This afternoon I was interviewed by Intan via email for her #bincangminggu feature. Her concept was interesting — though she originally wanted to do it as a Twitter thread. Personally, I’m not a fan of “kultwit” (discussing a topic across a series of tweets). If you can’t express an idea in 140 characters, Twitter probably isn’t the right format for it. So I asked her to do it over email instead.
Here’s the full interview, quoted as-is:
Given that the digital era is accelerating, what opportunities can the Indonesian music industry take advantage of?
I honestly don’t know much about the music industry in the institutional sense — it’s outside my direct experience. But for musicians specifically, the digital era opens up opportunities that didn’t exist before: direct access to fans, the ability to release music independently, and new tools to manage your own career without needing a label.
The challenge is that most Indonesian music startups seem to be building for major label artists — which makes commercial sense since labels have large catalogs. But I’d love to see more startups targeting independent bands. That’s where the real opportunity lies, and it’s largely untapped.
What I do know is that if managed properly, platforms like dotuku.com and ohd.io could genuinely help a lot of musicians. And there’s a bigger idea here: musicians could collaborate directly with developers to build tools that solve their own problems. Scratch your own itch. The opportunity is huge — and almost nobody is doing it yet.