When you’re a successful creator on YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok you need to post regularly. If you take two weeks off you break your business model. Some musicians are playing this game, others are holding on to single-single-album release strategies. They think about album years and work towards tours. This isn’t strange, since touring has been the biggest revenue-generating activity for artists in the past two decades. Part of the creator economy, though, is a move towards direct-to-fan, or perhaps more apt is to speak of direct-to-audience, monetization models. We’ve gone from crowdfunding to subscription and from just music to music experiences, or music that comes with perks that might have nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the personality behind the music. But what’s actually happening when you start monetizing your fans directly? Can you scale intimacy? And how do you flip the funnel to figure out which communities you should cater to in order to find your 100 superfans?
Scaling intimacy
Intimacy is first and foremost about creating a connection between two people or just a few people. Sometimes, a concert can feel intimate even if a band or performer is playing in front of thousands of people. Some musicians just have the skill and persona to give people the feeling they’re singing or playing to them directly. What this means is that they tap into the identity of the listener. One of the key elements of fandom is that the fan attaches their identity to the artist’s music they support. During a live show, this attachment can become a two-way street of interaction, or at least it feels that way for the fan.
Outside of the live concert, it becomes much more difficult to scale intimacy when it comes to music. Of course, it’s possible to livestream your music, but we’re still in the infancy of how to do that well and move beyond the horseless carriage syndrome. One option is to simply talk to your fans directly via meet & greets or similar. The success of this can be seen in the talent list of Looped, a service that provides the tech for various interactive experiences. There’s chefs, actors, athletes, but also lots of musicians. Most of the latter group don’t actually perform shows through Looped. Instead, they host ‘experiences’ where their fans get access to the artists they love in a way they otherwise couldn’t. This doesn’t scale like a concert, but it represents a form of digital intimacy. It can scale, for example, by doing it regularly, or by organising an hour of speed dating where an artist talks to 60 fans for 1 minute.
If we take a cue from some major brands, we see that they often achieve intimacy by finding alignment between their values and those of their consumers. In the creator economy, every artist is a brand and their fans want to align with their values. There’s a lot of over-the-top reactions to NFT drops and the environment, but it shows the power of this value alignment, especially when the alignment shifts. Put differently, intimacy at scale can only exist in a way that fits the values of the artist offering it. Similar to a company with a brand thinking about their ‘why’ before they do anything new and if that new thing fits that ‘why’, so too should artists consider if a new experience, or form of interaction, fits their ‘why’ and fits their community.
The importance of community
First of all, what is community? Or, what does community mean? For me, a community is about a sense of connection between people. To foster a community, or to build a community, means to foster those connections. If you’re good at that in an online environment, you have every chance of creating collective connections that people will want to pay for to be a part of. In one sense, music is the perfect conduit for community, because it inherently connects people. On the other hand music faces an uphill battle because it’s difficult to quantify that connection. Take Toms, the shoe brand that started the buy-a-shoe give-a-shoe model. This is a super easy-to-get model that aligns with a lot people’s values. It’s much more difficult for artists to create such a direct mission. Artists make music because they have an inherent need to. Externalizing that into things that represent the values of the artist and their music takes work.
The Toms comparison is apt in the sense that everyone needs shoes, just like everyone needs music. Some people care about the shoes they walk in, but some don’t care so much. Similarly, some people care what music they listen to, while others are happy to lean back and put on a playlist. If you want to monetize your fans directly, though, you need to be able to speak to them. In the playlist analogy, you need to get them to care enough to go look for you and your music elsewhere. How to get someone listening to a playlist to go your Bandcamp or Patreon page? Or, to put it more bluntly, how to find your 100 superfans?
The key element for Li Jin‘s thinking around 100 superfans is that you add real value to those fans’ lives to get them to pay you around $1000 per year. Premium content and community are strong elements of adding that value and extracting that money. So while we all love sharing our Spotify Wrapped data and that certainly creates a form of community, that’s not what Jin’s talking about here. Instead, this is a connected audience that interacts with the artist they’re all a fan of, but also interact with each other. In order for community to really work, the level of interaction needs to be sustained even without the person or band who built the community present. This allows for a different kind of thinking about how to build this community too, because you need considerable buy-in from the people inside the community.
Flipping the funnel
Traditionally, the funnel is broad at the top and slim at the bottom. You start with a large group of potential customers or consumers and narrow them down to the people who are actually interested in what you offer. If you decide to become a creator on Instagram, for example, your potential audience is around one billion people. Or, if you’re a creator on YouTube, you start off with a potential audience of two billion. Now let’s say that you have 5000 subscribers on your channel. How many of those people will actually convert to tipping you during your livestream? Or how many of those people will actually shift into paying you a monthly subscription fee for your content and some added perks?
Now, if we think about community as this interacting group of people that care about what you do and share your values, we can flip this funnel idea. Instead of starting with your TAM – your total addressable market – you start with a few people who are already interested in what you do. If you’re just starting out it’s okay if this is your parents and your best friends. Start somewhere and convince those people to, for example, take on your subscription fee. Then you start building from there. To do this, you need tools and your first fans need tools too.
The whole premise of Web3 is based on this kind of community I’m talking about here. As such, most of the tools built for Web3 solutions can help artists out here. As we know, however, there’s a barrier to entry for fans, and for artists, to jump on this train. Thankfully, there’s also plenty of ways to start sharing what you do, and for fans to share what they like, outside of Web3. The key element to flipping the funnel is to build a fanbase one by one. This starts with talking to the people you know. Similarly, it starts with your fans talking to who they know. One way they can do this is through Bopdrop, a fairly new social media app that’s fully focused on sharing music. We all love to share what we enjoy listening to, and now we just need to add on that little push that tells people to support the artist we love so much that we think you should listen to them. Not just because you like their music, but because you get something else out of it: this can be perks, access to a creative process, learning how to better make music yourself, etc.
There’s another benefit to flipping the funnel and that goes back to what is often the first community for any artist, which is that of their fellow artists. If we broaden this out a little bit, and go back to the idea of the musician as a creator, the community becomes that of all creators. The next step is to connect the various audiences that all of these creators have. What I see a lot in GÂRDEN is that musicians play together in unique set-ups. Albertine, for example, took the opportunity to play with two musicians to perform her music. Going from one to three artists is an easy way to triple your audience. This type of audience-sharing is potentially a big win for any direct-to-audience strategy. If I like an artist enough to support them directly, I’ll be very susceptible to them telling me to also support another artist. Broadening the scope here, there’s an opportunity for creators of all kinds to share their audiences. Say I’m a watercolor painter with a medium YouTube following. If I then tell them I made this cool painting for this other artist and that people can support them directly: that works. It can be as simple as word-of-mouth and as strong as interpersonal interactions and recommendations.