Chicago Discussions

The discussion day (Saturday, March 1) is invitation only but we're doing our best to accommodate all requests for an invite. To request one just add yourself to the list on this page.

Emcee: Dan Sinker

David McCreath (Mule Radio) and Melissa Pierce (COO Everpurse, Director Chicago Women Developers, Filmmaker)

2:00pm

McCreath - Mule Radio and podcast profitability

Pierce - Everpurse, filmmaking, Chicago Women Developers

Tagline: Melissa and David speak about the line between amateurs and professionals and contemporary patronage, with highlights from their own experiences.

Context: The line between professional and amateur.

Q: David McCreath, how can someone be "too professional" for your podcast?

• Amateurs sing a song, often for the first time, on David's podcast.

• Grew up in a family / culture trying to get everyone to sing (Sesame Street, etc)

• Lots of people who just perform for themselves, so he tried to get people to do it (it's hard).

• Advertising model in podcast.

• John Gruber is in their network and his podcast basically prints money. He's the biggest "Apple booster." One of the first people who decided to go pro blogger.

• He sells subscriptions to his blog

• Gruber talks about Apple and technology on his podcast.

• Dropping ads into non-talkshow podcasts is hugely disruptive, so they have to figure out other ways to make money.

• Kickstarter, TugBoat, and Patreon are examples of alternative funding models. Gittip?

• Professional amateur. I make a big public statement and then I have to make the fucker.

• 1000 members in Chicago Women Developers

• Kickstarter about our audience. "Give us $30 and we'll make a movie about the day you were born." Each individual kickstarter gets one, so they get to hang out.

• Did you look at anything other than Kickstarter?

• IndieGoGo and self funding.

• McCreath: $150 to cover songs. Two buyers. Had to cover Royals by Lorde. The other is a bluegrass/banjo version of Joe Walsh's Life's Been Good.

• Know your donors.

• Pierce: Mom network talking about diapers when she heard about Twitter from Harper. Made Life in Perpetual Beta. Send in $30 and she mailed out a shirt.

• McCreath: This is the dream of punk rock - we can make our own shit.

• Pierce: Where is the line between professional and amateur?

• McCreath: "The means of production," ah, I'm starting to sound like Marx...

• The early period was a "speed bump" where you need to sell out to big corporations.

• Pierce: We're finding a different patron system. Who's amateur, who's professional, and does it matter?

• McCreath: What we're working on at Mule Radio in terms of patronage is asking listeners for patronage in return for content.

• Q: Small audiences, finding your niche, regardless of its size and mass appeal.

• Pierce: There's always going to be someone more talented. That's not going to stop me from making mediocre videos. I love it.

Pat Sansone (Wilco, The Autumn Defense) and Genevieve Thiers (Founder sittercity.com, opera singer)

2:45pm

Thiers - Founder of SitterCity, opera singer

Sansone - Wilco, The Autumn Defense

Context: How do you manage time between projects and life?

Tagline: Sansone and Thiers discuss time management, commitment, and knowing what you're good at.

• Thiers: I've got more time than I've ever had now.
• Graduated with a degree from Northwestern University in opera singing

Q via Sansone: Why did you start SitterCity?

• Thiers: I didn't want to wait tables. I came back from Oxford and my mom thought it was a great idea to be a bagger at Genuardi's. My whole life has been a direct line away from that. I got lost in SitterCity and put my whole life into it. Don't do that with a business. You will die.
• Sansone: My sister studied classical piano at Vasser. I played shitty clubs and bars, making zero money.
• Watched his sister burn out in the classical music world.

Q via Thiers: What was your trajectory?

• Sansone: I just can't do anything else. I really just do not have the ability to do anything else. It's the only thing I know how to do, only thing I've ever done. I'm a workaholic.

Q via Kung: When do you know when to go all in or when to reserve a bit of yourself?

• Thiers: You have to go all-in. I'm an evangelist and an inventor. I'm a disruptor. When you are an evangelist/inventor, you have to go all in. Leaving was the most painful of all. If you're lucky it'll fail fast.

Q via audience: How did you know when to step away from day to day operations?

• Sansone: I just didn't want the record to turn out like the last one. Instead of looking for another label, we'll make another record that we love, get a publicist, go on tour, and sell at least 10,000 [like the last record]. And we sold 3,000. Some people can DIY. We couldn't. So for the next record, we got a label again and it was definitely a better situation, but again no management. Nobody in the ear of the label getting on their asses.

