The Q&A: "You're competing in the most absurd, oversaturated field"

Singer Dan Mangan on attention-getting tools for an era of information overload

Dan Mangan

I’m interested in the ways independent musicians attract attention and build audiences as a special case of the predicament so many of us face in so many fields: technology offers more tools than ever, but when everyone uses those tools at once, it actually becomes harder to get noticed.

One person who’s been unusually industrious in finding solutions is Dan Mangan, a stalwart Vancouver singer-songwriter who’s spent his adult life writing and playing his songs. He won Juno awards for Breakthrough Artist and Best Alternative Album in 2012. He married and had kids. And he’s still out here making music and helping other musicians find audiences.

His new album, Natural Light, features the ancient sound of a guy with a guitar. He’s promoting it through every contemporary social-media tool, including his Substack newsletter, where readers will find posters they can print and tape to telephone poles in their neighbourhoods. He’s on mass texting terms with thousands of fans. Perhaps most intriguing, he co-created Side Door, an online tool for connecting performing artists with venues ranging from plush-seat theatres to apartments and back yards.

No artist sets out to be a social-media virtuoso. But fewer and fewer can afford not to. I spoke to Dan Mangan on Friday about the new world for ancient arts. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Paul Wells: Can you tell me how the music business was different for an independent artist in 2005, when you were starting out, from what it's like now?

Dan Mangan: [When I started] it was entirely run by gate-keepers. There were fewer channels of distribution and marketing and proliferation of all sorts. You really had to appeal to the people in positions of power to gain access to the kingdom. You spent a lot of your time applying to showcases and festivals, trying to put yourself in places where you thought that the industry might be. It was like you would stand in the line of fire and hope for a stray bullet. I did Canadian Music Week, and North by Northeast, and I did BreakOut West, which was then called the Western Canadian Music Awards, and I did South by Southwest. There's a bunch in England, there’s one in Hamburg, in Australia there’s a festival called Big Sound. They’re all over the world. They’re these industry conferences, the same that there would be for realtors, or makers of kids’ toys. You’d go and listen to people speak, and then you would try and humbly press a demo into their hand, and hope that they would listen to it and go: Oh, my God, you're wonderful! That was how you got into the industry.

There was press back then. There was an arts weekly in every town. [He’s talking about weekly independent print newspapers stuffed with club ads and personals, on the model of New York’s Village Voice: Now and Eye in Toronto, Voir and the Mirror in Montreal, (X)Press in Ottawa, Fast Forward in Calgary…] Essentially all of that is gone. Now, once you've made the music it’s all about social media.

There was a good quote somebody tweeted recently: The joke is on musicians, because we still think music is the product and the truth these days, more than ever, is that you are the product. What that’s meant is that instead of having five distribution channels, you have infinite distribution channels, and we are completely oversaturated with artists. It's the only business model where there is 10x the supply that there is the demand, and every actor of supply is trying their best to squeeze their little bit of product in front of your face and ears, and hope that you remember them.

Now labels will run you through a calculation. The artists now have to entirely prove their concept on their own, from their living room or from their bedroom, posting online. And if the world is responding to it, if they're going viral, if they're blowing up on their own, well, then, clearly they're worth adding a little bit of coal to that fire, and let's shovel some money and some expertise, to try and make them blow up even bigger. Very few labels are signing anything that isn't already proven in the market already.

You can't just make music. You have to be a content creator. You have to be a video editor. You have to be a website designer. You have to be a photographer. You have to be a videographer. You have to be a marketing specialist. All these things.

PW: Did you ever think that you would have to be spending as much time as you do, thinking about how to find audiences, and how to connect musicians to money?

Mangan: Certainly not in the early days. When I first started out, I did a million house concerts. I came up with this philosophy that if your footprint cannot be wide, let it be deep, you know, a fox paw in the snow. If you can't sell a thousand tickets, how can you have the most memorable, earth-shattering experience with 40 people in a living room or in a backyard, let's say?

I didn't have access to the gatekeepers. I didn't have a way in. I didn't have a manager or label for a long time, and so I figured I would just try and learn to do all those things on my own. I realized if I played to 30 people in a bar I would get paid in beer tickets, but if I played to 30 people in a living room I'd make 400 bucks, and I'd sell a bunch of CDs, and I'd high-five a bunch of people and feel like I had left a mark in that city. When I came back to that city those 40 people were going to tell five friends each, and the next time there would be 80 people at the show, and there was some growth.

