven't done it  too, you know, so I'm looking for some music contracts from my friends, I'm going through them  like classic ones or still from independent music scene, but then I'm like, oh, this is too much,  this is too much, so I'm making it down to the really essential points for like a music contract  with a label you could provide and then I'm having a Skype meeting with the artist and then we go  through each point and then it starts being like open and fair from scratch, you know, and that's part  of it, you know. And I hear from a lot of friends that they just got the contract per email and then  they didn't want to sign it or they didn't know what this paragraph means or why is it like 10 pages  long and then they didn't sign it but the record still came out and so this contract is still bonding  for some reason, you know, so it didn't really help the cost of not signing it and so we just don't  work like that in this very traditional way of how this classic industry is, but what I really like  is adapting it to like very DIY thing, you know, and learning it and then I'm saying like, I can do this  by my own, it doesn't really matter of having this huge old school structure and just adapt it in a very  professional way. So from this I hear like what you mentioned, you use just the kind of building blocks  so you have SoundCloud where you find, which is the first point of emerging for someone and then you  have like the label, your own label with the contract with terms of collaboration and you mentioned  festivals also, no? You mentioned like where you want to place the artist, something like that.  Yeah, I mean where you want to... So where the artist would be playing later, just as a way to look at  what infrastructure like comprises. Yeah.  How's that? Sounds good. Do you want to build on like... Yeah, I mean in terms of infrastructure it's quite  easy, right? It's like how do you get this thing to people, right? And there's two lines of that, in the  one sense it's like how do you get it to people's ears remotely and then there's how do you get it to people  in space, which is something that's becoming increasingly difficult in expensive cities. So there are  two parallel things, the latter one happens to represent at this point in time the closest thing to an  income that most musicians have and principally for me around these issues of infrastructure it's  saying well how much kind of agency does one feel within those structures, right? So you bring up SoundCloud  for example, SoundCloud provides a service, it does a few things really, really well, it allows you to do  many, a few things with that, right? And so these infrastructures where you go from a scenario of like the  old distribution industry, which in many cases was very limited, you're talking about passing physical  things around, it's an infrastructural issue to me to say well why is it now that our level of  engagement with this media when we receive it is actually somehow less than it once was. You have fewer  options to tailor or customize someone's experience of this music there. That's an infrastructural  problem, right? That's a design decision that has been made by an increasingly smaller and smaller pool of  designers with these monopoly platforms, right? Similar, this what used to be somewhat, I mean very much  connected but somewhat disparate live and recorded or distribution music infrastructure, you're starting to see  these two things blend into each other even more so now, right? Where there are fewer places for people to  play, right? So these are getting more expensive so these kind of areas of congregation that one used to go  to a place like a London or a New York or whatever to make a name for yourself and to develop a culture on the  ground there that's becoming increasingly difficult for people who don't have independent money. And so in  order to participate within the live music infrastructure, you know, if you have a band where are you going to  rehearse? So who gets to rehearse enough to be in a position to be supported by the festival networks which  are now increasingly influenced more and more by the design decisions of the distribution platforms, right? So if  you end up being on a Spotify playlist which I might add requires a certain kind of music, certain kinds of music  thrive in playlist cultures where other kinds of music certainly don't thrive, you have a better chance to  participate in the live music infrastructure, right? So these kind of questions for me are really pivotal because  now I tour the world playing music, I'm very fortunate with my partner Holly and we go to these festivals and it's  very interesting to see over time and be like, ah, yeah, like DJs, low overheads, no one can rehearse. The joke for  me is, you know, DJ culture is kind of like the ultimate complement to the Silicon Valley ideology that you make  profit by curating the work of others, you know? And DJ culture obviously has a wonderful, venerated history but it's  kind of interesting to be like, oh, this works really well because it seamlessly flows into playlists, it seamlessly  flows and you see even as a performing artist on stage, the seamless transition from one artist to the next, like  you move your record bag and another person brings their record bag there, this kind of seamless user experience of  the festival environment works in terms of generating money and works for a certain agenda but the question is in the  case of Cream Cake, I'll just use as an example because you're here, what if you wanted to do something else? What are  the affordances of that infrastructure at that point in time? And over time what I fear, I see down the line is what  comes to represent a monoculture that has all of the trappings of the abandon of yesteryear so we get to pretend that  we're raving and all this wonderful history and it's like, well, this stuff happened because people had space and this  stuff happened because people had control over their own infrastructures which increasingly, even within our  communities, is a conversation that people put down, they say you're old fashioned. So it's like, no, actually I think we  should reserve the right to be critical of sand cloud as much as we can celebrate their accomplishments but these  infrastructural issues are of pivotal importance and end up having aesthetic ramifications, hard aesthetic ramifications  for kids who, and I teach students who've grown up with this and know nothing else. So anyway, I'll show up talking about it  but infrastructure for me, it's an aesthetic issue actually when you get down to it.  