Welcome to SOAS, virtual SOAS at the moment. My name is Kasper Melville. I am a senior lecturer in the School of Arts and I convene the MA program Global Creative and Cultural Industries and so the talk I'm going to give you today is just to kind of as advertised a taster, just a little, it'll be a kind of an excerpt from a slightly longer lecture that I give on one of the classes which is a compulsory class in Global Creative and Cultural Industries which is called the Music Business. So it's composed of a variety of different elements. There's a core course which is based around theories of culture and ideas about the economy of the creative economy and then there's a course which is more focused on film called Global Film Industries and then this is the class which is called the Music Business where we look at all aspects of the production, consumption, circulation of music and so one of the issues that is currently very hot in which you'll probably be familiar with, that's one of the reasons I've chosen this because I hope that you're a bit familiar with some of these issues, is about the issue of streaming. So I've called this lecture, when I give this lecture, the whole lecture in the Music Business class I call it the Politics of Streaming but here I've called it what's wrong with Spotify. Okay so that's the kind of a few questions that I'm going to try and sort of think about and give you some sense of the way in which we think about these kind of things so as in this particular MA. So yeah let's get started, please do you know if you've got questions I'd love to answer questions from you so as Armand said use the Q&A function. So the first thing to bear in mind, I mean the context for understanding why streaming has been talked about so much and is so important, well there are two contexts, context one is I can't tell for sure, I don't know you, but based on my research and when I say my research I mean asking my current students this year so I've got more 30 students, the vast majority of them stream music, most of them stream it using their mobile phone and the vast majority of those people who do stream use Spotify. It's not surprising because Spotify's got the largest market share but this is a really significant change actually when I started teaching this MA about seven years ago no one was streaming, lots of people were file sharing but no one was streaming and then very rapidly streaming has taken off and the context so that's one set of context it would very much surprise me if you didn't have a streaming app on your phone which you've got in your hand now or very close by because nobody likes to have their phone very far away these days and the other context is of course the impact of digitisation on the music business, on the music industry the global music industry and the impact initially of digital was a huge catastrophe for the music business it is usually credited to Napster the file sharing site which came along in 1999 which enabled using mp3s which were compressed music files which are the standard way in which we experience music online people with file sharing they were swapping files of music without paying for them right and this was named by the industry piracy because indeed it was stealing their revenue that might otherwise they would normally have accrued from selling CDs. CD sales collapsed record stores closed record companies profits tanked so as you can see in this quote from Dave Hesman House who's one of the the theorists I'm going to be using for this talk. Music industry revenues declined 14 years in a row from 2000 to 2014 people who were file sharing were criminalised by record labels trying to recoup or stop people from sharing you know taken to court ISPs were closed down a huge anxiety about the future of record business lots of people lost their jobs lots of bands got cut from from rosters of record labels it was widely considered to be a you know the language is usually the digital storm the digital tsunami they've been saved by streaming that's really the simple point in the red you can see what Dave Hesman House said the recovery of revenues and in fact just yesterday I saw that music business revenues are back to now at 23 globally 23.1 billion which is back to the level before Napster to the to the late 1990s at the height of CD sales and that's almost entirely driven by the increased use of streaming and this is happening globally and we'll know that some of these companies are American companies but Spotify is from Sweden and there are other streaming services and other parts of the world this graph here just gives you some just a way of picturing how big streaming is this tells you how many what percentage of the people who use the internet in any given country have used music streaming at the top is Mexico 75 percent of the people who are on the internet use music streaming you can see the United States almost half 48 percent United Kingdom a little bit less 43 percent but still that is a huge huge number comparative to where we were a few years ago and that's what has enabled the music business to recover in many ways okay so what how do streamers streaming services make their money and I'll talk a bit it's not just Spotify but I'm using Spotify as my key example generally speaking there are these two key ways to make money streamers one is to sell ads to offer a service for free which has got ads or subscription based services or some kind of hybrid between the two so using Spotify as an example you know you can get Spotify for free as long as you submit to listening to ads you know which they make extremely annoying and very loud and interrupt your listening in order to try and push you into subscription but actually there's been a humongous growth of subscription it was long wondered by the music industry whether people would actually pay on a regular basis to subscribe to things online well guess what they will if you find the right price point Spotify at the moment in the UK about 999 but if you're a student I think 499 there are family bundles many of you might share your streaming with your family or your your friends in some way people live in the same house and also it that is not what we've seen across the whole creative industries is actually that subscription model I don't know about you but I found myself now having a lot of subscriptions to a lot of things you know it's not just Spotify but it's also you know Netflix and Amazon Prime and you know maybe Disney Plus and BFI this it's something that consumer has now come around to in a very big way and partly it was Amazon that drove this process because they made it so simple and easy once you register your card details then you never have to think about