✘ Straight to You: Will 2024 be the year of the direct mindset?

And Fortnite's jam mode; Comparing indie author and musician incomes; The quiet thriving of web3

It’s a weird time for the arts, especially, I’d venture, music and books, the two artforms I know the most about. There are more people making music, images, and stories than ever, yet prominent critics goofily bemoan how uncreative these days are. Everyone longs for connection yet grumbles about social media. Everything is blander and yet more customized than ever. 

The commercial side of the arts feels just as unhinged and contradictory. The long tail is dead, increasingly and purposefully cut off from the anodyne hydra-heads of celebs and stars and heavyweight influencers. Big legacy media companies continue to collapse and consolidate. The creator economy is fragmenting, as platforms lose steam, becoming more and more like crappy broadcasters or pennysavers, while creators demand ownership of their data, audience, and creations. 

For artists, creatives, quirky makers of all media, what is to be done? One idea: Head for the frontier. It’s closer than you think, and it’s a happier place. You won’t be alone, either. This coming year, a lot of thinking and activity will coalesce around a very old approach to finding and nurturing an audience: going direct. By that, I mean straight from creator to fan, with as little as possible in between. 

I’ll share some general industry-level observations, and then some more personal ones from my own recent experiences. I hope they inspire you to find a more direct path this coming year.

Fragsolidation

First, let’s dig into the broader context. That, in a word, is fragsolidation of the creative realms.

I’ve long dreamed of coining a word even uglier than “glocalization” (one of this year’s music biz buzzwords for sure) and I think I’ve succeeded. There is a point to the ridiculous coinage, beyond sheer awfulness, however. As tech democratizes creation and access to the market, the market increases dramatically in supply and fragmentation, what ultimately results is consolidation, which puts a damper on that very democratization spreading to other aspects of media production/consumption. Voila, fragsolidation.

Fragsolidation flies in the face of the long tail theory, that long-accepted hope that easier creation and greater access would inevitably bring a broader distribution of attention and income, a hope that still lingers in many a music tech startup deck. It was a beautiful idea: People who had never had the opportunity before would make idiosyncratic stuff and other people who like said stuff would find it more and more easily and joyfully, thanks to the internet. It would cost so little! It would do so much! And of course, this does happen in certain online niches, especially in enthusiast groups and interest-bound communities. 

Yet the long tail theory writ large proved wrong. It imagined uniformly desirable content flowing over a smooth topography towards discovery. The theory couldn’t predict how gnarly the online world gets, how textured, bumpy, swampy, and sludgy. How prone to platform-induced power laws, the gated, throttled, pay-per-click world since web 2.0. The long tail did not account for Amazon ads, for example, the lifeblood of many genre writers’ business for around a decade.

As the number of suppliers of media, entertainment, or art increases by orders of magnitude thanks to ease of creation and distribution, they don’t find audiences organically. They drown.

Low-cost supply, purely digital products like ebooks and mp3s, and commodified distribution put downward pressure on prices. This means legacy companies already dominating the market have to consolidate. This has been very apparent in both music (major labels merging and buying up indie distributors) and book publishing (major publishers merging, Amazon controlling much of book distribution). 

These big players strive to maximize the impact of the scale they’ve already reached--their ability to force a signal through an increasingly noisy environment--on financial returns, which fall per unit with the glut of supply. Soon, a thin but heavy layer sits on top of the business like a layer of ice capping a slushy sea of completely inchoate content. The layer absorbs some of the fragmented chaos below and simultaneously drags on the sea’s potential dynamism. It co-opts and tamps down its potential energy. 

In what way? The consolidated top controls pricing (see Audiblegate). It homogenizes artistic production (encouraging us to write/create to the current market or to rapid release mode, which doesn’t leave time for an idea to develop more fully). It encourages us to create in casino mode, instead of acting deliberately in our best interest. It increases labor power imbalances (artists are “suppliers” of content, not contractors/workers, and face obstacles to certain organizing) and self-serving intermediation (platforms keep the data-and in many cases have to by law-and maintain moats).

For creators who make what can’t be instantly absorbed into the top layer, this can mess with your head. Platforms breed misery and frustration—if you feel this way, you’re not alone! The options can feel stark: change to fit the market or find an escape hatch. That escape hatch is going direct. 

Escape from noise

The discontent with platforms and the longing for true independence has sparked a new interest in direct sales. These have long been possible, but as services prove they don’t want indies, direct sales can be an antidote. The time is right: Fans (and shoppers more generally) got used to buying something online from a person’s store (as opposed to a platform or big name marketplace) during the pandemic, and this habit has stuck.

Bandcamp may be the most familiar music store for this kind of approach, but there are even less centralized ways to go about it: Shopify+Single, Bandzoogle, NFTs, Pressly or Qrates (for vinyl crowdfunding), Ever, options for direct sales of all sorts for music and its physical formats. On the book front, there’s a lot of interest among successful indie authors around Shopify bookstores and Kickstarter (old hat for musicians, new thrills for authors), as long-standing platforms which once determined entire author careers implode under their own enshittification. The majority of creators will earn way more from direct, while retaining control over inventory, contextual branding, and pricing. That may sound dull, but it’s really exciting for many, as it opens up a new mindset to tackle the age-old problem of finding people who are into what you make.

