There’s a need to excel in human beings. If you go into music, you do it to be successful; if you set up a music/tech business, you do it to be successful. The hits you generate or the unicorn status you achieve subsequently measure your success. To focus on the artists for a moment, there’s a seemingly growing number of artists who make a living from streaming revenues: Spotify talks about 43,000 artists earning 90% of the revenues thus giving them a solid income and AWAL says that they see a 40% year-over-year growth of artists earning more than $100k a year from streaming. This sounds positive – and reminds me of the Hans Rosling TED talks that take a macro view and say overall life on our planet gets better over time – but still impacts only a very small amount of artists. As Mark Mulligan has recently argued, there’s no silver streaming bullet to fix this: equitable remuneration won’t; user-centric payment systems won’t. So what will work? And what does that mean in terms of that insatiable need to excel?
What will work? Or, what needs to be done?
I recently wrote that music is the catalyst of the creator economy. In this economy driven by passions it is connections, mainly between artists and fans, that create and amplify value. To succeed, artists need to engage directly with their fans which in turn means they need to gain access to those fans. This requires more than a ‘follow’ on Spotify or adding a song to a playlist. Fans need to do more and artists need to entice them to do so. Key to this is marketing and, to paraphrase Cristina Jerome, knowing who your fans are, being where your fans are and then creating content relevant to the platform they are on. Listening to Cristina speak during a recent recording of the Unsigned Podcast I realised how the marketing she does with artists through RnBae Collective follows one of the tenets of the passion economy: the benefit of focusing on a small group over scale.
Brand partnerships
One way to develop this intimacy and monetize it is through brand partnerships. One key to success is authenticity. We believe it, for example, when Beyoncé tells us she’s on a fitness journey just like everyone else. Maybe we don’t believe it when James Blake tells us he always checks his songs in a car before putting them out. So stay true to yourself when deciding on a brand partnership and make it a personal experience as a consequence.
Another key to success, and this relates back to the point about intimacy, is that having a dedicated fan base – and this doesn’t have to be big, sometimes it’s even better if it’s niche – is what will draw the brand in. The partnership should then focus on something the artist wants to create, an experience for the fans, and an opportunity for a brand to get involved and gain the recognition from being attached to a genuinely creative process or product.
Ownership
There’s a great quote by Tim Sweeney from Epic Games: “The worst term that’s ever been invented in the history of the internet is ‘own the customer’. ‘The customer owns themselves!” Lots of talk around the passion economy focuses on ‘owning your fan’ but what that really means is to have direct access to your fan. No ownership is involved there. If anything, the fan should end up feeling like they have some ownership in the creative process they support.
Where ownership does matter is when it comes to the music. Not just because cutting out middlemen ups the revenues that will end up in the artists’ pocket. Moreover, ownership gives freedom to pursue other lines of revenue. It’s important to think out of the box here as music can be used in all kinds of ancillary projects. There are, for example, great opportunities in synch licensing, but also more broadly there are opportunities to get involved with shows and films. This is a tip from Matt Levin, who works in this space through Endeavor Content. His point was to not just try and get – to stick to the example – a song or composition synched on a show, game, film, etc. but to see if you, as the artist, can get involved. That way, a deeper partnership establishes itself which in turn creates and more value.
The need to excel, or the pitfall of meritocracy
We love to think that we can do anything we set our minds to if we just show discipline and perseverance, but that’s not how it works (there is no 10,000 hour rule). Believing that it does, and that we live in a society where you are judged on merit only, specifically doesn’t work in music either. Music is always made as a collaborative effort: even the singer/songwriter needs a team. Furthermore, there’s so many great musicians and bands, that there’s many more that would deserve, on merit, to be successful than those 43,000.
The work necessary to achieve what I’ve described above – building relationships with your fans, retaining your rights and getting creative with revenue streams – takes a lot of work and a lot of people. The pitfall of the meritocracy means that when you fail it’s often your failure and yours alone. But it’s not, it’s part of a much broader discussion about value, of music and of production. To maximize the value of music, the best solution right now is to start talking directly to your fans and being open to the myriad options out there to further monetize what you create. Doing that is tough and takes a lot of energy. It means it’s not just about the music and making music, but, and perhaps even more so, about the many stories that surround the art and the creative process.