 |
|
|
|||||
It’s the size of a coaster and looks like a toy, but when the needle hits its groove, it’s immediately clear that Tiny Vinyl is exactly what its name suggests: a tiny vinyl record. Measuring just four inches in diameter, it’s a miniaturized version of the familiar 12-inch records that have existed in one form or another for more than 130 years, and just as playable. Shrinking the record down to pocket size is an unexpected evolution for this old technology, but starting later this month this new take on an old concept will be hitting stores nationwide. Tiny Vinyl, the Nashville-based company behind this concept, has more than half a million small records coming off the presses for an exclusive retail partnership with Target. More than 40 tiny records will be released in the next two months, with a mix of contemporary artists and well-known rereleases. New acts like Doja Cat, Chappell Roan, and Doechii stand alongside throwbacks like 1999-era Britney Spears, early hits from the Rolling Stones, and Christmas singles from Frank Sinatra. Each will retail for $14.99, and, like 45 RPM singles, will include one song on each side. [Photo: courtesy Tiny Vinyl/Broken Bow Records Music Group] The idea was born two years ago when toy industry veteran Neil Kohler was thinking of new ways to expand the universe of one of the toys he’d helped bring to market. Toymaker Funko has seen massive global success with its Pop! line of collectible pop culture figurines. Kohler noticed how many of the company’s best-selling figurines were musical acts, and thought it might be fun to create tiny playable records that could accompany the toys. He started socializing the idea with people in his circle in Nashville and got talking with Jesse Mann, who’s had a long career managing bands and putting on music festivals. He thought the tiny record idea could stand on its own. [Photo: Ethan Lovell/courtesy Tiny Vinyl/Warner Music Group] The two reached out to Nashville Record Pressing, a vinyl production facility that opened in Nashville in 2022. They found that it was technically possible to create tiny playable records, small enough to fit in a pocket but big enough to hold up to four minutes of audio. That’s more than enough for most artists today. “Thanks to Spotify and other trends in music generally, the average length of a song is getting shorter and shorter,” Kohler says. And thanks to Spotify and other trends in music, the experience of listening to music has become increasingly digital in recent years. That’s also led to a hunger among some listeners for a more analog or physical connection to music, whether in the form of records or compact discs or even cassette tapes. From a revenue and fan building perspective, there’s also a growing interest among bands and record companies to physically get music into the hands of fans however they can. Tiny Vinyl is a new way to do just that. [Photo: courtesy Tiny Vinyl/Concord] After soft launching the format on merchandise tables for a few touring indie artists last year, Kohler and Mann saw enough demand from both artists and fans to start thinking bigger. Last fall they partnered with Urban Outfitters for a limited release by violinist Lindsey Stirling. It sold out within the first day. Kohler reached out to contacts at Target that he had from his toy industry days and the ball got rolling on what would become an even bigger retail launch. The vinyl resurgence The partnership comes at an interesting time for vinyl records. Despite the age of the technology and its seeming replacement by tapes, CDs, and streaming, records are surprisingly resilient. More than 55 million vinyl records were sold in the U.S. in 2024, up from about 13 million in 2016. Oddly, many of those sales are to people who aren’t actually listening to the records. A report from 2023 found that 50% of vinyl record buyers do not have turntables on which to play them. “They never even open the shrink on the vinyl,” says Kohler. [Photo: Ethan Lovell/courtesy Tiny Vinyl/Universal Music Group] These collector-fans are not the market Tiny Vinyl is chasing, or at least not the only one. Kohler sees the small records his company is producing as a new music format, less skippable than a streaming service but easier to engage with than a full-length record. “We’re trying to create more of a digestible vinyl experience, and hopefully bring people into the vinyl medium with a couple of songs at a pretty accessible price point,” he says. Mann, the music industry veteran, says the shrinking of the record has appeal on both sides of the merch table, giving bands another revenue-generating way to engage with fans, and giving fans an affordable takeaway alternative to a tour T-shirt that can cost upwards of $50. That’s why Tiny Vinyl insisted on making their mini records as similar to existing records as possible. “Being able to play on a regular turntable at the normal turntable speed, which is 33 RPM, was really important to us. If we’d made it some wacky new speed, or even 45 seemed like it was edging more into the exotic space,” Mann says. Being new while also being familiar led the company to mimic some of the standard elements of the record as we know it. “We number each edition on the spine of the record. We put them in authentic gate-fold mini album jackets, just like a 12-inch vinyl, and it has a mini inner sleeve,” Kohler says. “It’s scaled proportionately to be just like a 12-inch