Why artist subscriptions won’t save music

By:Cherie Hu

Published:2024-03-25

Alrighty everyone, it’s time for some nuance.

Last week, I posted this tweet:

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Yes, this is a subtweet of James Blake’s new direct-to-artist subscription on Vault.fm — which grants you access to Blake’s unreleased tracks and a private group chat with fellow fans, in exchange for $5/month and your phone number. Blake is positioning Vault as a hub for creative experimentation, a source of financial stability, a direct communication line to superfans (and their data), and an antidote to the growth-hacking hamster wheel on social platforms that don’t pay.

The hype around Blake’s Vault seems to have surpassed that of new annual trade reports from major players like Spotify, MIDiA, and the IFPI. To me, this signifies two important points: 1) People listen when artists talk, and 2) people are hungry for alternatives to the zero-sum status quo. At minimum, the Vault launch is commendable for moving beyond critique and towards tangible, engaged experimentation with new solutions. (Notably, Vault is owned by the same parent company that operates music NFT platform Sound.xyz, so this isn’t the tech team’s first rodeo.)

However, the notion that a direct artist subscription model is a template for the future of music is flawed.

There’s a graveyard of attempts to scale direct artist subscriptions over the last decade, across sites like Patreon, Twitch, and the now-shuttered platforms Ampled and Drip. Many of these subscriptions launched early on in the COVID pandemic, to provide a much-needed financial lifeline to artists who could no longer tour. Many also called themselves “memberships” and not subscriptions, to suggest that fans were opting into a more intimate, mission-driven community and not just another broadcast feed.

But in almost all of these cases, there were ultimately misaligned expectations about what fans actually wanted, and/or a significant underestimation of the amount of effort it takes to maintain subscriber satisfaction under a recurring payment model.

The reality is that James Blake isn’t most artists, and most artists don’t have the mindset, the energy, the resources, the fanbase, or the staff to make this model work.

1. THE ADVOCATE

My perspective on this issue is personal: I’m a long-time fan of James Blake, and have seen him perform live more times than any other artist in my life so far. From his shows at House of Blues Boston in the early 2010s during my college years, to his mindblowing acoustic/DJ-set double-billing at the inaugural FWB Fest in 2022, I’ve had the honor of witnessing the evolution of Blake’s artistry up close.

Blake is, without question, a musician’s musician. He built his reputation on pushing the boundaries of music-making, crafting vulnerable and complex emotional landscapes using unconventional approaches to sound design, lyricism, and live performance. His melancholic falsetto tugs slowly at your heartstrings, while his dark, experimental beats and samples shuttle you straight into another futuristic universe.

Throughout his career, Blake’s online presence has consistently been about respecting music culture. On his Instagram and TikTok, there are no nonsense memes or dance challenges in sight — just snapshots from his studio sessions and CMYK club nights, with an aesthetic that is both energetic and muted. His superfans are the kinds of music nerds who will stay up all night poring over his setlists and liner notes, hoping to dissect his lyrical symbolism and production techniques.

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All of these qualities make Blake an ideal advocate for direct artist support. It makes perfect sense that he, as a musician’s musician, feels underserved by his current options on mainstream DSPs, and wants a paid, artist-centric subscription that’s “all about the music.” All of the tracks he’s posted to his Vault so far give a deeper window into his musicality and his wider creative influences. Some fans have already called the subscription “the best $5 I’ve ever spent.”

If Blake is genuinely committed to fostering a long-term community of music nerds through an alternative platform, in addition to his ongoing social media and marketing efforts elsewhere, then he is the one to make it happen — and he will likely succeed.

2. THE COMMUNITY

It’s a fact that celebrities with a strong brand voice and rabid fan community are leaving money on the table if they don't give their fans the opportunity for recurring support. If a major artist with 100 million social followers converts just 0.5% of that base to a $5/month direct subscription for exclusive content, they will birth a multimillion-dollar business overnight. No wonder we’ve seen more stars jump onto the paid community bandwagon recently — from Cardi B making $112 million from her OnlyFans in 2021, to Nicki Minaj launching her exclusive “Gag City” community on Medallion for fans who check in at her IRL shows, to now James Blake and Vault.

