Hilke Ros 0:01 I am an artist myself. 0:03 I mainly do music. 0:04 You can find all that on my website, hilke.eu. 0:07 I'm also a software developer. 0:09 Very recently I started a new job at Petsy. 0:13 That's a very indie ticketing service in Switzerland. 0:17 And I also help out a bit at North Sky. 0:22 This happens to be my very first post on the Atmosphere. 0:26 It's paraphrasing a post by Alok, a statement by Alok, like the only identity I really chose for myself is to be an artist because being an artist, it's about being creative, it's about imagination, it resists every definition. 0:48 When something like a queer or a trans identity, that's more how other people see you, how the society puts you in boxes and it's like shaped by discrimination patterns, and you can reclaim that identity, and I think we do that as a community. 1:05 But for me personally, my gender expression is as much— for me, it's the same thing as music. 1:16 It's like an output of my creative drive. 1:21 So that's a little side note. 1:23 About the relationship between my artist and my queer identity, but why the hell did I become a software developer? 1:34 I got an interest in the internet and in technology around 2007 when we had the first wave of social media apps, and back then, for me, it felt very empowering as an artist. 1:50 MySpace in the beginning changed relationship between artists and fans. 1:56 SoundCloud and Bandcamp came on the scene, also YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and then when Instagram came, it gave like a visual identity to artists. 2:08 So that felt empowering because it became possible to talk directly from artist to fan, to be in some kind of community or communication. 2:20 So back then I was like, yeah, we can bypass the traditional gatekeepers of the music industry. 2:26 Yeah, and that felt empowering, like I said. 2:34 A couple of years later, around 2010, I was lucky to be part of this band. 2:40 The person in the front, that's an earlier, younger version of me. 2:45 And we had quite a big radio hit in a very small country, Belgium. 2:52 And yeah, that opened a lot of doors. 2:58 It was a combination of traditional radio and press, but also the new social media, Bandcamp, quite a lot of sales there. 3:10 From the outside, it was like a success story to be told internationally, but in reality, it was not financially sustainable. 3:19 So after a couple of years, in 2016, I decided to switch careers. 3:25 I took an internship as a software developer because I was working in technological stuff because of what I told before. 3:31 So that is what I've been doing the last 10 years to earn money. 3:36 But I still kept making music. 3:39 So let's flash forward. 3:40 What does it mean to be an artist in 2024? 3:45 Actually, that is be very present on Instagram, even better buy ads on Instagram. 3:54 Those ads, you point the people to Spotify to convert them to listeners. 4:02 To generate plays that will not bring you money, or you really need a lot, a lot of plays. 4:09 But when those statistics look good on Instagram and on Spotify, then you can convince show promoters that you might sell tickets. 4:19 And then when people come to your shows, that is how your career can somehow start to grow. 4:24 That is so a bit the situation. 4:28 Um, maybe TikTok comes into the game. 4:32 I must say most of my peers are 30+, so we are still figuring it out, and we find it not very creative and very annoying. 4:43 Um, so the conclusion is, 15 years later, the gatekeeping is completely back, and it's driven by 2 or 3 big tech companies, and that's not even people, that's like an algorithm that you are fighting with. 5:00 So you might wonder, is that a mistake to '24? 5:04 It was on purpose because for me to '25 and my friends was a big wake-up call at the beginning of the year when Trump got reelected. 5:15 Maybe naive for some people, but that was like, oh yeah, some statements by Zuckerberg Of course, those companies are super capitalistic, but actually they also align with authoritarian and fascist regimes. 5:30 So yeah, what do you do as a queer artist then? 5:35 So I gathered with my peers, with my friends. 5:41 We organized some workshops to try to find out what to do. 5:45 Stay, leave, find alternatives. 5:49 Because I have this technical background, I was looking also to the technical solutions and informing people about that, how does this all work. 6:00 I looked at the Fetifers in the beginning more that, and then more and more at the Atmosphere. 6:05 And I had the impression that it is more suited for what musicians need if they want to build some more reach. 6:14 I started explaining everybody how this works. 6:18 I created a starter pack. 6:20 I created a custom music feed of my local scene in Switzerland. 