For most of the streaming era, the music industry has become extraordinarily good at building audiences it cannot fully reach. That's not the industry's fault, it's how the broader ecosystem evolved. What that means is that an artist can have a million monthly listeners and still have no way to contact those people directly. Hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, with an algorithm deciding whether they see the next post. A sold-out venue, without knowing who was standing in it.

For years, that trade-off has been worth it. In many cases, entire business models have been crafted around it. Streaming gave artists enormous distribution and discovery potential. Social offered enormous reach potential, assuming you accepted that it was increasingly a pay-to-play kind of deal. So music businesses optimised around it. Get the track onto the right playlist (through quality product, hype or nepotism - take your pick). Jiggle the algorithm a bit. Build social reach. Buy media. Drive streams. Make some CASH MONEY, BABY. Ch-ching 💰

But holy moly, it's expensive to do that. And if you keep paying to reach the same people without building a relationship with them, you're giving yourself a lot of work to do next time. Sustainable businesses give their customers reasons to come back and spend more. Deliberate, direct and personalised communication can take the strain of that heavy lift for you.

In music, we call this activity “direct-to-fan”: building relationships and doing business directly with the people who care about what you make. It isn't new… trust me, this shit is hundreds of years old. I've worked in music CRM for more than 15 years, and there have always been artist teams that just get it, and some that don't. But what's interesting now is how much independent activity is converging around this same idea that D2C is the way forward.

UMG signed a multi-year agreement with EVEN in February, plugging direct music sales, early access, exclusive content and community into its broader D2C strategy. In March, ATC Music Group acquired Push and Cirkay, bringing digital marketing, data analytics, ecommerce and fan engagement capability into the group. Laylo expanded into the UK and Europe in May, talking openly about growing demand for first-party fan data and direct relationships across ticketing, merch, presales and releases. TIDAL has now moved into direct-to-fan sales too, allowing eligible artists in the US to sell music directly through the platform with no platform fee on those sales. By September, ATC was describing its expanded Services business as a “direct-to-fan engine”, while building technology intended to bring streaming, commerce and audience engagement data together for artists and managers. And Openstage continues to build and strengthen its proposition around artist-controlled fan data, direct audience relationships and the infrastructure needed to run direct-to-fan businesses.

This is fucking interesting, because these are NOT identical bets being made by identical businesses. But it IS a move in the same direction by a group of related businesses. The herd is migrating.

Imagine 100,000 people listen to your artist’s music this month. A lovely number, sure, and it looks great on a slide in a meeting with the C-suite. But on its own, it doesn't tell you much about the humans doing the listening, or provide a way for you to speak to them again. If 10,000 of those people give you permission to contact them directly, you can start building a much more detailed picture… Where they live, who bought vinyl, who registered for a presale, who spent money in the store and who wants to hear about the next tour. Suddenly, you've got some levers to pull, something useful to work with.

I think about this through four pillars of data: demographic, behavioural, psychographic and transactional. Put enough of those signals together and you can start recognising cohorts of fans in your audience with shared interests, habits, and identifiable characteristics. Then you can deliver personalised marketing at scale instead of sending everyone the same fucking broadcast message. The fan who bought the last three records and the person who signed up yesterday probably don't need exactly the same message. As marketers, we HAVE to evolve from this at some point.

Look after those relationships and the value can compound like interest on your investments. You learn more, earn trust and get better at giving people something they actually care about and value, and most importantly - are willing to spend money on. Someone who registers for a presale today might buy the record next month, come to the show six months later and buy merch next year. But you’ve got to earn that.

Of course, other marketing channels work within this strategy too. But with a permissioned audience that you own, you also have a direct route back to somebody when you've got something relevant to say. You're giving that relationship a better chance to develop beyond whichever post the algorithm happens to serve them.

So where do you start? 🤷‍♂️

I think this is one of the most exciting, genuinely pro-artist shifts we're seeing in the industry. Streaming and social still have their place, and nobody needs another weird gated community for the sake of it. There's an opportunity here to redress the balance, giving artists more control over the relationships they've spent years creating. The technology is improving, businesses are putting money behind it, and everyone is still figuring out what good actually looks like. For artists and their teams, a useful place to start is with what you've already got: where your fan data lives, who you have permission to contact and what you'd like those people to do next.

This is where I can support you. I help artists, labels, managers and music businesses make this work and it delivers results. From strategy and data structure through to CRM, segmentation, lifecycle communications, reporting, testing and the boring-but-important operational shit that stops everything falling apart six months later.

So if direct-to-fan is appearing on your roadmap, or you've already got the tools and a pile of audience data but aren't sure what to do with it, tell me about it today. Let’s talk.