vinyl with a mini label in the center on each side.” [Photo: Nathan Zucker/courtesy Tiny Vinyl] A new form factor One downside of Tiny Vinyl’s tiny size is that some record players, especially old ones, can’t actually play them. The tone arms on these older machines are designed to automatically stop right about where a Tiny Vinyl starts, which is where a conventional 12″ record would have its printed label. Some record players have the option to disable this auto-stop feature, but older and lower-end players are just not compatible. But for those with record players that can handle them, playing a Tiny Vinyl is remarkably similar to the experience of a standard 12-inch record, from pulling it out of the sleeve to plopping it on the turntable to watching it spin as the needle drops down. Just like vinyl, but tiny. [Photo: Nathan Zucker/courtesy Tiny Vinyl] Easy to conceptualize, but as it turns out, not so easy to create. Kohler says he and Mann worked with Nashville Record Pressing for more than year to figure out how to make such a small record play correctly. The closer to the center of a record, the smaller its grooves become to maintain a uniform playback speed. Cramming that into the space of a record just four inches across took some extra effort. “The physics of playing vinyl at that scale were not trivial to overcome,” says Kohler. “It’s not rocket science, but it’s nontrivial, and we’ve got a patent submission to try and protect that.” Its main problem solved, the company has its eyes on expansion, accepting orders from big name acts as well as indie groups looking to augment their touring merch. They’re even looking beyond just making tiny records. One obvious next step: tiny record players. Kohler and Mann wouldn’t say when something like that might be available, but tiny record collectors may soon have another item to add to their hi-fi setup. “We are in development on those things now,” Kohler says.
Category:
E-Commerce
Damian Kulash, guitarist and lead singer of the rock band OK Go, is also kind of a creative director. His band has become world famous for its inventive, elaborate, and absurdly complicated music videos, including its breakout dance video made on synchronized treadmills, a stop-motion video shot over the course of 21 hours, and another that was made up of 64 films playing simultaneously on 64 iPhones. By the band’s own tally, its videos have been viewed 11 billion times. It’s achieved this success by approaching the creative process in a unique way. Kulash was recently on the main stage at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival in New York to talk about the inspiration behind these projects. Speaking to a capacity crowd, Kulash broke down the band’s process into simple terms: “The abstract version is that we look for the things in the world that make us go Ooh. [Photo: Jonah Rosenberg for Fast Company] He was being interviewed by Karl Lieberman, global chief creative officer of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. The two spent a lot of time talking about their creative processes, and revealed some surprising ways a rock band can work like an ad agency. Lieberman, whose firm is known for its campaigns for brands like Coca-Cola and Nike, noticed that Kulash uses an analogy for describing OK Go’s creative process that’s almost identical to his own. “Once you get an idea, you have a sandbox, you called it, and that resonates with me because I often call ideas buckets, Lieberman said. “It’s not an idea that’s fully formed, it’s more of a notion or a direction of an idea in the form of a space that can be filled with even more thinking and . . . hopefully from even more people.” Kulash says his sandbox concept is one based on play. “It’s all about discovering the thing,” he said. “We don’t start knowing it. It also allows everybody who’s involved to actually make the project better.” [Photo: Jonah Rosenberg for Fast Company] An example he shared was the filming of one of OK Go’s most famous music videos, “Upside Down & Inside Out,” which takes place in zero gravity. Aside from knowing the video would have no gravity, the band boarded the gravity-free airplane without any preconceived idea for what they’d actually do. “It was seven flights of pure play, seven flights of a rehearsal, and then six flights of actually shooting it,” Kulash said. “There is no idea until you’ve played. You have to see the thing and be like, things feel cool in zero gravity or things feel cool in slow motion, or things feel cool in stop motion.” For Kulash, play is an essential part of OK Go’s creative process, even when the band is working in partnership with a company like Apple or General Motors to help finance the project. But that doesn’t mean there’s no pressure to turn all that sandbox time into something great. Earlier this year, OK Go gave Fast Company global design editor Mark Wilson an exclusive inside look at the filming of its latest music video, “Love,” which was so technically challenging to film the band was only able to get the shot it needed on the very last try before the daylightand the budgetran out. “We’ve got a ton of skin in the game ourselves,” Kulash said. “We often pay for [the videos] ourselves, even when we have a sponsor. We can’t afford to fail at them, ever.” Plus, Kulash told the audience, the band’s got a reputation to uphold. “Can you imagine if the next OK Go video is the one that was really boring?”