I can't problematize that any better than that just to broaden it and say, not that we have to go into all this stuff this  evening but I think that sort of, if you think about your musical experience, especially kind of coming from a traditional  musical background, this extends from sort of early music education, and I've even taught keyboard skills and things, to this  sort of instrumental musical experiences and experiences of playing music with other people. We used to have a culture where  everybody was involved in, or not every, most everybody was involved in some kind of communal music practice. So trying to then  turn music into something that's in the hands of a few people is something radically different and that's why for some of us it's  actually very deeply disturbing how often people from kind of this mainstream industry model repeat this idea of music  making is too easy, too many people are making music. So they're trying to protect some kind of very specific elite that they,  not to be overly accusatory, but that they grew out of a very strange reality, the birth of recorded media. We seem to be  returning back to something where everybody is making music. But then the question is, is the value of that music going to be  measured based on this sort of strange remnants of this old system grafted on to some kind of new internet culture?  That's a lot of deep, kind of disturbing questions in some level. But I would say, you know, at the same time, we can also  consider some of those other infrastructure elements. You know, if you look at the musical output of a country that has  public music education, even on the digital side of things, it's very different than that from a country that doesn't. So part of  what seems to be tempering kind of access to the global music market is not just unequal access to the sort of recording  distribution side of things, but also unequal access to music education or instrumental education and differences there. So I  think as we kind of hopefully widen to a more global music community, it'll be interesting to see kind of how we contend with  that and contend with different music educational backgrounds. I think that's enough. Yes?  I'm very good at English, but you talk so fast I cannot follow you.  All of us or just me? All of us, okay.  There's a recording.  That's, yeah, we're all exciting each other and probably it's like just like injecting caffeine into one another. So let's slow down.  We can slow down.  It's slow down. It's also great to listen to the recording at low speed, which also sound later, which will also make each of us sound  much more authoritative. But other than the meantime, let's slow down.  It's also an infrastructural question.  Yes.  So that everybody can use that.  You remember to do that. I did have a coffee just before. Go ahead. Let's try to slow down.  All right. So we've got, I drew a little picture of the infrastructural map and I would like to, so we've looked into the, a little bit of a mixture of what's currently there with  Spotify, playlist, fast, big festival circuits, SoundCloud here, spaces to perform the control that we have over the artworks.  And from here, I'd like to, to draw a bit more into this before we get into the conversation.  I hope we get it all together in the end. But I like to, because all of you are active in some way or the other to, to make, to be an active in this space and to, to maybe change some, some of the things.  And I think from those things we can learn also what's maybe in addition to what you said, what's maybe a problematic or what needs to be changed.  And that, so I would like to add this stuff and then we can do the overall discussion.  And Daniela, you've already started to talk a little bit about what you, how you, do you operate with Cream Cake, but maybe you could elaborate a bit further on what are you, so you, you are trying really to be, to build your own independent network  and what you talked about the label and that type of contracts and so on. What are the points that you are, want to change or that you are doing differently than the others or some of the others?  So, so who, who does know Cream Cake is an event series. It is, it started as a club night or like a really like music night. We do shows at home.  We do another show at Behrkain, but we also worked with How and Kavi to have more like an overlap of different interdisciplinary art forms.  So for instance, we work with like performance art, music and then visual art.  And then we build like installations around it and check out different environments and how music and art comes together.  And so that, that's it for, for the beginning, right? So we, we, we are booking artists. We are trying to pay them always as much as possible, which is also really interesting because no one actually really knows that when, when you offer someone a fee,  I'm also restricted in some ways of how much I can pay this person because of entrance. And then there is like a lot of rent, maybe orders, like a different infrastructure behind that too, you know.  So I think it is always problematic in terms of India, why culture you start with emerging artists and they are really newcomers in that way.  And then they, they make a good record. They might become more powerful and then we are not able to pay the fees anymore, for instance, because we, we, we don't, we don't have that money yet, except when we are applying for funding.  