it again and it just comes out of your account and of course it is very cheap because if you listen to a lot of music you know the amount of music the payment if you break it down per track is actually very low much much lower than were you to go and have to buy a record when we had records or CD or any other material form this conforms to what you know the model which is very common on the internet called freemium model you get a certain amount for free so nearly all subscription services will give you a month for free to get you using it and then try and gradually build you up into a subscription model the point about streaming what makes it streaming is that it's and what makes it different from for example radio is that it's on demand you control it it's user control you decide what you listen to and when you listen to it there is a key point about all of these services which is pretty much all streaming services are not profitable and it's a very weird thing to get your head around but they actually they generate a lot of income and turnover you know they generate millions billions but they don't make a profit and if you listen to Spotify they'll tell you that's partly because they send so much money to the record labels to distribute amongst the musicians we'll talk about that in a second they worth a lot of money on paper or on the stock market so Spotify's been valued at $53 billion the execs obviously pay themselves vast amounts of money lots of people work for it and get very well paid they are the people who have invested in Spotify are on paper extremely wealthy but of course the shares could always tank but they don't make a profit and that's true across the board and was true even of things like Google in the early days certainly Facebook took Facebook a long time to to develop a revenue model which was sustainable and it was basically advertising now of course they're one of the world's biggest advertisers there are a few exceptions to this rule and I've mentioned here bank camp which is a kind of different model it's not exactly streaming really it's more about buying material music or digital music which is actually profitable I'll talk about that in a minute okay so who are the main players in the streaming world okay Spotify it is the world's biggest 144 million paid subscribers 140 that's you know that's less than half of the total subscribers a lot of people apple music apple would came in later into the market they had the huge benefit of course that they had iTunes already you know embedded in in apple products and apple phones there are around 60 million at the moment youtube has just launched its own subscription service youtube as you'll know has been free for a very long time and it does have a streaming service they've got about 20 million amazon unlimited it's a bit hard to compare them because that one is bundled in with amazon prime which many of you will be amazon prime subscribers some of you might not even know that you are because amazon has a sneaky way of subscribing you by asking you if you'd rather not pay for postage and it's not always clear that that's what you're signing up for there are independent streamers as well idagio which specializes in classical music soundcloud which is a kind of producer led it's much more for for producers to upload their own music to and then for consumers to to interrelate with it bandcamp i mentioned bandcamp to you this is more about kind of it's almost like a virtual shop window for independent record labels tidal which sells itself on the back of having famous people own it like jz and can you west and exclusives and higher quality higher audio quality but in fact it's been a bit of a failure it is currently owned by sprint the american telephone company these are the french streamers which is owned by orange so you can see that there are big players here big corporations backing this because it's extremely you know potentially i was going to say profitable but of course it's not profitable but actually it's generating a lot of revenue for the music business revenue which is replacing lost revenue then of course in other parts of the world although Spotify is you know moving around rapidly just added 85 new countries to its to its list in india the largest stream service is called geo seven that's how you pronounce it they've got a hundred million active users not not subscribers but active users and then china is dominated by 10 cent media 989 million subscribers sorry that's not true forget that that's that's a misspell it's 89 million subscribers 900 million users you can see the potential size of that market and how they were going to come to dominate streaming in china is slightly different from streaming outside of china it's much more based around a social media model okay so what are the controversies around streaming well here are three of the key ones the first one is related to larger questions about digital culture which is the way in which the platforms predominate massively it's about concentration of media ownership really here we're talking about apple amazon facebook alphabet who own google um you can include spotify they're smaller spotify and netflix are smaller but they're they're building so there are worries about the lack of kind of independent players or the way that the big boys have pushed out the independent players in this market and what does it mean in particular that nearly all of these are american based and the money's based you know even though spotify originates in sweden it's really an american company now um and and it in some sense the the dominance dominance of these platform capitalists could be imagined as an extension of american soft power um i won't go into that argument too much but there's a way to read that the second set of anxieties is really around what does it mean to move from buying music purchasing music having collections of music that we love and we value and we're fans of and we identify with so the idea that we're really paying just for access to music that music is more literally a stream that we're just every now and then dip our toes in what will the consequences be for how we value music for how the role it plays in our lives there's been anxieties expressed about that and then the big anxieties that you might be familiar with particularly in relation to spotify is are is enough of the money making it's making its way back to the people who actually make the music what we do know is a lot of the money is making it back to record labels because it's labels that have the relationship with spotify and then it depends on the nature of the contract the label has with the musician how much money that person actually gets and there is a lot