Since the first entry in my artist app diary, a lot of writing by other people made me question some of my assumptions. Is it too focused on professional artists and kind of elitist? Is it repeating consumerist patterns of the big tech social media and not putting enough weight on participation by fans and hobbyists?
It was my initial intention for this episode to write about artist community building for the app that I have in mind, and make a quick sketch about the costs of maintaining such an app. However, the questions I mentioned before made me ponder: do we have a common understanding of what an artist community is? Of course, there is not really one general artist community, but rather a plethora of niche artist communities, and maybe it is fair to say that not every community has the same needs, and that this is completely fine. Maybe we need to tell how we envision to build tools for our own niche community, and on the way we can see if our visions can converge, maybe in one app, maybe in shared lexicons, maybe just by using the same protocol.
I develop my ideas about an artist app from my own needs and from the needs of my peers. Those are mainly musicians creating rather 'left field', indie music, from the edgier side of pop, over rock and electronic to much more experimental improvised music. Most people I know, play shows for audiences between 20 and 200 people. Some might fill a 1000 capacity venue, and a festival lineup with a nice mix of bigger international artists, can sometimes give them the opportunity to play for a couple of thousand people. There is a quite rich landscape here (in Switzerland, but more generally in Europe) of smaller venues (100 to 500 capacity) and music festivals where these musicians can play. Lots of those places have been struggling financially the last couple of years, take less risks to book less known bands, and I see many artists seek refuge in even more underground places, with much more improvised infrastructure and fuzzy communication channels. There is some money going around, but almost nobody can really make a living from it, without juggling a couple of side jobs. The line between a professional and a non-professional artist is very blurry in this scene: a lot of people are very talented and dedicated, some play quite a lot of shows, very few have the luck to dedicate as much time to it as it is considered normal in most professions.
This informal network of bands, artists, music venues and festivals has been relying a lot on Instagram to communicate what is going on: it is used to announce shows and new releases, and it grew into a channel to do storytelling around the artists. Until a couple of years ago that worked pretty well, until the following graph got deprioritised by Instagram and the content that gets pushed by the algorithm became more and more uniform: mainly short form video of someone talking into a camera. Artists started to shape their message and their artist image to optimise for discovery by the algorithm. There is less and less diversity in artistic expression, or, when you stick to your own style, you just don't have any reach any more.
This is the main thing that I try to fix: give artists the opportunity again to show their peers and community what they are doing, where they can see each other play, while staying authentic and true to their own personality and choosing the way to express themselves artistically.
Recently Tessa wrote about 3 things we do while networking online:
Discover - find who you’re looking for across the different parts of your life
Coordinate - respond, resolve, and make plans faster and more consistently
Actualize - track and improve your wellbeing and skills alone and with friends, professionals, and your devices
When I compare what I am focusing on with my ideas about an artist app with what others have in mind, it is certainly 'discovery' and much less 'actualisation'. Maybe it has to do with the fact that music is a rather social art form and a lot of actualisation takes place in the analog world, away from computers and smart phones? Writing, drawing or painting are quite suited as solo activities, where as music and dancing is something we rather do together with other people, in rehearsal rooms, or at shows in music venues or theatres (of course this statement is overgeneralising, all art forms can be done in many different ways).
In any case, discovery is important for musicians, and it is broken right now. People are longing for the serendipity we used to have on social media, the chance to discover other artists in your niche genre on an international level, and keep in sync with what is going on in your own local scene. Broadcasting about what you do as an artist is important, and I don't want to write this off as bland consumerism.
One of the big dilemmas about creating an online tool for artists, is finding the balance between the familiar and the creative, between the uniform and the diverse. What artists do is very diverse, personal and creative. On the other hand, if you want to exchange with other people, you need to be at least findable, or even better: discoverable (thank you Anna for making this valuable distinction in your great article about Atmospheric websites for artists!). In a social media feed, we squeeze our creative expression in a uniform shape, because it makes it more familiar and understandable for people who have never seen what we are doing. That is the tradeoff of being discoverable. However, once people have discovered you via this familiar shape, there should be an open door to the much more personal identity of the artist. In the end, I think that is what my initial sketch of the 'keeping up' and 'slowing down' parts is about. The 'keeping up' tab is more uniform, familiar and fast pace. The 'slowing down' part is wildly creative and personal.
Can curation be a community practice?
I envision the 'slowing down' part of the app to be wildly creative, multi-layered and low pace. The interval that I have in mind is that a single artist or collective would occupy this place for a whole month. This would also mean that this part of the app is heavily curated, at least in the beginning. I have mixed feelings about this, because curation means power and it can easily lead to gatekeeping, and I don't want to be in this position for too long.
On the other hand, handpicked curation can play a big role to help people slow down in the information overload of the current landscape. I notice that the 'slowing down' part of my story sticks the most with people, when I talk about my app idea.
