In early September 2014, Atri from Maverick invited me to participate in Pecha Kucha Jakarta. After some consideration, I said yes — partly as a way to contribute to the global Pecha Kucha community. I had seen a Pecha Kucha event in Bali around 2009, back when I was more active in the creative community there, but I had never presented at one.
For those unfamiliar: Pecha Kucha is a presentation format built around constraint. Each presenter gets exactly 20 slides, and each slide advances automatically after 20 seconds. That’s it. Six minutes and forty seconds to say everything you have to say.
Preparation
Despite the format being familiar — it’s still a presentation — preparing for it was not easier than preparing for a regular talk. I wanted to test the format’s own premise: that any idea, no matter how complex, can be communicated through 20 slides in six minutes. So I chose a genuinely complex subject. If I couldn’t pull it off, the idea itself was probably weak.
The Presentation
Finding the right idea was the hardest part, as always. I wanted something original — something that could be remembered and reused by others. Once I had the concept, I built the slides one by one. Here’s a walkthrough of all 20:
My name is Robin Malau, from Musikator — a platform that helps independent Indonesian musicians reach a global audience through a range of our services. What I’m sharing tonight is what I’ve observed over the past several years. Draw your own conclusions.
I want to talk about the shift in how music is created, reproduced, distributed, and consumed — moving from mass to personal, from expensive to affordable, from physical to digital, from ownership to access. I call this The Great Shift of the Music Industry. Most of us have seen it happening, but few of us have fully grasped how wide its impact is.
Creation is the process of writing songs, recording, and mixing. Its output is the master recording, ready to be duplicated. This is where everything starts — with the songwriter and the musician. What’s changed? The entire studio — once a room full of physical equipment — has become intangible. Everything now lives on a screen. The old distinction between project studio and home studio is no longer relevant. The result: recording equipment has become abundant and affordable, music creation has become dramatically easier, and things that were previously impossible — like true mobile production — are now routine.
After the master is ready, comes Reproduction — preparing the master for duplication and distribution, whether digital or analog. The shift here was simple but total: everything that was analog is now digital. I remember mastering to 1-inch tape for cassette duplication in the mid-90s. Today, mastering produces a file, easily backed up, permanently archived.
Distribution is the marketing, spreading, and promotion of music — the process that puts a song on a record store shelf or a digital platform. We used to only be able to buy music at record stores — that was a form of industrial control over our listening lives. Now we can choose where we buy or access music. The result: multiple sales models, a much larger potential audience, and a rich data infrastructure that will be enormously valuable to the music industry going forward.
Consumption is what the market does — at record stores, on digital platforms, at live shows. This is where all of us as music listeners come in. The shift is from an ownership model to an access model. You pay not to “own” something, but to listen to it. Actually, we never really owned songs — buying vinyl was buying packaging and access, not the song itself. We were never allowed to duplicate and distribute what we “bought.” So in a sense, access was always the model. It’s just more visible now, with streaming making the transaction explicit. If you stop paying Spotify, you lose access.
Today we have more format choices than ever — vinyl, CD, cassette, digital download, streaming, and more. And more music available to us than at any point in history, at prices lower than ever before.
Above all of this, a global-scale confusion has emerged. People are disoriented because they were conditioned not to have choices. The music industry has always controlled what we heard, where we bought it, what format we used, what media we read for information. That control is now dissolving. Consumer behavior is changing. Perception of music is changing. Technology is changing.
Right now, we are living through the largest-ever moment of music creation, reproduction, distribution, and consumption in human history. If you want to be in the music business, you need to decide what you’re going to specialize in — because right now everything is chaotic and bewildering. The most recent example: Foo Fighters, who chose analog in the digital age, and succeeded brilliantly precisely because they didn’t forget the fundamentals of making and selling music: creating value. Move fast and you’ll get there first.
I hope that was useful.
On the Night Itself
The Pecha Kucha Jakarta event was generally well-executed — Maverick has a lot of experience running these. Unfortunately, the sound on the night was very poor. My energy dropped significantly on stage when I realized I couldn’t hear my own voice. Throughout the presentation, the slide projector was also being cast onto two side walls, and my natural instinct to move toward the audience kept blocking one of the projections.
Looking back, the organizers should have marked a standing zone for presenters, or required a rehearsal — the stage setup wasn’t standard, and those few minutes before going on weren’t enough to figure it out. I should also have arrived earlier.
Update: After following up with Atri, I learned that there was a standing mark on stage — I just hadn’t been briefed on it, and didn’t spot it in the chaos of getting ready. The venue (Es Teler at Adityawarman) was a pro-bono space, not a dedicated presentation venue, so the setup was inherently a workaround.
Despite all of that, I achieved what I came to do: contribute to the Pecha Kucha community, test a constrained presentation format, and write an essay in the middle of a busy period. Worth it.