of controversy you've probably heard about taylor swift and um tom york and various other um you know famous pop stars kind of raising questions about this and being anxious about it so these anxieties are kind of expressed in in three claims the first claim is that this is this new system let's call this the person who i'm drawing this from dav heisman house calls this the new system the or the new streaming system right it is a new fundamental form of the record industry it's damaging musicians it's not paying it's not paying them enough right the second is that the new system reproduces unjust systems of industrial power that's the platform capitalist argument and that it's now harder for musicians to earn a decent living from recording music than it used to be so there are some specific claims going on in this debate around these politics let me just give you a sense of who plays what i mean it's you'll hear a lot of uh in in the kind of public realm there are a lot of um of sort of uh numbers that get thrown around which are all incredibly small uh in order to sort of illustrate how little a musician makes per stream here you can see a list of the different services the streaming services and you can read across it to see the average payout per stream for spotify for example is 0.0028 of a penny okay sounds pathetically low number of streams to earn one pound therefore is 357 and the number of streams to earn one hour's UK minimum wage 3104 and what this all adds up to is a sense that musicians are not getting paid enough for the all of the effort and creativity and work that they put into making their music uh you can see there's some variation in the different uh rates that are being paid but overall and in general not enough that's the argument um it really depends on the nature of the deal that you that the um that the label has with the artist like i said if you're a big artist you're a Taylor Swift you're likely to be on some kind of deal like 30 percent you're with your you know you'll get 30 percent of the revenue and the label will keep 70 percent because they claim we've invested so much in you know all the marketing and all of the recording and all of that kind of stuff so that that's why labels say we want to hang on to that but most most artists will be much more on more like 20 and they get a very tiny proportion um there is anxiety about whether songwriters make any money from this as well songwriters only receive about 10 percent of streaming revenues and this figure becomes lower as money flows through foreign collection societies this is to do with the incredibly complex way that copyrights are collected and distributed globally through an overlapping series of national systems i haven't got time to go into it here it's immensely complicated anyway according to tom gray now what has what's happened recently is that these kind of campaigns have sprung up to challenge this model and tom gray is from something called broken record which is one of these campaigns who makes arguments about how this system needs to be changed to better recognize the value of creative people in order to incentivize them to keep making good music and to make sure they can make a living and pay their rent and this has obviously become even more pertinent under lockdown uh when they're in when what happened after in uh would be what went hand in hand with the development of digital streaming was the huge growth in live shows as well which live shows are a much more reliable way to make income for artists they can they can separately negotiate how much money they're going to make from a tour they can do more tours bigger tours in order to get more revenue and that that for the last few years has been the biggest way in which artists have made money and obviously for the past year that's completely disappeared and so that's that's brought this issue into much sharper focus because of course this has been boom time for streamers boom time for the digital the digital economy boom time for capitalists and we know that you know elon musk and um jeff bezos have made i saw the figure yesterday i mean i think jeff bezos has made 85 billion dollars in the last year and that's a lot of money i don't need to explain how uh here's a couple of things that spotify does that have raised some concerns one of them is that they use these trips to help get people market to market them so you may be familiar with this called spotify wrapped at the end of the year if you're a spotify user they send you this kind of clever little campaign which tells you how many new genres you discovered that year what your favorite track was it's the kind of thing that people would like to share online and what it amounts to according to liz pelly who is a great journalist and kind of um critic of spotify is a really really effective marketing campaign where you are the marketer and this this feeds into larger anxieties about digital culture which is all about the exploitation of free labor and who are these free laborers they're you because you feed the algorithm your behavior is what trains the ai in order to make it more effective in delivering back to you and other people the things that they think you want so i've laid out the issues and i've given you some ways in which to understand them but now i'm going to throw a note of caution at you and this is something that this is kind of indicative of the kind of critical thinking we like to do it so as which is just to say hold on a second and this is what again i'm using this article from Dave Hessman house which it was called uh you know is streaming good for musicians and he is slightly critical of some of the way these arguments happen and the reason i wanted to show this to you is because i thought that maybe you you were aware of some of those arguments you know streaming isn't paying enough streaming is destroying music or it's not very fair and Dave Hessman house basically says the jury's out on that we don't have enough evidence one of the problems is all of this is hidden behind um very secretive companies non-disclosure agreements and things like that but actually there isn't very good evidence point one point two the argument that streaming is killing the music business imagines that there was some perfect time before streaming when everything was great and of course that wasn't the case music the music industry has always been very exploitative very unfair very top-down and hierarchical with certain uh you know capitalist entities dominating the system and it's actually always been quite difficult to make a living as a musician so in all these ways uh Hessman house wants to kind of what he's really he's his article is not defending Spotify but he's