The idea of a network of house concerts was stirring in my head and in 2017 I started this company called Side Door with my friend Laura, who still runs it. And now there's 11,000 artists and about 4,000 hosts on there. The site connects artists and hosts for off-grid shows. There's a lot of cool bells and whistles and ticketing features, and you can split revenue and all sorts of stuff. My experience trying to bring users in and make them happy on a tech platform really altered how I think about having any kind of longevity as an artist.

I don't have a huge audience, but I do have a very dedicated audience: people who send me incredible notes about how my music has been a huge factor in their life, or how it’s been present in a really special moment. I’ve leaned on those people. The truth is that I want to have a relationship with these people that lasts.

I record every one of my concerts, and during the show I say, text me the password for tonight, and I will text you a Dropbox link, and a recording of tonight's show if you ever want to listen to it again. So now we have a relationship over text message. I've got about 12,000 people that I can text with through this app called Community. I can text by location, so if I have a show in Winnipeg I can reach out to everyone within 40 miles of Winnipeg and say, here's the link to the show. I probably sell about 60 to 70% of my concert tickets through email or through text message. And then the rest would come through digital ads from the promoter. Having that direct relationship has meant that I can survive into my forties as an artist and continue to have a relationship and continue to have a career.

PW: So it used to be that the entire game was to find the one door that could get you from not being in the conversation at all, to being in the conversation. And that's like John Hammond discovering Bruce Springsteen, where your life changes overnight. Now we're in what should be a utopia, because the costs of entry have collapsed. But the value of entry isn't nearly what it used to be, either. You can make an album in your living room. You can send it to anyone in the world and it sounds exactly like you made it. You can push out your own message on Instagram or TikTok. But since almost everybody on the planet is doing that, it gets you no closer to being in the conversation.

Mangan: That's right. It used to be that there was room for about 30 or 40 famous musicians at once. You know you had your Phil Collinses, and your Stings, and your Madonnas, and your Janet Jacksons, and all of those people were shoveled through the same four distribution channels. There were five big record labels in the world. And those record labels owned all the access to radio and all the access to distribution into stores.

Then in the ’90s, a bunch of indie record labels had some considerable success. You had Sub Pop who broke Nirvana. The model started to shift a little bit, and those massive labels kind of broke up.

But now the barrier to access is over. What that means is that everyone with a guitar is trying to get access. You're competing in the most absurd, oversaturated field. Sometimes people break through by being really earnest and sweet. Something that works on TikTok is an unexpected person playing music to you. It's not a really beautiful, well-filtered, well- photographed person. There's a guy who's 85 years old, and he sings these sweet cover songs, and he's a huge star on TikTok, because you wouldn't expect him to be the person. But then people start following that trend, and they’re trying to game the game.

I hate to be the old guy yelling at the sky or feeling like the world used to be better than it is. I don't actually believe that it ever was better than it is. However, it's different. Artists start to adjust their artistic inspiration or their output, or their north star to fit a model. They start making music that is immediately digestible in 15 seconds. You have to wonder: have we lost artistic patience? Rather than having a truthful thing that is magnetic because it is truthful, artists are making a thing only considering that it could be successful. And that is a very dangerous thing for art, because art that's successful in the short term is rarely meaningful in the long term.

PW: Tell me more about Side Door. How does it work concretely? I hadn't heard of it before this week, and most of my readers will not have heard of it. It's like Airbnb for gigs?

Mangan: Side Door was born of a philosophy of trying to sidestep the gatekeepers of the industry. We did some research, and we found that 97% of people playing shows do not have an agent. They don't make enough money to make it worthwhile for an agent. And so Side Door was born of this idea of, how do we serve that 97%?

Anyone can host a show. If you have access to a space, a backyard, your living room, your cafe, your warehouse, your bookstore, your office space, your co-work space, curling rink — whatever — you create a profile for that space, not dissimilar to Airbnb. Then you can create a Show Call, which is basically broadcasting your availability. Something like: “We were thinking about hosting a show this summer, and here's the kind of artist we're looking for.” Artists do the same thing. You build a profile as an artist, and you create a Show Call. You could say, “I'm going to be in Houston, Texas and I'm looking for a show between July 14th to 17th.” Both the hosts and the artists can broadcast their availability to each other, and then they can chat, and they can build a show together.

