🔵 Reviewing the "time spent to money earned" ratio for artists

Is time being spent in all the wrong places?

Hello everyone -

First up, my apologies for the radio silence; two weeks ago I was in Berlin, doing meetings and attending the excellent Superbooth expo (featuring various MU clients in the music creation space), and then last week was first spent away on a strategy 'retreat' and then attending The Great Escape.

Net result? No time whatsoever to even think about writing Network Notes! This is another example of where running an ever-growing company and maintaining a fairly well-subscribed newsletter can clash, horribly.

Interestingly though, it also feels like decent topics to write about are getting slightly harder to come across. Perhaps that is just me, but in general it feels like things are still flattening out a little, and not in a good way. In the last fortnight, topics have not really leapt out at me to write about, which I find quite telling. One dominates of course, but it’s a general “everything is looking grim” kind of narrative that I’m keen to avoid dwelling on, not least because it isn’t constructive.

But enough about that - let's crack on with today's offering....

Yesterday I watched a brilliant video from artist and producer JonWayne, and it has really got me thinking. In the video, Jon talks about the conundrum artists face with regards to time spent versus money earned.

On the one hand, he argues, you have platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X and yes, even Spotify. These are platforms where, in most cases, one can find and reach audiences with relative ease, but where the value of those audiences is actually quite low. He even opines (correctly, in my view) that TikTok's ultimate aim would be for everyone to be famous, but that by extension the value of that fame would be near zero.

At the other end of the scale, he argues, you have platforms like Bandcamp, where artists can make solid income thanks to the unit sales and low commission on sales. The problem, however, is that reaching large audiences on these platforms is far, far harder than on the likes of TikTok.

So you have the high reach, low return platforms of Insta et al, and on the other hand you have the low reach, high return platforms of Bandcamp, Patreon and more.

In the middle, he argues, lies YouTube. YouTube is different because its algorithms are far, far more attuned to keeping audiences engaged with you, where the likes of TikTok and Instagram are more invested in just keeping you on their respective platforms. YouTube is also better at connecting the audiences you build with third party platforms - and in Jon's view, they were far less awkward about driving users off-site to, for example, your Bandcamp store or Patreon page.

For this reason, he argues, YouTube is a far better place to invest your time as an artist. The yield one gets back - specifically a more retained audience, coupled with that audience being far more likely to convert to things like Bandcamp sales or Patreon subs, means that in terms of time spent to money earned, it is tough to beat.

I've summarised, so I'd encourage you to watch the whole clip as it's some of the most articulate thinking around artists and platforms that I've seen in a long while. Jon is clearly a very smart man:

But this also got me thinking that in truth, that ratio - of time spent to money earned - is probably a conversation we should all be having a lot more than we do.

The music industry, in my experience anyway, is very guilty of a "follow the person in front" mentality. Often if you ask a label why they use a specific platform, the answer might well be "because saw label X or Y using it and so followed suit". There's a herd mentality that can unwittingly develop, and it isn't especially healthy.

Should artists make more time for YouTube? I think it's a loaded question of sorts, because it obviously depends on the artist. However where I think JonWayne had a great point is just in this notion of how we strategise, long term, for artist growth and development.

When you consider it in those terms, he might just have a point.

I should add that Jon is not alone in voicing these kinds of sentiments either; Mary Spender, another artist who has built her profile via YouTube, also argues much the same point (and again, tellingly prioritising YouTube over Spotify) in this video:

The state of the music business in 2025 is prompting a huge amount of reflection and, I hope, some fundamental re-evaluations of which platforms and strategies are allied to the industry's needs, and which are not. This entire "time spent to money earned" angle is one I feel we should all take some time to reflect upon, whether you're an artist, a manager, a label head or whatever else.

One might argue it is time we stopped letting the tail wag the dog here.

Have a great evening,

D.

🎶 Listening to Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force - "Khadim". I was lucky enough to attend a listening party in Berlin for this album, which was played through about 25 speakers in an acoustically-treated room, all therefore being ridiculous high quality. I loved the album before that moment, but hearing it in that environment was truly magical, and yet another reminder of just how impactful music can be in those truly high fidelty setups. The closest you'll get to replicating it is listening on Qobuz where it's in 24bit, 96Khz glorious HD.

📖 Reading “Three Album Run: How Rock Music Never Bettered AC/DC’s Powerage, Highway To Hell & Back In Black”. There is good music journalism. There’s great music journalism. And then there’s journalism which elevates the form into high art. The opening paragraphs of this article had me both laughing like a hyena and genuinely applauding the writing, which is magnificent. This sentence remains the greatest thing I’ve read this year: “Teenagers – a recently invented term for a class that had previously been a source of cheap farm labour, whose numbers were determined by luck, vermin, and a Papal workaround known as the rhythm method – were, all of a sudden, the judge, jury, and executioners of culture.” Exquisite. Someone offer this writer a book deal.

📺 Watching “Massive Problem on Spotify” by Fantano on YouTube. It was quite odd to watch this video, flagging just how easy it is to release music under an existing artists’ name (such that it appears on their profile), purely because I remember El-P having this exact issue about 6or 7 years ago. Clearly, not much has changed and, much as with streaming fraud, it highlights a real weak spot for DSPs in general.

🤖 Playing with AI MCPs. Perhaps “playing with” is a stretching the truth a bit, but MCPs are this connective protocol that will allow, for example, AI to look at your Google Docs, Slack messages, Notion databases and god knows what else, and then act on it accordingly. This might sound boring, but it’s a huge game-changer in the AI space and one that will likely have a drastic impact on how we’re all working soon enough. Keeping up with this all is both exciting and utterly exhausting, not least because the pace of change is dizzying.