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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Branding by contradiction

Five extremes make a brand.

Why it matters

Artist branding can take time: Read interviews with artists and books on branding, hire an artist-branding consultant, attend workshops, create mood boards, and put together a 50-slide brand deck.

Today, I present a version that takes five minutes.

How it works

This approach’s strength is its simplicity, but don’t underestimate its effectiveness:

1. Pick two extreme opposites.

2. Decide which one you are.

3. Repeat this at least four times.

The result is a branding guidelines document in its simplest form.

Some pairs worth deciding on:

• Are you a happy or a sad act?

• Mysterious or approachable?

• Outspoken or private?

• Polished or unpolished?

• Artist or musician?

• Serious or playful?

• Nostalgic or futuristic?

• Maximalist or minimalist?

• Local or global?

• “I” or “we”?

• Rave or deep listening?

• Chaos or control?

• Improvised or engineered?

• Warm or cold?

• Inviting or detached?

• Traditional or experimental?

• Glamorous or grounded?

• Romantic or cynical?

• Quality or quantity?

• Political or apolitical?

• Vulnerable or armoured?

• Fast or slow?

An extreme, even a slightly inaccurate one, gives fans, curators, and journalists exactly one thing to remember.

Brand positioning is about being difficult to confuse with anyone else. That’s called brand differentiation, but using branding theory makes it no longer simple, so let’s save that for another edition.

Yes, but..

This lacks nuance. Deliberately, because that’s the whole mechanism, and also the risk. An artist who commits hard to happy can end up performing happiness on days they don’t feel it.

And brands evolve, especially early in a career. Extremes might not hold once the music, the audience, or the artist themselves has changed. Revisit the list annually rather than treating it as permanent.

Take action now

Pick two extremes right now and write down which side you are, not which side sounds better.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Simplify your marketing strategy (The Fanbase Builder)

• The strategic choice between raw and polished content (The Fanbase Builder)

• Positioning artists as heroes, outlaws, jesters, and magicians (The Fanbase Builder)

• Quality versus Quantity: Two content strategies for artists (The Fanbase Builder)

• A simple trick to create content that doesn’t feel cringe (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

When should artists say yes to an unpaid gig?

Early-phase acts get this email constantly: Come perform for beers and for the exposure, because our audience is huge and it’ll be so good for you. Exposure is not a currency, and most of these offers deserve a straightforward no. But not all of them.

Why it matters

My starting point for this edition was an early draft titled “never play for free”. But that blanket advice is too simple. It lets artists off the hook from figuring out what their time is worth.

Nobody would turn down an underpaid Super Bowl halftime slot. That level of exposure is invaluable, and not a single artist would turn it down for lack of monetary reward. Artists shouldn’t refuse every unpaid offer on principle. Instead, it’s valuable to understand the difference between an offer that’s genuinely below market value and one that only looks that way because you haven’t defined your market value yet.

How it works

Every offer an artist receives is a trade. Venue promoters aren’t guessing what to offer you. As with every product or service people buy, they’re pattern-matching to what they believe you’re worth. Artists can teach the market to expect.

The reward doesn’t have to be cash. What matters is that the artist names the reward honestly and weighs it against what they believe they’re currently worth. Market value is a claim an artist makes about themselves, and every accepted offer either confirms or resets that claim:

• Free beers signal “hobby,” not “career”. It’s fine for acts who genuinely see themselves that way.

• Exposure to a genuinely bigger audience can move a career forward, but the promoter is pricing your market value at €0,00.

• A €10 door fee, a €500 guarantee, a €10k festival fee: all legitimate, depending entirely on where you actually are right now.

Whatever you accept becomes the number the next promoter starts from. Say yes to €150 because a friend was promoting, and the next offer is €150 too, they’ve no reason to offer more.

Yes, but..

None of this means saying no to every unpaid offer on principle. Sometimes the point is getting into a room you can’t otherwise reach. A support slot for an artist whose fans should become your fans can be worth more than the €200 a random Tuesday show would pay.

Avoid turning down every early opportunity while waiting for an offer that matches a market value you haven’t yet built. Before you have a track record, the honest answer to “what am I worth” is sometimes just: “not much yet”, and that’s fine.

Take action now

Artists can pick one number today (a minimum guarantee, a minimum door fee, a minimum audience size) and hold it for the next show request that lands in their inbox.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Market value is the music industry’s hidden currency (The Fanbase Builder)

• Why your live show should be more than just your album played loud (The Fanbase Builder)

• What do you sell as an artist? (The Fanbase Builder)

• The limits of business logic in music (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

What do you sell as an artist?

Music is just a small part of what’s actually for sale.

Why it matters

Ask a typical emerging artist what they sell, and the answer arrives instantly: music, meaning streams. Every campaign, every caption, every paid ad leads back to the same call to action: stream this.

About a decade ago, I built a marketing website for a promising emerging artist. I included the entire marketing playbook: email capture, videos, a small merch shop. Their reaction summed up an entire industry mindset: nice, but how do we get people to Spotify?

Don’t get me wrong: It always starts with music, streams matter and are very important, and artists should absolutely think about driving traffic to DSPs. But music and streams are not the only products that drive artist careers.

It’s what made me ask a more basic question: what are artists actually selling?

How it works

These four levels of what artists sell are loosely inspired by how brand equity thinking describes a product turning into a brand:

• Level 1: Music. The song is the entry point, the thing that first earns someone’s attention. But alone, it doesn’t explain why a listener becomes a fan.

• Level 2: Identity. Fans use an artist’s music and image as identity markers that signal taste and a position within a certain culture. At this level, artists sell a way for fans to recognise themselves, and be recognised by others.

• Level 3: Experience. Beyond identity comes shared experience: a room full of people who feel the same rush at the same moment. You’re not selling the setlist, but the feeling of being there, together.

• Level 4: Belonging. At the top of the ladder, fans aren’t just identifying with an artist or sharing an experience. They belong to something ongoing.

Yes, but..

Don’t diminish the importance of music and streams. It always begins with music. Period. However, it doesn’t end with music. Many artists can sell music. Only successful artists can sell belonging on a large scale.

Take action now

Artists can try this exercise: For the next four months, don’t use the word “music” in your communication. Not in social media captions, not in captions, not in emails.

After four weeks, look back and evaluate. What has it brought you? What did you miss?

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Why strong artist brands matter to fans, not just artists (The Fanbase Builder)

• Music is a social accelerator (The Fanbase Builder)

• Why your live show should be more than just your album played loud (The Fanbase Builder)

• Market value is the music industry’s hidden currency (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Better ways to spend €100 than on ads in 2026

The question is still whether an ad is really the best use of that money.

Why it matters

Two years ago, I made the case for spending €100 on other things rather than a social media ad campaign. In this updated version, we look at where that €100 can go today.

I’m still critical of advertising as the default tactic for emerging artists. I’ve written about strategic approaches to advertising before and created a five-step flowchart to help artists decide whether to invest in advertising.