calling for much better and clearer evidence in order to understand what's really going on and to stop the kind of hyperbole which is suggesting that it's all it's all down to streaming streaming's destroyed the perfect music system right one very specific issue is about the way in which um Spotify distributes the money there's a lot of talk about as you saw from that chart I gave you before you know how much do you get per stream right but in fact that's not how Spotify pays out they do not pay out a certain amount of money every time someone clips on a button to stream a particular track that's not how it's they use what's called the pro rata system which basically divides up the revenue that they make over a given period by the proportion of who listened to what during that period and the result of that is that you can the potential for huge distortion and one of the distortions is when you're clicking on an artist on Spotify because you want to listen to their record you're their song you're not necessarily putting any money in their pocket at all because it's not a one-to-one relationship and in fact what might well happen that over a period of a month because of the revenue the revenue that you put into the system and everyone else is tot it up and then divide it up according to who gets the most streams your money is always going into the pocket of Taylor Swift of Justin Timberlake of the big huge successful artist as much as it's going to the independent artist so there does seem to be something very unfair about that that system and we need to clarify the language in which we use to speak about these things there is a recommendation on the table from broken record conveniently for this debate there was a government not a government a parliamentary committee looking into this very issue a couple of weeks ago and they gather together a lot of people to give testimony including people who run record companies people who are in the streaming services and musicians and broken record where they where they made a proposal or one of the proposals that is being made about these kinds of things is that they need to change that system but there's something in you know at heart unfair about the system isn't it wouldn't it be better these people argue if there was some more direct relationship between the song I decide to listen to even if it's from a very you know minority artist who doesn't get a lot of streams that the proportion of my the money I've given Spotify should go to that entity and not be split amongst all of the people who are streamed during that defined period that's called user centric payments and I'm going to talk to you in a second about how some people have jumped on that and very effectively so the larger point I suppose I should try and say to you is that there are a variety of different debates at play about streaming which are happening right now academics are trying to be involved academic publishing is very slow so it's hard for them to be you know as up to date as needed to discuss these kind of things but certain really good academics like Dave Hesman how she would working in the creative industries world and there are many others publish rapidly and call for clear evidence and actually get involved I mean he actually gave evidence to the to the the inquiry that was going on at parliament and is involved in the process as well so I think it's quite possible that the you there will be there's it's possible there will be a change in in from the pro rata model of the way that Spotify pays for streams to something else something which is more directly connected to the art between the user and the artist and in fact just last week one of Spotify's rivals you might say although they do something slightly different SoundCloud so I don't know if you know SoundCloud but you probably you do people of your your generation seems to know these kind of things so SoundCloud is much more about or has been used in the past for independent artists who might not even have record labels to upload their own music for fans to comment on that music to share it they almost went bust last year it wasn't clear what their business model was what would people pay for but now they have they've taken the opportunity just last week to launch this thing that they are calling fan powered royalties and they are precisely adapting this model which has been suggested by broken record in others that Spotify should follow which is that there's a much more direct relationship between between streaming revenue and what you've actually listened to fan powered royalties are a more equitable and transparent way for independent artists who monetize directly with SoundCloud to get paid the more fans listen to SoundCloud and listen to your music the more you get paid kind of makes sense and the fact that they can express it so crisply and clearly I think shows that it does it does seem to make sense this is what the chief executive said as the only direct to consumer music streaming platform and next generation artist services company the launch of fan powered royalties represents a significant move in SoundCloud's strategic direction to elevate growth if you fill it out the marketing speak what he's basically saying is we've jumped on this idea first and we're hoping that we can steal the clothes of Spotify and some of our other big arrivals with our different model and find something that people really want because it turns out that one of the reasons I think Spotify will change is that people you and I and many others who do stream we can see the unfairness in not rewarding out the artists we play with the money that we pay and that has quite a strong resonance with us so it might well be that we're looking at a shift that's happening right before our eyes in a way just to sort of pull back a little bit this is an art from an article written by a journalist called oh sorry I flipped on not a journalist sorry a musician whose name is Damon Krakowski who's in a band called Galaxy 500 and he wrote an article for a music magazine in my teaching because I'm trying to teach about some contemporary things where there isn't always a great deal of academic work I tend to combine academic work with you know high quality journalism there's a lot of great digital music journalism around from you know reputable sources which can be put together often academia and the theoretical ideas provide the background because some of these debates are not new they might be in a new form around streaming or whatever but they all come back down to questions of justice to questions of value to questions of you know what does culture mean in our lives and how should it be funded and how should it be protected those are