Why hyperpop artists are flocking to Matter

A few days into 2020, the artist known as ericdoa woke up in his New York AirBnB, went on his laptop and was met with a sea of SoundCloud notifications. “Disappointment” — a song of his that had been released in November 2019 and racked up over 70,000 plays on SoundCloud, his most at the time — had been taken down for copyright infringement. “I was like, what the fuck? This has no sample in it!” eric told me.

All throughout this year, the 18-year-old rapper was hit again and again with copyright strikes. He estimates that he’s had 20 to 25 songs taken down for no clear reason, and for a month, his account was frozen. “It was horrible. I waited months and months and months and never got a response [from SoundCloud],” he says.

He wasn’t alone. The week “Disappointment” went down, Angelus, kuru and others in a genre-bending online scene that’s casually referred to as “hyperpop” had their music taken down by SoundCloud.

The problem is that it’s extremely easy for anyone to flag and take down an artist’s song on the platform, which, like other major sites like YouTube and Twitch that allow user uploads, operates under the DMCA. Namely, as soon as the accusing party sends a request to have a song removed, SoundCloud takes it down. Then, if the accuser doesn’t file an action seeking a court order against the artist, SoundCloud says the song “may be replaced, or access to it restored, in 10 to 14 business days or more after the receipt of the counter-notice.”

This makes it easy for malicious trolls to take down artists’ songs for no apparent reason — and that’s exactly what’s happening to the hyperpop scene. “It’s just like … why is that a feature? It doesn’t make sense,” says Taylor Morgan, a scene producer from Arkansas. A song he co-produced for kuru called “closure” got removed in the first wave of takedowns. Morgan says this can affect producers in a unique way, since they often occupy a much smaller spotlight than the artists they produce for. “To have one of your few hit songs that you produce get taken down, that affects you because you’re not the artist that can just drop another song and get 500,000 [plays],” he says.

The last straw for hyperpop was in early October, when some of the scene’s more buzzing artists like ericdoa, glaive, SEBii, blackwinterwells and osquinn had songs taken down in the same week. By then, these artists, and eric in particular, were tired of SoundCloud’s antics and ready to move on. But where?

The origins of Matter: Frustration with SoundCloud

The exact definition of “hyperpop” is still up for debate. The term itself was first popularized by a rising Spotify playlist of the same name, which launched in March 2018 to little fanfare but has gained nearly 120,000 new followers in the past two months alone, alongside coverage of the subgenre and its varieties in publications like VICE, Pitchfork and The New York Times.

Alongside the eponymous Spotify playlist, many commentators have pointed to artists like 100 gecs, Charli XCX and A.G. Cook as hyperpop canon. But in reality, many of the scene’s defining sounds and recent hype today emerged from a more underground scene consisting mostly of teenagers who were influenced by several strands of online rap (Lil Uzi Vert, Bladee, Playboi Carti), as well as by the aforementioned pop artists.

As with many digitally-native music communities, many of these young hyperpop artists grew close through SoundCloud. “I’ve met two of my best friends, and my partner right now, only because of SoundCloud,” says Taylor Morgan. Today, the hyperpop community is tight-knit and distributed mostly across SoundCloud, Twitter and Discord, and are organized into collectives like Nova Gang, Neilaworld and Bloodhounds. When one of their figureheads speaks out on something, everyone listens.

So when ericdoa, glaive and several other burgeoning talents within the hyperpop realm announced that they were moving to the relatively unknown streaming platform Matter in October 2020, their follower bases, well, followed. The platform’s user base started to increase by upwards of 6,000 people per day.

“We have no paid campaigns going, we have no paid marketing,” Matter’s co-founder Paul Meed says. “Just me speaking to our users, and every day we’re getting thousands of new users.”

Meed has a background in financial engineering and data science, but is also an artist himself: He used to upload music under the moniker three30 to SoundCloud, where he met some of his closest friends. But in 2017, when the Raine Group and Temasek acquired a majority stake in SoundCloud, Meed noticed the platform shift its priorities from nurturing a place for rising artists to trying to compete with major DSPs like Spotify and Apple Music, arguably turning into something like an industry machine in the process.

“That wasn’t the value [artists saw] at the time,” Meed says. ‘The value was it was a great place to start your career, to build your community, where you published your first music content, for your voice to be heard.” In contrast, under the newer model, “artists were almost interchangeable from [the platform’s] point of view.” Meed added that the dominant DSP model put artists fourth in the ladder of profitability, after advertisers, listeners who pay for a premium subscription and labels that provide the content for premium subscribers. In turn, this made it difficult for many SoundCloud rappers of Meed’s generation to cultivate loyal fanbases on bigger DSPs, which directly affected their revenue.

With his friend and producer Josh Pan — who was involved with 88Rising in its early stages — Meed began developing Matter, a platform that would aim to build relationships among artists while also helping to create loyal fanbases and alternative revenue streams for them. As a contrast to incumbent DSPs, Meed promised a young, experimental platform that would engage with its artists, provide them the communal feel of old SoundCloud and have a human-led (as opposed to automated) system for handling copyright claims that would make it much more difficult for trolls to take down songs.

Matter’s alpha launched in the fall of 2019, and had been seeing steady growth, including a spike earlier this year after the rapper Tokyo’s Revenge signed up — but nothing as crazy as when ericdoa and osquinn and others in the hyperpop scene signed on this fall.

Meed was able to cultivate a relationship with hyperpop artists in large part thanks to Bern Putnam, who serves as Matter’s events coordinator and runs the blog Underground Vampire Club (UVC). Founded in 2018, UVC has become an editorial hub for the hyperpop scene, and caught Meed’s attention when their URL festival, Vampalooza, brought in over 4,000 virtual attendees in April 2020. Meed sold Putnam on Matter, and turned him into a full-on employee while also bringing on fellow UVC writer Bill Bugara as an outside ambassador.

When the second wave of hyperpop-targeted copyright strikes started in October, Bugara and Putnam passed around word of Matter throughout the scene, culminating in a Discord call that included Bugara, Putnam, ericdoa, glaive, osquinn, producers chach and Taylor Morgan and the Matter co-founders.

“We essentially just said Matter is the move [and] we can’t be investing time into SoundCloud when they don’t care about the community as a whole,” Bugara says. All the artists in that call went on Twitter and announced their move to Matter. Many more followed suit; of course, some called the Matter advocates “industry plants,” on the grounds that the sudden mass promotion felt inorganic.

The experience: All of hyperpop’s main platforms rolled into one

What exactly is Matter?

As Putnam describes: “It’s literally if Discord, Twitter and SoundCloud had a baby.” That analogy isn’t too far off: If you got to Matter’s homepage (in its current iteration — it’s still in beta), you’ll see a Discord-esque live chat window on the bottom right. It’s usually pretty quiet, but I was once in the chat when the hyperpop star osquinn popped in, and suddenly the virtual room was packed. There’s also a whole Social tab that has the feel of a Twitter timeline, but focused solely on artists.

The more standard, DSP-leaning features include a big, glowing button for the Track of the Day, curated playlists (including, yes, a hyperpop/glitchcore one), a general “music feed” based on who you’re following and a chart of the platform’s trending songs called the Matter Hot 100.

For now, Matter does not compensate artists with royalties, but there is a tab called Marketplace where users can buy and sell the whole gamut of music-related assets and services — i.e. songs, instrumentals, merch, drum kits, sample packs, feature verses, “opens,” even mixing and mastering. “The thing that I like the most about [Matter] is it’s free to post a drum kit,” Morgan says, in contrast to some other services like Traktrain that charge a monthly membership fee for uploads.

What’s more, items you buy in the marketplace can be tagged in the songs you upload. So, for instance, if you used Taylor Morgan’s drum kit in a song you uploaded to Matter, you can tag it and point your fans to the original item in the Marketplace. (Ironically, the vast majority of items posted on the first page of the Marketplace today are available to download for free — perhaps reflecting the “copyleft” culture inherent in many emerging electronic music scenes.)

For a monthly fee, you can also subscribe to an Artist Club in exchange for exclusive content from a given artist, in a similar manner to joining a membership on Patreon. “It’s definitely one of the coolest parts about it,” Morgan says, although he admits that he hasn’t figured out what to do with it yet. Rapper/producer mixed matches started their membership recently, although they have yet to post anything as of press time. Matter takes a 10% cut of all of these revenue streams.