Let’s say an artist has €100 burning a hole in their pocket. What would be a better investment than running an ad campaign? The good news: in 2026, there’s more to do with that €100 than there was in 2024.

How it works

Here’s where I’d put €100 instead of an ad campaign right now. Some are brand new, and some are pulled from things I’ve already written about. Let’s extend this list together, leave your suggestions in the comments.

• Handwritten notes to your actual fans. Pick your twenty most loyal fans. Send each of them a short, handwritten card, because a personal note is the ultimate luxury product nowadays.

• An afternoon on (AI-)findability. Use an AI-coding model to add proper Schema markup and clean metadata to your website. Align it with how fans, industry pros, web crawlers, and AI discover artists. €100 spent here compounds for years.

• One really good press photo. Hire a music photographer for a portrait you’ll reuse everywhere for a year.

• Bank a favour. Invest €100 in someone else. Invite a fellow artist or industry pro for a Guanxi-coffee. Offer help, a listening ear, or company. See what you can do for someone that can move your career when you need a favour in return.

• Take a course. Get better at what you’re good at, or take something completely new that can move your career forward, like a coding or design course.

• Get a gym pass. Gyms are great places for music. Beyond the health benefits, which undeniably benefit your music career, gyms are spaces where people discover music while doing something positive. It’s valuable for artists to understand these dynamics.

• Print (eco-friendly) stickers. Hand them out and put them up yourself around your local venue’s neighbourhood. People who walk by daily (a.k.a. the venue promoter) see them every day.

• Buy a digital wellbeing tool for yourself. We’re all addicted to social media and our phones. I use a physical app blocker (Tap Out) to block distracting apps. It works a bit too well for me, but it does help me spend less time on my phone and focus on more inspiring things.

Yes, but..

Running ads isn’t a bad tactic. It’s just not the best tactic for every artist with marketing money to spend. Earlier, I created a five-step flowchart about when artists could run ads and when they shouldn’t, which aligns perfectly with this topic.

Take action now

Pick one of the ideas above to commit to this summer, or..

Your thoughts

..add your ideas in the comments below.

Further reading

• Don’t run ads: Better ways to spend a hundred euros (The Fanbase Builder)

• Should artists run ads? (The Fanbase Builder)

• Why artists should do things that don’t scale (The Fanbase Builder)

• Get found by bots using Schema markup (The Fanbase Builder)

• Simple things artists can do to attract music supervisors (The Fanbase Builder)

• The Guanxi approach to networking in music (The Fanbase Builder)

• Battling social media addiction while working in music (The Fanbase Builder)

• Results from a three-month social media break (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Don’t clone your own voice

Regulators worldwide have been warning against voice-cloning for years.

Why it matters

Google now lets anyone record a short video to build a permanent AI clone of their face and voice inside Gemini, then have it say whatever they type. It’s the most mainstream this technology has ever been.

I’m wary of any feature that makes identity reproducible in a few taps. Tools like ElevenLabs have offered voice cloning for years, and law enforcement well beyond Silicon Valley has been responding to it for almost as long.

• The FTC flagged AI-cloned emergency calls impersonating family members back in 2023.

• Closer to home, the European Parliament’s own research service reported that deepfake voice scams are escalating rapidly. Europol now tracks AI-enabled voice and video fraud as one of the fastest-growing organised crime categories in the EU.

How it works

Every avatar and voice clone works the same way, regardless of which company built it or which country it’s used in: feed a system enough clean audio of someone talking, and it learns to generate new sentences in that voice.

Gemini needs a short recording of your face and voice through your phone, and currently requires you to be 18 or older with a paid Google AI plan. Other tools ask for less: a public voice note, an interview clip, or a Story archived for 24 hours is usually enough raw material.

Barrington et al (2025) found listeners could only correctly identify a cloned voice as fake around 60% of the time, and mistook a clone for the real speaker roughly 80% of the time.

Here’s how that could impact artists:

• Fans get targeted: A convincing video or voice note from “you” asking for money is far more persuasive than a text scam.

• Family and dating fraud: The exact scheme the FTC first flagged in 2023 as an AI-cloned emergency call.

• Business impersonation: In Hong Kong, a finance worker transferred $25.6 million after joining a video call where every other “colleague,” including the CFO, turned out to be an AI deepfake built from public footage.

• Unconsented commercial use: YouTuber Jeff Geerling found a company narrating its own product videos in a voice cloned from his channel, without ever asking him.

Yes, but..

The FBI’s fraud guidance recommends limiting how much of your voice and image you post online in the first place, which is obviously something most artists can’t comply with.

And avatars and voice-AI are undeniably cool when in the hands of creative people:

• It could help artists reach other markets by dubbing into other languages, or by recording a scripted intro for five markets overnight.

• Creating videos with AI becomes much easier; every situation artists want to place themselves in is just a prompt away.

• Artists can take it even further by creating direct-to-fan video and audio messages on a large scale.

• And obviously, artists can use their cloned voice to create music in new ways.

For most artists, most of their voice is already out there. So maybe my advice isn’t applicable to artists at all, and artists should take full advantage of this new technology and create an avatar and clone their voice today.

Take action now

Artists can agree on a spoken code word with their team and family, the same low-tech fix regulators keep recommending against cloned emergency calls.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• I Cloned Myself With Gemini’s AI Avatar Tool. The Result Was Unnervingly Me (Wired)

• I made a Gemini avatar of myself. It’s so real, it creeps me out (PC World)

• Create and use an avatar in Gemini Apps (Google Gemini Help)

• Scammers use AI to enhance their family emergency schemes (FTC)

• Scam calls in times of Generative AI (European Parliamentary Think Tank)

• Barrington, S., Cooper, E. A., & Farid, H. (2025). People are poorly equipped to detect AI-powered voice clones. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 11004. (full-text)

• Criminals Use Generative Artificial Intelligence to Facilitate Financial Fraud (FBI)

• Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’ (CNN)

• They stole my voice with AI (Jeff Geerling)

• Autonomous humanoid robots joining the band (The Fanbase Builder)

• Proof of humanity as a marketing metric (The Fanbase Builder)

• Navigating AI beyond the hype in 2026 (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Entertain media with creative PR

Three campaigns that pitched a story to enjoy.

Why it matters

Generating earned media matters for artists, even as power shifts toward community and niche positioning. Media remain one of music’s gatekeepers: journalists can accelerate a career and decide which artist gets associated with what.

Every week journalists open dozens of music pitches saying the same thing in different words: new single, new album, new tour, a quote about staying true to the sound.

Journalists read hundreds of stories, and they get bored exactly like everyone else because sometimes, music PR reads like a checklist rather than a story.

We forget something obvious: we work in the entertainment industry, and journalists are humans susceptible to entertainment. So, entertain them.

