Story #1: James Blake partners with Vault.fm to create an artist-first, D2C fandom-driven subscription service.
I have dug into the company behind Vault.fm, a corporate entity called "OUT THE MUD VENTURES INC.". It's the same company behind the renowned Web3 music portal Sound.xyz, with founder David Greenstein at its helm. It's easy to predict a strong synergy between the two platforms in the near future, especially considering all the enormous and partly untapped potential in the Web3 landscape.
Now, remember the James Blake tweet that made headlines a couple of weeks ago?
If we want quality music somebody is gonna have to pay for it. Streaming services don’t pay properly, labels want a bigger cut than ever and just sit and wait for you to go viral, TikTok doesn’t pay properly, and touring is getting prohibitively expensive for most artists.
— James Blake (@jamesblake) March 3, 2024
Was this a marketing stunt to launch Vault.fm? A way to kickstart a conversation that would eventually lead to the product being released to the general public? Or did the collaboration between him and OUT OF THE MUD VENTURES INC. naturally developed over a two-week time period (since the tweet above happened)?
I am leaning towards it being a marketing effort, but it's worth noting that tech companies nowadays are able to turn over a minimum viable product (MVP) in a mere few days.
Last but not least: why is James Blake waking up only now to the joy of fandom-first community building and superfans curation? Could it be that his records lately haven't been performed as expected? Perhaps...
Anyway! Vault.fm seems to be a modern, solid platform, ticking all the boxes of modern community-building practices: control over fans' personal data, early access and messaging features increasing the intimate value of fans-to-artist interactions.
While we already have a plethora of companies offering pretty much the same thing (Patreon above all), it's worth noting that nothing stops you from simply opening a Stripe account and collecting subscriptions from your own fans, linking to a gated area on your own website. Because, spoiler alert, that's exactly what Vault.fm is doing (Stripe included).
Story #2: A secret composer behind 650 'fake' artists profiles on Spotify, racking up a whopping 15 BILLION stream.
Murray Stassen
Summed up, Johan Röhr, a Swedish composer, has published music under more than 650 pseudonyms via his record label Epidemic Sound.
I don't see why this would be necessarily controversial - pseudonyms have been a staple in the music industry for decades (remember the 80s?). They are quite common in the dance and club records landscape and the instrumental background music field.
Rather than focusing on the 'fake artists' narrative, a more interesting question would be whether Spotify has a specific royalty share agreement with Epidemic Sound, making it cheaper to boost the label's catalogue on the platform's editorial playlist...
Story #3: Shawn Reynaldo's super interesting essay on the industry not actually selling music, but rather marketing to everyone the luscious dream of becoming a successful artist:
Shawn Reynaldo
Also, this tweet is strangely eerie:
I think a lot of people haven’t realized that the market for making people feel like artists is larger than the market for consuming art itself
— Pidud (@Pidud_) March 14, 2024
