The State of the Middle-Class Artist

Episode title: The State of the Middle-Class Artist

The “middle class musician” is a popular talking point in the industry. Several platforms have been built to serve this group. 

But what exactly is a middle-class musician? How can they get ahead when the major companies are incentivized to support the superstars? How does the 1000 True Fans theory apple here? And which companies do a great job of serving them today? 

I talked to Tati Cirisano of MIDiA Research to break it all down. Here’s everything we covered this episode:

0:44 How much money does a middle-class musician take home?

9:05 How the 1,000 True Fans theory works in the steaming era 

16:06 Why platforms struggling to serve middle class 

18:33 What fans actually want from artist-specific subscriptions 

21:23 How touring is for the middle class artists

23:21 Artists catalogs generating $20k+ from Spotify 

26:25 Good data vs bad data

28:49 MIDiA’s Bandsintown return to live study

34:39 Why Pandora struggled to serve the middle class 

36:18 Is serving middle-class musicians a viable business model? 

48:13 Will middle-class musicians have it easier in 20 years?

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Host: Dan Runcie, @RuncieDan, trapital.co

Guests: Tati Cirisano, @tatianacirisano

This episode is sponsored by DICE. Learn more about why artists, venues, and promoters love to partner with DICE for their ticketing needs. Visit dice.fm

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TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Tati Cirisano: If an artist is trying to sell them something for 300 just so that they make 50 or whatever it is that translates to the fan as them having to spend so much money just to prove that they're a fan of the artist.

So we don't want to. harvest people's fandom, we want to cultivate it. And the current industry makes it hard to fulfill that promise.

[00:00:17] Dan Runcie Audio Intro: Hey, welcome to the Trapital Podcast. I'm your host and the founder of Trapital, Dan Runcie. This podcast is your place to gain insights from the executives in music, media, entertainment, and more who are taking hip hop culture to the next level.

[00:00:44] Dan Runcie Guest Intro: Today's episode is about the state of the middle class artists. It's a very different world than it was 20, 25 years ago. If you talk to artists back then, who are now frustrated with the current model, they'll tell you that the nineties and the eighties were a great time for middle class artists. You could sell a few tens of thousands of CDs per year.

You could still bring home enough for you and your band and others to earn a living off of that. But those economics get a lot harder in the streaming era where you need millions of streams, if not more. Just to make that same revenue that you did 25 years ago. But because of the streaming era that we're in now, it's also opened up many more opportunities for different revenue streams, both in real life and through digital communities and online marketplaces and things like that.

So with all of that change, all that dynamic. Where does that leave us? So for today's episode, I'm joined by Tati Sirisano. She's dug into this topic specifically with some of her work at Media Research and a lot of the analysis she's done on fandom. So where are we with middle class musicians? What does it mean to be a middle class musicians?

And for all of the platforms out there that are aiming to serve middle class musicians, who's actually doing it well? Let's dive in.

[00:02:00] Dan Runcie: Today's episode is all about the middle class musician. This is a group of artists that is often talked about in the industry from all of the companies, all of the services that are trying to help artists, but how many of them are actually serving artists and doing it in a meaningful way? And I'm here to talk about it with someone who's talked about and read about this topic herself, Tati Cirisano, welcome back to the pod.

[00:02:26] Tati Cirisano: Thanks, Dan. I'm excited. I love a thorny topic and there are many thorns to this one. A lot of contradictions, a lot of really, I don't know, interesting viewpoints. So I'm excited to get into it.

[00:02:39] Dan Runcie: So first let's define middle class musician. When you hear the term, when you use the term yourself. What are you referring to? How do you define that group?

[00:02:49] Tati Cirisano: Yeah. Well, it's, funny because if you think about a middle class musician as someone who's earning a sustainable living wage from their music, there's very few artists as we know, that actually do that. Like some of the successful, you know, relatively well-known artists that we listen to might not even fit into that description.

so I think it is, you know, a pretty small group. but that's what I would define it as, I guess if we're being technical about it, is it's someone who is able to actually, earn a full-time living from their music career. And, when we look at, you know, at media, we do a lot of creator surveys. and when we look at, you know, how many creators fit into that.

when we did our last creator survey in the UK and the US, we got, about 19% of everyone who filled out. Our survey was actually doing it full time. That doesn't necessarily mean they're making a living wage, but that means that this is, you know, what they're doing for, you know, their main career and the average income was about $46, 000. So that's kind of what I see when I think of the term, I guess.

[00:03:59] Dan Runcie: Yeah, I think the sweet spot. I've thought about that as the floor to 50, 000 that you are earning from your music related activities. And I say that specifically because I think this is where some of the difference of the term and its interpretation is for years, people used to look at that number specifically think about it in terms of what is derived specifically from your music revenue.

You being able to sell CDs, sell physical albums. How much of it comes from there today? Obviously, the economics are flipped and it is. Quite challenging for artists, especially if you don't own the rights to your music to be able to earn that level of money stand alone from CD sales, unless you're complimenting it with another revenue source.

So that's a bit that's why I mentioned music related things, because artists, at least now do make more from touring and we'll get into that a bit more. They also have merch and other things that they still did have in. The nineties and other eras before, but some of these things have expanded and there's now all of these digital, so you have the IRL experiences, the IRL experiences too, and if that can combine and you're making, let's say at least $50,000 in profit, I would say so take home expenses of, or take home revenue of what you actually have versus up to let's say $150,000.

That's how I've defined middle class musician. If you're earning more than that, then you're definitely at that closer to that tip of the spear. I don't know if the numbers would exactly put you in, let's say the 1%. I think there might be even a little bit of gap below that, but that's how I've roughly looked at it.

So even though I know that. Every year, Spotify has its breakdown on how many artists catalogs generate this certain amount. And the math there is roughly been okay. You can multiply that number by 4 and that can give you an idea of what the total recorded music revenue is. That's still only 1 source that doesn't include all the other sources that are there.

So there's a bunch of ways. And I think a lot of people out there do feel like you should be able to be a middle class musician. If you're earning solely from the music recording itself, but I do like to think of it a bit more broadly and that's how I've defined it

[00:06:19] Tati Cirisano: No, definitely. I realized that I answered that question thinking about it that way without even realizing it because it's so common now that I mean, I think earning a full time living from your music alone and not these other things, all these other things around it is nearly impossible for a lot of today's artists. And when we look at, you know, in the research. Most of these artists are learning from a really fragmented mix of income streams, right? There isn't just like one thing that is their main source of income. They tend to have a hand in all these different places from, education to sync to performing, producing for other artists and things like that.

So we hear a lot. There's this need to kind of have all the wheels spinning all the time. And usually the sources of income that, are maybe more important are the ones that actually are not about your music itself. So that's a really good, that's a really important distinction to make for sure.

[00:07:14] Dan Runcie: Because I think what you're calling out and it's true is that what people enjoyed about the CD era was that there was 1 item that you could purchase in that 10 to 20 dollar range and that benefited. Those artists who could then get at least, let's say, 4 to 5 for every 20 CD that's sold. They then k