• Thiers: It's good to know what you're good at. I tried to negotiate the sale of the company and it was the worst mistake I ever made. There are a couple things you should never do. Don't sell your own company.

• Sansone: Artists and musicians are typically not the greatest promoters.

Q via Jesse Von Doom: DIY has become a huge church, but I am a big fan of record labels. How do you prioritize the various influences in your life?

• Thiers: I'm a hot mess, is what I am. I'm doing what makes me scared now, and that's how I know what I need to do. There's a girl in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who has an interview to do the thing that she wants to do more than anything in the world and that day she forgets her contacts and doesn't get it. She goes on to save the galaxy multiple times but doesn't care. I psych myself out doing this.

• Sansone: It's about setting things in motion. We need to have someone who's paying attention to us. We need our own team and someone who thinks of each project as its own entity. It just so happens that the big band is taking a break just as The Autumn Defense takes off, which has been great. But it's going to be a challenge. Check in with me in about 6 months.

• Thiers: If we live.

Chris Kaskie (President Pitchfork, The Dissolve) and Samuel Valenti IV (Ghostly, drip.fm)

3:30pm

Chris Kaskie - President Pitchfork, The Dissolve

Samuel Valenti IV - Ghostly, drip.fm (finding revenue from subscribers)

Context: How did you guys get to know each other?

Tagline: In this talk, Sam and Chris discuss balancing vision and principles with profitability.

Valenti: I probably reached out to you.

Kaskie: I think I reached out to you.

Valenti: Some sort of midwestern connection.

Kaskie: Sam and I had known each other for years and had not met each other until today. There had been a lot of crossover between drip and Pitchfork and nothing tangible until today.

Valenti: It was kind of old-school. Like a record label and a editorial.

Q via Brian Kung: What kinds of events did you have that crossed over?

Valenti: It's a theological crossover more than anything.

Kaskie: There weren't any. Music doesn't change depending on its distribution. It doesn't matter how it's distributed.

Valenti: It's about the necessity for an artist. CASH Music is a good example of it.

Kaskie: I need labels and place like Pitchfork or drip. It's like looking at a menu of 18,000 songs and I can't even order off of a menu with 40 items. People need to start talking about music and less about how it's dying.

Q via audience: How do you make money while holding true to the aesthetic [Spirit?] of Pitchfork/Drip?

Valenti: It's in our DNA to do RFPs and pitch for sponsorships. Is this something we use? That led to our relationship with Behance. I built Drip because it was something I wanted in college. I feel like it would be a disservice to our fans and our community if we didn't work with sponsors we weren't excited about. That said, we have worked with sponsors we weren't totally excited about, but that's more a matter of our bands.

Kaskie: Money is a weird thing. (laughter) Profound thoughts. We made a pretty conscious choice as Pitchfork's grown to use money to help Pitchfork grow in the direction we felt was right. It's a trial and error process that continues today. As much as we think we have a say in reinventing how brands think about advertising, that's the brand advertising on our terms. We get a lot more no's to that than yes's to that. How can we do advertising better? A fan of a band is an important thing, a fan of a label is an important thing, and those relationships are something we should think about. Making more money is easy if you decide to lose everything. I want to retire someday, but not until I'm in my 70s. Or 40s.

Q via audience: I feel like you guys can try to dictate the terms of advertisement.

Valenti: I think Ghostly and Drip are taste engines and we apply those to advertisements as well. People want to see that you stand for what you put out.

Kaskie: We try to pretend we're bigger than we are. We have a louder voice thanks to the World Wide Web then we probably are. So how do we do it on our terms and take that to companies? We don't. We just say we're creative people and this is what we stand for.

Q via audience: How careful are you in choosing to partner with a festival or another site to keep from offending your fanbase?

Kaskie: It's what I spend my day being careful about doing, protecting the people that write for my website as well as the people who read it. We have a reputation just like any band that if you jump the shark, you'll lose a portion of your audience. If I had to answer to a board, we'd probably be viewed as a failure because we've walked away from millions of dollars of advertising. There have definitely been things that haven't worked or have been bad ideas, but that's the trial and error part of it.

Q via audience: How do you hold on to the Pitchfork identity as you grow and partner with affiliate networks?