some of the core questions of this whole ma so his suggestions of this go local big is not always best he's making a plea there to artists particularly to not play the big stadiums but to play smaller venues support local systems recognize even if you're not making a great deal of money you're building fan loyalty consider what you're doing when you're streaming he doesn't say don't stream but just consider what you're doing be aware that you're not putting money directly into people's pockets so find other ways to do it care about the context what you know find out more about the band Spotify doesn't really provide a lot of contextual information for example I mean I'm a big jazz fan when I go on to Spotify I can't find out crucial information I want to know about an album which who's playing the drums who produced it what session is it from this is really critical information for for me as a consumer I can find that out because we have the internet you know we go via google obviously onto the internet and go and find it out and value it and care about it because otherwise we potentially will lose that deep context which is an important part of the musical ecosystem imagine other options he says you know there are other ways of doing these things and he suggests to everyone that we should share music as much as possible including musicians and he tells a story he says he has a bandcamp page right so if you're a small label you can set up a bandcamp page and he sells the same record on two different pages and on one of the pages he sets the price of the cd or the down digital download let's say it's five dollars on the other page he sets no price for it and he says well this can be free if you want or pay what you think it's worth and he says I always make more money off the second page which tells you something interesting about the psychology of consumption on the internet a different kind of psychology people are willing to pay if they feel their money is going to a good cause but they don't want to be taken for granted or taken you know or exploited so those are just some of the questions and I think I'll leave it with this very last question which I think is the most pertinent question at the moment about digital technologies you might have heard about NFTs the non-fungible tokens these this digital art very poor digital art in my view but that's just my view which is being sold for six or 68 million because they're unique right and they're and the information is embedded in what's called blockchain I haven't got time to explain that to you but it's a new way of embedding information which guarantees its authenticity so it's kind of like an authentic artwork like the Mona Lisa but it only exists in digital space it's a bit like bitcoin in that regard it's a bit like art as cryptocurrency but there's only one of them so what I'm going to say about streaming also applies to NFTs and that is drawing from Kyle Devine who's a professor at you know Oslo who studies these kind of things there's a widespread notion that digitized music is dematerialized right it just exists in the ether think of all the metaphors the stream the cloud wireless we're not connected you know somehow it's just it all disappeared in the puff of smoke right it has no impact but that's absolutely not true there is a huge environmental impact of digital storage and we're starting to see this to sustain streaming for streaming to grow for cryptocurrencies and NFTs to grow we get bigger and bigger data farms which are often put in the global south they are extremely expensive of resources they use fossil fuels often they're not environmentally and mentally sustainable they're putting a huge weight we are building a system where the more people are buying into this digital space online the more they're putting a huge and unsustainable burden on the environment and we really should think much more about that according to Kyle Devine and in fact according to me as well so that's just a picture of I'm going to stop sharing now that's just like a sort of rapid tour around some of the issues I mean not everything I teach is about digital I put issues around digital technology in the context of early advice about technology whether it was Bob Dylan playing the electric guitar or whether it's the use of synthesizers in certain kinds of traditional forms of african music there's always been debates about technology we teach something about that I teach something about that I teach issues of value and what the art the arts and culture mean to us and what we prepare to pay for it who funds it so it's really about looking at all of those kinds of questions and also thinking about at other times the actual experience of working within the creative economy and whatever whether we're talking about curator in art galleries you know marketing for Spotify being an artist yourself and how you market yourself and what the kind of ethics of it are to sum it all up I'd suggest that probably the way to think about it is we want to help people understand how we can work within capitalism because as anti-capitalist as we might be or maybe you're not it's not going anywhere anytime soon we're all living within it everything I've just described to you is inherently part of contemporary capitalism how can we do it as ethically as possible how can we do it in a way that represents our own values and the values that we want to promote and is sustainable so those are the kinds of questions and also what's interesting about it and what's dynamic and what are the new ideas and how do they relate to ideas which have already been talked about in other disciplines in sociology political economy cultural studies arts and literature so that's it that kind of brings me to the end of my portion I can make the PowerPoint available if I don't know I mean one of the questions is is the PowerPoint available I mean would there be a place to put it online yeah we can have a look to see if that's not viable maybe share a dropbox link and what I'll do is if you want to copy of the PowerPoint if you drop me an email so I can be reached at ap179 I put that in the chat for you so ask.ac.uk and I'll make sure that you receive a copy of the presentation so that's there okay so I'm here we're I'm here for any questions that anyone might have feel free to ask anything about anything doesn't have to be about what I was speaking about about the MA about so as yeah about anything so we'll give it a couple of minutes give a couple of minutes to receive some questions if we don't get any of them okay uh well just wait listen to some music I bet you stream don't you Adam ooh after that I'm a bit reluctant to admit to it I think it's worth saying you know that um