So for instance, with 3 HD festival, it's much better because we got like funding from city tax and we always get funding from music board.  And that really helps also to support the artist in a much more sustainable way because if you are doing a club night, you won't make a living from our team.  And also the artists when they play once, once a month, they will never make a living from this, you know, they have to play like each weekend and then four times.  And then there is the club who can offer this kind of shows now. But if you are not really considering yourself as like, as like someone who plays club music, then there's a total different infrastructure.  Then you connect more maybe with new music venues or you, you, you go into gallery context and then there's no entrance and then you don't get a fee and then the sound system is shitty.  And it's in a whole other story. So there needs to be like a fundamental funding for, for this type of scene because it's so interdisciplinary that it is connecting on so many things.  And I think that is like a, it's a challenge for, for us to open the stores also and, and really hard work to, to really get more funding for, for, for the people behind, behind the project and also for the artists we would like to support.  And that's like everyone needs to do this hard work until you might be not like so independent music scene anymore because, because you're going to be mainstream or you're going to be a mainstream festival.  But to that point is really a long way. And I think that is, it's also good because you really learn, you just learn everything by yourself, you know, and you will make mistakes and you will experience so many different things, which is really amazing.  Because if you think about it before, you wouldn't have done anything. You would just have signed a contract and then you give someone else the power to make the decisions and searching for the wedding song or the live song and really pushing the superstar or the pop star idea of the mainstream culture.  And that's really something we never looked, looked for.  Do you find the dependency on funding problematic and being independent?  Definitely, like the, the, the funding is always like you write an application for, for, for, for like a festival. You really do like concept based work. I mean, you sit there two weeks writing and then it's all in the hands of the Shuri members.  Like it's, it's, it's, you don't, you don't really know them. They're also in a different age group sometimes and they don't really know the context. So these people who make the decisions are not the ones who are going, going out or going to explore subculture in that sense, you know, they're coming more from  an academic background, very intellectual background, often very white male academic music background. And then it's like, if they don't try to, to, to get into the context, then we, we have also like a problem, you know.  So this is like a challenging thing that you are approached, approach different new things, but you should never stop. I think that is like the, the, the, but we always had, we always kept on going and it's growing. And like, because Berlin is so wonderful in terms of like rent and, and, and, and the, and the fees and everything,  like the whole structure is still like, is like such a wonderland bubble place, you know, which has allowed us to do this in a certain extent, you know.  And, but, but otherwise it's not, not gonna, it's not in a, in, there's no funding system in America in that, in that sense, you know, or,  but it's interesting because now we, for, for infra, for instance, we got money from Art Council Tokyo, and we got another, we got another fund, but it's not, it's not enough for, for going abroad and work with like a Japanese collaborator on like a five days festival, but we still want to do it because it is  actually a wonderful idea. And now I'm applying for funding for the Norwegian government for the Finnish Institute. And now you're collecting money from all these types of European cultural funds, which is amazing that this infrastructure exists in America.  For instance, it's not there, you know, or in other countries. And so you will start trying to, to, to find money. I mean, what's also interesting in terms of like infrastructure because there's like a lot of money in cooperation.  In music, for instance, if you, if you decide to work with a cooperation that is might helpful or can be like the, the, the point where money comes in, but then it's like the, yeah, then we grew up in, in Europe and in Germany, for instance, and I come from like museum background,  and you never have sponsoring of a corporation in institutions, you know, that's not what, what, what we are having. But the tendency, for instance, if you look at the British system, there is fundraisers, there is a different financial structure towards  like where private people give you, give you budget, or if you look at, like, I mean, there's like red bull, Ableton, native instruments who are actually giving money, but then they also brand the, your, your events.  So that's also like a question of the, of the cooperative structure in general, if, how, how you could approach them or if you want to, you know, that's the decision making. Do you want to work on a cooperative level and with who and what's the purpose for, for, for the  cooperation?  So, well, yeah, I mean, just, I would say, I mean, I was sort of laughing about the United States, but I would say, you know, that, that still counts as, I think that still counts as an infrastructure, right? So this is just a, this kind of a different infrastructure.  