Kaskie: That's a fucking good question. I have no idea. It's like...we can't have this dude walking around. Not in terms of what's cool or not cool for Pitchfork, it's just not cool. That's one example. Part of our job is helping brands figure out how to be good at what they do.

Hold your ground.

Q via Jesse Von Doom: You both are doing something that looks like a terrible idea. How do you take something which on the surface looks like a terrible idea and run with it?

Valenti: I think any good business is counter-current. I got lucky and met Thomas from Daft Punk and what he said was that what we always try to do is be different. I think you should be counter to whatever the prevailing trend is. We tend to run into a burning building. I was using Napster in college and wanted to make a record label.

Kaskie: I don't want to be GQ, I want to be something you leave on your bookshelf or coffee table.

Valenti: I don't think anyone here can help it. You have to follow your own ambitions.

Jessica Hopper (Music Editor, Rookie) and Jes Skolnik (Board Pure Joy, musician, writer)

4:30pm

Jes Skolnik - Board Pure Joy, musician, writer
Jessica Hopper - Music Editor, Rookie

Context: Accessibility

Tagline: Jes Skolnik and Jessica Hopper talk about the nonprofit venture, Pure Joy, a new safe space for all ages and creeds, as well as all of the considerations that go into making a truly safe space for everyone.

Hopper: Can you outline what Pure Joy is and how it differentiates itself from a legit all-ages venue?

Skolnik: Our mission statement, essentially, which is what we are refining and refining. We are designing it to be a space that is accessible to everyone from the ground up to be physically accessible.

Hopper: Can you elaborate?

Skolnik: I came from a very accessible space. That space was absolutely necessary for someone like me, a place where I could be away from [the negative] and near the positive. Being able to build that space for people from the ground up really the mission. As I've grown up, punk spaces have not been safe spaces simply because they are punk spaces: racism, sexism, violence. It exists in a way that-

Hopper: Where there's a way for someone to be marginalized?

Skolnik: Exactly, so we're trying to design the space in a way that is safe for everyone.

Hopper: What are the ideas that you are working with in order to make it so that this is a place that everyone is welcome to and is truly accessible?

Skolnik: The physical aspect of that is that we carefully thought about where it is in terms of accessibility. It's in a space accessible by two 24 hour bus lines. It's relatively accessible. It's in a place parents would feel safe with - there's a police station nearby. And there are three high schools really close to here. It's accessible even if you don't have a car. You have to be part of the "in crowd" in order to know where anything is [in the punk community].

Hopper: You may not automatically be offered an entry into (or an exit from) mainstream into what you are interested in. And so having a place that is genuinely accessible [is valuable]. What goes into a space that makes a space safe?

Skolnik: We're also a community center and designing it as a community center. We have after hours programs from fabrics making to poetry.

Hopper: Are adults going to feel weird going there? Do you care about that?

Skolnik: I was talking about this. My band played a show and I was talking about that. People were like, "Beer. Where's the beer?" This is Chicago. You can find that on any corner.

Q from audience: How is this sustainable? Most clubs make their margins on alcohol.

Skolnik: The only way it can exist as a nonprofit. We give artists and 80/20 split, which is not something you can do as a business. We are going to have to run an IndieGoGo or a Kickstarter. There's a lot of money in the city for after school programs or events because the public school system is a fucking mess.

Q from audience: How are you navigating the city politics around this? I know that there's no category for all-ages venues. There's nothing in-between a bar and a juice bar. How are you approaching that?

Skolnik: Chicago's a particularly hard city for establishing something like this. I was involved with something similar in Baltimore, and in Baltimore, nobody cared. They were like, "You want to use the space for something that's not drugs? That's great. Go for it." And it's not like that in Chicago. We're super lucky. We have alderman support. Sarah is a paralegal at a law firm that supports nonprofits and they are giving us legal support, pro bono. Having city council support and Carrie and I working at the same labor union, working with the city, gave us connections. All of those together have made this a more viable option.

Q from audience: I'm curious, does Rahm Emanuel help you in any way?

Skolnik: NO! Not in any way, at all. That guy is...not cool! (laughter)

Q from Matthew Tift: Have you thought about your online strategies? Can you talk about that?

Skolnik: Not really.

Hopper: You're really up on Tumblr.