streaming is amazing you know Spotify is amazing I mean yeah I do use Spotify and I for one found the presentation really interesting I mean I might be biased thank you I mean I think one of the things that never happened I'm not quite old as people can probably tell but one of the things when I was young the idea that I can hear of you know I'll be on Twitter and someone will say oh this tune's great and within you know a minute I can not only listen to it on Spotify I can add it to my own playlist I can share it myself you know I can immediately at this has never happened before in the history of of music consumption and the amount of things we can access I do think potentially that comes with some issues because plenty isn't always what's best right maybe there's something about scarcity or something about the work that you need to put in to discover things which might make us value them more I you know that's a question that I'm interested in thinking about so there's a raised hand in the in the attendees we're unable to unmute and allow speakers to speak so the questions has come through the question is what do you think about band camp can it be more popular in the near future yeah thank you for asking that I mean band camp is a very interesting example I as for my class this year I actually interviewed someone at band camp because I have a good friend who is now the head of editorial at band camp I mean he's got an amazing job there he's a DJ so I interviewed him to try and find out if they indeed are what they appear to be which is kind of like the good guys of of Silicon Valley right they are a private company they are owned by an individual but they very much take a different approach they're not data mining they they guarantee they will not use your data for anything you know most of these other big companies a big part of their revenue potential is that they can use the data that they get from you in marketing and sell it to other people they say they'll never do that and what they really want to do is empower small labels to have access to new audiences so there's that plus of course the band camp Fridays that they've been doing throughout the lockdown and particularly in support of Black Lives Matter which has really made them appear to be you know really the good guys I do think that they are a very interesting model I buy I mean what I tend to do in terms of trying to be ethical in my music consumption is I discover things on Spotify and I buy them on bandcamp and I absolutely love the idea that when I'm buying something on bandcamp I know exactly how much money bandcamp take 15 percent of every transaction and that's it so all the other money and on bandcamp Fridays they take zero percent all of the other money is going into that small label and I think that that it has created the possibility of small labels really finding a revenue model because they no longer can find within in any national environment they don't have to open a record store where they have to pay very high rents they can sell merchandise they can communicate with their audience so I tend to I mean not just because my friend works there but I tend to think that they are a really interesting and great model it's they have a streaming component because you can't they do have an app and you can stream but it doesn't have the flexibility I mean I really like playlists on Spotify for example they don't have that kind of capacity so I you know I think they're a very interesting model I'm very interested to see what SoundCloud is going to come up with because again that is very user focused and small you don't even have to have a record you know for bandcamp you have to be a label to get on to bandcamp but on SoundCloud you can be anyone anyone can have a SoundCloud account and upload a tune they made on the laptop you know in the morning they can upload it in the afternoon and that's a really interesting way to both to sort of hear musicians working out their ideas and sort of building their careers without having to go via a big label this was always the big offer of the digital space we could leave the labels aside so it's a very interesting moment it's all moving very rapidly and I think we should always be very aware I mean it's always possible that the person who owns bandcamp could decide right we're going to do advertising or I'm going to sell it to someone else and it's actually really interesting I would imagine that he's had because he's now a very wealthy man he would have had so many offers because the traditional way it works in the digital space is a small company comes along with a great idea builds their business and at a certain moment the big boys come in and just eat them up and make their make their owner a billionaire and then swallow it into their larger system whether it's Snapchat or Instagram or any you know any of these great ideas so it's it's a vulnerable moment and of course it's still digital so it's still those same issues around sustainability use of fossil fuel you know those still apply and we still interact with them I don't know about you guys but I'm hoping for a way to do to interact which isn't screen based I'm just so sick of the screen I mean it's lovely to talk to you here but you know I remember being offered in the future you know at least a hologram interface right rather than just this flat screen but at the moment no it just seems to be more and more and more screen so we're all moving from our work life which is screen and then we did when we do our downtime what do we do load up Netflix right or scroll through you know our social media so we're getting trapped a little bit I think in in a digital space and we kind of need to think about especially when we do unlock how are we going to bring some of this into the outside I mean I buy vinyl on bank camp so there's an interesting relationship between kind of the analog and the digital there thanks for your question there's another one there I think yeah one more's come through uh does streaming pay more than physical concerts why should a musician go for streaming because from your lectures streaming basically cannot be of helped upcoming musicians but only to world-class musicians even though what the streaming platform pays is still low it seems exploitative yeah that's a very good question firstly physical concerts play much more because well it means it depends partly how many people you know are you a successful band but even if you're not the fact is you you get cash or you get kind of money that comes straight to you without any complexity there may be some middlemen like live nation whoever sells the ticket but potentially the artist gets a hell of a lot more from that I mean the artist doesn't