Category:
E-Commerce
Tony Stubblebine moved Medium from losing $2.6 million monthly to achieving its first profitable month in August 2024, after 13 years of losses. The CEO, who previously founded habit-tracking company Coach.me and helped develop early Twitter, has refocused Medium on serving writers more interested in sharing their expertise than profiting from their words. For Stubblebine its about the expert economy, not just the creator economy. Known for viral productivity techniques like Interstitial Journaling and his 75-minute guide to iPhone optimization, Stubblebine has grown Medium to over one million paid subscribers while maintaining its ad-free, quality-focused approach. Now the company is launching a new app for notes and writing, called (fittingly enough) TK, in a bet that strong design will distinguish it in a crowded marketplace. Stubblebine spoke with Fast Company about why he still prefers paper notebooks for meetings, and how Medium differentiates itself from creator platforms like Substack. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Youre launching a new writing app. Why does the world need another writing tool? I had to make this case to get people inside the company excited. There are four things I want that I don’t see right now. First, the Medium design ethos matters to me. I want my words to look and feel beautiful. I was already drafting things in Medium’s editor that I never intended to publish just because I like the typography better. Second, this world of second brain apps exists, but the idea of a second brain is a mainstream concept without mainstream implementation because you have to do so much manual organization. Most people are not that organized. A messy system almost always beats a regimented system. This is a great use case for AIour view is it’s meant to elevate people, not replace them. AI can completely alleviate all the manual organization that would typically go into Roam or Obsidian. Third, theres a way to use AI as a writing assistantnot to write for you, but to do your bidding. A lot of what I publish needs citations. The other day I was writing about an old Medium program launched by founder Ev Williams. I highlighted the paragraph and said to the AI assistant: Ev wrote about this on the Medium blog in 2017. Find the link and add it. It figured out the core concept, found the link, and added it. Im easily distractedif I had to find that link myself, I would have been lost for an hour. Fourth, I’ve never seen any note-taking apps attached to a distribution network. My writing is very sensitive to the idea that you could share it and get validation and help someone else. Sometimes youre working on something and realize this could be helpful to other people. We’re excited to attach Medium’s massive network of readers to this genre of software. Youve taken a strong stance against AI training on creators work. Why? Were the only social media platform that if we can get money out of the AI companies, is planning to give 100% of it back to the creators themselves. We refused training deals with AI companies worth low single-digit millions because we heard from our writers that they felt it was unfair for companies to make money off training on the Medium network without giving anything in return. Theres still an ongoing negotiation across the industry about whether these companies will pay creators. We just supported an initiative called the Really Simple Licensing standard. We hope that gives consent and control back to the creators. How do you compete with Substack when writers can earn more there? The people who actually make the most money on writing are not charging for the writing itself. We sort of forgot in the rush to the creator economy how lucrative the expert economy is. Some of the best-paid writers on Medium are technical leaders who post twice a year, but those postings are their calling card when they go get jobs that sometimes pay upwards of a million dollars a year. The creator economy is kind of a content treadmill and doesnt always pay that well. Meanwhile, building yourself up as an expert authentically often opens up really interesting work opportunities. If you’re committed to the creator economy, you should follow a strategy of publish once, syndicate everywhere. Medium folds into that as a place to syndicate, to get additional traffic and subscribers back to your main mailing list. But if youre not in the creator economy, you’ll build an email following on Medium faster than anywhere else because you have a built-in