6:26 Yeah, a lot of explaining, trying to convince to make an account, to start posting. 6:32 It needs a lot of repetition and patience because the problem is a bit We still have to be on Instagram. 6:42 We cannot just leave it because our audience is there. 6:46 So we need to still put time in there. 6:50 And this means that most artists are quite burned out from social media. 6:54 They want to be less on social media. 6:58 They are low on resources. 7:00 And yeah, when you then say, let's try out these new channels, it's difficult because they are really They have had enough. 7:12 But there are some of them who do it, who are like, have more political drive or something like that. 7:18 Or yeah, I don't know. 7:20 So that's the reality, but this talk was about dreams. 7:24 So let's start dreaming. 7:28 I have 4 of them. 7:32 They go from very pragmatic to something more artistic. 7:36 And for the last two, I built a little prototype. 7:40 The last month I was here in Vancouver at ZSpace, a kind of residency. 7:44 Thanks to Boris that I could be his guest. 7:50 Yeah, so I finally got to code something. 7:54 But the first two are not that much about code. 7:57 My first dream is about connection. 8:00 Finding that connection again that we used to have on Instagram. 8:04 So I think what we really need is a real alternative to Instagram with more product maturity. 8:09 And I don't want to diss Splashes and that kind of apps. 8:13 This is like a one-person project. 8:17 But I really hope that Sebastian gets much more resources, that the product can improve, and that it is like what Bluesky is to microblogging, that we something have for what I— I don't know if I invented the word microvisual right now, but yeah, artists, they don't really think in this microblocking format. 8:44 They think more visually. 8:47 I'm not very good visually, but most of us do. 8:51 So yeah, we need a good platform to have like a visual language on the on the protocol. 8:58 There are such things like you try to explain this, yeah, you would want something like Instagram download flashes, but then it's like a BlueSky account and it's so complicated to explain that. 9:10 So, if it would be more mature, then maybe we can get past that friction. 9:17 I also noticed that in my community, there is an important distance between the feeds of the normal feed of posts and the stories. 9:29 And stories are not really a thing on Flashes yet, I think. 9:35 To explain that, we see the feeds much more as a curated artist identity, so it needs to look good. 9:43 It's like, it's thought through. 9:47 Stories are much more spontaneous and We go a lot to each other's shows, make a quick video, upload it, the artist reposts it, and it can be bad quality, song a bit out of tune, doesn't matter, it's way off for 24 hours, but you don't want to have that in your feed for eternity. 10:09 Of course you can delete, but it's just a different medium, so that's like, The skeuomorphism that is missing for us right now. 10:22 Those are basics. 10:23 I discovered also a couple of nice to haves for the last weeks. 10:28 It would be really great to have an integration with event lexicons so that you would scroll your feed, you see a video with an announcement of a show and there's a link to something smoke signal-like and you can just do— I will attend. 10:43 I've been talking to a couple of music venues and they still use Facebook Events for over 40 drum and bass and rock concerts because it still works a bit. 10:57 It's almost over, so it would be really great to have that back. 11:00 It's like, oh, all my friends are going, and it gives also some security to show promoters that people will turn up. 11:08 So that would be cool. 11:10 I also noticed last month I have been posting quite some music I did, like @proto music march, I think, more or less. 11:19 I don't remember the name. 11:22 I post a lot of Bandcamp links. 11:25 Bandcamp links have artwork, so that's visually good material. 11:31 But because it's not really a photo in the feed, it will not show up on Flash. 11:35 So it would be cool that that would also work. 11:38 Nice. 11:42 Dream 2, inspiration. 11:44 How am I on time? 11:46 Because I have no idea. Speaker B 11:47 You're doing great. 11:48 You have 15 minutes. Hilke Ros 11:51 Okay. 11:51 I still have a lot. 11:54 Okay. 11:54 What— then I've been thinking what could be even more inspiring, an app that would be specifically about music. 12:02 And art. 12:03 And how I think about it, I would like to have it different paces. 12:07 That aligns a lot with earlier talks. 12:09 That's the disadvantage of being the last talk. 12:13 Yeah, what I would like to have is that to have also these quick updates, right? 12:18 Like Instagram-like personal feed. 12:20 What are the new shows? 12:22 What are the new releases in this microvisual, micro-broccoli style? 