A Musical History of Digital Startup Culture

Startup language, culture and strategy--once seen as enemies to the music business--have permeated artists’ careers and exerted significant influence over their creative decisions. From Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo as ＂entertainment software＂ to Drake’s meme-friendly video for ＂Hotline Bling＂ as ＂open source code,＂ some of the music industry’s biggest celebrities today are openly embracing tech rhetoric and strategy to inform their creative decisions.

Tech companies like Napster, Spotify, and Facebook have exerted a significant influence on how artists market and promote their music. But what happens when artists begin to treat themselves as the technology? How does pop culture shift when artists start framing their success and popularity as an entrepreneurial and engineering problem, not just as a cultural or aesthetic problem?

Using several actionable case studies across the past 50 years, from David Bowie to 3LAU, this book takes a deep-dive into the music written of, by, and for startup culture--and how this burgeoning creative scene is changing the meaning of artistry.

Cherie Hu is a journalist focusing on the intersection of music and technology. She writes regular columns for Billboard, Forbes and Music Business Worldwide, with additional bylines in Variety, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and the Columbia Journalism Review. In 2017 she received the Reeperbahn Festival’s inaugural award for Music Business Journalist of the Year.