even need the label for a tour you just you hire a tour manager you can go out on tour as long as you've got someone to book it so potentially live very very important for revenue so last couple of years by far the big bands and the small bands were making much more from that than they were from streaming but obviously not this year secondly streaming is pretty useless for small bands you know it just doesn't it's almost no point I mean the point is you want to be on there because you want to grab whatever minuscule revenue you can get your hands on so you put things out on to the streaming sides but if you're streaming in the kind of thousands you're making I mean there's lots of funny stories of musicians getting checks for like 75p and stuff like that you know you're just not making anything and you're not going to survive so while the narrative on the one hand is streaming has saved the music industry streaming is not saving musicians below a certain level so you're absolutely right it is exploitative and one question to ask is well what a Spotify and some of these other companies who are making vast sums and the labels going to do to stimulate the growth of small parts of the music economy which might then become big I mean you know these big artists weren't always big they started off small so how are they feeding back into it thank you for that question and for Ina's question so I teach the classes I teach at SOAS are I convene the MA in global creative and cultural industries I teach the actual the core course in term one which is called analytical approaches which is a kind of theoretical overview I teach the music business I teach a podcasting class where we make group podcasts together with a professional podcaster I also teach a cast an undergraduate class called art cultural and commodification which is around similar set of issues for undergraduates and I do some guest lecturing on media courses sometimes on film classes and I convene kind of seminars just for kind of discussion of all kinds of things so that's what I'm doing at the moment. Great, Jeffrey's put I believe your bio in the chat in the reply box so you can have a look well I'll stop to all the teachers. Okay I think that's it for all the questions so I guess all I have to say thank you to you Casper for the really interesting talk and thank you to Jeffrey for helping us out today and thank you to the attendees for coming in to watch. On my profile page you can find my email address if you've got any questions about the MA drop me an email cm54 at sarahs.ac.uk and I'll answer your questions and maybe I look forward to seeing some of you at Sarahs.


Yeah, I'm talking about transitional interfaces and CSS3 animations. It's pretty basic. It's how many of you are designers over here? How many designers do we have here? How many developers? So that's pretty cool. This talks for everyone. Designers, developers, random people. It's pretty general. So yeah, let's get on to the basics. What is a user interface? What exactly it is? I mean, when I'm designing a particular website, I go static. I mean, I design a particular state A of a page. I design a state B of a page, but something which is missing is how do I change that state A to state B? It just happens. It's like, I call it Buzzinga. It just happens. The state just changes up. This is where I introduce the area. It's already there in the talk. It's called transitional interface. So let me talk a bit more about this. We as designers, we pay more attention to aesthetics. We make pages visually very appealing. We use some really cool CSS to make things run. They look beautiful. They look pretty amazing. What happens if I do something like this? Say I have a list of items and I'm willing to add another item using a button. Let's just do this here. Now you see the button coming in. It's coming. Now I ask you this question. Where is it coming from? Is it the list element converting into Buzzinga? What is happening here? I mean, what exactly is happening here? Something is broken. Something is missing. I don't know what, but let's just do it again.  There's nothing here. There was one state A which was minus the two new list elements. And we have state B, which is with the two list elements. There's nothing intermediate. This is what I call it is missing. What is it missing? Let's talk about that. Now when I'm designing a user interface, I put up a certain list of guidelines about that. I mean, this is all static. The ones I showed you with static, there's nothing in there. Now we add content to it.  You don't make one page. You make another page. You don't link them between. It does not really make sense. And another talk about that is, there's more to animation than aesthetics. There is functionality. Let us use animations to add a little more functionality to it, rather than showing it off. I can do this cool stuff with animations. I can use the screen frame. You can take things there and everywhere. It doesn't work well with, say, older browsers, mobile browsers, etc. IPath, etc. doesn't work. So let's stick to the core functions. It's called functionality. This is the thing. This is the new dimension, which is missing in all the functions, in all interfaces that we make. I call it time. I mean, if a state is changing from A to B, something is missing. That's something it is called as. I call it time. It's like pretty simple.  We put a lot of thought in visual design, but we neglect this very important feature of a user interface design. It's time. I mean, you have to do something about that. Let's get into more details on this. So yeah. So how we make great interfaces? We use CSS3. We use animations. We use transitions. It's simple. How do we control them? We use the good old jQuery. UI is there. It's pretty simple. It's another concept. And there are several other libraries. I have like anime.css. We have complicated transitions. Everything can be done through D3.js. And there are several other libraries. There's Twitter Bootstrap, which takes care of this sometimes. Now, talking about animations, let's get into the theoretical sides. How many of you wonder what is linear, what is ease in if you have written animations? What is ease in? What is ease out? What is ease in and out? And what is ease, which is the default for animations? It's a default fallback. So let's get this started. See, I call this thing, this is a state A. The left part of it is state A. The right part of it is state B. I'll talk about simple concepts called acceleration. Now, when I have to change something from state A to state B, the ball here as such, it accelerates, deaccelerates. Something's going to happen. Now, this is linear. This is how a general computer works. There's