Why are we doing this club?
This “Artist Enabler” idea came about as a way to support our artists within a changing music industry. With streaming now becoming the main revenue source for the music industry as a whole, we have become painfully aware that the streaming model only works for a particular type of artist...
We are worried that the move toward the streaming economy is going to stifle some of the truly inventive artists in the world. This is due to the fact that “success” in the streaming space is largely predicated on appealing to the masses. Artists need to receive tens of thousands of streams before the money starts adding up... And while some of our artists do well on the streaming platforms (Kishi Bashi for instance has over 1 million monthly Spotify listeners at the moment), there are a large number of hugely important artists who simply don’t appeal to the masses on this level (for example, the Melvins, who have only 300k monthly listeners). We felt the need to do something to prop up the innovator-artists whose work is not widely accepted by the casual music listener.
The Artist Enabler Club is meant to serve those artists, to be a platform for them to offer their fans the coolest shit possible. The artist gets the lion’s share of the money (95% of digital, 50% of physical). We are hoping this will be a platform to help some of our most influential artists receive some regular income on par with what some of our more popular artists are making from streaming services.
I think Lou is a perfect artist to guinea pig this idea, and we're very excited that he's up for the challenge... If this experiment works out, we hope to roll out Artist Enabler Clubs for other artists in 2020.
- Karl Hofstetter
Curator & Founder, Joyful Noise Recordings