However, the direct subscription model isn't suitable for every artist, and long-term success requires a lot more effort than Blake is suggesting on his socials.

Based on Water & Music’s research on online music communities (full list at the bottom of this article), maintaining and growing a successful paid artist subscription requires three key elements: Consistency, intimacy, and governance.

Consistency is the lifeblood of any subscription business. When customers pay a recurring fee, they expect a steady stream of high-quality, relevant content and engagement in return. Failing to deliver on this promise erodes trust and undermines the long-term relationship between creator and subscriber.

For artist-fan subscriptions, consistency is especially crucial because fans are seeking a deeper connection with the artist beyond mere content, which they can already get on traditional social platforms. Many artists who see success with a direct subscription treat it as their primary social media channel, releasing content to paid subscribers even more often than they post on free channels like Instagram or TikTok. The posting schedule ends up looking more like that of a podcaster or vlogger rather than a traditional recording artist; it is its own unique kind of hamster wheel.

This is where intimacy also comes into play, in a way that is important to consider for artists who care about “just the music.” In practically all historical cases, the direct artist subscriptions that survive long-term expand beyond music, bringing fans into the artist’s inner circle through behind-the-scenes access, live video or text chats, and more.

Fans also want connections with other fans, not just with the artist in question. In fact, Gina Bianchini, CEO/Co-Founder of Mighty Networks, shared in January 2024 that 93% of a community’s success on their platform could be attributed to how often members connected or collaborated with each other. “It was the result of the relationships members built, not the content they consumed,” wrote Bianchini. “It was the result of discovering the most relevant people, not just following the creator … It was the result of questions that members were stoked to answer, not just read.” For an artist subscription, this looks like having fans bond and sustain conversation over their shared interests, values, and experiences, even if the artist themselves isn’t there.

Governance is perhaps the most overlooked element of a healthy artist subscription experience. By bringing fans together into a single, private space, artists and their teams assume the responsibility of community management, including having one or more dedicated moderators who engage with members, lead by example, and enforce clear rules.

The role of community manager is one of the hottest jobs in the music industry right now, and for good reason: It’s really hard work. Artist teams already face significant resource constraints when it comes to marketing, which often leaves community governance by the wayside. As artist Amanda Palmer, who has over 18,000 paying fans on Patreon, told me in 2019: “Not every artist wants to run an entire company or customer service department; all they want to do is write and deliver music to their fans.”

Any failure of a direct artist subscription experience can be attributed to a lack of consistency, intimacy, and/or governance. During the COVID pandemic, I saw many artists front-load their platform with content, only to abandon it the following year in favor of traditional social media for album or tour promotion. Others would post only unreleased music files without providing a deeper window into their lives, leaving fans questioning the value of the overall experience if their primary music consumption was easier to handle elsewhere.

The example that many music heads have revisited amidst the Vault hype is Drip, a paid membership platform for indie record labels that ran from 2012 to 2019. Early on, Drip helped labels like Ghostly, OWSLA, Mad Decent, and Stones Throw run their own direct-to-fan membership experiences — the labels with exactly the kinds of music-nerd audiences Blake seems to be targeting with Vault.

Drip was acquired by Kickstarter in 2016, but a planned reboot was canned after just a few years. Perhaps the most interesting element of the story is that Drip struggled not because of technical issues, but because of industry behavior. Their team fought to keep creators engaged with core fans after project releases, but creators would instead disappear back into their creative process, or seek to reach new audiences from scratch rather than nurturing their recurring subscriber base.

Even Taylor Swift — perhaps the world’s most talked-about music celebrity today — has struggled to make a paid community work. Her former mobile app The Swift Life, where fans could see exclusive photos and videos and interact with custom emoji (known as “Taymoji”), lasted only one year due to poor moderation and a clear lack of long-term investment from the artist herself.

