🔵 Centralising data ownership for artists and stakeholders

A proposal for how the music industry can decrease its reliance on Big Tech and build better relationships with fans

Hi there,

I have a proposal for the music industry today. This one affects us all - majors and indies alike.

Data, and who owns it, is a constant focus for Motive Unknown. It has to be; in 2025 it is the main currency controlling access to fans. Of late, my colleague and Technical Director here at MU, Tom Packer, has been investigating this space, and today I wanted to present a proposal of sorts from Motive Unknown.

Let’s dive in…

The problem:

Data, and who owns it, is a constant focus for us here at Motive Unknown. It has to be; in 2025 it is the main currency controlling access to fans. For that reason, everyone, from Big Tech to plucky startups, wants to either own that data or be some kind of host for it.

Previously this landscape was more simple, but of late the fragmentation has reached ridiculous levels, and that creates yet more problems for artists and those working with them relative to managing that data and, by extension, that fan relationship.

Alongside this we have social media becoming more like algorithmic media. Instagram, taking a leaf from TikTok’s playbook, is now pushing far more towards just showing you what it thinks you need to see, rather than just the people you have elected to follow. The end result, as I mentioned in my recent presentation “Understanding The Music Fan in 2025” is that it is getting harder to reach fans than ever, and when you do reach them, it is a far more transient experience.

Quite a few platforms are contending in this space to try and help artists. They all have good points and bad, and I think part of the problem here is that none of them are capable of ticking all the boxes. After all, to manage that would be to take on innumerable multi-billion dollar companies at their own game. That’s not a space you can just take over and your funding will run dry long before those you are seeking to depose even hit a minor bump in the road.

Alongside this, there’s a reality that most music-centric platforms tend to come and go. The bitter truth is that “just” focusing on the music industry is too limited in scope; you might win big deals with the three majors, and maybe even bigger players like BMG or Believe, but once you get past that it is a long, long tail of companies with far less money to throw at solutions. VCs eventually tire of trying to achieve that mythical 10x ROI and move on to the next shiny new thing, accepting a fire sale along the way. Remember Buzzdeck? MusicMetric? Big Champagne? Topspin? I could go on (and on, and on) because they all end the same way - and despite what most incumbent platforms currently blowing up might think, the odds are far, far greater that they will fail within a few years than succeed, especially if they’re pumped full of VC cash. (And all the more so with what I think we’d conservatively describe as “uncertain times” ahead thanks to Trump and his cronies, which might yet cause another 2008-style financial crash, massively impacting VC’s investment power in the process. But I digress…)

This whole fan data space is fragmented and transient. Alongside that, the interests of Big Tech and arts & culture have never been more divergent.

The solution:

Taking a cue from the adoption of CDP (Customer Data Platform) technology in other industries, an “FDP” or “Fan Data Platform” is needed, combined with an open ecosystem of plugins to integrate data from many sources to give a complete profile of each fans interaction with an artist. Essentially, Segment.com for the music industry, if you are familiar with that.

Making the system open for many integrations future-proofs the setup. New platforms can be integrated as they gain traction. If platforms become less important it doesn’t matter, because the platform isn’t reliant on any single platform; it is only focussed on the fans themselves.

In short then, this should be a command centre / toolkit for artist marketing, centred around rich fan profiles, powered by first party data plugging into multiple tools and third party platforms and services as needed.

The funny thing is that I recall writing about the need for a “swiss army knife” kind of solution to music marketing back in, oooh, about 2010, if I recall correctly. My issue has always been that people want to throw money into massive, catch-all solutions that never really materialise - and often they focus on Shiny New Tech (hello Web3!) rather than deal with far more mundane issues often staring us all in the face.

Data management is one such issue. What we are envisaging here is a centralised platform that can aggregate all data around an artist and provide maximum insight into it.

Now, I’ve no doubt I’ll get a bunch of replies from people owning or operating fan platforms at present, saying “but Darren, we do that already!”. I’ve worked in music now for… too long (he says, realising just how long) and believe me, no platform has ever managed this.