How it works

When strategising a PR approach, challenge yourself to pitch an out-of-the-box concept instead of a routine update. Journalists like this because the story is an instant conversation starter.

Three examples of artists who pitched the format, not the music:

• A music campaign in a runners magazine. Harry Styles was interviewed by Haruki Murakami for Runner’s World. Two men from entirely different creative fields, talking about marathon running. I’ve written about this interview before for what it teaches about creative positioning. Here, the learning is the pitch itself. A running title got a music story it would never normally chase.

• The venue becomes the pitch. Substack has hosted a run of literary readings in unlikely spaces, most notably a reading held inside a New York bathhouse. While the readings themselves were fairly standard, the format wasn’t. A room of writers reading in swimsuits is simply a far easier story to tell.

• The interview as a power game. Back in 2017, for her album Masseduction, St. Vincent had journalists interview her mid-massage, face-down with no eye contact possible, or inside a purpose-built pink box, with pre-recorded answers ready for any cliché question. She topped it off with a parody interview series mocking the exact questions press days throw at her.

None of these three pitched the music directly. They pitched a format a journalist couldn’t ignore, or, in the case of St. Vincent, surprised the interviewers who expected a standard interview format, resulting in high-value earned media placements.

Yes, but..

These three examples work for emerging or established artists with a track record: Media only risks an unusual format when there’s already a reputation to spend. It isn’t workable for an introduction campaign with no prior coverage. A journalist has no reason yet to trust an unknown name with something this odd.

However, it still holds for introducing new artists to smaller, special-interest niche media, where the bar for newsworthy is lower and a strange, well-matched pitch is exactly the creative work that gets you noticed.

Take action now

Artists can run a Crazy Eights session to brainstorm eight strange pitch angles in eight minutes, weirder than “new single out now.”

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Harry Styles Is One of Us (Runner’s World)

• I went to a steamy literary reading in a New York bathhouse (Dazed)

• St. Vincent Is Telling You Everything (BuzzFeed News)

• Op auditie in St. Vincent’s Wonderland (3voor12)

• Finding creative clarity in unlikely crossover interviews (The Fanbase Builder)

• How to make your album announcement newsworthy (The Fanbase Builder)

• Generate eight new content ideas in eight minutes (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Not all listening is the same

There is a difference between music playing in the background while cooking and music someone specifically searched for, opened, and turned up.

Why it matters

I’ve written about user intent before. The idea that what a listener is trying to do when they press play matters as much as the fact that they did. Uses and Gratifications theory, developed by Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch in the 1970s, provides a research foundation and a more precise vocabulary.

Precision matters because it points to what actually moves a listener from one mode to the other, something the low- versus high-intent distinction doesn’t fully address.

How it works

Uses and Gratifications theory (U&G) proposes that media audiences are active. This now sounds obvious but wasn’t at the time.

People don’t absorb everything in front of them. They choose what to watch, listen to, or read based on what they hope to get from it. U&G doesn’t ask what media does to people, but what people do with media.

Gratifications refer to what people seek to satisfy. U&G researchers identified broad categories of need: acquiring information, managing emotions, connecting with others, affirming identity, and escaping tension.

Music can serve all of them, but not simultaneously, and not always with the artist at the centre. Someone playing techno while working is satisfying a completely different need from someone who goes out of their way to experience the same DJ live.

Rubin (1984) later distilled U&G into a distinction more applicable for artists than the original five-category model:

• Ritualised listeners engage frequently and habitually, mostly for diversion. Music is on in the background; the artist is incidental. They are reachable through playlists, algorithmic placement, and mood-based discovery, but they may never register who made the music.

• Instrumental listeners engage less often, but with a specific purpose. They search for the artist. They hit play deliberately. They come for something only this artist can give them. They’re reachable through artist identity, storytelling, and community. They come looking.

Yes, but..

Rubin examined ritualised and instrumental television viewing, not music listening. While it’s easy to argue that music and TV share mechanics, recommendations and curation are more influential in music than in TV. Radio playlists or recommendation algorithms can surface an artist repeatedly until passive exposure starts to feel like preference. At what point does ritualised become instrumental?

Take action now

The shift from ritualised to instrumental is where artist marketing either works or doesn’t. Something has to interrupt the habitual listener. So artists could try to make them pause and recognise who made what they just heard.

This is why artists who build around an identity beyond the music tend to convert listeners more reliably than those who rely on quality alone. The goal here is to be noticed in a mode where noticing requires effort.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Uses and Gratifications Theory (EBSCO Research Starters)

• Katz, E., Blumler, J.G., & Gurevitch, M. (1974). Utilization of mass communication by the individual. In J.G. Blumler & E. Katz (Eds.), The Uses of Mass Communications. Sage.

• Rubin, A.M. (1984). Ritualized and instrumental television viewing. Journal of Communication, 34(3), 67–77.

• Ruggiero, Thomas E. “Uses and Gratifications Theory in the 21st Century.” Mass Communication and Society, vol. 3, no. 1, Feb. 2000, pp. 3–37.

• How to leverage user intent (The Fanbase Builder)

• Measurement fallacies in music and fandom (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

FOMO works and that’s a problem

Limited merch drops. Exclusive access. Countdown timers. The music industry has enthusiastically and successfully adopted Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) as a marketing tactic. And it works. But what actually happens to the fan on the other side of that tactic?

Why it matters

I find it highly questionable whether FOMO tactics are ethical. I’ve written about this before: the pressure artists are under to manufacture urgency, and the way that pressure gets passed directly onto their fans.

Japutra et al (2025) published research that provides a framework for that discomfort. They surveyed 511 consumers in the fashion industry and examined how FOMO shapes how people relate to brands they love.

Their conclusion is more nuanced than the idea that FOMO is simply good or bad. FOMO excites fans, but under certain conditions, it can push them towards a kind of passion that harms them.

How it works

The researchers build on dual passion theory, which explains that there are two fundamentally different ways to feel passionate about something.

• Harmonious passion means you love something because it genuinely fits who you are. You buy the record because the music means something to you. You go to the show because you actually want to be there. Your enthusiasm is yours.

• Obsessive passion means your engagement is driven by pressure, like social comparison, fear of exclusion, or the need to prove something to yourself or others. You buy the merch because everyone else seems to have it. You feel anxious when you can’t attend. Your relationship with the brand isn’t entirely your own anymore.

Japutra et al (2025) found that FOMO activates both types of passion. Interestingly, it predicted harmonious passion more strongly than obsessive passion. So, FOMO isn’t simply destructive: Fans who feel that pull can channel it into genuine enthusiasm for an artist they already love.

But obsessive passion is the pathway to compulsive buying: debt, stockpiling products that never get opened, and purchases people later regret. FOMO feeds this.

One more finding worth noting: consumers aged 35 and older were more vulnerable to obsessive passion under high FOMO conditions than younger groups. The assumption that FOMO mainly affects impulsive younger fans isn’t accurate.

Yes, but..