So, while Blake's Vault has a clear mission that fans can rally behind, its future success is not guaranteed and depends on the ability of both the artist and the platform to deliver a consistent, intimate, and effectively governed experience for subscribers. Importantly, Blake’s career status allows for him to take a risk on short-term experiments. For other artists with more limited resources, long-term success in direct-to-fan subscriptions requires much more careful and strategic consideration.

Screenshot of the vault.fm website

3. THE PLATFORM

Jack Conte, the co-founder and CEO of Patreon, gave a compelling talk from SXSW 2024 about the macro forces that make platforms like Vault increasingly appealing to creators. He argued that the concept of subscribing directly to an artist for updates is a fundamental building block of internet infrastructure, which is being eroded by ranking algorithms, digital advertising, and "for you" feeds on mass-market social platforms. Conte's vision and enthusiasm for empowering creators is clear, and is mirrored by the depth that the Patreon product has now achieved across media offerings, community features, and pricing models.

In contrast, the long-term vision for Vault remains unclear. Is the product simply a paid Dropbox with an SMS signup sheet, or does it aim to be a deeper community platform?

While this might just be a short-term experiment spun up with Blake in response to public demand, Vault's decisions could push it in a few very different directions if it wants to stick around.

If Vault's goal is to unbundle the music category from Patreon and create a standalone app for artist subscriptions at scale, it must address the challenges of making such a platform work in the current music economy. Although there’s certainly an opportunity to build a more focused version of Patreon with a better user experience for listening to audio files, the market size of artists who can generate sufficient income from this model is quite limited. Spotify's latest Loud & Clear report reveals that only around 30,000 artists earn more than $50,000 per year from the service. The subset of those artists with a large-enough engaged fanbase to achieve a profitable conversion rate to direct subscriptions — not to mention the resources and willingness to commit to such an experience long-term — is likely even smaller. As the platform grows, there will probably be pressure to expand the core business model beyond music, leading to increased competition with established players like Patreon.

On the other hand, if Vault's vision is to white-label custom apps for artists, the opportunity could be more compelling, although history is not on their side. Custom celebrity apps have largely failed over the last decade due to poor management, subpar UX, and competition for attention from music streaming services, social media platforms, utility apps, and every other app on a given fan's device. For a direct subscription product to succeed, it must be exceptional, and "exceptional" will mean something different for every artist and fanbase.

Lastly, fans themselves are already strapped for attention and resources as well. The IFPI 2024 Global Music Report confirms that global streaming growth is slowing down, indicating a saturation point and potential subscription fatigue among consumers. The rise of direct artist subscriptions could lead to an even more fractured content experience for fans.

Emily White, a former product manager at Spotify, highlighted the specific UX challenges at play; for instance, most fans listen to multiple artists in a single session, making siloed artist-centric experiences on disparate platforms a poor fit for real-world music consumption habits. It also becomes cost-prohibitive for the superfan if they are subscribing to multiple different artists' vaults at the same time.

For any artist launching a direct subscription, they must ask the question of whether this is something that their target audience is actually able to support.

In short, James Blake’s likely success with Vault does not signal a panacea for the entire music industry. The long-term sustainability and scalability of the model hinge on factors that many artists may find challenging to maintain in the current economic landscape. And the widespread adoption of artist-specific subscription platforms risks creating a fragmented and frustrating user experience for fans who are already grappling with subscription fatigue.

As the industry explores new alternatives, it is essential to approach them with a critical eye, carefully considering their second-order effects on everyone involved. Based on recent market data and the current competitive landscape of music and fan platforms, it seems that artist-specific subscription platforms can be a sustainable business for a small niche of select artists who are willing to put in the work. For the vast majority of artists and fans, the future instead lies in more integrated, user-friendly solutions that prioritize a seamless, engaging, and affordable experience across multiple touchpoints, to reflect the wide diversity of environments in which music culture and fandom can thrive.

While the need for innovation is clear, no solution will be universal.

Dive deeper into Water & Music’s research and reporting on fan communities: