Introduction

Hi I’m Rae Isla. If you were to Google me you’d find several albums, many videos, some songs in films, and many social media posts depicting me as a Traveling Bard. You may also find that I revere nature and spend a lot of time immersed in it;  probably because I grew up on a tiny island in the Pacific Northwest. But if you scroll further down the search results you’ll discover I have another persona as a music technologist and entrepreneur, who after studying music business at Berklee College of Music and discovering the music industry wasn’t functioning AT ALL for artists, decided to pave my own way as an independent musician. In between writing songs, making records, and performing live, I seek to build both a better business and a deeper connection around my music for the people who listen to it. I’ve built entire video games for songs, sold a thousand pictures of my real rock collection as Music NFTs, created the first ever tokenized tour where fans around the world could support my tour stops from afar, and collaborated with independent brands and businesses on custom beers, guitars, and so much more. 

I sometimes wonder what a music career would be like if I was working back in the good ol’ days of the 60s and 70s when musicians could “just be musicians,” but I actually think those decades of blissful ignorance led us to where we are now. The industry was built by design to exploit artists, and the murkiness of how it operates is no accident— the less artists know about the business that feeds off of their creations, the better for those who are pulling the strings. Thankfully, as the industry shifts, the cracks in its foundation are letting artists glimpse a whole world of possibilities. Since no one seems to know what to do next, it might as well be us, the independent pioneering artists, who bushwack the trails through this new frontier. 

Spotify and Streaming

There’s a common complaint I’ve always found funny that music streaming platforms aren’t working anymore for artists, but here’s the thing: they were NEVER supposed to work for artists. Streaming was a shoddy replacement for the sale of digital recordings. After Napster burst that bubble, labels conceded to getting something rather than nothing and they haven’t found a new business model to replace the Record Business. An all-you-can-eat buffet of songs for $9.99/mo. was never meant to solve the problems of artists because the real existential problem is that we’ve conflated a digital recording of music with the value of music. 

The Value of Music

The value of music goes infinitely beyond the “final product” of a song. It’s often the process of getting to that final product that moves people to support artists. The demo, the first piece of handwritten lyrics, photographs from the studio, the live shows while working out new material, a rock collected while traveling—these all make people feel connected and alive, and that's very valuable. But how do you make money off of a process that feels intangible? What do you even sell if not records? My honest answer is that it doesn’t really matter what you sell. If you let people into your world you could sell a dirty sock and people would buy it, because it’s not the sock they’re after. They want to support you in the way you tell them to, because they trust that you being supported by them means you can keep living and creating music. We need to focus less on the final product of music and start sharing (and selling) the process. If you’re making great songs and building an intentional audience, there are a hundred ways to do business, and the more open you are with what you share, the more people will want to support your journey.

Social Media

If you’ve only existed as a musician online, you probably haven’t had the opportunity to grow a fan base one fan at a time like you would in a local scene. Social media acts like a one-sided bulletin board where responses are anonymous and you can’t really know how or why someone is connecting with your post, or if they plan to stick around after.

An Artist’s Job

An artist’s job is to create something that makes humans want to congregate around the watering hole and have a conversation. At heart, we’re all still animals. Whether that conversation is a wordless one during a live performance, or a verbal one before or after the show, to share music is to start a conversation. 

The problem is that the places we’re conversing (social media) are very shallow and those conversations are happening in silos (DMs and comment sections). It makes me think of this quote I found on the United States Geological Survey website:

"Humans don't live by surface water alone." For thousands of years, people have also relied on groundwater to serve their every need. Groundwater is invaluable for many uses, from irrigation to drinking-water supply. But, you can't see groundwater, so how do water scientists know where it is in order to be able to drill wells and pump it out for use?”

In this analogy, curators are scientists and artists are the water, and in a world of infinite online consumption we’re all sucking up surface water and slowly dying of thirst. Wow, dramatic. But in essence, this is what’s been happening. We need to trust human curators of music, whether that’s a dear friend or a seasoned journalist, to tell us where to dig for songs.

As I said before, the real value of music lies beneath the surface level where the experience of listening and conversing is deeper. Active listening. We still see flickers of this depth in nostalgic physical spaces like folk music venues and musty music shops but we’ve yet to mirror it digitally, perhaps because the companies building these online “spaces” profit from driving a wedge between artists and fans, and controlling the conversation—a rabbit hole for another time. We need below-the-surface relationships to fully experience music and connect with each other and I think it's going to take both artists building fanbases more intentionally, and fans showing up to support artists beyond streaming and social media.

Building a fanbase brick by brick

Artists, if you come across someone who loves your music, make a note (literally on a piece of paper with a pen, or in a google spreadsheet) of this person. You know that mom who came to your gig last week, bought your merch, and told you she loved your voice? Get her email. Send her a thank you note. Ask if you can add her to your mailing list, or send her the flyer for your next show. Do NOT just send her to your Spotify and call it a day. Spotify is a black box and you will lose that connection. That woman is trying to be your fan and you need to give her the opportunity. This is how you build relationships that will last your career. 

The infinite reach of the internet has made us dissociate from the simple fact that everything real is built brick by brick. If you only had a pen and a piece of paper then your job would be simple. You’d write down the names and emails of every person who expresses interest in your music, including something personal about them like where you first connected or which of your songs is their favorite. Anything that helps trigger your memory to have even an ounce more depth and care in your relationship will keep them around. The obvious argument to this method would be, “what happens when there’s no more room on my paper?” Well, that’s when you start to have a real music career. If you get to know a thousand people like this, you are going to make it. 

Artists are Businesses

At the end of the day, being any kind of artist includes starting a business. Whether you decide to sign to a major label, crowdfund your projects, or take out a bank loan, you’re giving up something to get started and you will have to make many decisions along the way to create your own version of success. The relationships and mechanics you build around your career exist to serve the songs you make. You will need people to fall in love with your songs and share them with their friends. You will need to sell things. You will need to ask for support. You can’t do it alone. 

Harmonic 

This leads me to Harmonic, a new project I’m advising on which addresses many of the things mentioned above. In my entrepreneurial moonlighting I’ve spoken to hundreds of people building “tools for artists” and almost none of them have invited an artist to participate in the building—and they will fail because of this. 

Harmonic has the right ingredients: seasoned music industry professionals with a track record of doing right by artists, teachers, music journalists, and no funding from corporate entities. Its offering is simple: a music platform where human beings curate songs they love and fans support artists they love, and everyone’s efforts are equitably rewarded. Discovery on the platform happens around conversations first, and recorded music second. In these early stages, you can recommend songs that lead to the sale of digital downloads, but imagine a storefront where artists can offer anything that has value tied to a song, curators can story tell more richly because of it, and fans can support their favorite artists in a deeper way. Think Etsy meets OnlyFans but for independent music.

The question I get asked the most in my career is “how can I support you?”. The desire to support artists is palpable, and we (artists) need to align on what it means to be supported and where that support can take place. It’s not on Instagram, it’s not on Spotify, it’s not on some 3rd party app that makes you pay to access the email addresses of fans YOU recruited. We need digital spaces that mirror our physical reality in order to bring back the human conversations that only music can provoke.