Music Is Not a Product of Its Audience
I used to open with this metaphor when I guest lectured at the University of Georgia's music business program. And I keep coming back to it because every few months, a new piece of industry strategy goes viral that confidently tells artists where the ships are but without acknowledging that the board just changed again. And, at the same time, the game is still the same game.
Joel Gouveia's recent two-part piece (Part 1, Part 2) on what he calls the death of Spotify is the latest example. His "Fiji Water Theory," the idea that streaming is commodified tap water and artists need to sell premium experiences to superfans, is argued well, and clearly struck a nerve. I've received it in my inbox several times now.
But I wanted to respond from my experiential perspective, because I think there's some bad advice for artists buried inside some good observations.
I think Joel Gouveia gets a lot right. He's building on Jimmy Iovine's recent comments about DSPs being "minutes away from obsolete," and the diagnosis is largely right. Artists are the ones driving the ship. They do what the rest of us can't do. They make the art we connect with.
I agree with Joel that Spotify's refusal to build creator tools is short-sighted - though I'm not sure I'd fully trust those tools even if they were more built out; their artist backend is increasingly becoming its own in-app upgrade funnel. Joel's "dumb pipe" critique is also fair. And anyone working in the music business knows the per-stream economics are brutal for most artists. DSPs are not artist-friendly platforms.
But here's where I think Joel's argument breaks down: his solution is still the same logic as the problem, just pointed at a smaller audience.
To prove my Battleship point, let me walk through my own career.
When I first started working for Sufjan Stevens and (later) running Asthmatic Kitty Records, we were trying to figure out how to send exclusive MP3s from Sufjan's Illinois to a platform called iTunes.
Five years later in 2010, with Sufjan's Age of Adz coming out later that year, I partnered with a little startup named Bandcamp. At that point, the only artist of sizable stature on Bandcamp was Amanda Palmer. We wanted to launch an EP in advance of Adz, and do it quickly, and none of the music download providers were interested. So we surprise-dropped All Delighted People on Bandcamp one Friday afternoon.
Fast forward another five years to 2015 and though Spotify is just get getting started but firmly entrenched. We were releasing Carrie & Lowell so I went to the Spotify and Apple Music offices to pitch the record for playlisting. I thought it was received well, but when the album came out, both platforms opted to feature better-known artists. I think the big highlights that March were Darius Rucker's new album and a Van Halen best-of collection. Carrie & Lowell went on to become one of the most acclaimed records of the decade.
The point isn't that any of these platforms were wrong or right. The point is that the board changes constantly. People giving strategy advice are usually describing the last game.
The Ouroboros
Joel's piece frames the current moment as if we're witnessing a specific death and a specific birth: the death of the mass audience, the birth of micro-community. But the music industry is an ouroboros, a self-inflicted cannibal, continually eating itself to feed itself. Nothing lasts forever, and everything that feels new has usually happened before. Everything is always ending and beginning at the same time.
The "1,000 True Fans" idea that underpins Joel's Fandom Funnel? Kevin Kelly wrote that essay in 2008. The internet was young then. Social media was around but a mere baby. We were all trying to be mayors on Foursquare. MySpace was still a thing. Bloggers were the influencers. And Kelly, a blogger, argued that a creator only "needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living."
When Angelo De Augustine, an artist on Asthmatic Kitty, turned in an album called Tomb in 2019, his manager and I talked extensively about the 1,000 True Fans model. Everything we did on that campaign was geared at getting 1,000 True Fans.
It wasn't a new idea then, even a decade after Kelly wrote that piece. It isn't a new idea now.
And the reason it keeps getting recycled is that it sounds right in theory. It's a lovely idea. I believe in it!
But it is messier in practice.
What I've Actually Seen
When I read strategy pieces like Joel's, my question is always: what about the artists? The subject of these thought pieces is usually the bigger forces: platforms, economics, funnels. Rarely the lived reality of the people making the music.