Direct sales mean, however, that under the corporate ice, the sea is going to become even less visible to business observers and data gatherers, as few of these direct sales will be tracked well under current systems. We don’t really know what’s out there. 

Direct may already be way bigger than we as an industry have fathomed. Indie record stores are already struggling to report sales, and how direct from website sales might be tracked is anyone’s guess. While the new exciting artists may not show much activity on Spotify (why send your fans there, when you may never get paid?), they will be in other nooks and crannies that no one observer will track (or even be able to do so at scale). And all the Shopify bookstores and in-person author interactions won’t leave a trace on BookScan or bestseller lists.

The old signals of commercial success are breaking down, and there’s nothing to replace them. Charts are in a strange state of flux. Labels’ A&Rs can’t find artists with career potential, only singles that are already gaining traction. Maybe most of us, those who aren’t running a volume business, don’t need these signals anyway. They don’t validate our art or our business plans, and the concerns these signals track may not be our concerns. 

Straight from the heart

It feels kinda exciting to put the days of data mining and algo gaming behind us. A new landscape lies ahead for us to explore, one that runs on connection.This, indeed, is the Shangri La of web3, the community that might congeal around direct connection thanks to NFTs, digital collectibles, digital twins, and so on. But you don’t need blockchain to do this (unless you and your crew like blockchain; then by all means, go crazy!). 

You can use familiar ecommerce modes with that same mindset and likely make more connections faster with a wider range of people. You can judiciously balance tech and IRL interactions and structures to elicit and nurture these connections. You can prioritize your planning and marketing based on this mindset, foregrounding the ways you can connect with minimal middlemen and investing there first.

And the connections are real. If you deliver something to someone firsthand, they will often share something valuable of their own, their own art or collection or story. They will insist on giving you more than your asking price. They will be human with you. In the last few weeks, I’ve had someone give me a vintage postcard collection, had someone else serenade me with a piano piece she composed, while buying my book. 

The exchange of money isn’t the main thing, to state what’s obvious to creative types like us, but what’s very easy to forget in the slush sea of content (though direct trumps mediated there, too). It will earn me the same $ to shove 100 books into unknown randos’ Kindles as it will to sell one book direct. That one book will work a tiny bit of magic, as people reach out, ask questions, want to know more and go deeper. They are here for the story, which is also why I am here. This is the ultimate point in the end, where all scale collapses and it’s just you and me.

---

LINKS

📚The Big Indie Author Data Drop (2023 Report from ALLI)

“Median self-published author income stands at $12,759 and is growing by 53% (compared to traditionally published authors at $6-8,000 and falling).”

✘ It’s exciting to see a big, data-rich report on a very fragmented space and to see how, in book publishing at least, indie creators’ revenues are stronger than traditional author revenues and that they are growing more rapidly. (Important: many folks publishing books with big publishers may make their main income elsewhere.) The report is chock full of other interesting data and tidbits (female-identifying authors make more than male, LGBTQI+ authors earn more than hetero writers) that makes it an exciting read for those of us eager to look across media and industries, to get a real bird’s-eye view of the creator economy.

(Bonus nerdery: Compare the income figures here with those from a recent UK Musician Union’s survey… Musicians, or at least the ones in this survey, apparently make more than authors on average)

🎸Fortnite Is Reviving Rock Band — With a Little Help From the Weeknd (Ethan Shanfield/Variety)

“Fortnite Festival offers a ‘jam system,’ which allows players to interact with each other and the music library in fun, wacky ways. With up to four band members per jam session, players can switch between instruments and songs as easily as emotes, combining, say, the drum part from Weezer’s “Buddy Holly,” the guitar riff from the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” and the vocals from KT Tunstall’s “Suddenly I See.” By tinkering with the tempo, key and major versus minor scale, players can create on-the-fly mashups that sound surprisingly good — or at least funny.”

✘The focus of the coverage of Fortnite’s recently announced music-based gameplay was on the celebs and the reboot resonances with Rock Band, but for me, the real surprise was “jam” mode, a heavily guardrailed but obvious example of music’s “multiplayer,” fluid future. This is interactive music for people don’t think about making music, and it’s fascinating.

🐧Pudgy Penguins Reveal 'Pudgy World' NFT Game Rollout Plans

“The alpha launch of Pudgy World is a massive step forward for the Web3 and NFT space because Pudgy Penguin owners will be playing with their Pudgy Toys, without any pre-existing knowledge of the blockchain technology it is built on.”

✘ This kind of virtual world for NFT owners isn’t a new model (heyya Otherside etc), nor does it promise to be particularly groundbreaking in terms of experience, but the Penguins are noteworthy for keeping a solid floor in the midst of NFT value collapse and for making the most of their IP, getting plushies into places like Walmart and getting extensive traction for videos. This may be another fad, but the fact that projects like this are thriving, along with news like the launch of Sona Stream last week and Sound’s acquisition of Soho, signals that the web3 is doing just fine, finding it own slow and steady way forward, without talking much about its underlying tech.

---

MUSIC

Yeah, sure, this song has been out for a while, but who doesn’t need some well-produced Ukrainian folk-pop with merpeople and strange woodland creatures come the end of the year?