This research was conducted in fashion, not music. Fashion is a product category where social visibility is partly the point, similar to customer-based brand equity mechanisms: What you wear signals who you are.

On the other hand, there is also significant overlap between music and fashion when social media is taken into account, and social visibility comes into play again. Take stories of fans at concerts or festivals as examples. Where you are signals who you are.

Take action now

Artists can review their most recent campaign promoting a tour, concert, or club night. Ask one question: What emotion does this primarily trigger? Is the framing built around what fans gain, or around what they’ll miss if they don’t act fast?

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Hoe merken onbewust dwangmatig koopgedrag aanwakkeren (SWOCC)

• Japutra, A., Gordon-Wilson, S., Ekinci, Y., & Adam, E.D. (2025). The dark side of brands: Exploring fear of missing out, obsessive brand passion, and compulsive buying. Journal of Business Research, 186

• The psychology of scarcity (The Fanbase Builder)

• How artists contribute to social media addictions (The Fanbase Builder)

• Artists fuel social media addictions (The Fanbase Builder)

• Why strong artist brands matter to fans, not just artists (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Fans turn waiting into its own event

Nobody likes to wait, but fans are surprisingly good at it.

Why it matters

Artists spend a lot of energy on the release itself. Less thought goes into the space anticipating the release.

Many music campaigns focus on the concepts of anticipation and speculation. For example:

• Announcing an album and the campaign leading up to the release date.

• Announcing a tour, the campaign leading up to the on-sale date, and the time in between purchasing a ticket and the event itself.

• Rumours of major artists going on tour or releasing new music.

• Fans predicting festival lineups.

• Fan discussions about DJs playing 'IDs' at major shows.

For artists trying to build a lasting relationship with their audience, knowing how fans behave during a campaign’s build-up is as important as the campaign itself.

How it works

Fandom academic Owain Gwynne introduced the concept of fan-made time in his philosophy PhD thesis at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

For two years, Gwynne analysed discussions on a popular Lord of the Rings website prior to the release of the first film in the ‘Hobbit’ trilogy. The film’s production faced many obstacles, including lengthy delays, a union strike and the departure of the original director. According to Gwynne’s thesis, these events appeared to be as emotionally engaging for fans as they expect the films themselves to be.

The pre-release period is a block of time that fans create, shape, and possess themselves. During this time, fans engage in speculation, frustration, debate, and discussion. The wait between the present and the anticipated transforms into a separate event: a special experience that's enjoyed as much as the release itself.

In her book Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture, author Hannah Ewens applies this concept to fangirls queueing for many hours for concerts. She describes the queueing as a ‘block of time created by fans’. By queueing, the girls extend the experience of a concert.

The release doesn’t start the experience. The announcement does. Sometimes the rumour does.

Yes, but..

Fans create most of this themselves. The speculation, the anticipation, and the community energy often happens despite an artist’s marketing, not because of it.

So, if fans are perfectly capable of generating their own engagement around an artist, what is official marketing actually for? And is there a risk that too much managed communication; like scheduled posts and polished teasers; actually interrupts what fans were happily doing on their own?

Gwynne’s argument is that fan-made time should be treated separately from hype and marketing strategy. It’s not the same thing as a rollout. Conflating the two risks turning an organic fan experience into a managed one — and fans tend to notice.

Take action now

Artists could facilitate fan-made time to be enjoyed. Monitor fan accounts on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, etc. Learn how to engage with them and send them some news once in a while.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Fan-made time: How fans enjoy waiting (The Fanbase Builder)

• Gwynne, O. (2017). Fan-made Time: Power and Play in the Production Paratext of The Hobbit (Thesis, Doctor of Philosophy). University of Otago. [link]

• 'Fan-made time' - a study of Hobbit fans (Otago Post)

• Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture (book)

• Can superfan and community strategies coexist? (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Why artists can’t ignore vanity metrics

Music industry gatekeepers base their decisions on easily inflated data.

Why it matters

In marketing, the distinction between vanity metrics and actionable metrics is well established.

• Vanity metrics like followers, streams, and likes are easy to inflate, straightforward to polish, and reveal little about genuine audience behaviour.

• Actionable metrics, such as video watch time, save rates, or ticket sales, reflect real human behaviour showing intent.

Experienced marketers know this. The problem is that most music industry gatekeepers aren’t running the same analysis.

For example: A booking agent deciding whether to sign an emerging artist may look at Spotify monthly listeners. A label A&R might check Instagram follower counts. A festival promoter weighing a guarantee could look at streaming numbers.

None of these are deep engagement signals, but they are publicly visible, instantly available, and fast to interpret. In an industry where a decision-maker evaluates dozens of artists a week, vanity metrics become shorthand.

Hence, vanity metrics are a branding asset, and artists can’t dismiss them outright.

How it works

Vanity metrics are easy to manipulate. I am not recommending any of the following tactics as examples. However, understanding how they work is useful, both for protecting yourself from being impressed by inflated numbers and for understanding why organic growth signals are harder to fake.

• Streams (any platform): Land a placement on a passive-listening playlist: a concentration playlist, a sleep channel, a background music compilation. Listeners aren’t following the tracklist; they want ambient sound, not artists. The streams accumulate without building an audience.

• YouTube video views: Run a skippable pre-roll campaign on YouTube targeting Smart TVs. Millions of people use this channel as their main music source. Most viewers don’t actively skip; it’s too much hassle. They’re unlikely to search for the artist’s name or click through. The views-to-comments ratio tells the real story.

• Social media followers or likes: Run ads targeting the cheapest available markets. The follower count rises, but the engagement rate drops. Future organic reach won’t grow as much because algorithms don’t pay much attention to followers in the long run.

Each of these tactics inflates the number without building the fanbase. More importantly, experienced gatekeepers recognise the patterns.

Yes, but..

We can’t fully blame industry pros for relying on vanity metrics.

First, actionable metrics are private. They have to be requested from the artist, and who’s to say the numbers supplied haven’t been selectively presented? Vanity metrics are the only publicly verifiable data available.

Second, decision-makers are moving fast. What feels like a life-changing opportunity to one emerging artist is a routine call for the person on the other side of the table. Running a deep engagement analysis on every artist takes time nobody actually has.

Third, and this is the most encouraging part, the best decisions in music aren’t made on data. They’re made by ear. The most experienced gatekeepers trust their listening, the scene an artist belongs to, and a quality of appeal that doesn’t show up in any spreadsheet. Those qualitative signals are the most actionable metrics of all.

Vanity metrics get artists in the room, but what happens in the room depends on everything that data can’t measure.

Take action now

Artists can run a cold gatekeeper read on their own profile. Open a private browser window, search your artist name, and look at what a booking agent or A&R would see in the first thirty seconds. Ask what impression those numbers make before anyone has heard a single note.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Finding the metrics that matter (The Fanbase Builder)

• Artists shouldn’t rush releasing music to streaming platforms (The Fanbase Builder)

• Why artists shouldn’t skip steps (The Fanbase Builder)

• Artists should focus on only two metrics (The Fanbase Builder)

• How to leverage user intent (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

What if synthesisers only worked in the USA?