I think the United States is really lacking in ideas like cultural diplomacy, just a, just a little bit, seems to be getting worse fast. But, you know, I think there are things that maybe you, that coming from the states that I would take for granted that are not existing  in the United States, and that there's, there's a culture of, I think there's a culture of public giving. Sometimes that can, I mean, that can be less problematic, even than some of the other things that we've talked about. There is a, there is a culture of kind of how to fund raise with  private partners. Well, there isn't good federal arts infrastructure. Sometimes there's quite good local arts infrastructure. So it's, so it's not, you know, the, the, it's, it's a, it's a complicated situation in the United, in the U.S. And, you know, I would also say, it's, there are certainly challenges to working with certain governments to, at least, and I think  ethically as well. Obviously that, that will impact your agenda in the same way that working with certain corporations would. That was, that was it kind of on this sort of funding infrastructure question.  You had something there?  Sure.  I'm spacing on the name, but there's a great book that University of Santa Cruz published talking about the legacy of German arts funding for the American avant-garde, like post the Second World War, and it's a remarkable book and I'm, I need to, if you're curious about it, please get me afterwards,  because I'll get my phone out and find it. But the argument within that is that most of what we understand to be the American avant-garde, your cages and so on and so forth wouldn't really exist if it weren't for the support of, and particularly things like jazz music also that, you know, the Swiss and the  French and still to this day do a huge job in, in supporting. So yeah, so taking most of what we understand as music doesn't exist without taking that funding somehow. You know, there's a, there's a mythical period of time that suggests that  it could exist by itself, but it most likely didn't in most cases, or at least for the people on the margins.  We were supposed to slow down talking.  I actually tried to slow down.  Are you okay?  Please say if it's, we have, they may be, we may be reminded if it's.  I expect that reach all the time.  Okay, so just to, huh?  Just, just to kind of back this up for a second, I guess, I, because just personally, I have, I'm terrible at solving most of the problems that we've just described, even for myself individually, when it comes to figuring out how financial  infrastructure is meant to work, figuring out sometimes how to get paid, sometimes it's not my strongest skill, nor is business planning.  But I would say maybe to kind of look at the larger picture here, I, I think one fundamental question is, what is, what really is the value of music?  You know, and what will the value of music be to a society?  And whether digital tech, I mean, digital technology is involved because the sort of microprocessor, light speed communication revolution is involved in everything right now.  But, but that's not, I think that's not the point so much as figuring out what this, where this value is.  And I'm okay, I'm even okay with some of that value coming from something like advertising.  I have no problem with this sort of global capital system getting involved with music as long as we can make it work for ourselves.  I pay my bills based on advertising, so I don't see advertising on websites as being fundamentally evil, as some people do, because if I did, then I would also see paying my rent as somehow fundamentally evil, and I don't.  But that's because I've been able to kind of take that system and make it work.  It seems that, but just expecting the sort of world to organize itself around music making is wildly unrealistic, and the reason is that cultures tend to view musicians as dangerous a lot of the time.  And the monetization of music is something that often gets marginalized, almost nearly all of the time.  So we really have to kind of figure out some way to go into the system that's geared against us, because people are mistrust, mistrust what music does for society, because it seems to make people go crazy and consume a lot of drugs and alcohol and have sex.  And that's not just a, that's not just a kind of a, like a Berlin club notion.  This is something you can see repeated in lots of texts from centuries back from cultures all over the world.  And you can kind of do an ethnomusicological survey and find that there are many, many times that musicians start to be distrusted or marginalized from society.  And that the kind of the main internet businesses right now are also really not organized around music and have not found a way to make much money off of music.  So even as the industry complains that Google and Microsoft and Apple are getting rich off music, that's really not true.  If nobody is making money off music on the internet and then nobody has a real clear idea how to do that, the problem is they've started the cycle where they kind of put music further and further and further to the side.  So if our problems seem a bit intractable tonight, I think this is part of why.  You know, because we have to remember that the natural tendency of what we do is for things to get marginalized.  But that doesn't mean that the natural value of music is small. I think that the actual value of music to society is really great.  And the problem is that we've had a disconnect with how the kind of businesses are built around it and the way that the music is valuable.  And then on top of that we have the industry coming in and saying there are too many musicians, which to me is a bit like saying that there are too many people good at math.  What we actually need is more people to be making music and people's musical skill level to be higher.  We shouldn't let the kind of this economic disconnect become an excuse for saying that everybody making music is a bad idea.  Maybe that's a good point to start talking about resonate, I find.  Just as an example, I hope you don't mind that we've not talking only about digital infrastructures so far, but the topic has broadened.  But I think it's good. I think it's okay.  Because it all kind of connects together space, money and so on to the question of how can we organize our independent music cultures.  