10 ways to prototype your music

By: Cherie Hu

Published: 2020-01-28

Axios recently published an article about how Kanye West edited the contents of both TLOP and Jesus is King after their initial release, demonstrating that streaming technology has made music “mutable” rather than fixed. I found myself asking: If streaming does make music more mutable, why haven’t more artists taken advantage of that mutability to prototype, test and update their songs more openly with fans?

In the worlds of tech and design, a prototype is an early, bare-bones draft version of a product — often called a “minimum viable product” (MVP) — built with the purpose of testing a given concept with a small set of users. For example, it’s typical for streaming services like Spotify to test new features like social playlisting with select power users before releasing those features to the wider public. Prototyping a product or feature before its official release is both normal and encouraged in the tech industry, as it allows developers to validate (or invalidate) their ideas quickly and get feedback on what is and isn’t working, thereby reducing risk of failure.

Importantly, prototyping also comprises a mindset, not just a process. I learned as such while reading the book Sprint — in which veteran technologists and designers Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz outline the prototyping mindset that helped companies like Blue Bottle Coffee, Slack and Gimlet develop culture-changing products.

In the authors’ words, to embrace a prototyping mindset is to switch your satisfaction level “from perfect to just enough, from long-term quality to temporary simulation.” Moreover, prototypes are meant to be disposable. “Don’t prototype anything you aren’t willing to throw away,” write the authors, as “the solution might not work.”

Finally, by spending any longer than one day on a prototype, developers risk becoming too emotionally attached to the outcome of the test. “The longer you spend working on something — whether it’s a prototype or a real product — the more attached you’ll become, and the less likely you’ll be to take negative test results to heart,” write the authors. “After one day, you’re receptive to feedback. After three months, you’re committed.”

The above definitions helped me hone in on a few potential reasons why the concept of “prototyping” a piece of recorded music is still considered unconventional, or even taboo.

In the world of tech and design, the purpose of a prototype is to understand meet a market need through iteration. In contrast, many musicians aren’t looking to meet an external market need; they’re looking to express their own, personal creative vision, and to meet their own, internal, emotional needs, independent of what the market might be looking for at a given time.

In addition, many musicians are perfectionists who will spend months or even years working on a given album. They won’t be happy releasing a product that’s “just good enough”; nor will they be OK with potential fans viewing their creative work as “disposable.” Yet both are requirements for a prototype mindset.

The music industry could stand to benefit from embracing a prototype mindset more often. After all, both recorded and live music can be super risky and volatile businesses, and getting any kind of early feedback about market demand or audience perception can go a long way in reducing said risk and maximizing one’s chances of sustainability and success.

Prototyping in public does happen naturally in the music industry already — especially in the live events scene, such as through dedicated listening parties and surprise drops during DJ sets. That mindset has only started to translate at same level to the recorded side, despite technology opening up a whole slate of possibilities for interesting kinds of tests and experiments.

I tried to compile as many methods as possible with which artists and their teams can prototype their music and gather feedback directly from fans in the modern era. I’ve summarized ten such methods below — organized roughly from most to least common, in the context of the mainstream music industry — along with at least one key example for each. I’d love to hear your feedback on any other kinds of prototyping that you think may be missing!

Live shows and DJ sets

As I mentioned earlier, “live prototyping” already happens naturally in the music industry in several ways. For decades, producers have premiered new or unreleased tracks on the dance floor during DJ sets, to test their sound mixing as well as the crowd’s reactions. Acoustic artists and bands also frequently debut unreleased music during their live shows, both to gauge audience reaction to the music and to hone their live-performance skills in general.

As David Bruenger wrote in Create, Produce, Consume: New Models for Understanding Music Business: “Bands just starting out almost unavoidably (though usually unconsciously) adopt the Lean Startup method of connecting with ‘actual or potential customers’ very early in the process, before they are necessarily very good at what they do.” I think the goal, and the challenge, with prototyping music online lies in translating the immediacy and potency of this offline feedback into the digital world.