Technology with a foreign off switch isn’t really yours.

Why it matters

The US government issued an export control order requiring Anthropic to suspend all access to its latest Claude models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for anyone outside the United States.

I’m writing this on Sunday, June 14. What strikes me is how little coverage this has received in European media.

AI is proving itself as the defining technology of this era. That technology was switched off overnight for the entire non-American world.

At first sight, this might read like an edition that’s far removed from usual fandom-strategy-related topics. But look at it this way:

I’ve used synthesisers as an example before. It fundamentally changed what music could sound like, who could make it, and which ideas could reach an audience. Now imagine those instruments had only ever been available to American musicians, just because the US government decided so. That’s the direction we’re heading.

European creators already depend on US-hosted AI tools for writing, production, visual work, and planning. It’s valuable to start considering where those tools come from.

How it works

The problem the Anthropic suspension reveals is compute dependency. Europe currently controls around 5% of global AI compute. The United States controls roughly 80%.

Last week, European AI scientists published their initiative ‘Europe 2031‘, a five-year scenario about Europe’s impending slide into irrelevance. It’s a great read, and I highly recommend scrolling through the scenario or reading the summary.

Europe has misjudged AI’s speed, scale, and capacity to catch up. These are genuine trade-offs. Building sovereign AI compute at scale takes years and enormous capital. In the short term, reducing dependence on American frontier models means accepting tools that are currently less capable. In the long term, it might mean investing in sustainable data centres and reducing CO2 emissions in other sectors.

Yes, but..

Sovereign AI compute is not something an emerging artist can act on directly. It’s too simplistic to say “just use European AI like Mistral”. Artists should use a range of AI models to develop stronger AI intuition. So what I’m trying to do here is raise awareness of this problem, which was surprisingly overlooked in European mass media.

Take action now

Artists can start by mapping which AI tools they currently use and checking where those tools are built and hosted to understand what they depend on and what would replace them if access changed.

The Europe 2031 initiative is freely available and worth reading, particularly if you work in music or creative industries in Europe.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Europe 2031 (Europe 2031)

• Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 (Anthropic)

• Anthropic suspends new AI tools over US government security concerns (BBC)

• ‘Wake-up call’: Europe reacts to Anthropic halting access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models (Euronews)

• European sovereignty in AI requires ugly trade-offs, say experts (Science Business)

• Navigating AI beyond the hype in 2026 (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Create simple DAW tools for fans using AI

This is one edition in which many readers know more about the subject than I do.

Why it matters

Virtual merch is one of the most underused tools an artist brand has. I wrote about this when I built The Fan Bass Builder synth in four hours with AI coding tools. That was six months ago, which feels like decades in AI-innovation time.

My synth is just an online toy, a standalone website, disconnected from DAWs. Creating a VST plug-in or sample pack would be a logical form of virtual merch that creator-fans can actually work with, but they require effort to make.

For artists, it would be valuable to find a middle ground: creating simple tools for their fans that live inside the DAW where the music is made, tools pulled directly from the artist’s creative process.

How it works

While browsing YouTube, I stumbled upon Ableton’s Extensions SDK announcement video and the accompanying how-to tutorial.

Ableton Extensions are custom tools that don’t touch the sound, but can read and rewrite the data and structure around it: the raw material an artist brand could turn into something fans actually get to interact with.

Artists can build custom extensions using the SDK, a JavaScript and TypeScript toolkit built on Node.js.

Translation: AI coding tools such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex eat this for breakfast.

Artists who can describe their idea to AI can build working custom tools for Ableton without any coding experience, and release them as virtual merch for their fans.

That’s exactly what I did when building my synth as a live example for artists to create virtual merch: describe what you want clearly enough, and a model like Claude Code or Gemini can build the rest.

When digging deeper, I found that Ableton isn’t the first DAW to open this kind of door. Bitwig has an open-source Controller Extension API with a community library of scripts on GitHub, and Logic has Pro’s Scripter. While Ableton’s SDK seems a bit more accessible, they’re not the only DAW that allows for creating AI-assisted customisation.

Yes, but..

I cannot test any of this myself. Unfortunately, I don’t produce music. While I have messed around with Ableton, I don’t understand it well enough to create extensions myself.

So I’d genuinely like to hand this one over. If you use Live and have joined the beta, or if you build something with the Extensions SDK in the months ahead, please share in the comments below what it actually feels like to work with, and what an AI coding assistant gets right or wrong when you ask it to help.

Take action now

Artists who use Ableton Live 12 Suite can join the Extensions SDK beta and try describing one small idea to an AI coding assistant. See what comes back, and how close it gets on the first try.

Your thoughts

Share your virtual merch, created with or without AI coding assistance, in the comments :)

Further reading

• Introducing Extensions SDK: An experimental playground inside Live (Ableton)

• I built a web-synth in four hours (The Fanbase Builder)

• Navigating AI beyond the hype in 2026 (The Fanbase Builder)

• How artists create brand worlds (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

How to build a community?

Nobody joins a community that hasn’t formed yet.

Why it matters

Artists are told to build their audience. Post consistently. Grow the numbers. However, audiences form around belonging, not output.

Earlier, I wrote about McMillan and Chavis (1986), who identified four conditions for a genuine sense of community:

• Membership: A feeling of belonging.

• Influence: Members matter to the group and vice versa.

• Integration of needs: The community delivers something of value.

• Shared emotional connection: History, common experiences, rituals.

Artists can’t manufacture all four conditions from scratch. But a working scene already has them.

Think of local music scenes, online communities, or creative collectives. These scenes have regulars, shared tastes, and trust built over time. Showing up in them means borrowing those conditions before you’ve built your own.

How it works

I think there are four recognisable phases in building a community:

Phase 1: Join an existing scene.

Find a community close to what you’re making. Not the most aspirational one, but the one you can actually show up for next week. Local venues, online forums, genre-specific communities, group chats with five other artists working in similar territory. Show up with genuine interest. Go to their shows. Collaborate without an agenda.

Phase 2: Subgroups form on their own.

Smaller clusters emerge inside any active scene. They self-organise around shared interests and repeated contact.

Phase 3: When the scene grows, you grow.

A scene that produces compelling work attracts attention, secures bookings, and draws audiences. Your growth becomes tied to the scene’s trajectory. Because you’ve built specific relationships within the scene, you’re a node rather than just a member.

Phase 4: You become a community.

At some point, the subgroup that formed around your work develops its own gravity. People are showing up specifically for you. The dynamic repeats: within your community, subgroups form. Fans who also make music. People who met through your work and now know each other. Artists you’ve started to support because you have the reach to do so.

Yes, but..