And so talking about financing, so you described how you try to make this culture you're interested in possible through finding ways to finance it.  And so you're an advisor to the streaming service that is newly building up.  That does a few things differently. Do you want to describe?  Sure. Peter Harris who started the resonate project is in the room.  And we have 20 minutes.  So resonate, I guess to botch a small description is a platform cooperative.  The nature of a platform cooperative is, I guess if you were to boil it down, you say think about a platform that you use and then imagine if that was owned by the people that use it.  It's probably the easiest way to describe it. So there's a platform cooperative alternative to Uber, for example, where the prices are not determined from above by a few people who you don't get to communicate with.  They're determined by the people who use it, by the drivers who use it.  These are small projects right now, but they're increasing in number and scale.  So resonate, you could consider resonate an equivalent to right now, an equivalent to say a Spotify in the sense that everybody who participates in resonate,  both the audience and the artists own a share and a stake in resonate.  They collectively get to determine what features are added to the platform.  And because it is built on the blockchain, which is something that many of you will probably, it's a word you'll probably hear a lot at this conference today.  There's also lots of cool things that could be built on top of it.  And so, going back to the idea of agency I was discussing before, one could say that it starts out as a streaming service.  There's so many other applications that can be determined by the community in order to speculate on new revenue streams,  or speculate on just cool new interactions around music that actually take music beyond this stagnant wave form that's compressed and shot around the world.  All of these things become possible when we have collective ownership over that platform.  Try convincing Spotify to make a change.  You have to contend with their shareholders, because ultimately, and Sanclad at that point, right?  So, and to speak to Peter's point, I agree with you on a level where I say, when it comes to advertising, I would never judge someone for taking money.  I'm actually, for my community, generally, like a bit more diplomatic than most people about things like Red Bull, or Ableton, for example.  I think there's a place for that, because in many cases they are reinforcing or filling a gap that has been left by this kind of decimation of the music industry in the last 10, 15 years.  And I think it's a very complicated issue.  That being said, try imagining an Apple commercial, or any of the digital infrastructures, these monopolies that exist, with the kind of goodwill or the momentum of youth culture and subculture removed from them.  They'll start looking very dry and very kind of dusty.  And the opportunity to me is to say, if we are the ones creating the value, and in my mind, initiatives like yours, Daniella, are creating the value, because I've seen this multiple times.  What you're putting on now, through economic pressures, end up being grabbed by legacy labels, which then in turn will influence the major labels, which then in turn will influence what you hear on an advertisement in the middle of Karlsruhe.  What you're doing is you're providing incredible value, and traditionally independent musicians have provided that value.  If we start to acknowledge that value and take ownership over it, and this is the funny thing, we have more tools available to us now.  The costs of doing this are so much lower than they ever were, and the goodwill and the ability to find people to help you build these things is increased tenfold from when the original independent pioneers built the original independent music industry.  If we are to do that, who is to say that there isn't a financial incentive at the end of the day?  But I do know that companies do profit from music, maybe not directly, they take a loss on it.  So Apple paying however much for a Drake exclusive, they take a loss on that, but they benefit greatly from having that as part of their arsenal, and they understand that that is a huge part of their ecosystem.  It's a huge part of how they sold, sell their products in the first place.  So the speculation for me around projects like Resonate and other things like Saga, which we don't even need to go into, but other projects I've been involved with and things that Holly and I do as part of our practice,  is to say, well, what are the new kind of boundaries or frontiers for this kind of independence?  If we were to foment a consciousness of a new form of independence, what kind of power do we have?  And the answer might be nothing, but it's really worth asking that question, because at this point in time, it's cheaper to do it.  We can get in touch with as many people as possible, and yet this conversation seems to be somewhat lacking.  And the answer might be that through a blockchain system built, through a service like Resonate, musicians may not end up selling their songs, but they might end up selling moments.  The live experience might expand and syndicate to 50 countries worldwide, and the song format itself might change.  The economic structures around music have modulated the song format for as long as we know.  Radio songs were shortened in order to work better with radio advertising.  There's all different ways the song can move that we might be able to monetize, but we don't have a fucking say at it when it comes to working with Apple, Spotify, or these platform monopolies.  So it's not for me to answer the question, but all I'll say is we're not going to get any further unless we start taking more control over this, and I think Resonate is a great first start in doing that.  