Hence we should not be looking to create Yet Another Platform aiming to replace these all. What is required is a centralised system that simply plugs into those platforms and draws the data back into one manageable, actionable space.

Perhaps the really revolutionary idea is that this is should not be a venture with direct profit in mind - and by extension, it cannot be something pumped full of VC money. This has to be almost the equivalent to open source: a platform that everyone can make use of, understanding that it can deliver maximum value back to all stakeholders and - crucially - can remove any ongoing reliance on Big (or little!) Tech. If one platform disappears because funding dried up? No problem; you have the data and the whole platform remains evergreen. If a platform moves into a questionable direction (looking at you, X)? Again, no problem; focus can be placed elsewhere, recognising that you directly own all relevant data regarding the fan relationship.

So is this a naive pipe dream, or something actionable?

I guess that’s really over to us as an industry.

I would however, say this: even the majors, some of whom might be feeling quite on top right now, need to reduce reliance on large tech partners and build more resilience. Right now everyone has the same Achilles’ heel: over-reliance on Big Tech platforms.

A centralised Fan Data Platform could fix all of that. The question, really, is whether this industry of ours can pull something like that together.

Doubtless this is something that could get gravely complicated if allowed to do so. However from where we are sat, the logical core component - i.e. a centralised fan data platform aggregating all data into the one place for both analysis and deployment - should not be something requiring millions in investment.

We are keen to explore this space. If you feel the same way, we’d love to hear from you. After all, we all have a vested interest in this, irrespective of which corner of the industry we occupy.

Have a great evening,

D.

🎶 Listening to “Bonus Beats - Rare & Unreleased Finnish Electro 1990 - 2002”. Compilations like this are catnip to me; I love nothing more than well-curated round-ups of scenes I may have entirely missed “back in the day”. This, then, is manna from heaven, rounding up all manner of killer electro action from the Finnish scene. The (at points) proto-’ardkore vibes only add to it as well. Glorious - and another reminder that electro, when great, is absolutely unbeatable. (Sidenote: not to Stan on Qobuz, but I discovered this by just browsing their New Releases section and filtering it down to Electronic. I assume there’s some curation going on here maybe, but either way… simple, but effective.)

📺 Watching “Ichiko Aoba - SONAR (Official Music Video)” on YouTube. My team sent me this a few weeks ago (Ichiko is a Motive Unknown client) and it blew me away; just a beautiful video that’s really a short art film. It made me pine for those days where videos were really focused on as an artistic statement, which feels less the case these days in my experience. Ichiko is certainly gathering one hell of an audience; quite the cult following, which even The Guardian are now writing about in excited tones.

📖 Reading “The Music Business is Healthy Again? Really?” by Ted Gioia. If you only read one thing this week (er, Network Notes notwithstanding!) then make it this. In it, Gioia perfectly outlines how things feel anything but healthy as majors and others all proclaim us to be in a new golden age of revenue in music. I’m with Ted on this one: things are most definitely NOT all OK here. Not at all.

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Notes in dispatches:

• Knowing that readers would likely have understandable ambivalence to “man who writes stuff and runs company also releases music” angles here, I decided to make 50 copies of my EP free to anyone who wants to grab it. Just email otapromos@gmail.com with Last Sane Man in the subject of the email and you’ll automatically get sent a code to download a free copy via Bandcamp. It also adds to your collection on there, which is pretty great if you want to stream it via Sonos or the Bandcamp app etc. Having someone at The Orchard reply saying it “fits right in” to the Berlin Hardwax/Basic Channel sound made my week, so that man (who shall remain nameless), I owe you a beer and thank you!

• Thank you to everyone who responded to my call for interest in the Indie Worker Pass. We’ve had a solid number of responses, including some of the bigger labels and retailers out there, and we’re now looking to progress this along. If you missed all of this, please read that edition of Network Notes where I explain the whole idea.

• I’m now posting over on Bluesky too, so if you want hot takes on stories as they break etc, follow me over there. 🦋

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