This takes longer than most artists expect, and sometimes growth doesn’t happen at all. You earn a place in a scene on the scene’s timeline, not your own.

Take action now

Artists can start by mapping the scene they’re actually closest to. Ask yourself: Where do I already belong, and how do I show up there more consistently?

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Creating a strong sense of community (The Fanbase Builder)

• McMillan, D. W., & Chavis, D. M. (1986). Sense of community: A definition and theory. Journal of Community Psychology, 14(1), 6–23. (full-text: pdf | online)

• Artists can create momentum by making things happen (The Fanbase Builder)

• Why fans wear band shirts like football jerseys (The Fanbase Builder)

• How artists can find their niche (The Fanbase Builder)

• The Guanxi approach to networking in music (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned.

The PESO model is one of the first things every artist should understand about marketing.

Why it matters

Most emerging artists discover marketing through social media. It’s visible, creative, free to start, and everyone around them is doing it. It’s absolutely not a bad choice. The problem is that it’s often the only choice.

How it works

The PESO model (Dietrich, 2014) divides marketing channels into four types: Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned.

It’s a classical framework in communications strategy, and arguably one of the first things worth understanding when you start thinking seriously about how to reach people.

• Paid: Reach you pay for. Ads on Meta, TikTok, or YouTube. Sponsored content. Paid placements. You control the message and targeting, but you’re renting attention rather than building it.

• Earned: Reach that others give you because your work is worth it. Press coverage, playlist features, blog reviews, podcast appearances, word of mouth. A gatekeeper amplifies you, spilling-over credibility precisely because you didn’t pay for it.

• Shared: Content distributed across social platforms via community sharing and user-generated content. High visibility and relatively low direct cost, but you don’t own the platform, and reach is algorithmic.

• Owned: Channels you control completely. Your website, your newsletter. No algorithm decides who sees it. The audience you build here belongs to you.

Most emerging artists are:

• Heavily invested in Shared.

• Lightly invested in Owned.

• Occasionally active in Earned.

• Too early in Paid.

The model makes it clear what you’re already doing and what you haven’t looked at yet. From there, the question becomes straightforward: which channels fit your brand, your career stage, and your available time, energy, and money?

• An artist with a strong visual identity and a compelling story might find Earned media a better investment than paid advertising.

• An artist who is still developing their sound might prioritise Owned first: build a newsletter, develop a website, and create a direct line to their audience before worrying about social volume.

• An artist with an already-engaged community might find that a small investment in Paid amplifies what’s already working, rather than buying cold attention.

Yes, but..

PESO was originally designed as a PR framework for communications professionals, not for solo artists managing their own marketing with limited resources. Some channels, particularly Earned, require established relationships, market value, and strong press materials before they are accessible. An artist without industry contacts or a track record will find it difficult to secure meaningful editorial coverage, regardless of how strong the music is.

Take action now

Write down every marketing activity from the past three months and place each in a quadrant: Paid, Earned, Shared, or Owned. Where is most of the time and money going? Which quadrants are empty?

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Paid, earned, shared, and owned media: fully operational, fully integrated (Spin Sucks)

• Dietrich, G. (2014). Spin Sucks: Communication and Reputation Management in the Digital Age. Que Publishing.

• The problem with newsletters (The Fanbase Builder)

• Why artists should select their platforms with care (The Fanbase Builder)

• Don’t run ads: Better ways to spend a hundred euros (The Fanbase Builder)

• The anti-content strategy (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Music is a social accelerator

In a world optimised for individual experiences, the thing society needs most has the worst business model.

Why it matters

Festivals in the Netherlands (arguably the world’s strongest festival market) are struggling to sell out. Governments are pulling back on cultural investment. While AI companies attract billions in funding and streaming platforms grow their subscriber base quarter after quarter, the live music industry is left to explain why a ticket costs what it does.

Princeton economist William Baumol observed in the 1960s that certain sectors can never become as productive as manufacturing or software. He used a string quartet as his example: it takes four musicians forty minutes to perform a Schubert quartet. No technology can change that.

When wages rise across the economy, driven by productivity gains elsewhere, sectors like live music, theatre, and childcare must raise prices to stay afloat, even without the productivity gains to justify them. Baumol called this ‘cost disease’.

Author Alex Mayyasi recently argued that cost disease is one of the hidden drivers of social isolation. Their piece inspired me to reflect on this subject and apply it to music. They state that the economy has systematically rewarded what scales: digital entertainment, streaming, and AI.

• Netflix can add a million subscribers without hiring a single extra employee.

• A festival cannot add ten thousand attendees without proportionally more staff, infrastructure, and security.

The profit logic of scalable media favours individual, at-home experiences. The economics of communal experience remain structurally punishing.

This matters for artists because they are caught in the middle of this dynamic: producing something with irreducible human cost, in a market that increasingly funds what doesn’t need humans to scale.

How it works

The Pareto principle is evident throughout the music industry. A small number of blockbuster artists generate the majority of revenue. The vast majority of artists operate in an industry where income from music rights is negligible, live income is costly to produce, and government cultural investment is declining.

Earlier, I wrote about Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence, the emotional energy that emerges when people gather in shared rituals like concerts and festivals.

A shared physical experience creates a sense of “we” that digital experiences, by design, struggle to replicate. It produces something beyond entertainment: identity, solidarity, and the felt sense of belonging to something larger than yourself.

Music does this more efficiently than most things. Fan communities form around artists and endure long after specific songs or albums. Shared taste fosters in-group identity. Festivals concentrate this social energy for tens of thousands of people over a single weekend. An investment in live music infrastructure is, on this reading, an investment in social cohesion.

The contrast with current funding priorities is stark. AI companies attract investment because their products scale infinitely. Streaming platforms grow because their marginal cost per user approaches zero. Governments fund what delivers measurable GDP returns. Music does neither in any obvious way. Its economic model is stubbornly labour-intensive, and its social returns are diffuse and long-term.

This is exactly the gap that music can address. Not by pretending to be more scalable than it is, but by making the case for what it uniquely offers: a social accelerator.

A technology for building shared identity, community, and belonging at a scale no streaming platform can replicate.

Yes, but..

The “arts need funding” argument has been made for decades without decisively shifting how governments allocate resources.

Government arts investment has a complicated history of favouring established institutions over emerging scenes and minority communities, which runs counter to what the social cohesion argument would support.

Take action now

Artists can make this argument themselves: When speaking to venues, local governments, grant bodies, or the press, they can frame what they do in terms of what it builds: communities, shared identity, and local belonging.

A sold-out show is not just a revenue figure. It is a room full of people who now have something in common. That is worth naming explicitly.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Why ‘Cost Disease’ Is the Secret Force Behind America’s Toxic Solitude (Alex Mayyasi at Derek Thompson)

• Baumol, W.J. & Bowen, W.G. (1966). Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma. A study of Problems common to Theater, Opera, Music and Dance.