One thing, or one service that I've been thinking about in context of this topic is Bandcamp, because I've always found that Bandcamp has kind of a not super cool image,  but in a way it's like I think the only real platform that is working profitable, or that actually has music as a business model, because you can stream there after a few streams, you have to buy the song, which makes sense,  so you can listen for free, then you buy it, you support an artist. I think it's quite a good site.  I'm always wondering why people are not using it more.  People use it, and you also get the email address also, by buy.  Just as something that already exists.  I really like it too. It's a good platform. It's also been around for a long time, and they also take a cut. I think it's like 15%. What's really funny is if you have a song online for 99 cents, and then Bandcamp gets a cut, and then PayPal gets a cut for the transition,  and then you look at your exo sheet, and then you have millions of little tiny numbers, which adds up to 30 euros in the end. This administrative process of how this is monetized,  also when you register your artist at GEMA, and then we do the GEMA procedure, and then they collect all the tiny little coins together, and then in the end it's like 150 euros,  and it's really a lot of administrative work in this kind of old system, so it is kind of trying to monetize money with this kind of, okay, this is one euro,  but how then this infrastructure works is quite weird, I think.  For instance, we put out an appeal last Friday. It is four euros for four tracks, so each track one euro.  We uploaded it through an aggregator, like digital distribution company, and it is on iTunes, but in iTunes it's just 2.99,  because if the consumer buys it for a whole package, as the whole four tracks, they give discount, and they don't even ask you.  They don't say, are you okay with this? And now this EP is in 270 shops, and it all has different price.  And the only one who actually, I put everything correct, I wrote featured, always small, I wrote the artist's names, how it is supposed to be written,  and in some platforms it's totally wrong, and you're like, how does this information come there, you know, and then I'm really like, oh, no, I'm not going to think about it.  I mean, I'm googling, and then I'm finding the EP somewhere totally random, and some communities, and they're rating it, and they are talking about it,  and this is really interesting how it goes everywhere, and without you knowing, and then your researcher is like, wow, this is funny,  but it is small money in the end, and it's how it is working also on Spotify, this is also really interesting that they're really bigger labels,  or independent labels, so they curate now this playlist, you know, there's like more playlists, there's like, so it's so funny,  and also the smaller artists retweet this playlist, and they say, I'm in the playlist now, and I think it's really nice how they are curating the playlist,  and it makes you money, then they put like a little mainstream music, then a little more smaller artists, and then they try their artists also to get money from it,  and then it's like, this is an interesting idea, the playlist Spotify is a thing now, and it's not getting you so much money,  like you won't, as a small label, you won't benefit so much, but there are people paying, and people pre-ordering, and that's really nice, you know,  and this is, it's a good thing. I mean, how could you make them pay more?  I mean, like in the event situation, it's really also restricted towards a price, you know, you cannot, it's also different access,  if you say, please pay 12 euro or 18 euro would be even better, you know, but it's like a different thing if you go out every weekend,  pay 18 euros at the door, then you don't have so much money at the end of the weekend anymore, so it's like, how, where does this money come from?  We say it comes from the consumer, and we try to change the consumer behaviour in the sense that they are giving more music, more money to music,  how we could do that, but I also really like the resonate idea, because it's such a good idea, and how you, when you sign up,  and how the platform is talking to you is actually already really different, you know, like you feel welcome,  and you feel like someone is taking care, and if you are really using like digital, like music distribution or anything like else,  you really think like you talk on like a mobile hotline, you know, you're waiting for 30 minutes, no one is talking to you,  no one is, yeah, yeah, with the distributor, but we don't have like a contract or anything like that,  but it's like, if you use like digital aggregators, and then it's like taking, yeah, yeah,  then you need to get a deal with like digital distribution company, then they take a cut, then you might end up doing vinyl,  then you have more budget into your music, so.  I'm wondering with some of those like Spotify you mentioned also before the Spotify players influences the festivals,  and so with some of those players being so large and dominant already,  what do you think like alternative approaches coming up now like Resonate or so,  what's the chance even for them to come because of the network effects and everything that's in the favor of those who already have  all the repertoire at this point, what do you think about?  Well, I mean, there's always some room for competition,  so I maybe I'm more hesitant to just vilify somebody like SoundCloud or Spotify.  I mean, I think the reality is a lot of people, a lot of artists have gravitated to Spotify and SoundCloud and Bandcamp  for different reasons because they were able to find some sort of traction there, you know,  they were able to find some kind of solution, they were able to kind of get some of their music out.  So I agree with all of the criticisms that are here, but then you'll hear me gripe about them too,  but I have at least some optimism, so talking to people about some of the positives from those services.  