Example: In November 2018, Kaytranada premiered an unnamed, unreleased track featuring Kali Uchis during his set at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Paris. There were multiple comments under the YouTube video from viewers who were itching for the track to come out; the track, called “10%,” was finally made available to the public on Kaytranada’s latest album Bubba.

Listening parties

These kinds of exclusive, pre-release listening events already happen all the time in the music industry, especially at private venues like Soho House and NeueHouse that cater to creative-leaning folks.

Example: In 2017, I attended Grizzly Bear’s listening party for their album Painted Ruins, held at NeueHouse’s Los Angeles location one week before the project’s release. Attendees weren’t allowed to use our phones during the event, and we all sat in silence with the lights dimmed as the album played through from start to finish. The album itself was incredible; the listening-party experience, which felt a bit stiff, was personally not for me — perhaps because the attendees present were not so much fans or customers as they were potential business partners.

Singles and mixtapes

It took a few conversations with industry folks for me to realize a form of musical prototyping that is already super commonplace across all genres: the single. Typically, artists today don’t record full albums off the bat. Instead, they record a succession of singles over time as a vehicle for understanding how listeners are (or are not) resonating with their work, before investing more upfront in larger projects. Mixtapes in hip-hop play a similar role, and are typically released for free for the sake of wider distribution and “testing” early on, such that artists can more effectively adjust their creative output to consumer demand for more official, more polished albums.

Example: It’s becoming increasingly popular for artists like Tom Misch, The Chainsmokers and UMI to “drip-feed” or “cascade” singles leading up to an official album release — i.e. releasing tracks once a week for several weeks in a row, instead of having just one flagship single. While the tactic technically requires that an album is already finished and ready for public presentation, I still think it’s a form of prototyping, as artists and their teams can use the resulting consumption data to make decisions about which singles to pour more marketing dollars behind, e.g. for a radio impact date. It’s also tailor-made for the streaming era, which prioritizes consumption over one-off sales.

Remixes, covers and acoustic versions

While these three prototyping methods are obviously different from each other, I put them into the same category because they’re all examples of derivative content created with the explicit purpose of segmenting an artist’s reach into multiple different marketing channels. It’s pretty common for a given pop/R&B single, say, to get both an EDM remix and a downtempo acoustic version, for the purpose of increasing potential playlist placements as well as general audience interest beyond those who may already be following the artist proactively.

Examples:

Livestreams

A growing number of artists are livestreaming themselves making new music in a recording studio or performing stripped-down, acoustic sets of their work, as a way to engage with fans more deeply and in a more freeform manner. This can be an especially powerful form of prototyping because fans can provide unfiltered feedback in real time through chat forums, whereby the consumption leads immediately to lean-in conversation.

While musicians have been using Facebook Live for years, I find that some of the more exciting prototyping happening in this realm is taking place on Instagram Live, as well as on platforms like Twitch that are proactively expanding their target livestreaming audience beyond just gaming alone.

Example: Independent electro-pop artist HANA broadcasted the entire recording process for her album HANADRIEL on Twitch over a four-week period. This unfiltered approach allowed her to absorb real-time feedback from fans, and to pursue creative avenues that she otherwise would not have considered. In her words:

Viewers were super helpful with decisions. [They inspired me to] keep  working on songs that I would have abandoned, which became some of my  favorite songs. Like “Black Orchid” — it was a mess for a while but a few people kept saying it was their favorite, so I pushed through and kept working and now it’s one of my favorites, too. They also helped a lot with themes. The first day we had a huge brainstorming session where they told me what they wanted to hear from me and gave me so many keywords and ideas. They were also super helpful with track listing —  and so opinionated.

Teaser posts and stories on Instagram and Snapchat

For many creative types, including those in the music industry, Instagram is the new business card. Whenever I ask artists about their social-media platform of preference, they tend to cite Instagram as one of their top platforms not only for building and engaging with a fanbase, but also for researching and recruiting collaborators on future creative projects.