Skolnik: I started doing music essays and journalism on tumblr and kind of half-assed it into a freelance writing gig.

Hopper: I feel like having a space that is age neutral will make it so that people will be interested in Pure Joy.

Skolnik: There's been a lot of interest from bookers who are excited about booking the space.

Q from audience: I was wondering if you could talk about online space and safety there. Cops have made fake twitter accounts and shut down shows. Can we talk about safe space online?

Skolnik: Absolutely. My introduction to online space came from Zinespace, the first place I could talk about sexual assault, which is where [Hopper] and I met, where survivors could talk in a safe space. The internet has been amazing for that. We have definitely talked about that and how to bring the safety of what is an online community to

Q from Meredith: I'm curious about what you think about not just being accessible, but being invited. You can open a door, but how do you make it so that it feels like it's a place that someone wants to be?

Hopper: I think from my experience in terms of things with Rookie. One of the things we did was show by content to show how we were different, how we understood this female experience culturally within the internet. We monitor comments super closely and show by example how to be positive and supportive and disagree with each other nicely. Rookie is literally the only place on the internet where I read the comments. If you're creepy, it's peace out.

Skolnik: I was at an event where people came up and asked "How we can help" and helped us unload.

Issues at unsafe venue spaces for women:

• Asked if you play bass
• Asked if you sing
• Sexual pressure women
• Asked whose girlfriend you are

Hopper: Is this going to be a volunteer based venue?

Skolnik: I will be the only full-time employee. There will be a part-time role and the rest will be volunteer.

Hopper: Will using volunteers make them more invested in the venture?

Skolnik: Absolutely. What I've found is that if there is no strong community, there is nothing. That's how great art gets made. A great community.

Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500, Damon and Naomi) and Harper Reed (former CTO, Obama for America)

5:15pm
Damon Krukowski - Galaxie 500, Damon and Naomi

Harper Reed - Former CTO Obama for America, Threadless

Context: I'm not going to ask these guys a question.

Tagline: Harper Reed and Damon Krukowski cover a wide range of topics including conversion, making money, and effective organization.

Krukowski: I'll ask Harper a question, since he's been involved in politics. How do you make people take action, like buy a record or go to a show? These kinds of offline, actual activities, is becoming more a question. Since you've been in the business of getting people to vote or give money, how is that done?

Reed: I was mostly a bureaucrat. To answer your question, one of the things I noticed when I was talking to friends who were trying to get people to do things is that they weren't really majoring the action. They're not quantifying [action]. A lot of what we did on OFA was quantifying those actions. When we sent an email, we could say what was effective and would know what knobs to twiddle. Before our email campaigns, the president never said, "hey." When the President said, "hey," people gave boatloads of money and now the president says "hey." Through measurement, we were able to see that. Now, this gets really boring.

Krukowski: Information flows like what?

Reed: Probably a sledgehammer.

Krukowski: So not like whatever.

Reed: It's not your friend.

Krukowski: Actually getting a hold of the data is very hard.

Reed: I don't think it's hard, it's just that nobody cares. It takes someone like an entrepreneur or someone who cares to get together and make it go.

Krukowski: I have an app and the transparency with Apple is not there. The information flows, but then it's gone.

Reed: That's probably a mistake on your part.

Q from audience: Even if you had the data, you'd have so much data, you'd drown in it. What do you do with it?

Reed: Are there third party apps that will parse your protected data?

Audience member: They aren't good.

Reed: Then make one. That's how...that's how you become rich. (laughter) If there's only one company that can parse these weird documents from iTunes, you can charge $15 a file to parse them and get information out of them. Do you know Pud? Pud created a website, Fuck Company, that listed all of the companies that were going out of business.

Krukowski: There's a lot of misinformation and information obfuscation in the music industry.

Answer from Audience: David Jacobs says hello and he's working on a solution for getting more information from your iTunes app.

Reed: There's such a flood of information that sometimes I just want to lay down. One of the big things we talk about is the conversion rate. What are we trying to convert for? What are we trying to optimize? What are we trying to do?

Krukowski: For instance for my app-

Reed: First you need people to download it and then you need them to subscribe. How do you actually get them to subscribe? That's your actual business model. And here's where it gets dark. Sometimes the conversion rate changes content. Here is where we sell out. And I have sold out. (laughter)

Krukowski: The indie ideal is not really about that.