network of people you don’t already reach. We’re much more built for that group, which is the majority of the internet. How did you engineer Medium’s turnaround? The key thing is, even if you turn around the business, you have to end up with a business that you’re proud to be running. A lot of the turnaround was in the product itself, making Medium a place where smart amateurs write regularly. Until that point, we’d either been a place where professional journalists were writing or where the new wave of content creators would write for small dollar amounts. We looked at that as paying to create more content mill stories that otherwise wouldn’t exist, and that felt bad to us. Beyond that, its run-of-the-mill business. Every dollar you spend is meant to bring back at least a dollar. If you dont have a theory on spending money, you shouldnt spend it. The startup industry was very lax about how it spent money for a while, and Medium was definitely in that boat. Just getting tighterpeople call it cost cutting, but I think of it as role clarity. Every person needed a role connected to how we work as a business. What advice do you have for technical founders transitioning to CEO? The bar for companies has gone up. It used to be build it and they will come, or you only had to be good at one or two things. Now people are so savvy about how to build a company that you really have to plot the whole business model through. Its not just can you build a better mousetrapcan you build a distribution channel? Can you build a business model where you can make money? The last company I started in 2011 was just like, I hope if I build something cool, people will use it. I came to regret that pretty quickly because I didn’t know how I was going to market it, let alone make revenue. When people come to me and say they built a better habit tracker, I tell them: I believe you, but how are you going to get people to use it? How are you going to make money? Why is this a business? If you don’t design that into the plan, good products just get abandoned because they don’t work as businesses. What does your current daily tool kit look like? I have a pretty simple work life. I’m mostly meeting with people, so I’m spending a lot of time either in Zoom or Google Meet. I typically have a paper notebook in front of me because my view on note taking during a meeting is that it’s a form of active listening. I have a strong opinion about the ideal paper notebook. We found notebooks that are landscape format, which means they’re wider rather than taller. The thing I lie about wider is that I caught myself thinking deeper about my own notes. It’s like taking the idea of writing in the margin and blowing that up. I end up with almost always three columns: raw notes as Im trying to follow along, a second column for things I need to come back to or how I want to participate in the meeting later, and this empty third column for total epiphanies. The way that form factor interacts with the way your brain works, I found fascinating. What’s your current relationship with your iPhone after writing that viral optimization guide? I still basically believe the premise of that postthat it takes 75 minutes to reconfigure your iPhone for productivity. The meta point was that these software tools are not preconfigured to make your life better. The worst offender is notifications, which should be called interruptions. If an app asked you, Is it okay for me to interrupt you mid-meeting? you’d think harder about whether thats okay. I keep basically all my notifications off unless its text messages from certain people or phone calls from my favorites, which is three people. I always try to keep in mind that the iPhone is meant to be a tool for me. My front screen is all Google utilitiesmaps, calendar. The action button is set to photos. Youve mentioned considering going even further offline. Whats your experience been with that? I did a four-month camper van trip around the U.S. and drove 9,000 miles. The thing that blows people’s minds is that I didnt listen to anything during the drive, unless I was tired. I tried to have quiet time for thinking and seeing where I was going. That was one of the happiest periods in my entire life because my brain was not buzzing all the time with brain candy that exists on your phone. If I wasnt working, I would probably opt to be nearly fully offline beyond extremely helpful things like Google Maps. Opting out seems like a good way to live for most people.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||