We built a ticketing mechanism where you can have multiple payees. You sell tickets and every ticket that's sold, you can see how much is going to the host, and how much is going to the artist, how much is going to SOCAN on the artists’ behalf to pay for the performance royalties. We're trying to bring daylight to this underground world and make it really normal to play a ticketed show in a cafe, after the cafe closes. It's mutually beneficial. Right? There's a bookstore here in town that's a Side Door host. I've seen a number of shows there, and now, every time I walk by that bookstore, I'm inclined to go in there and buy a book, because I have these positive connotations with it. Businesses are served by it. We’ve paid out over $3,000,000 to artists over the last seven years. It’s a part of my brain that I never thought I would access. I never thought that I would be pitching venture capitalists on my music tech company. But building a startup is not dissimilar to building a career in the arts.

Spotify has been in bad graces with the artistic community for many years. They've helped a lot of artists have a career. A lot of artists have been discovered on Spotify. The algorithm has just worked for them. The fact that [Spotify CEO] Daniel Eck invested 700 million dollars in military AI, though, is the biggest slap in the face. It's like some evil supervillain shit. Why does the guy who builds the platform have 700 million loose bucks hanging around to invest in military AI, and the millions and millions of artists who have given him that 700 million dollars can't pay their rent?

I'm not in a position where I can take my music off Spotify. I'm not comfortable enough financially, and that's a very shitty thing to say out loud. It's a very shitty thing to feel. I wish I could leave this thing, but I can't. But I've been using this app called Untitled for a while, just to share music with the label and the band and stuff like that. It's a private music sharing app. It works really well. So I decided to create my own little streaming service through this app, put my catalog on there, so people can listen to it another way. I put it behind the paywall on my Substack, and that was my way of saying, Hey, this is a way you can support me and sidestep these big, multinational corporations if that's something you're interested in.

PW: My solution as a consumer is to stream on Tidal, which pays artists better royalty rates than Spotify does. And I set aside a budget every month to buy albums on Bandcamp. [More about Bandcamp here]

Mangan: Beautiful. Effectively, you're an angel investor in these artists’ lives.

PW: Most people aren't even aware that the service they're using to stream music is not helpful to the people who are creating the music. And it's a cosmic irony that the universe has provided a solution: they now have music that is not produced by people. There are bands that are nothing but an AI construct?

Mangan: Yeah. For a long time, when you'd hear AI music, it was jokey stuff. Something like, this is what The Police would sound like if Taylor Swift was singing their songs. And that was the extent of AI, and I didn't feel threatened by that. But this band, Velvet Sundown, well, it’s not good, but it's passable. If you heard it in a coffee shop, you wouldn't second-guess it. You wouldn't think: is this AI? For the first time I thought, oh, this is my lane, this is indie music.

It's really not good music, but they put out an album every 2 weeks for 6 weeks, and it had accrued in those 6 weeks almost twice my monthly listeners on Spotify. It’s about outpacing artists. They can affordably flood the market with so much of this music and eventually some of it's going to catch fire. I think there's close to 100,000 new songs on Spotify every day. How long before there's a million songs or 10 million new songs on Spotify every day? 99% of it just AI generated. It's just numbers to them. And they're hoping that one of those songs takes off. And eventually it will. That's just how the algorithm works.

I fear for a musical landscape where artists have altered the kind of music they make to fit the medium of social media. At what point is music just this thing that happens in the background of your life? When I was young I spent time listening to music. I would sit with headphones, and I would just listen to music, and I would consider the words and music, and I would feel it. I'm just hoping that teenagers who have that extra time and that insatiable appetite to consume the world and understand it— I hope that they're still having that sense of discovery with music.

I would love Spotify to offer the ability to check a box that says: I don't want any music that's AI. I think a lot of people would do that.

PW: You've got a new album out. Where are you in the cycle of that album? Are you touring?

Mangan: I'm in the social media content-creator portion of my album cycle. My record came out in May and I am trying to get the world to hear it. It's my seventh album and it is unquestionably the best thing I've ever done. It was made in this miraculous, serendipitous six-day stint at a cabin. I've never felt that amount of creative flow, ever in my life. I’m hoping that people connect emotionally with this music so that it might stay with them for longer than five seconds. I’m touring in the fall, doing a number of larger cities in Canada with the full band. Essentially, I'm going to be cycling between Canada, the States, and Europe for the next 18 months or so.

PW: Are you doing any of this through Side Door?

Mangan: I do. Especially in places where I'm less known. When I tour in the States or Europe, I tour alone just to keep costs down. In those instances, there's way more room to add a living room show. If I’ve got a few days off in a row, I’ll say, let's just add a cool side show here.