There should be room, there should be lots of room if there's so much music being made and so much music being consumed,  there should be room out there for some new ideas.  Now, unless, and this is a Silicon Valley problem, unless there's a kind of a tiny number of tech companies  who determine all of the funding and the direction for the whole industry, that's obviously not so good.  But I mean Bandcamp is a good solution and I think both of your initiatives are good examples too in that,  you know, we can talk about kind of solving affordable housing globally,  and then we can also talk about kind of like solving affordable housing in Kitesberg, you know.  We might have, and the impact of solving affordable housing in Kitesberg is just as real,  maybe more real because we might get somewhere.  So Bandcamp, for instance, became hugely, hugely successful in a business that had never existed before,  which was people going and buying independent video game soundtracks.  And so now there's a whole economy around that and there's a whole group of listeners and the music sounds  kind of like nothing has ever really sounded before because this is a totally new culture that didn't exist before.  And there's a little healthy kind of little underground composition market too, so that you've got everything there.  So I think, you know, as we continue to kind of focus on our own human scale and continue to do some of the things that we do,  well we may not solve the overarching problems.  Part of the reason that some of us are not necessarily venture capital funders is that we may be better working on that scale.  And there's some exciting things happening there.  Disagree, sorry.  I mean, I agree.  It's interesting you mentioned independent video game soundtracks, right?  I have friends in the independent video game industry and they sell stuff.  You can make independent video games and live a healthy life.  And in fact, in many ways, culturally, because there's a lot of money involved in that and a lot of goodwill.  And again, a fomented sense of identity in opposition to a dominant industry, a dominant kind of dumbed-down industry.  There are use cases all over the world, right?  Like you can look at different industries where people are paying for this stuff.  The thing that where I agree with you and I disagree with you simultaneously, I agree with you on the DL,  because when you're talking about network effects, platform monopolies and venture capital,  and the fact that if you speak to anyone in Silicon Valley and you talk to them about music, they see it as a problem that's been solved.  Because in their mind, also, music is not something that evolves.  It's a wave file and then you have bands and it looks like a band from the 70s.  It's like, no, no, no, if we were to start being a bit more ambitious with this,  of saying, well, no, you can have that.  If you want that representation of music, by all means, stream it, put it on playlists, whatever.  We want to be something different.  There are markets out there.  And so while I agree with you on the one hand, I also demand we be more ambitious.  Because there's also like a kind of diplomatic acceptance of the current state of affairs.  While I think has rationale to it, I also think can also somewhat placate a sense of urgency around this.  Where for me, it's not necessarily music will always exist and it will always have some degree of value.  For me, my interest in music is in its relevancy.  And when I see the way that these platform monopolies represent music and you go to the festivals and it's the same thing and the same thing.  And then, oh, it's the 80s now and it's the 90s and so on and so forth.  And we just blissfully forget that we're living in this new technological age where anything could happen.  I agree with you and I also think, no, if we were to start being a bit more ambitious and a bit more insistent on this,  there's a market out there.  And you can look at other markets to see good examples of that.  And so ultimately that...  Or for example, the independent video game market.  Where there are huge amounts of money, huge amounts of money transacted.  There's a site called Humble Bundle, for example, that a friend of mine had a game sold through where...  I'll botch the figures, but an abstract amount of money is spent on bundled video games that go out through a newsletter.  And there's a story behind that and there's an identity behind it.  And I think there's so much goodwill within musical communities that we could form a similar sense of urgency,  but we're not going to get there through satisfying diplomatically our relationships with Spotify or SoundCloud or whatever.  But you know what I'm saying, I'm just kind of like relativizing it.  There are opportunities out there, that's all I'm saying.  And again, to bring it back fundamentally, it's an aesthetic problem.  Because music, if you take away the relevant...  Music's power to represent people on the margins, to insert new things through these time-worn cultural mechanisms  into greater cultural discourse, if you remove that, you've lost it.  That's what music is for me.  I can listen to 1,600 people making techno records at home, I don't care.  It's not coffee table music, it's more than that.  And so if we start ceding this to playlist cultures that, for example, don't represent the labels,  try finding a Warp Records page on Spotify.  You'll find their playlists, but try finding a page that's problematic for me.  And I think we could do better.  Do you see any...  When you talked about Resonant, but do you see any example where you would say,  oh, this is actually a good...  Sure. I think...  You brought up Bankcamp, I think Bankcamp is a good, honest service.  It's an honest, it's kind of like a storefront, right?  You go in there, you pay money, they take a cut, you get money.  It's great.  For me, my personal interests, again, it represents music up until a certain point,  and I think we could do better.  The way that people interact around music now presents all these wonderful opportunities  for monetization and experimentation that kind of stops short of Bankcamp.  