12:26 But I would also like a much more curated part that goes much deeper into the artist's work and that slows us down. 12:39 The pace I'm thinking about is like the artist of the month. 12:44 Like really one month, there is this one artist that you can go deep into. 12:49 You can really immerse yourself deeply into their world. 12:53 And after some talks, this sounds a bit boring now, but some of the ideas that I had, like yeah, maybe they can present a feed of the accounts that they find interesting. 13:08 Maybe they have a selection of long-form articles that they want to point you to, to like, that is the things that influenced me. 13:17 I like a lot leaflet, feeds on Bluesky because it points me this door to more long-form content and that goes deeper. 13:30 Could be something like what are the favorite albums, what are the favorite books. 13:37 But to be honest, what I would love the most to see is like anything that this artist can imagine that would be on this app. 13:44 And after the talk of Dame, and also of— what was the name of the last talk? Speaker B 13:54 You! Hilke Ros 13:56 It was like, yeah, that would be cool to have something like that there for one month. 14:03 I can also see some spillover into the offline world. 14:08 If there are these— Precipitation project. 14:47 Warming up. 14:49 Sorry. 14:51 Timing is very flexible. 14:52 The last ones. 14:54 OK, good. 14:56 Yeah, yeah. 14:58 I was volunteering yesterday, so I'm prepared. 15:05 Yeah, if artists are talking about their favorite books and records, we could have deals with local record stores and bookstores too, that if people have a subscription to this app, and the more expensive subscription, you just go to pick up those physical books and records, something like that. 15:26 We could have book clubs and listening parties that extend on this app. 15:31 That is how I would like to be inspired. 15:34 Next dream is about distribution. 15:40 When I heard about the protocol and how PDSs work, my thing was, well, it would be very interesting if artists would distribute their music releases from their PDSs. 15:52 It would shift the power dynamics because it would be like their own, They own the music and they give permission to the streaming platforms to offer the audio files to the end users. 16:04 There could be different platforms that have very different business models and artists can choose which one they want to work with or which one they want to stop working with because they invest in war drones or something like that. 16:22 So you would upload everything once with all the right metadata also for royalties and copyright and rights holders and streaming platforms can evolve but you keep control over your data as an artist. 16:40 And you can take everything with you to another PDS provider like this story we all know but like for artists it's like completely new that it would be possible that together with your social media content that you would also take with you all your releases. 16:56 So, the little concept I started working on is like ad-proto music streaming done right. 17:02 Also from a music industry point of view because I'm also part of a label and I do a lot of administration work there. 17:09 So, I have a bit of background in there how that works. 17:14 So, I made a little demo of that. 17:18 Of course, I need to sign in. 17:23 So, I mainly— Speaker B 17:25 oh, yeah. Hilke Ros 17:32 I posted about this a couple of days ago. 17:34 I mainly proposed a couple of lexicons to have the metadata right about your music. 17:42 The most important thing to understand The difference that I made is the difference between songs and recordings. 17:47 Songs are like the more abstract part of music, like the melody, the lyrics, the chords that are made by composers and lyricists. 18:00 And then you have recordings. 18:01 Those are recordings like performances of this song, and there can be many performances of one song. 18:07 That's also why you have different rights in the music industry to that because some people just write songs and don't perform or record them. 18:16 So, everybody needs some money, so that's why this difference exists. 18:22 So, let's look at a song record. 18:27 You can add a lot of metadata in this UI, like this thing, the ESWC, that is something that copyright collecting societies care about. 18:38 This is like the identifier of the song, and you see there all the rights holders. 18:44 That's me, but also my producer and my label as a publisher. 18:50 That's all on the PDF now of this song. 18:55 Then there are existing recordings of that song, well, one. 19:01 And there you have like the recording, this ISRC number is like important to get the money to my label and to me. 19:09 So you can also all record that stuff on the PDS and then a release is like an album, it's like normally a collection of songs. 