Reed: Indie is not about conversion. But it is, really. They did the same things that we all do. You need a certain mass to make it worthwhile to go to a show. We're all talking about business, but we don't admit it.

Krukowski: But the culture is not about conversion. Here's a few paradoxes I heard in the talks emerging today. "Time is not money."

Reed: I spend a lot of time on minecraft. That is not making me any money.

Krukowski: Which is not about conversion.

Reed: I have a lot of fun with my brother.

Krukowski: Now you're in a situation where you can apply yourself all you want on your opera or whatever.

Reed: You have to try to make money if you want to make money. If you say, "Money is not important to me." That is not a good way to make money. I've done a lot of crazy computer things in Chicago and made zero money. Then I was like, "I want to make some motherfucking money." Then I joined the campaign and then didn't make any money. I think if you do something for art and then expect that to make money, then you're doing it wrong.

Krukowski: I think art and money used to align better.

Reed: I think we have a fantastical recollection of what happened.

Q from Jessica Skolnik: Do you think money is inherently corrupt?

Reed: Jessica recently told me about Rookie magazine and my first thought was that you could make a lot of money. Whether it's corruption that brings you to that point or a pure vision. Threadless was one of these places that for the first seven years was pure. Then at some point, they said, "fuck it, let's make money." I used to do a presentation and one of the slides was, "We're awesome because we've never used money on advertising. It's all word of mouth." Then one day I realized it was wrong. And I had to change the narrative, and that's when you rewrite history, and that's hard.

Krukowski: Punk rock accidentally created the brand as a meaningful identity tool. That scares me as a corruptive force. How can you shape an aesthetic, do work as a creator, without creating a brand identity that becomes a corruptive influence? Rookie is now in that place where it's become a powerful brand, but how do you keep it attached to the community?

Reed: 4chan is a great example of a site that went the other way.

Krukowski: So did they monetize that?

Reed: I don't know how they'd monetize that. But another example is in open source projects, which either are hydra headed or have a benevolent dictator for life. Like Adrian.

Krukowski: Punk is not a safe structure. If you let everybody in, what do you do with the Nazi Punks when they show up? You're not the kind of punk that we want? It's not anti-authority. It's not punk.

Reed: I've always been the leader of small groups. I was at a company called Rackspace and I did the Gartner Strengths Finder. And it was like, "You like command." Which also means that you like to fit inside a hierarchy. Then I remembered all those times that I was like, "Fuck it, let's burn it down! But here are the rules for how we burn it down."

Krukowski: Occupy to me was this amazing experience watching this group with no organization decide that they needed organization.

Reed: And this hurt their organization. There was another organization that did this called the Tea Party. If you listen to them, they are literally agreeing with Occupy. And [Occupy] was less effective and didn't have anything that the Tea Party didn't have other than being dirty.

Krukowski: Does ineffectuality go hand in hand with incorruptibility?

Reed: That is a very good question.

Jesse Von Doom: That's our organizational motto.

Reed: Bezos says that vision should take precedent over process. And [that's how I operate]. If I say, "this is how we're doing things," then someone else says, "no, let's do it this way," I'll be like, "Ok." That's why I hired him, that's why I work with that person.

Q from Matthew: Why hasn't open source had as big as an effect on the music industry?

Reed: I'm going to give this to Adrian.

Adrian Holovaty: It's still too hard. It's still too unodcumented.

Reed: And a lot of the people developing this are people developing for your phone. /Reed proceeds to make fun of people without Facebook./ It's probably easier to build tools for jugglers than musicians because there are more jugglers in open source.

Guidelines

1. No pitches. We’ll introduce speakers, their company/band, and whatever context is relevant. They're encouraged to talk about your world, but we've asked everyone to stay away from sales pitch mode or we’ll call bullshit.

2. Ask questions. The goal is to start conversations — between speakers and with the people in attendance. It's okay to not have answers to everything. "I don't know" is a powerful idea.

3. Be positive. There are plenty of problems out there, but let’s talk about solutions and ideas. Any problem can be solved, so let’s use the summit talk with each other about ways forward instead of enumerating issues.

4. Be flexible. Don't be offended if someone has to leave in the middle of a talk. Don't feel bad if you have to leave. There's room to talk in a side room and we encourage you to do so if you want to talk while conversations are going on.

 

Thank you to Brian Kung for taking these notes!