Artist friendly platforms: all-in-one options

In this series, we’re looking into various platforms for artists, within the context of how artist friendly they are.

Last time, we talked about Bandcamp as an all-in-one platform. Today, we’re talking about membership based all-in-one platforms.

Remember, the ability to own your audience is a defining feature of an artist friendly platform.

All-in-one artist friendly platforms

These platforms are all-in-one services that are membership based, where your fans pay you every month.

The pros of Patreon

• One of the original innovators in the artist/creator subscription model space.

• Their newsletters on business tactics for creatives are actually pretty good, and the info they provide is not overly biased towards info that only benefits the platform.  Refreshing to see from a company-run blog.

• Offers recurring, predictable revenue to smaller creators, with the ability to set your own pricing, and features quite reasonable platform fees (at least for now).

• Founded by a real, working artist (Jack Conti). That could actually be a con, not sure yet.

  • Jack Conti has a history of gross mismanagement within his own artistic career, and has lost a ton of money on his own shoddily-run tours.  He’s got a long history of squandering his flashy promotional attention with some pretty poor decision making.  So, I’m not really convinced that he’s the best figurehead for an artist career platform.  It does seem like he’s surrounding himself with competent people currently, at least🤷‍♂️

The Cons of Patreon

• Managing any paid subscription feed will require regular, consistent time input from you, and constant maintenance and iteration in order to earn the subscription fees that you’re asking for from your fans. You’re gonna need to put in consistent time and effort to earn that $5/month.  This is not easy money, and it’s certainly not passive money.

• I haven’t seen a ton of large touring musical artists doing super well on here, personally. It seems to be a platform that is best suited for other types of artists, particularly visual artists, animators, YouTubers, coders, and game streamers.

  • I’d say Patreon has more of a “content creator” vibe over an “artist” vibe, though as those terms become closer to each other who’s to say that will actually matter in 10 years?

• Expect your results to vary: for every one artist doing well on here, there could be 100 that it just doesn’t work for.

  • Patreon did not work at all for me, for example, despite a solid 2 years of posting what I'd consider to be high quality stuff very consistently. On the flip side, there are also plenty of artists out there who are currently paying their rent with this service. Could definitely be worth a shot in your individual situation, and something well worth considering.

The Pros of Substack

• A very artist friendly platform, with a strong public record of artist support coming from their top-level management (at time of writing).

• Is in a pretty unique position in comparison to the other “indie” platforms, in that it’s artist friendly, charges reasonable fees, and yet also seems to have a lot of very focused fans on there that really do care passionately about keeping up with the artists they love directly. In that sense, it’s somewhat similar to something like an email list or maybe Reddit before it started to suck.

• Substack currently has a very “exclusive club” feel. Always a good vibe for smaller independents.

• You might consider taking the Patti Smith approach to this platform, where you’d use it as a kind of “creative journal” to document your day-to-day creative activities, while then also releasing your finished musical work onto one of the more mainstream streaming platforms for wider distribution.

The Cons of Substack

• Not really a music platform per se, this platform was originally made for writers to start up a paid feed for their fans.

• It’s basically a paid blog, with both long-form and short-form written text options, so it would be quite clunky to use this as a musical artist for your primary music distribution.

• This platform has had some recent troubles with poor moderation of some very troubling content, and could be falling into the death curve of “enshittification”. That’s where they’re starting to stop prioritizing the curation quality of a small, focused platform in favor of an ad-supported model to please their investors. More on “enshittification” straight from the source here.

Next time in this series, we’ll get into some of the consumer-facing digital music streaming platforms.