Will Matter actually succeed?

Whether Matter will pan out into a sustainable company long-term is another question, but one thing’s for certain: The platform wasn’t ready for this upswing.

The site encountered numerous bugs amid the recent hyperpop flood; for instance, multiple users reported getting osquinn’s notifications without deliberately following her on the site. For a while, you could even follow yourself.

Positioning itself as an artist-first platform, Matter has treated these bugs as opportunities to engage with artists on how they could improve, taking to Twitter to resolve artist requests. In contrast, artist communication has been a persistent issue for SoundCloud. ericdoa says it’s like talking to a brick wall, especially since they seem to ignore certain complaints entirely while addressing wholly unrelated ones. “We specifically asked for one thing” — improving their copyright claim system — “and they put Dolby Mastering as an option on your tracks? What kind of bullshit?”

Another significant problem is that there’s clearly too much going on in the Matter UI. While the website looks sleek and dynamic, it lacks the streamlined quality of Spotify and Apple Music that gets you straight to the song you want. “I think that there can and will be issues with there being too much,” Morgan says. “It’s like Traktrain, it’s like Patreon, there’s just so much.” Like Putnam said, Matter looks like a child of three or four different social media platforms; while convenient in theory, it isn’t the prettiest picture in its current state.

When I told Paul Meed this, he retorted, in the most #Online way imaginable, that big changes are coming: “It’s a very substantial simplification of the platform. I’m a big Runescape player. A lot of it is inspired by the Achievement Diary there.” Meed envisions a sort of incremental “unlocking” of features, paired with achievements that you can collect, that will get you acclimated to the site as a new user.

His mood was cheery and entrepreneurial, and virtually every artist in the community that I talked to seemed optimistic about the place for all kinds of reasons. “I don’t know if it’s a type of placebo, but I really think that the quality on there sounds really different than SoundCloud,” the artist funeral says. “I was listening to ericdoa’s song on there, and it just felt different.”

Initially, funeral wasn’t immediately sold. “I was just kinda scared at first. I wasn’t sure what was gonna happen.” Several weeks later, he dropped an exclusive song called “do we got a problem” on the platform, and it reached #13 on the Matter Hot 100. Now, he thinks it can be something of a “home” for hyperpop, like what SoundCloud was to venerated 2010s rap collectives like GothBoiClique and Seshollowaterboyz. “We could really start a platform and help it grow for future artists so that they don’t have to deal with the struggles of being on SoundCloud,” he says.

A natural concern is that artists in this scene that have put in work on SoundCloud, yet aren’t rising stars like ericdoa, glaive and quinn, may have trouble converting their fan bases onto an entirely new platform. “That’s not what we want to do,” ericdoa says. “The whole thing is to make Matter an option for people and have them consider it strongly.” ericdoa and others are urging the scene to treat this as an additive, as opposed to competitive, platform, a win-win that artists should give a chance. “I’m really open to moving with my SoundCloud and my Matter, and dropping on both platforms,” funeral says.

Meed also emphasized Matter’s non-competitive nature, even saying that he’d be open to partnering with a major DSP. If this happened, his idea would be to connect Matter’s selling point — the Marketplace — with a streaming giant’s listenership by introducing a loyalty or rewards program. “When you go to Spotify, you can stream ericdoa’s music. [Imagine that] now he’s able to creative incentive for you to do so by coming up with unique rewards in his Marketplace.”

In its current stage, though, Matter is a place to listen to music and buy and sell things, with a handful of social features. And if you like hyperpop, there’s still a natural, deep pull that SoundCloud has. Aside from the smoother user experience and larger user base, there’s the fact that the very roots of the hyperpop scene are in the progressive mid-decade stuff that gets called “SoundCloud Rap.”

In fact, SoundCloud seems to be responding to the growth (and/or mass digital migration) of this community by featuring a “hyperpop” section at the top of its Discover page. ericdoa compares the dynamic to being stuck in a toxic relationship: “We keep going back to [SoundCloud] even though it’s after us.”