19:19 They are a sellable product and they have this GTIN number. 19:23 So you can also encode that on the PDS. 19:27 Because you have these differences, I also have like 3 lexicons which I call actors. 19:32 I think that's the right way to do that on the protocol. 19:36 So, I'm— related to my repository, there's like the artist Hilke, which is a bit confusing because that's also my name. 19:45 But that's also my brand, you know. 19:49 Something what I call publishing owner, that's like Songwriters and lyricists. 19:56 There I'm registered with my full name and this IPI number, which is important internationally to recognize that's me. 20:05 And I don't have a master owner record because my label has that. 20:11 Label has the rights. 20:12 But what I did with the recording is assign it to the master owner Red Brick Records, and it was easy because it was already registered with the DID, so I could just add it. 20:28 Yeah, the same for the songs. 20:31 Okay, that's this little demo. 20:36 And it, like, on the PDS, it looks something like this. 20:39 All this information is encoded there. 20:42 So to sum up, artists upload all the metadata that the music industry cares about for monetization with all those acronyms, and the data points are linked to user bits. 20:55 This is like a very basic proof of concept. 20:59 Some future features that I see is that artists, composers, labels could verify the data with each other, and that would build more trust, and streaming services would have better knowledge that they are not infringing copyrights. 21:13 Hopefully. 21:14 If they even would, better. 21:16 And of course, right now it's not really possible to upload audio files. 21:21 I didn't want to do that because on the PDS, when I just upload it, everybody can actually download it. 21:27 And it's not good for my monetization. 21:30 I think we need some kind of permission data for that. 21:33 Of course, Player FM is also going that direction. 21:36 That's what I learned this weekend. 21:39 So we will probably collaborate on that. 21:42 Yeah, I made some proof of concept with encryption. 21:46 It's in a PR. 21:47 I didn't want to have it in the main branch. 21:50 Yeah. 21:50 I guess when permission data are there, we will have better solutions for that. 22:00 The fourth dream is about creation. 22:09 That's something that I've been thinking about for many years. 22:12 The internet changed a lot how we promote and distribute our music, but not that much how we create music. 22:18 It's mainly a play button and people push the button and they listen to the same recording. 22:23 And I found it a bit limiting and I saw so many possibilities, but somehow the timing was not right in that. 22:33 So my question is, what do we do if we redefine the music formats for social internet? 22:40 Because music is supposed to be a social experience, and we actually unlearn to listen to music together. 22:48 So I have this idea a couple of years already, but now I thought this is the right time to build a demo of that idea. 22:58 I'm not sure how to pronounce it yet. 23:00 But to the end or something like that. 23:03 And let's try the demo. 23:07 So what it tries to do is to motivate people to listen to music together in the same place physically together with each other. 23:17 Oh yeah, I have to say, please don't try it out yet because it ruins my explanation. 23:27 And David will be my volunteer to make it work. 23:30 After that, you can also all try. 23:32 I'm curious what will happen if we all do it. 23:40 Okay. 23:41 I logged in. 23:42 Now I can, like, join the music experience. 23:45 This will create a record on my PDS that I want that I will join this. 23:51 It needs to know where I am because we want to track physical distance. 23:55 So I'm going to allow that. 23:58 The first song of this project is 2 to the first power. 24:02 I can listen to the music alone. 24:25 It's some ambient track that I made last couple of weeks. Speaker B 24:31 But what would happen if we listen to it with two people? Hilke Ros 24:40 Because two to the first, like two people. 24:43 So I would like to invite David to join. 24:54 So what happens if he joins? 24:56 The arrangement becomes richer, there are like more layers to the music. 25:02 Yeah, that's like the idea I had and that I could make quite easily with this. 25:12 If you want to join, I'm very curious what will happen. Speaker B 25:17 A little break. 25:45 Oh, just sit back and listen. 26:38 How are we with time? 26:41 Do we want questions, or do we want to meditate with this music? 27:03 It's not that long anymore, I think. Hilke Ros 27:44 Oh, some other people are listening on speaker, huh? 27:47 I'm going to stop it. 27:50 Yeah, 9 people, 10. 27:51 Oh, not bad, not bad. 27:59 I have one more secret