WeTransfer and the Intersection of Music, Business, and Tech

 

Continuing our Happy Hour series, we welcomed Damian Bradfield, Chief Creative Officer at WeTransfer, to discuss how music, business, and tech intersect. Calling in from Amsterdam, where WeTransfer is headquartered, Damian shared how the ubiquitous file-sharing company came to be a market leader, explained his motivation for writing a manifesto imagining a better internet, and left us with a message for the music community about approaching brands and other potential collaborators.

 

Happy Hour Guest: Damian Bradfield

Damian is a champion of disruption and an outspoken advocate for online trust, art patronage, and human values in business. Published in 2019, his book, The Trust Manifesto: What You Need to Do to Create a Better Internet was labeled “a superb and timely book showing how we can face up to the tsunami of big data that threatens to engulf us all,” by actor and author Stephen Fry, and “an essential book for our times,” by the New York Times bestselling author Sir Ken Robinson. As CCO of WeTransfer and Chairman of The University of the Underground, Damian understands the unique challenges facing tech companies and the importance of building relationships across the music, business, and technology industries.

The interview was conducted by Songtradr CXO, Victoria Wiltshire.

 

Conceiving and Growing WeTransfer Into the Company It Is Today

Kicking off our virtual sit-down, Damian explained how—before joining the company in 2010—WeTransfer founders Bas Beerens and Nalden (Ronald Hans) teamed up to transform the file-sharing business. 

“RapidShare, Megaupload and YouSendIt, those were the guys dominating the space and it was pretty much about piracy and porn,” Damian remembers. “Their business model was basically to share illegal content and then sell ads and premium content off the back of it.”

“What Bas and Nalden decided was to create something a little bit simpler.” 

Damian arrived on the scene a short time later and has been with WeTransfer ever since. He’s overseen its global expansion and says WeTransfer benefited enormously by entering the market right as the internet blew up. 

“We had a ton of luck,” he says. “In 2010, you didn’t have to spend a single penny on Facebook to build a community. You could just open up a page, invite some friends, they invited friends, and before you knew it you had half a million followers. You can’t do that today. All of it costs money.

“Back in 2010, we had none,” he continues. “We hadn’t raised any money and we weren’t going through any funding rounds, so we had an incredible amount of luck. The market was just there and you could take it.”

 

Backing Free Education through The University of the Underground

In the early days, WeTransfer donated 30% of its available ad space to creatives, offering them a blank canvas to showcase their work online. “A great piece of satisfaction for us came from crashing someone’s website because suddenly we’d given them so much traffic,” he says fondly. 

Under Damian’s watch, WeTransfer expanded their philanthropy efforts in 2014, sponsoring a bursary course at the prestigious London arts college Central Saint Martins. Nelly Ben Hayoun, who ran the course at Saint Martins, later branched out on her own, and with WeTransfer’s support started The University of the Underground. 

“She said she wanted to leave Saint Martins and set up her own institution, and she asked if we would be interested in supporting her and setting something up that would basically be a completely free MA in experience design,” Damian recalls. “And we said yeah, let’s do it.” 

Now in its fourth year, the university has two locations: Amsterdam and another in London. The whole thing is free—no student has to pay—and guest tutors, including Noam Chomsky, Dave Eggers and Pussy Riot, volunteer their time. “It’s a super eclectic mix of mentors who are trying to give a bit more of an all-round education to people in design,” Damian explains. 

However, like any organization that seeks to challenge the status quo, the university has faced a fair share of challenges from other institutions who see its progressive curriculum as a little too radical. Ironically, Damian says, that was kind of the point.

“Establishing a free MA in design is complicated, and not every institution is warm to the idea. A lot of other institutions saw it as competition and thought that we were undervaluing and undermining the education that they were offering. But honestly, that was part of the process too. It was about trying to shake up the system a little bit and getting people to realize that things need to change.” 

“We’ve seen a bunch of kids go on to all sorts of different industries,” Damian continues. “Most of them are following their own career path. I wouldn’t say any of them have left and gone to work for Apple or IBM; most are independent creatives or independent strategists at this point.” 

 

Creating a Better Internet

Further displaying his prowess, in 2019, Damiam put pen to paper and wrote a 224-page book titled “The Trust Manifesto: What You Need to Do to Create a Better Internet.” He admits that it poses more questions than it answers—some people even criticized him because he wasn’t coming to them with a solution. But his suggestion that we look at urban planning and gentrification to imagine what the future might look like online is intriguing, and it makes a strong case for further examination. Here, he explains why he so often compares offline and online environments.

“So much of the internet is not well thought through,” Damian begins. “It’s a lot like the city of LA when it was first built. The infrastructure was put in, then the infrastructure was removed; it’s a sprawling mass with very little connection. It’s basically a metropolis that isn’t really connected, and it feels like the internet.” 

He then offered another offline example to further illustrate his point. “If you look at a city like London, it had no parks until 1850. There was space, but it was mostly private. Hyde Park was a private hunting ground up until 1850, and only then was it turned over to be a public space because they realized the people of London needed somewhere to be able to communicate that wasn’t owned by anyone. That wasn’t very long ago. On the internet we don’t yet have those public spaces, but they will come. It’s just such a young space that we haven’t thought about it, but we’ll have to.”

Damian predicts that in 30 years the internet will look nothing like it does today. 

“The advertising business online, it’s pretty much going to disappear,” he says. “All those shops that set up who were only able to keep the storefront open because they had advertising being generated on the wall or with billboards, they’re dead. Cookies and private browsing is going to kill off the majority of the advertising business.”

 

A Message to the Music Community

Having established WeTransfer’s commitment to creatives and explaining that it’s because of the music community that the company is still able to thrive (Prince was an early adopter of WeTransfer’s file-sharing software), Damian then shared why he personally feels a deep sense of gratitude towards them. 

“In every new market we move into it’s musicians that discover us first,” he says. “It’s musicians that use us the most, and actually, it’s musicians that ask the least from us. So I guess I would say to them, feel free to reach out and see if we can help you with a project.” 

Like many of our previous Happy Hour guests, Damian’s final piece of advice is that being your genuine self is key, especially when approaching brands or individuals and asking them to collaborate. 

“Don’t spam people,” Damian says. “If we do get people reaching out, quite often it feels like an email that’s gone to a hundred other people. If you’re trying to make someone feel special and that they could be a part of something exciting, try to address the person by name.  

“Understand what benefit your work could be to somebody else,” he adds. “I love it when someone comes to us with a really clear proposal, where they have really thought something through, where it’s a realistic budget and we can see how there’s a clear role that we can play in the process. It’s a dream.”

 

 

Fans can catch the full Songtradr Happy Hour on YouTube.

Watch the full panel discussion:

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