• Durkheim, É. (1912). The elementary forms of religious life.

• Why your live show should be more than just your album played loud (The Fanbase Builder)

• Creating a strong sense of community (The Fanbase Builder)

• The limits of business logic in music (The Fanbase Builder)

• Why fans wear band shirts like football jerseys (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

The problem with newsletters

Newsletters only work when they earn their place in the inbox.

Why it matters

Right now, more than 400 newsletters and transactional emails are sitting in my inbox waiting to be read. They won’t be. There’s simply not enough time, and at some point, my brain stops trying altogether. That’s what got me thinking about this week’s topic.

Email is owned data. That advice is correct, and it’s why so many artists are told to start a newsletter.

The problem is that nobody talks about what happens on the other side of the inbox. Readers subscribe with good intentions, fall behind, and eventually stop opening anything. The inbox becomes a graveyard of unread editions.

Newsletter marketing is not only about “how do I grow my list?”, but also about “how do I earn someone’s attention?”

How it works

From a writer/publisher’s perspective, I see two broad approaches to newsletter publishing. Both can work if expectations are clear:

• Consistency (hub content) means showing up regularly. Readers know what to expect and when. It’s easy to skip a busy Tuesday, but that regular presence builds familiarity over time. Readers start to recognise the sender, even when they don’t open every edition.

• Go-big (hero content) means publishing less often but with greater ambition. When something lands, it surprises people. It tends to earn more opens precisely because it doesn’t arrive every week, and readers know it’s high quality.

Neither is wrong. The mistake is sending inconsistently without intention, which signals to readers that the newsletter isn’t a priority for the sender either.

Another important factor is the perceived value.

A newsletter that only promotes (stream this, buy that, click here) offers nothing. It only asks. If every edition is a summary of what the artist did elsewhere, there’s no reason to open it on a busy day. Readers quickly learn that nothing new is inside, and the open rate quietly dies.

The newsletters that survive inbox saturation are those that entertain, educate, share a perspective, or offer access readers can’t find anywhere else.

Yes, but..

All of this assumes there’s already an audience to write for. For most emerging artists, the hardest challenge is getting people to subscribe in the first place. A great newsletter with 50 readers is still 50 readers.

Take action now

Before the next edition goes out, ask: Does this give readers something they can’t get from my socials? If the answer is no, rethink the content.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Quality versus Quantity: Two content strategies for artists (The Fanbase Builder)

• What a perfect artist newsletter should look like (The Fanbase Builder)

• Focus on input, not output (The Fanbase Builder)

• How to use download codes on Bandcamp (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Take control of your narrative with the active voice

Small grammatical shifts create massive psychological changes.

Why it matters

I’ve read thousands of artist announcements in my career. The most common mistake: artists who erase the creator entirely in an attempt to sound official or professional.

When I read an artist write, “New music will be released on streaming services”, it feels as if someone else is in control. It implies that an invisible corporate machine did the heavy lifting behind the scenes.

That gives way too much credit to others and far too little to yourself. Your music doesn’t magically appear on streaming platforms, so stop writing as if it does.

Behind a line like “the album was finished,” there are months of work. You created it. You released it. Your fans want to hear from the leader who built the world they are stepping into, not a detached observer.

Passive language creates psychological distance and strips your announcements of their rightful power.

How it works

In grammatical terms, the active voice is used when the subject of a sentence performs the action. In the passive voice, the subject receives the action.

We create mental frameworks based on how information is delivered to us. When you favour the active voice, you reduce cognitive friction for the reader and immediately position yourself as the driver of your career.

Here is how this shift looks in practice:

• Passive: “The new single was released on Friday.”

  • Active: “I released my new single on Friday.”

• Passive: “A music video is being filmed for the track.”

  • Active: “We are filming a music video for the track.”

• Passive: “Tickets can be purchased via the link in bio.”

  • Active: “Buy your tickets via the link in my bio.”

• Passive: “The album was recorded in my bedroom.”

  • Active: “I recorded this album in my bedroom.”

• Passive: “A tour is currently being planned for next year.”

  • Active: “I am planning a tour for next year.”

You establish immediate ownership by simply changing the sentence structure. Taking direct responsibility for your art builds trust.

“I wrote this song” demands attention and respect, whereas “This song was written” allows the reader’s mind to wander from the creator.

Clear, direct language removes ambiguity and compels fans to connect with you.

Yes, but..

So, what if it’s a multi-artist project? Simple: use we.

It’s not about arrogance or authority. “We spent three months creating this record” is just as active and powerful as “I spent three months.” The critical mistake is to say, “The record was created over three months.” The latter sounds like an automated, impersonal process.

Take action now

Review your latest announcement about new music, shows, merch, etc. Rewrite passive-voice copy into the active voice and adjust your phrasing to reflect the reality of your hard work.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Captivating fans using the active voice (The Fanbase Builder)

• Active vs. Passive Voice (Grammarly)

• Passive Voice: When to Use It and When to Avoid It (University of Toronto)

• How to make your album announcement newsworthy (The Fanbase Builder)

• The limits of business logic in music (The Fanbase Builder)

• Crafting an artist’s brand personality (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Proof of humanity as a marketing metric

Artists who can’t prove they or their fans are real are in trouble.

Why it matters

Rapid AI developments are flooding streaming platforms with new music, and fraudulent use of that technology is surging alongside it.

Deezer reports detecting 75,000 AI-generated tracks uploaded to its platform per day, while Spotify earlier removed over 75 million spammy tracks.

It’s a volume problem for established artists, and a discovery problem for emerging artists.

To be clear, the issue isn’t artists using AI creatively. It’s the spammy, fraudulent use of AI to game royalty systems: impersonating artists, churning out sped-up or slowed-down tracks, and diverting royalties to fraudsters.

DSPs are responding fast. Their discovery algorithms are tightening to prioritise quality and relevance.

New detection systems analyse listener behaviour to distinguish “real” music from spam. Tracks without behavioural signals, such as active streams (plays from search), saves, shares, or repeat listens, are flagged as suspicious.

The next step could be a distribution model where music is pre-evaluated before upload, and not every track automatically makes it onto a platform.

How it works

So, what does this mean in practice for artists?

DSPs are moving away from passive metrics and towards engagement quality. The question is no longer just “how many streams?” but “are real humans actually responding to this music?”

Earlier, I wrote that artists shouldn’t rush to release music on streaming platforms. I argued this for branding reasons: Streaming numbers are public. Tracks with fewer than 1,000 streams immediately signal limited audience interest, which damages the artist’s brand.

Now that DSPs tighten their music discovery algorithms, a new argument becomes even more valid:

Community is more than ever the most important quality signal an artist can build.

The old “drop-and-pray” strategy of uploading to DSPs and hoping the algorithm picks it up is increasingly unreliable in a world where millions of AI-generated tracks compete for the same editorial and algorithmic slots.

