FAILED EXPERIMENTS (WHILE FINDING YOURSELF)

I often find myself wondering about what we destroy in order to feel the illusion of control. The virtue of change, disruption and all things that come with starting a new to find ourselves at the same spot again; and those who benefit from selling a dream forever.

Gotta get your shot ups. That’s been my motto for better or worse. The constant in my life has always been momentum and this is the energy we’re imbuing into MINE.FM and anyone who builds alongside us. The last sprint was live-streaming, bonding curves, and whatever else Racer built to inspire a new wave of social-fi apps–a term that feels like a contradiction as I type.

If anyone reading has been paying attention to our social activity, we’ve shared minimal updates of a live streaming web-app, which we built, shopped around to potential customers and investors until the smoke signals of a failed PMF rose from the ashes of an empty Brex account. But in the midst of failure and unmet user needs, there were nuggets of wisdom that I was able to sift through and document.

Live streaming ain’t new and there’s a new generation of builders trying to revolutionize digital companionship, and with good reason. The rise of “companion content”, or long-form content with minimal edits that listeners find comforting is indicative of an overall deficit of intimacy we all may be experiencing in 2024. The alienation is also, of course, not new and we may always find ourselves searching for kinship when society’s demands pull us apart. I often think about growing up as a latchkey kid in the early 00’s with a working single mom and much older siblings and how the static of television was a welcome presence in an empty home. Live streaming is a worthwhile pursuit with a seemingly infinite depth of problems to solve and yet I found our approach limiting for the community of music nerds we envisioned ourselves serving.

Ultimately, I found myself as a founder, overcompensating for this reality of alienation and digital distance by trying to create a consumer product with clear logic, thus making it superior and more convenient to the in-person concert. Every experience had an endgame, because what was the internet if not a tool for efficiency and expedited experiences? There is no need for the friction that the journey offers us when the destination is right there. But this line of thinking is off. What is, is, and what isn’t, is not, for a reason. The internet, more specifically, social networks, allow us to perceive a 4th dimension (or an approximation of one) and bend our perception of space and time (i.e. the friction) so that we can feel closer to one another in a way the three-dimensional space does not allow. In contrast, the beauty of our three dimensional existence lies within the constraints and friction of space and time: the people, bound by proximity and circumstance, are what makes the contours of our moments memorable. Each has its worth but will never be equal. 

Exchange is the expression of desire and if our desires remain infinite then the drive to exchange with one another will also continue. This, at times, was the main motivation for me when trying to maneuver the music industry’s cartel-like business tactics, the tech industry’s lazy push for AI and the incoming wave of slop content that’s being fed to users just to fill the void that overpromises left behind. The exchange of human interaction will become a premium as we have an increasing number of abstractions between people, places and our own ego. And more importantly, what are the contextual clues that fill our periphery when we interact with something unfamiliar and unexpected? How do we find affinity in the alien without the guidance of another human perspective pushing against our own bias? And the questions go on, but in a weird way the unknown is what makes the future exciting to think about, personally. 

So instead of worrying only about the plight of artists, I shifted my mind to the plight of the ecosystem and what that meant for human and sound exchange. With each form of technological progress that has allowed us to dive deeper into musical solipsism, it feels like we’ve forgotten what music means for the collective. Maybe the novelty of private music consumption over the last 40-ish years has reached its peak, and the only thing left is to unravel the silos we’ve built up for ourselves to make something new out of the nuggets of human experience previously taken for granted.