Forming a Digital Salon for Music Connoisseurs
Tony Lashley is the founder of Marine Snow, a music-centric social and streaming platform for cultural connoisseurs. The product is akin to a digital version of the Venice Biennale or Cannes Film Festival for music, and a place online where people go both to experience unique, (historically, critically, and culturally) important work, and socialize with others who have similar interests. Tony — an ex Spotify (he helped co-create POLLEN), ex Blonded, ex SoundCloud employee, and music lover — is on a mission to make music streaming a multiplayer, immersive experience, and maintain music as art. Launched in November 2020, Marine Snow now has a waitlist of over 1200 people waiting “in line” to get access to this digital musical oasis.
Tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got here.
I’m the son of immigrants. My parents are from and I’m a dual citizen of Grenada, a very small island in the Caribbean. In fact, it’s the smallest country to ever win a gold medal at the Summer Olympics. It’s so small that after Kirani James won the gold medal in London in 2012, they named everything after him.
Growing up in Washington D.C. and Silver Spring, I felt like I was in the middle of three different cultures. Caribbean/Grenadian culture, Black American culture, and larger American culture. Music was my hack for getting to the center of any one of those three cultures, and feeling like I could be all three at the same time.
I’ve been obsessed with music from a very young age. When I was 10-years-old, a friend of mine named Gabe got an iPod and I was immediately very jealous of him. I asked my parents to get me one but they told me it was too expensive so I decided to start selling my Caribbean lunches to my non-Caribbean classmates to save up. I was running a pretty successful business at the time — the brown stew chicken went for $2, plantains for $0.50, and vegetables for $0.50. One of my friend’s parents would always pack him an extra sandwich so I would eat the lunch meat in that for lunch every day until, eventually, I saved up enough money to buy my first iPod. That moment truly ignited my love for music, which has been at the center of my life and career since.
I graduated from the University of Chicago with a dual degree in Economics and English Literature in 2015. Upon graduating, I interned for SoundCloud for a summer before joining the Boston Consulting Group as a consultant. Later, I went to work for Spotify where I helped spearhead their music marketing strategy and operations for a couple of years before working directly for one of the greatest music artists ever. Throughout my journey, I spent time learning and reflecting on the music industry while getting the skills needed to successfully run a business.
Was there a specific moment or event that made you think “I need to start this company now”?
I would say that it’s been more of a slow build. I tend to be a pretty contemplative person, but when I act…I act. It all started with my journey as a music consumer in college trying to organize my music across platforms. I used to have linkblogs that I’d use to bookmark songs from different platforms like Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, and Bandcamp. It was my single source of truth for my music taste because I found that there wasn’t a single site where I could organize all of the music that I loved and thought was important.
While interning at SoundCloud, I discovered how passionate people were about a lot of music that couldn’t be found elsewhere, and how negotiations with major labels could prove perilous. Then during my time working at Spotify, I had the opportunity to dig into what worked on the platform and what didn’t, as well as some of the fundamental flaws with some of the larger streaming music services available today — one of them being the lack of sense of community.
One of the main reasons why people enjoy music is because they can interact with others through it, but with Spotify, you very much have a single-player experience. I wanted to build something that was a multiplayer experience and also highlighted music that is historically or culturally important, which you can’t find across any streaming service today.
You launched Marine Snow earlier last year. What has been your biggest learning curve so far?
There are so many. The biggest one is that I am someone who is very honest, and I’ve had to learn how to remain that way while being a little bit more careful about the information I gave others. When you are trying to motivate a team, for example, you can’t bog them down too much with every single detail of what’s going right and wrong because it can very quickly distract them from the bigger picture. So it’s important to learn how to speak at a more abstract level.
