Chris Brown has just released "Heartbreak on a Full Moon," a 45 track, 2 hour and 38 minute recording that includes him whining about bottle service. It's hard to imagine that even the most diehard fans want that much new Chris Brown. But there is a method behind his latest madness.
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Chris Brown is trying to game the Billboard charts.
We first wrote about this problem 14 months ago. Back then, in an attempt to game the charts, artists that usually released 10-12 track albums were upping there game by 50% and more. Drake's then new "Views" album ran 83 minutes with 20 tracks, and James Blake's "Color Of Everything was 75 minutes and 17 tracks long.
This week Chris Brown took the track count wars to a whole new level, releasing "Heartbreak on a Full Moon," with 45 tracks clocking in at 2 hour and 38 minutes.
Why, Chris? Why????
Almost three year's ago, Billboard began counting 1500 streams or 10 paid downloads of a song as the equivalent of one album sold. So, when fans streams Brown's new release on Spotify or Apple Music, his 45 track release counts for 400% than the usual 10-11 song album.
Other artists are taking a similar approach, but with track counts that are half of Brown's. This year, Ty Dolla $ign’s "Beach House 3" had 20 tracks, Lil Yachty’s "Teenage Emotions" 21, Drake’s "More Life" 22, Lil B’s "Black Ken" 27, and Future released 36 songs across two albums in the same week.
The "Shit At A Wall" Approach
Brown and others releasing these super-sized albums are taking a risk.
"It’s also harder than ever to know exactly what will resonate with streaming’s diverse youth demographic, so Brown’s “shit at a wall” approach gives more opportunity for one track to catch on," writes the Guardian's Ben Beaumont-Thomas, "but it’s a dangerous gamble, given that it’s harder to find the gems amid such an intimidating mass."
Known for the hit "This Is Why I'm Hot" (circa 2007) Washington Heights rapper Mims is seeing new success with the RecordGram app, which allows both producers and aspiring artists to rent and lease beats, to the benefit of all parties involved.
Take It To The Bay: RecordGram cofounders Erik Mendelson, Shawn Mims and Winston 'DJ Blackout'
You remember Mims, the Washington Heights rapper responsible for 2007 chart topper “This Is Why I’m Hot" and its delectable, tautological refrain: “I’m hot ‘cause I’m fly / You ain’t ‘cause you not / This why (this is why) this is why I'm hot.” Now he’s back with another compelling product--this time it’s not a song, but an app.
Mims, along with manager Erik Mendelson and producer DJ Blackout, founded RecordGram in February 2016 with the idea of harnessing the power of smartphones to bring a recording studio to life in your pocket. For $90 per year or $9.99 per month, producers can upload beats and lease them to aspiring artists for $5 apiece. If a resulting collaboration turns out to have hit potential, it can pay dividends for both sides.
“I felt like artists needed a system or a utility tool to be able to record [without] spending hundreds of or tens of thousands of dollars in the studio,”explained Mims, 36, in an interview following the SF MusicTech Summit earlier this week.
Mims’ inspiration for the app dates all the way back to the aftermath of “This Is Why I’m Hot.” He and Mendelson say Mims grossed roughly $18 million that year for Capitol, which had paid Mims an advance of $850,000. But after accounting for seven-figure promotional budgets, he recouped only $30,000 or so.
That experience left Mims disillusioned with the music business, and sapped his motivation to record a follow-up. Indeed, he released only one more full-length album: Guilt, in 2009, which didn’t come close to matching his debut. So in 2010, he and Mendelson turned their attention to the tech world, trying to get an app called URemix off the ground. But the product revolved around costly existing copyrights, and they didn’t get anywhere.
“And then ... I guess a light bulb went off in my head,” says Mims. His thought: “Maybe there's something that we can do that allows our users to create original content."
He talked it over with Blackout, who simply googled “how to develop an idea,” and soon they’d farmed out creating the technical underpinnings of what would become RecordGram to some freelancers in India. But a project they thought would cost $1,000 quickly ballooned to $100,000.
Fortunately, the idea caught the attention of industry executives. Mendelson and Blackout moved to Nashville for several months last year, completing the Project Music accelerator—and earning small investments from Universal, Warner and Sony.
