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 musici