Blog: BandLab

The creator tools industry, meaning the market for music-making hardware and software, has historically served as the funnel to the recorded music industry. At the centre of that industry are big record labels, which trade on career artists.

Writing about a new era of music fluidity last month, we noted how streaming services might align more closely with creation, as Spotify has done by acquiring music creation platform Soundtrap. Well, that vision for Spotify is no longer.

The creator tools business has been one of the biggest winners of the pandemic, as people turned to music-making in record numbers. Second-hand gear marketplace, Reverb.com, provided some insight into the products driving the creator boom – and two, in particular, stand out: the MPC One and OP-1 samplers.

Creator tools are taking an evolutionary step toward commercially empowering creators. Live streaming tool Happs’ recent $4.7 million investment is a relatively small yet significant bet that the future of creator tools in live streaming and beyond is not solely in tools designed to create content.

Regular readers will know that MIDiA has been analysing the creator tool space for some time now and building the case for why the changes that are taking place will be transformational not just for the creator tools space itself but for the music business as a whole.

News has emerged of Deezer being a potential buyer of troubled Soundcloud. This follows on from Spotify’s prolonged but ultimately abortive courting last year . Soundcloud was once a streaming powerhouse, with 175 million Monthly Active Users reported in October 2014.

I recently took part in the True Music Forum in Madrid, an event organized by Boiler Room. I was on a panel that explored whether DIY is now coming of age with a host of high profile artists, most of them urban artists, bypassing or twisting the traditional label model and still achieving stand-out success.

One of the themes my MIDiA colleague Tim Mulligan (the name’s no coincidence, he’s my brother too!) has been developing over in our online video research is that of next generation TV operators. With the traditional pay-TV model buckling under the pressure of countless streaming subscriptions services like Netflix (there are more than 50 services in the US alone) pay-TV companies have responded with countless apps of their own such as HBO Go and CBS All Access.