This spring, RecordGram won TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield-New York, along with a check for $50,000. Most recently, the startup landed on Apple’s Planet of the Apps and raised a $1 million round led by a $650,000 investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, an early backer of Snapchat.
The three founders still hold 70-75% of RecordGram’s equity, and they’re hoping to hang on to as much as they can going forward. Perhaps for this reason, they’re exploring an ICO later this fall—with the goal of raising a whopping $100 million via Ethereum.
“This is really the direction, I think, that we need to take our business,” says Mendelson. “We don't have to give up any equity, and we can actually involve the community. And if the community has a vested interest in us, then they're going to be our advancers and talk about our platform, which is going to help our business out.”
This publication tends to be skeptical of what may be a centibillion-dollar bubble, and stating a goal to raise $100 million is, of course, no guarantee that it will be achieved.
Even if RecordGram could raise such a large sum, what would the young company do with that sort of war chest? Mendelson has plenty of ideas: kicking off a massive social influencer campaign to drive users to the platform, licensing commercial music from labels and perhaps becoming a full-fledged streaming service—in essence, SoundCloud with a virtual studio attached.
Bold future plans aside, Mims is already quite happy with the here and now; in his current role, the time spent on stage at tech conferences may end up being more lucrative than his time spent onstage at music venues. And with RecordGram, he's giving up-and-comers a label-deal alternative that he was never able to consider in his own career.
“There are artists on the platform now that have taken meetings with labels that are holding off” on signing deals, he says. “They feel like … as the RecordGram platform rises, that they're going to get more visibility on our app than they would ever get through a record label.”
From iTunes to Spotify, the bundling and unbundling music - the practice of combining or separating tracks - has had a major effect on the industry. Here, in Part 1 in a four part series, Adam Marx takes a deep dive into the dynamics of bundling.
In recent years, the dynamics of bundling and unbundling have changed everything in media. But they’ve had an especially palpable effect on music.
This is an exploration of the bundling and unbundling dynamics taking place in the music universe right now. Because of the massive amount of information discussed herein, it is necessary to cover it in series of parts, each explaining a particular aspect of change and restructuring.
This series will appear as the following:
Introduction to the Bundle
Part I: Reformatting the Barriers
Part II: Shifting the Paradigm
Part III: Democratizing the Future
Additionally, all four pieces (including the introduction) will subsequently appear as a single, holistic text, entitled: Unbundled: The Story of Music.
This is the first entry in the story.
A New Emerging Dichotomy of Freedom and Reach
A few months ago, Chris Saadpenned an article on the dynamics of bundling, and how they’re affecting a number of fields. In his piece, Saad addressed how concepts of bundling are impacting areas of creativity like art and music, among others. Ironically, it had a similar air to Joshua Topolsky’s earlier article on media companies, which itself prompted my response on music-startup realities.
Such examples were only briefly mentioned, but one can go deeper on them, particularly in the way of music. Things are happening now to the age-old structure of music that arguably haven’t changed for the better part of five or six decades. And even that is only the tip of the iceberg.
Part of what was so intriguing about Saad’s examination of these morphing areas is just how much change is going on which is not being discussed. In many ways, Saad’s piece shines a light not only on the changing bundling and unbundling dynamics taking place in music, but how these two different forms—yin and yang—are interacting with one another to shape a new musical landscape. What we see is an emerging dichotomy of freedom and reach that we haven’t seen in quite a while.
Three Trends in a Specific Order
Within the context of music, three trends—unbundling, bundling, and unbundling again—matter. And they matter in that sequence. This is so because each (un)bundling action touches a different area of the music arena, and thus their interaction together forms a new paradigm.
They lay out as follows:
unbundled
Covered in Part I, Reformatting the Barriers
Choice
Format
BUNDLED
Covered in Part II, Shifting the Paradigm
Bundled in the Wrong Way
Power and Paradigm Shift
Sexy vs. Unsexy
unbundled
Covered in Part III, Democratizing the Future
Power, Gatekeeping, Scarcity, and Democratization
Ownership
Money and Community
The Expansive Powers of Identity
The music industry, like all other forms of media, is undergoing such a massive tectonic shift that we’re only beginning to now see how big the fissures are. The most interesting thing will be how these changing power paradigms affect the music coming out, and the communities which are built around the material.
Stay tuned!
Find me on Twitter @adammarx13 and let’s talk music, tech, and business!