Artists who build an audience before release day have a structural advantage: real people interacting with their music from the moment it drops creates exactly the behavioural signals DSPs are now using to distinguish legitimate artists from bots.

Build community before the first release, not after. Fans will search for, save, and share new music.

Engagement by real humans is increasingly the proof that an artist isn’t a robot.

Yes, but..

Building community takes time. Not every emerging artist has the resources or network to generate meaningful engagement organically. I recognise that it’s much easier said than done for introverted bedroom artists.

However, I’m confident this shift benefits the authentic creator. While it’s harder to “lift off”, once you are validated by real human behaviour, you are no longer competing in the same arena as the bots.

Take action now

Emerging artists who haven’t yet released music on DSPs could ask themselves whether their community is engaged enough to support a release. You’ve only got one chance to make a great impression.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• How streaming platforms release thousands of new tracks every day? (PowerOfMusic by Tuned Global)

• Deezer: AI-generated tracks now represent 44% of all new uploaded music (Deezer Newsroom)

• Spotify Strengthens AI Protections for Artists, Songwriters, and Producers (For the Record by Spotify)

• Spotify has deleted 75m+ ‘spammy tracks’ – as it unveils new AI music policies (Music Business Worldwide)

• The Attention Currency: Don Jazzy’s Lesson for African Creators (Ynaija)

• The Music Industry Crosses an AI Tipping Point (The Hollywood Reporter)

• Artists shouldn’t rush releasing music to streaming platforms (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

How to run free AI models on your studio computer

Most musicians with powerful studio computers are perfectly equipped to run AI locally.

Why it matters

Earlier, I recommended artists to navigate AI beyond the hype and build ‘AI intuition’. But experimenting with AI isn’t cheap. For example, basic access to Claude Code or Cowork costs music artists about €18,00 a month, which may be a significant investment for emerging artists.

However, most musicians have a significant advantage over other AI enthusiasts. If you produce music, your laptop or desktop likely has a high-end CPU, ample RAM, and perhaps a dedicated GPU. You are perfectly equipped to run powerful open-source AI models locally on your laptop, desktop, or even smartphone, entirely for free.

How it works

Local models aren’t on the same level as top-tier subscription models (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc), but new models from Alibaba (Qwen3.6) and Google (Gemma 4), both released this April, are catching up at an astonishing rate. For everyday tasks like brainstorming content or drafting emails, they are more than capable.

The best part: Absolute privacy, with exactly zero recurring costs.

It’s quite simple to install your first local AI model:

1. Download an interface: Tools like Ollama act as your host software.

2. Download a model within that interface.

3. Start prompting: Once loaded, you can interact with the AI entirely offline. No data ever leaves your computer.

Here’s what I did:

1. I opened Terminal on my Mac and installed Ollama by pasting
   curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

2. Next, I installed Qwen-3.5
   ollama run qwen3.5

3. After downloading and installing, I could immediately chat with the AI.

Some ideas to get started:

• Because local AI is 100% private, you can safely upload a contract or a split sheet agreement and ask the AI to explain in plain English what rights you’re giving up.

• Like Claude Cowork, you can ask a local model to help you organise your chaotic downloads folder.

• Use it as a sounding board for your music and lyrics without worrying about whether they will be used to train the AI.

• Of course, you can still ask a local AI to help you write your emails and social media captions.

Yes, but..

I’m running the previous Qwen version, Qwen-3.5:9b, and it’s so slow on my last-generation Intel-based MacBook Pro. To run the latest, decent models, you still need good, up-to-date hardware. And I haven’t even mentioned that the download is 6.6GB.

On my laptop, I’m better suited to a lighter model, like the ultra-lightweight Qwen-3.5:0.8b (1GB), which can even run on a smartphone. It’s very capable for its size, but noticeably less powerful than the 9b version.

Take action now

If you have a decent laptop or desktop for running your music production software, give a local AI model a try. Approach it as a fun, geeky project to further experiment with AI and build AI intuition, rather than trying to embed it in your daily workflows immediately.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7 (Simon Willison)

• Google’s Gemma 4 finally made me care about running local LLMs (XDA)

• Navigating AI beyond the hype in 2026 (The Fanbase Builder)

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

Why artists play it safe

Would you rather lose 500 long-term fans or gain 1.000 new fans?

Why it matters

Great artists make bold, creative decisions.

• Changing their sound between albums.

• Changing genres when their interests change (for example, from pop to indie).

• Embracing activism into their brand.

• Changing their aesthetic through fashion.

• Etc.

These decisions feel enormous. Creative instinct pulls in one direction, but the way the human brain processes potential loss pulls even harder in the other.

Artists often play it safe because the fear of losing what they have outweighs the excitement of what they might gain.

How it works

Prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) is a psychological framework that helps explain why artists resist creative risk, even when doing so might benefit them.

The theory suggests that losses feel roughly twice as painful as equivalent gains feel pleasurable. Gaining 1.000 new fans doesn’t feel as significant as the prospect of losing 500 current fans.

The existing fanbase, no matter its size, feels like something to protect rather than something to build upon. The asymmetry between imagined loss and imagined gain distorts decision-making.

Loss aversion is prospect theory in action:

• Fear of public outcry when moving away from an established sound.

• Reluctance to drop a visual identity that’s ‘working’.

• Hesitation to alienate current fans by targeting a new audience.

• The belief that what’s already been built could collapse overnight.

We tend to be more risk-averse when things are going well, and opportunities for gain are apparent. Simultaneously, we are much more risk-seeking in a loss domain, where we are more likely to take risks to recover a previous position. This is why struggling artists are more likely to attempt radical creative reinventions, while commercially successful ones often play it safe.

Artists adopt more fan-first, outside-in approaches within their authenticity-first, inside-out strategies. But loss aversion often prevents this balance, locking artists into audience-pleasing behaviour that quietly erodes the artistic identity that attracted fans in the first place.

Artists who avoid all risk to protect their fanbase may end up with a fanbase that no longer reflects who they are or where they’re going.

Yes, but..

These aren’t irrational fears. The music business is driven by vanity metrics. Some festivals book their line-ups solely on follower counts. When market value is tied to visibility and follower counts, creative reinvention carries real commercial risk.

Too much focus on authenticity might limit commercial success, while excessive market adaptation risks undermining artistic credibility. The risk isn’t zero, but it’s rarely as high as loss aversion makes it feel.

Take action now

Do not let loss aversion dictate your discography. Take action now to bridge the gap between where your sound, brand, and reputation are and where you want them to be.

Name the fear explicitly. Write down exactly what you think will happen if you release that niche track. Be specific. “I will lose 200 followers.” Seeing it on paper reduces its subconscious power.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263. (full-text)

• Finding the metrics that matter (The Fanbase Builder)

• Market value is the music industry’s hidden currency (The Fanbase Builder)

• The hidden power of casual fans (The Fanbase Builder)

• The psychology of scarcity (The Fanbase Builder)