There is also the pragmatic problem of convincing people disillusioned by Instagram to try out a new app and give them a reason to stay.I would like to start with about 10 artists in residence from different parts of the world, who have a bit of clout to attract other artists and a critical mass of audience. I come from a music background, but I can imagine that this 'artist in residence' format needs people from different, adjacent art disciplines, or artists who think more in conceptual and multidisciplinary terms (since it still would live in a very digital format of an app or a website). It feels a bit uneasy that this sounds very elitist and gatekeeping, but we have to start with something. I think it will already be difficult enough to kick off such a project, to find the first dozen of artists (1 month per artist), to have some certainty that we can run the project at least for one year.
Moreover, the target audience might be more interested in compelling art than be very principled about decentralisation or power dynamics. We want to reach outside of the decentralisation bubble, and attract people who want something better than Instagram. That doesn't mean that decentralisation of power and curation shouldn't be a longer term concern. There should be some ‘exit to community’. I don't want to be the only one to take decisions, and I am explicitly asking for ideas on how this could look like. I was thinking to ask every artist to pass it on to 3 other artists. This way we can build a long list, and the residency planning would become more a pragmatic decision procedure about who is available to deliver for the next residency (taking into account the one month cadence) than one curator handpicking each contributor.
Along the way we have to see how quickly it grows. One residency program for the whole app user base might be not enough. People might ask for more agency what shows up in the residency list, or might want more focused curation of their niche scene, etc.
At that moment, we probably need to offer multiple curation tracks by different communities and give users the opportunity to switch their curation track. For me it is a very open question whether everybody should be able to start a new curation track, or whether we should try to keep it a bit more organised and avoid an overwhelming defragmentation. It's a tricky balance to strike: what are the tradeoffs of keeping things accessible for newcomers versus gatekeeping content and silencing certain voices?
What is this going to cost?
Until know I have been writing a lot about kick starting the 'slowing down' part of the app with a list of artists in residence, where creativity and depth should attract people who are fed up with big tech social media.
The other part, that I called 'keeping up', would be more or less a Bluesky client along the lines of Flashes, with more focus on images and videos than in the Bluesky microblogging environment, as we used to love it on Instagram. I am also thinking about better integrations with platforms like Bandcamp or Soundcloud, or with Atmospheric event lexicons, things that make a difference for people who mainly have an interest in music, or with other tools from other artistic areas, that are not on my radar yet.
The main technical challenge of this part, will be fast content delivery that scales with the user base, since the app will be heavy on images and video content. The biggest cost I see here is initial development and maintenance. I think this might be doable by a solo developer or a small team. A lot will depend on how far we want to go with improving the UX and features of this part, I guess something that I might severely underestimate...
The technical implementation of the 'slowing down' part is mainly the work of the artists in residence.
Here is a quick sketch of the roles and 'staff' that I have in mind for the whole project, and what I see myself doing in this and what not. Let us begin wit the starting phase. I think we need:
someone who comes up with a design language for the app: the brand, the logo and a design system. I don't really have the right skills in this area myself;
someone coding the basics of the app: I already started on this and I am motivated to carry on this task;
a first batch of interested artists in residence, so that we have an interesting app experience for the first 6 to 12 months at least.
On a mid or longer term I see the following roles:
someone taking care of the planning of the artists in residence. This mainly means taking care that there are enough new projects in the pipeline to have a stable and continuous output of residencies. I can do this in the beginning, but would prefer to pass it on later;
not all artists in residence should know how to code - to the contrary. My dream job in this project on a mid term is to provide technical coding assistance to help artists shape their vision;
we will need software developers who do app maintenance and handle infrastructure and scaling issues. How many people we will need, will depend on how big the app becomes. The beauty of the Atmosphere is that it doesn't have to be huge on a global scale to be helpful to a specific community;
a thing that most of us are underestimating is moderation: I hope that initiatives like Eurosky and the Modal Foundation can help us out there.
I have not a lot of experience to estimate the infrastructure cost of this project: servers, database cache, CDNs, again moderation: no idea!
Let us end this diary episode with some quick thoughts (of course they are much too quick...) about possible revenues.
One of the advantages I see in the concept of artists in residence, is that it can tap into the pool of cultural funding and grants by governments and foundations. It is quite a world of its own, but those institutions generally love those kind of projects. They could pay for the fees for the artists in residence and they might even be open to fund the initial development phase of the app.
Further down the road, I think we will have to pivot to community driven financial sustainability. I am afraid that I can't offer more ideas than the usual clichés of end user donations and subscriptions. One of the things that I am thinking of is that the access to previous artist residencies would be part of a paid subscription: the current artist in residence you get for free, if you want to see earlier work, you have to become a paying member.
Let us be honest, the pot of gold for sustainable Atmosphere apps still has to be found. For the time being, I want to concentrate on building up community around ideas that inspire us to experiment, learn and grow.