In addition, I had to learn the sociology of venture capital and how it is an interconnected network of individuals rather than an abstract industry. It’s essential to learn how to break it down to specific people and their motivations, and pick up on how they communicate with others within that network. Before this journey, I thought that venture capital was like the sorting hat from Harry Potter. If you have a good narrative and certain sound business characteristics, you will end up where you need to be. I quickly found that this is not necessarily true. Honestly, you need to realize that people are people, and that you will have to work with them to get from point A to point B. In a way, being a founder is a bit like being a politician, like Andrew Yang or Elizabeth Warren. You have a lot of stakeholders to manage and you have to learn how to communicate with each one. Despite the fact that I’m from D.C., I never felt like I was good at being a politician, so that has certainly been my biggest challenge.
What are some tips you would give other founders getting started this year?
In my opinion, learning how to be poetically concise is an important skill to have as a founder. In college, I was an economics and English literature double major, so I love words and tend to choose them very carefully. Being impactful and thoughtful with your language in every sense and arena is really important, whether you are talking to your employees, customers, venture capitalists, or media. Also, understanding your own story and how to tell it effectively is equally as important. It may sound trite but it’s important to be able to vocalize your vision.
At the same time, I wouldn’t recommend that founders be wedded to just one idea. As a founder, you need to balance having high conviction and pushing through when others tell you that you maybe don’t have the best idea or approach, with being able to take something you worked really hard and throw it away because it simply didn’t work. Learning how to persevere without being stubborn and being able to change your opinion when new information is presented is one of the best skills you can have as a founder.
What are some of the biggest challenges the music industry is facing right now?
Well, I could give you a purposeful non-answer and say it’s COVID-19 because musicians obtain roughly 80% of their revenue through live shows, so that would easily be the biggest challenge the industry is facing right now. Hopefully, this is only temporary though, and live performers should be able to come back stronger soon.
If I had to be a little bit more nuanced about the question, I would highlight something that is less obvious. There’s been an increase in overtly commercial music that is often created to serve a passive listener. Ultimately, this is really detrimental to the music industry because it is optimizing for local maxima and short-term value, rather than the global maximum and long-term value. For instance, Tik Tok stars will team up with very talented producers to run a quick song and use it for streams and traction on services where value is doled out in per unit-of consumption in ad-style models.
Although I have nothing against this approach, I believe that this kind of approach commoditizes music, while all of the value in the music industry derives from the difference and uniqueness of works and artists. There will be long-term effects on the industry from the increase in commodity content, as it means platforms will just promote whatever content is cheapest or most profitable for them if it’s all similar. In a way, there is a general confusion of reach and resonance — which is easy to do with all of these digital tools that easily give you mass reach and given the fact that reach tends to be more quantifiable — and this is the most challenging problem facing the music industry today. You need resonance before reach to have a sustainable career as a musician, and generate long-term value.
Over the past few years, many have criticized the music industry’s inability to innovate. In your opinion, how do you think the music industry will evolve over the next 5 years? What role will Marine Snow play in that innovation?
Building off of your last question, I think there has been a conflation of art and entertainment, and treating them as if they were the same thing. In my opinion, over time, the arts and entertainment will become increasingly separate. Entertainment — what many would call “the creator economy” — will be focused on capturing the attention of customers, and will be fueled by companies like TikTok and Instagram with algorithmic, feed-based social media that are designed to keep you in a filter bubble, where you only view content that is tailored to your likes. This type of content has been designed explicitly to occupy your time as cheaply as possible. On the other hand, art is work made by an individual with intentionality that’s designed to express a new idea, opinion, or emotion, and needs systems with different value sets to thrive, and I think brand new systems like NFTs are ripe to help capture the value of art on the Internet.
I’m designing Marine Snow as a place for art, not entertainment. For instance, if you go to the register of a CVS store, you will find 40 different types of candy all within the same $2 — $4 price range. It’s an item that has been commoditized and is meant to reach your pleasure receptors but does not yield long-term value. On the other hand, if you think about the art market, there are unique paintings that are sold for millions of dollars every year. Even from a business perspective, I think that many will eventually realize that there is more money to be made on the art side. Marine Snow will be the place that houses art, and I’d like to see it become the brand that is synonymous with music as art.
On a Mission is a bi-weekly publication of interviews with first-time founders trying to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.
