Ask an artist to picture their biggest fan and you get the same image every time. Front row, every show going mental to every tune. They have the hoodie, the tote bag, the tattoo.

That fan is real and they matter but they might not be the most valuable relationship available to a working artist.

The ladder nobody climbs

Fandom has levels, and most artists only monetise the bottom two.

There is the private fan, who listens and tells nobody. There is the merch buyer, who spends money and wears the proof. There is the content creator, who takes your music and builds something on top of it, which is where the relationship starts generating value for someone other than you.

Then there is the level almost nobody reaches. A business whose entire identity is built around your music, and whose audience is your audience.

Instead of 100,000 people coming to all your gigs, you've got 5 businesses that use your music all the time.

That isn't just a smaller version of a fanbase, It is a completely different revenue stream. Five commercial relationships with recurring use and a marketing budget behind them beat a hundred thousand individual transactions that have to be won again every new tune release.

What it looks like when it works

Post Malone and Bud Light have been working together for ten years. Five Super Bowl commercials, a merch line, and in April a co-created product with his branding on the can. Anheuser-Busch's marketing lead calls it an authentic intertwining of the two brands.

The interesting part is where it started. Before any deal existed, Bud Light gave Malone a fridge and kept turning up to restock it. He was tweeting about the beer in 2017. The contract purely caught up with the relationship that already existed.

Brand deals however don't only exist on this scale.

Below the top tier

Imagine this. A brand sponsors pop-up shows because its customers and the artist's fans are the same people. That is the same relationship Bud Light has with Post Malone, running at a fraction of the size, and the fit is tighter than a national campaign. It is a superfan relationship. It just doesn't look like one, because we are used to fandom meaning individuals and top tier artists.

Why almost nobody captures it

If you're sitting there wondering how this applies to you, don't worry you won't be the only one.

For a business to build its identity around your music, it has to license that music, use it repeatedly across campaigns and channels and pay you properly each time. Every one of those steps runs through infrastructure most independent artists simply do not have access to.

So one of two things happens. The relationship never forms, because the brand hits the first clearance question and reaches for a stock track instead. Or it forms and nobody gets paid, because the music gets used and the licensing conversation never happens at all.

The second outcome is a large part of what our audit found when we measured £12 billion of commercial music going unlicensed every year. Businesses and artists want to build relationships around the things that they love. They go hand in hand but we simply don't have reliable infrastructure to make that work at scale.

The shift

Streaming pays less every year and every artist is looking for what comes next. Most of them are looking at the wrong end of the problem.

You don't need a stadium and a Super Bowl budget to do what Post Malone did. The mechanism is the same at every size. A business whose audience is your audience, using your music because it already fits, paying you for it every time.

Five of those relationships is a career. So could two. The artists who work this out won't need a hundred thousand individual fans.

What they will need is to be findable, licensable and payable at the moment a business decides it wants them. That part the industry has never built.

Five businesses that use your music all the time.
That relationship needs somewhere to happen.