Bankcamp is a place to listen to linear music and transact as if you were buying a record 20 years ago,  except now it's more convenient.  That's fine, and that's great for a certain expectation.  So I like Bankcamp and I use it, but I think we can think bigger.  And that's where the blockchain comes in and so on and so forth.  What else is there to this?  Okay, I see.  So, okay, we have one minute.  What?  I have an even simpler enemy than Matt, which is, I just think this.  Spotify is run by some musicians.  They're musicians who are happy with them.  They listen to feedback from musicians.  SoundCloud, I think the same is true.  There are even people at iTunes where the same is true.  There's tons of problems with them.  Plenty to criticize and let's keep criticizing them.  But Facebook, the problem is Facebook.  Facebook has now become the gatekeeper to where everybody sees their information.  It's everybody's new dopamine dose for the day.  It's absolutely destroying the world.  And I think I can say that without fear of offending anyone at Facebook,  because it wouldn't even matter.  If I pissed off, you know, if I went and pissed off Apple or SoundCloud or Spotify,  I might be worried about my future as a musician.  But I can literally stand here and say like, Facebook is Satan,  and it wouldn't have any impact on my music life,  because Facebook is totally uninterested in music.  And I think if we tear down one thing,  let's tear down the hegemony Facebook has on all of our lives  and the way that we would get music if you could find music on Facebook  which half the time you can't.  Thank you.  Yeah, I think I agree with that.  Daniela, I think it's also good because you mentioned  on the Twitter once, because when we are...  Facebook is actually really important to us  because that's where we put our events,  that's where we are inviting our community  and that's where the community sees the events.  And I always think that we never got to get this limit anymore  that we are not allowed to invite any more friends  because our percentage of attendance is always right.  So I haven't been at this point so far.  But then other people saying like,  sorry, can you just attend because I'm not allowed to invite anyone else anymore.  And I think that is really crazy how this gatekeeping works.  And you mentioned on Twitter once that we do email rounds  and really, I mean, we write emails and ask people to come  or if they would like to come, you know,  and then you need the email and the personal contact  and invite people as the type of connection.  Yeah, maybe as a closing, I think that's a good closing thread.  I think, Matt, I found in your profile a link  that you have got a group together  how to get away from Facebook events.  Yeah, yeah, exactly.  Maybe we can use this as a closing to the...  Yeah, exactly.  Well, I see, to build off both those points.  For me, Peter mentioned the dopamine thing.  My kind of analogy for Facebook is it's like a bar forever, right?  It's like dopamine spikes and they keep you in this one space.  And I'm like, I went to bars so I could meet people  and then leave the bar or find like a better environment.  And the thing is the network effect of Facebook dictates  that people will leave and the last...  the one thing they miss is they don't hear about events.  I'm like, that's torture, that's really wrong.  So if we were to try and build an alternative,  a simple alternative to Facebook events  that allow people to find out about things  without having to go through Facebook,  that could actually have a wonderful effect  of weaning people off that thing.  And so, yeah, so we put a first group together  and we've actually written a grant for it to try and move forward.  If anyone's interested in it, we're hoping to build it sometime this year  once the album is done.  Yeah, but it's these kind of little gestures  that could actually ultimately have a really big impact.  And that's not to even mention the dangers of having,  particularly in marginal communities, queer communities,  political activists communities,  the danger of having all that information publicly available  on an advertising network,  which not to glow or kind of play a violin,  we lost a lot of friends in the Oakland Fire  whose families were being called by trolls on 4chan  because while they were looking for the missing,  people were posting public cell phone numbers of their mothers  and fathers onto a Facebook event page.  Underground culture doesn't need that, right?  In whatever circumstance, and after, as a result of that tragedy,  there were other spaces being shut down by the police  because they had a paper trail from Facebook events to say,  oh, yeah, well, if this person went to a party there,  they also went to a party at this space.  I guess they're having underground parties there.  It's just a bad, it's bad vibes, you know, like, so anyway,  so that's a really good, it's a really good maybe place  to start in weaning people off these networks.  Okay, I think that's it.  I think we'll have to wrap up here.  Thank you for the conversation.  And we didn't do our Q&A with the audience,  but the Q&A we can do if you have a bit of time over a drink  because I have a bag of drink tickets here,  which you can collect from me here,  and I think there are some from the,  they are sponsored by the Berlin Music Commission  and the Club Commission, very generous.  And the only thing is I don't know exactly where we are going with them.  So there's a networking area, which I haven't been to yet,  and I don't know if the colleagues from the Club Commission  or Music Commission actually know where to go  so that we can go over there together,  but I have some tickets here,  and Réka is over there, and she has the other ones.  Yeah, she's waving there.  So, okay, well, thank you very much,  and yeah, let's continue over a drink.  Thank you.
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