So what happens when we look at it from the perspective of an artist?
It is both true and untrue that Spotify helps and hurts artists. We released Angelo's Tomb at a perfect time. We managed to score some big editorial playlist wins, right before Spotify started leaning heavily into algorithmic curation. That - and that his music is superb - propelled his music into the algorithm at a rate that continues to this day.
I've seen artists who make next to nothing suddenly earn $50,000 because some coffeehouse influencer puts their song on a playlist that thousands of coffee shops play on repeat from open to close.
I've also seen artists whose music absolutely deserves attention but who never get noticed by the machinery of DSPs, and there their music sits well shy of the amount of streams it takes to make money.
I've also seen artists do all the "micro-community" things Joel talks about, what he calls the "Fiji Water" approach: the exclusive access, the superfan cultivation, the direct-to-fan infrastructure, pressing vinyl, high-margin merch, the private listening parties. Sure, sometimes it works. But very rarely. And this is from my perspective in the independent music industry where theoretically it should work.
And, I know several incredibly successful artists who do none of the Fiji Water things. They don't create exclusive access events. They never talk to their "superfans" or cultivate them at all. They never let fans hear early tapes. And yet they have achieved artistic, creative, and financial success. Many of us listen to their music every day.
So What Does Actually Work?
This is the part where I'm supposed to unveil my own framework, I guess.
Well I don't have one.
And I think that's actually the point.
What I have seen work, consistently, across two decades in this business, is not a funnel. It's not a superfan strategy. It's not tap water versus Fiji water. It's this:
Create the best art you can create, and then help your music build emotional connections with people.
Or, put more shortly:
You're an artist. Make art.
That's it. That's the boring answer.
Is it a promise, a guarantee? Absolutely not. But it's the right approach to take, because that maxim can become the beating heart of your work. It's about reorienting from a transactional, commodity, marketing-driven approach to your work, and centering it around who you are, what you are making, and what you are saying and trying to do that is new.
Joel's framework asks artists: "What is the value you're creating for your fans?" This is marketing oriented language, and it turns the artist-listener relationship (if it is even a relationship) into a transaction, a commodity pipeline. Which is exactly the thing he's criticizing Spotify for doing, just at a different operating scale.
A better question for artists is: Who are you? What are you creating that was not in the world before you created it? What is important about you and your work? What is your artist statement? What are you saying with your work?
This is where both Joel's argument and Spotify's model fail in the same way, flip sides of the same coin. They are both consumer-focused. Spotify optimizes for the listener who wants frictionless background music. Joel's Fandom Funnel optimizes for the superfan who wants exclusive access. But both frameworks treat the artist as a means to an end, a content engine designed to serve consumers, whether that audience is massive or micro.
The artists I've watched and whom I've worked with don't think about their careers that way. They think about the work first. They ask what they're trying to say, what they're trying to make, what matters to them. And then they find, sometimes with help, sometimes by accident, sometimes through sheer stubbornness, sometimes with extreme doubts - the people who connect with that work emotionally.
That is not a funnel. That is...just art.
Stop Worrying About the Wrong Things
To the artists reading this: stop worrying about algorithms, but also stop worrying about "superfans." Neither the tap water approach nor the Fiji water approach puts you, the artist, at the center. But you are.
The board is going to change again. The platforms will shift. Some new strategy piece will go viral next month telling you the ships are in a different place on the board. And some of it will be smart and some of it will be wrong, and most of it will be both at the same time.
What will not change is that human beings are naturally drawn to music that moves them. Not music that was optimized for a playlist, not background music. And not music that was engineered to convert casual listeners into paying superfans.
Make music that someone needed to make. That someone else needed to hear. Even if that someone is just you.
That's the unifying attribute for all the artists that have succeeded. They had to do it. They couldn't not.
So, do that. Make the music you want to make. The rest follows. Not always quickly, not always fairly, not easily, and not even always. Rarely.
But when it does, when it works, it's never because someone followed the rules.