a break point in there. That's the point when the acceleration and deacceleration changes. Let's just animate this. So if you noticed, the change point occurs in the center of the... The change point occurs in the center. It's right in the middle. This is where this thing changes. And for animations like ease in, okay, let's get back to linear. Linear is how your usual capping computer works. It's like infinitely small time, amount of time. It just changes a state. I mean, it's not bad. It's disgusting. Let's talk about ease in. What ease in does is it shifts the change of point to a later stage. So the acceleration goes on for a longer time. It deaccelerates and it rapidly deaccelerates. This is a very good example. If you're making corousals and stuff like that, say you have two images and you're switching states between two images. It's very eye candy and it's highly functional if the images which are loading up for the user to see come up slightly slower so that a person at least has an idea from where this thing is coming from. This is the concept here. Similarly, we have things like ease out, the hair, the acceleration begins very rapidly and then the deacceleration occurs. This is another state of this thing. When we have these two together, we call it ease in and out. We have two change points. We have acceleration, deacceleration, twice happening over here with a constant speed in the middle. So that's a bit of the physics behind animations and transitions to be more appropriate. So yeah, if you really want to play on this, there's an amazing tool on the web. It's called Cubic Bezier. It's written by Lee Voreau. It's an amazing tool if you want to run your own animations, if you want to play around with it, if you have a hat with it, it's pretty amazing. So yeah, now I make a computer for humans. Now see the change that occurs, whatever I said, let's just try to implement it. So I'm adding a list element. This is how it should be like. It's like elements, it goes down, a new element slides in. It's much more clear. At least I have an idea from where the new element comes in from. Doesn't it make more sense to have stuff like this going on? It's very simple. It's very simple. It's like one line of jQuery and two keyframe elements that I'm using here. The concept is simple. There's no badassly involved with animations here. Oh cool, this is cool stuff happening with this. No, it's simply functional. So there are various other examples on the web. I wanted to show it live, but there's one pretty good app with the dribble, dribble hazard. It's pretty nice. LinkedIn for iOS is very amazing. When it comes to transitions, they are not static. They are highly dynamic. They make sense, but one another mantra I want to add right now is don't overdo with animations. They can screw up your mind. I mean, it becomes haphazard after a time. Animations in control are brilliant out of control animations are very sucky. This is an example I was talking about. One read, which is a paper that I was going through. It's based on, the paper is written by two Stanford graduates. These guys take animation as an example from cartoons. I'll give you an example. Disney has a huge set of guidelines. There are 12 of them. There are different forms of animations like exaggeration, easing, cushioning, etc. Cushioning is very simple to ease in, by the way. So that's one very basic fundamental of animation. Going around, they're very amazing. I mean, and user interfaces have a lot to take from cartoons. You can go through these people. It's very amazing. So as Pascal Resilva says, he's an animator at Alify, by the way, it seems to me that more people don't think about interfaces with respect to dimension of time. Motion can provide so much information, and it can provide context to information, which is much more important than designing an interface. So that's me. That's not me. Yeah. If you have any questions, you can just pick me up. Questions? Questions, questions, questions. Hi. Yeah. The example you showed for linear, I'm not sure. Are you sure that's the way linear works? Yeah, that's the way linear works. Isn't it, you know, there's no acceleration at all in linear? Linearization has a central midpoint. There is acceleration there. It's not your, it's not linear velocity concept that you're using there. It's acceleration, basically. Linear corresponds to a change point that happens exactly in the center of the state. That's the very basic. And that is how it runs. I mean, it is linear. Okay. Otherwise you can just not have animation, do not accelerate it. You can just move it from state A to state B and it will work. That also exists. Questions? Hi. Just a simple question. I was very curious as to what you define as functionality and what you define as aesthetics. Because when you say a list item is becoming more functional by adding a transition into it, what do you think a list's function is? And what exactly would you keep including in aesthetics? Because then I would say the fact that a list item has a blue color or has a gray color is also adding to functionality. The fact that it is likely wider is also adding functionality. So where exactly do you stop rationalizing everything as functionality and call some things as aesthetics only? Okay. Okay. I'll start with this. Say you design something, it's state A. We have something, we put in a lot of graphic design, we put up a lot of functions, a lot of CSS. We make a very good, minimal, good-looking interface. Okay. And you design a state after that, which is a very simple example that I gave of the list. The state B, when I'm adding a list element to that, that is basically, see, what the concept I'm trying to tell here is, we all of us have some sort of experience in using interfaces on the web, right? What a point makes to me, all this comes from experience. See, I'm designing an interface for my mother who's like not really into computers at such. Now, the information along with context adds to the functionality here. It is not just the information, it's not, okay, the list was there, list got added. It's okay, but where it coming from that adds context to it. It brings more life to it. It makes me think less of a robot, it makes me give a less robotic feeling of using an interface than a more human touch involved in it. And that is exactly my point. So what is left as aesthetics in it? I mean, in case you can answer that quickly. Aesthetics is what I'm doing in state A and B. Aesthetics does not involve the transition. One more question? As I guess I've seen, is the alumnus of my college. More questions? Yeah, as far as Michael is back. So that's it. Thank you. If you want to talk more about transition if it is, I'm right outside.