Aside from Instagram Live, the Instagram feed and Stories features can also be powerful prototyping tools, with which artists can bring fans and viewers behind the curtain into their creative process or ask for feedback on early versions of upcoming tracks. The dynamic can be translated to any app with a Stories feature or social feed, including Snapchat.

Example: Hip-hop producer Kato on the Track often makes posts like these on his Instagram account, in which he shares snippets of his unreleased beats and asks users to tag any friends or contacts whom they think would sound best on the beat as a rapper or fellow producer. It’s an ingenious way of measuring audience feedback while also engaging viewers’ social networks, leading to wider organic reach.

Dances and challenges on short-form UGC video apps like TikTok

TikTok is actually the perfect prototyping app for music, thanks to the speed at which the app can make a brief snippet of music go viral through millions of user-generated videos. Through observing the dances, challenges and other behaviors/contexts that emerge around a given song, artists and their teams can get a better understanding early on — without much upfront investment — of what resonates with a certain audience.

The repetitive, imitative nature of the app also helps artists arrive to insights more quickly. As Frank Woodworth recent wrote for Hypebot:

Historically, it could take weeks or months or even longer through traditional channels to build enough familiarity to move the needle on track. A trending sound clip on TikTok can gain the same awareness level in a fraction of the time. This audio affinity can then be leveraged through traditional media to create true impact for the artist.

You can also extend this form of prototyping to any platform that encourages user-generated content.

Example: You could make the argument that every well-known TikTok music campaign or success story is inherently a prototyping story — from Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” to DJ Regard’s “Ride It” with Ministry of Sound,” to Sueco the Child’s “Fast.” In each of these instances, TikTok helped the artists and content owners to understand the extent of their reach, as well as to get feedback from key influencers about the value they saw in the work. In the case of Lil Nas X and Sueco the Child, the prototyping phase also led them to much larger opportunities with major labels.

Crowdsourced market research and A/B testing

This method is not as common in the music industry yet, although the tools are definitely out there to get more quantifiable feedback on recorded music on a much more granular level.

Typically, the feedback that artists solicit for a song or album behind the scenes prior to the official release date is only as specific or quantifiable as the people offering the feedback are able to get. In other words, it typically doesn’t involve a static, numeric “rating” (e.g. “4 out of 10”), but rather involves informal or highly subjective statements about what elements of the song are or are not “good.”

There are a few tools and methods out there that allow artists to get much more measurable insights around the potential market appeal for their work — whether in testing different versions of a song, like A/B testing, or in crowdsourcing anonymous feedback from a target market via a survey, Amazon Mechanical Turk-style.

Examples:

Dedicated Facebook/WhatsApp/Patreon groups, private fan clubs

This category isn’t necessarily a “public” method of prototyping, but I think it’s an underrated one for gathering feedback in general.

One of my sources for my Complex piece told me that he’s part of several group chats on Messenger and WhatsApp dedicated specifically to artists and producers giving feedback on each other’s music and videos, both released and unreleased. I’ve seen similar feedback exchanges take place in closed Facebook groups and listservs dedicated specifically to creative professionals in the industry.

Also, since you are all Patreon subscribers — private membership groups like those that many musicians maintain on Patreon can also be effective channels for sourcing feedback on a larger scale, while still maintaining a narrower focus on a specific community or demographic of potential listeners and collaborators.

Example: For Facebook groups, I know closed groups like Asian Creative Network and Music Entrepreneur Club frequently host dedicated threads for exchanging feedback on each other’s work.

Derivations and adaptations of videos for different audiences

One form of testing that I’m seeing happen more frequently is that of creating multiple forms of a song’s accompanying video content to appeal to and test out different markets. This is adjacent to the TikTok prototyping I discussed above — but is more about taking bite-size excerpts of a music video, for instance, and testing each of those excerpts on a different audience (often through ads) to see which visual contexts stick and drive the most traffic.

It’s like remixes, but for videos — and I think there’s still an opportunity to experiment with that further, with the rise of additional features on audio-first streaming services like Spotify Canvas.

Examples: