The Forgotten Creators in Music: Tastemakers
The streaming model experiment has officially failed for musicians.
The razor thin margins that musicians receive from their streaming has dominated news headlines over the past few years. Goldman Sachs reported in 2020 that for every $1 spent on streaming, artists receive only 17 cents. New revenue streams have been explored for years, and those within the “creator economy” have been pointed to as the most promising.
The creator economy has birthed platforms like Patreon, and led to newer Web3 solutions like Royal. These tools allow for direct “artist to fan” monetization with fewer “middle men”. While the majority of listeners won’t show up to these platforms, an artist’s most loyal fans certainly will…and that is fine. According to a Music Ally research report on “superfans”, the top 14% of fans make up more than a third of all spending — making them a group worth building for.
The next layer after artist to fan platforms, has been the birth of “fan to fan” platforms. As Midia Research reported, “for the creator economy to be sustainable in the long-term, there must be a third prong where fans are not just connecting with their favorite artist, but also with each other.”
While a few fan-to-fan platforms have seen success, a major pitfall lies in the belief that “all fans are created equal”. These platforms still view fans as relatively homogenous, and have missed a key learning: artists are not the only creators within music — there is actually a group of creators within the fan economy.
This creator is known as the tastemaker.
Tastemakers discuss and introduce people to music. They build the bonfires within a fan community. They’re eloquent and thought provoking. They have loyal followings. They are trusted and they are underserved in terms of technology built for their style of community engagement.
Oversight like this isn’t unprecedented, however. We’ve seen it happen in gaming, where people scoffed at the idea of video game streamers being creators. Then Twitch happened.
When Twitch decided to pivot their business (from Justin.TV) and build tools for these gaming influencers, a completely unforeseen economy was born — leading to their $970M acquisition by Amazon.
Twitch built a technology specifically catered to an underserved creator type, and they won big.
And maybe the most compelling part of empowering this new class of creators? The impact it had on the underlying medium of gaming: growing the industry from $68B in 2011 to $135B in 2018.
This same lesson can be applied to music.
Build a platform that allows tastemakers to succeed, and the underlying medium of music will subsequently thrive.
At Anthems, we’ve sought to accomplish precisely this. We started by interviewing dozens of tastemakers who we witnessed were growing large and engaged followings. We asked them about how they drive unique conversations among their followers, and how we could help. After much learning, we honed in on the content creation process — supporting them via a data-driven social platform that allows them to repeatedly express their music taste in unique ways via viral shareables. This creative form of self-expression has sparked a new level of engaging conversations between these tastemakers and their audience — allowing us to grow from 2k to over 100k MAU’s in 2022.
While Anthems still has a lot of learning to do, we are confident that we’ve uncovered a new creator who is thriving in the middle of a rapidly changing music landscape. Despite being underserved in terms of technology, they are masters of fostering music communities. If adequately built for, these tastemakers could be pivotal in leading us towards a more vibrant and equitable music future. So what does that future look like and who is going to build for them?
