By most measurements, James Blake is quite a successful musician: a popular, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter-producer specializing in electronic-based, pop-leaning music, who released eight albums on major labels over the past decade, sells out major venues regularly and has guested on songs by Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Travis Scott and Kanye West. He even performed with Timothee Chalamet on “Saturday Night Live” last month.
And yet, like a lot of musicians, “I’ve been financially up and down since I started — a recurring cycle of doing really well and then almost broke,” he says. “There were random spikes of income — a few good gigs, a royalty check that might be low or might be high — but you don’t know when any of it is coming in. And multiple times I thought, ‘Am I going to be the classic story of the artist who did well and then can’t work out why they don’t have any money?”
The anxiety of that existence was enough for him to start looking under the hood of his career — something many artists don’t do, often for fear of what they’ll find. As Blake looked more closely at where his earnings were going, he saw leaks basically everywhere.
“Before last year, I was an artist who very much buried my head in the sand in terms of business,” he says. “And when I really looked into the machinations of what was going on behind each part of the industry, getting all the statements, I saw that there are unethical parts of the model that are responsible for a massive transfer of wealth away from the artist.
“It’s not that there’s no money there,” he stresses. “It’s just being diverted to the wrong places, and the system is set up to not give you that information.”
So Blake got out of his label deal (with Universal Music’s U.K. label Polydor) and, with his management team, started looking for other solutions. He landed on Indify, a company that essentially allows musicians to raise money for their releases like a start-up. Via its platform, artists connect with investors and marketing teams on a project-by-project basis, and it includes a leaderboard that gives investor bios and success rate with previous projects. In return, the investors receive a percentage of streaming royalties. Indify makes money by taking 15% of the investor’s share of profits after the initial investment recoups; no investor may keep more than 49% of streaming royalties after recoupment.
He also partnered with a company called Vault that, for a monthly subscription fee, creates what he describes as an “inner circle for artists,” with access to unreleased music, premium concert tickets and other benefits — and most importantly for the artist, a dedicated community. “Whenever I send a message or upload a song, all of them get a text message or email,” Blake says. “There is no algorithm stopping me from reaching those people, like with Instagram, and there’s a whole ecosystem that actually rewards fans. And when there’s enough people, it starts to look like a solid monthly income.” It’s also non-exclusive: If he wants to go bigger with a certain song or project, he can. (He has released two singles and an EP outside of Vault on his own CMYK label via Good Boy Records, including his most recent single “Like the End”; he is published by Pulse Music Group.)
Next, he tackled the Gordian knot of ticketing, which is dominated by companies that guard consumer data like North Korean government secrets. He joined forces with the ticketing platform Bside and experimented with concerts in New York, Los Angeles and London (more on that below).
And there’s more to come. In the following interview, Blake talked for 90 minutes with Variety about his experience and progress running a music career off the traditional grid.
How’s it all going?
Really well. I think the climate is ripe for change, and that is giving fellow musicians and creators the confidence to speak out and figure out an alternative. Speaking out is tough, and being willing to put it all on the line and sacrifice the favor of the industry machine is certainly not easy for any artist to do.
The industry is set up to be disempowering to any artist that enters it. I think most artists are led to believe that they’re not the ones in control, and that they’re not the source of all of the opportunities around them. I think a lot of artists are made to feel that we work for our managers, we work for our labels, and that the people in our teams work for them too. And I guess part of my drive is to remind artists that they are the boss of their business.
Was it your deal specifically that you were unhappy with, or the whole system? You seemed to be in a pretty good position for a major label artist.
Yeah, I was in a relatively good deal, because I signed in 2010, when the deals were better [i.e. structured more on a physical-sale model than streaming]. Also, I was not a high-priority artist, shall we say. So for them, it made sense to give me a higher royalty rate because they knew they weren’t going to invest a huge amount of money in me, so it was easier for me to recoup [his advance]. We kept that rolling for a long time — it was almost like rent control. (laughter)
But I work with a lot of younger artists and I’ve seen them being messed around by a label or management contracts that they couldn’t get out of, with the managers sabotaging them so they couldn’t release music. The amount of contract-based injustice that I’ve seen over the years is another inspiration for this, even though my deal was was relatively good compared to the kind of deals I saw from around 2015 [when streaming took hold] onwards.
There are good [executives] that really want the best for the artist, but the job of the A&R at a major label is essentially to conscript [talent], and the job of the team around them is to tell you that it’s all what’s best for you. But ultimately, we know that in any shareholder-driven business, that’s not the case. The model of the industry dictates that if you are doing that job, then you’re essentially signing artists into bad deals.
Why is your new model better?
Indify helps artists find a service that basically works like an investor — the artist gets to look at a leaderboard of investors and marketing teams and how they’ve added value to the artists they work with, i.e. where they were before and after they signed with those investors and marketing teams. Some of the graphs are pretty astonishing.
On Indify, artists are essentially meeting teams and using their instincts to find the right people for them, marketing, PR, whatever. And it encourages an equity mindset, where you can cut people in on a slice of your future profits. So everybody has more incentive to push your project up the hill; they’re financially incentivized in a way the label never would be.
Knowing the infinitesimal amounts of revenue that streaming pays artists, where does that money come from in this model?
Streaming is funny because, on the one hand, yes, when you break it down, they pay [on average] $0.002 or $0.003 per stream, which the artist splits 80-20 with the label, then 30% off the top goes straight to the streaming service — it looks like peanuts, right? But when you are not splitting it with a label that way, you open up a lot of alternative methods — the three options are basically streaming, live and sync, along with some other ways. But you can make serious money as an independent artist through streams and those other revenue sources.
And I think that Vault proposes an interesting new idea, which is access to unreleased music. A lot of people are interested in hearing all of the music an artist makes, not just the singles and the official albums, and not just for big artists. Vault is a safe space to release music to fans who already support you without opening it up to the whole world, and the fan has a certain level of exclusive access. There isn’t really a middle ground between my hard drive and those fans.
I actually recognize people in this community that I’m building because I’m talking to them regularly — unlike Instagram, which feels almost like an airport where I’m never going to see a lot of these people again. I can’t mobilize those people into a fan base, because the algorithm is limiting me on average to seven-point-something percent of reach. So I might reach that 7 percent, but I am never going to reach all of them at once, or all of them regularly, which makes it virtually meaningless: I’ve created a 700,000-person-strong marketing tool for Instagram, but I’m not able to market to them myself.
So that’s why Vault became so important to me, because whenever I send a message, or upload a song, all of them get a text message or email. I think Vault is closing the loop on fan interaction with artists, and I’ve been building a community that I can actually reach, that is basically an inner circle for an artist, for a small subscription fee. And when there’s enough people, it starts to look like a solid monthly income — and a dependable monthly income is the thing that a musician virtually never has.
But you don’t have to use it exclusively, right? You can place your more mainstream music, for lack of a better term, onto traditional streaming services and YouTube, as you’ve done with “Like the End.”
Yes, although I’d rather have a thousand dedicated fans who are connected and coming to the shows and [part of that community] than 10,000 people who are passively streaming and not really interacting. If I’d been able to do that on Vault starting ten years ago, I’d never have to worry about selling out a show — and I could probably do shows that are three or four times as big as the ones I do now, because my mailing list would be absolutely biblical in size.
I did a run of shows recently that sold out on the day. But for a lot of my artist friends, the algorithms have gotten so bad that they’re struggling to sell shows out because it’s impossible to reach people and tell them that they’re touring. It’s not because there’s not enough demand — they have plenty of fans in that city and have sold out shows there before — they just can’t reach them.
What you’re doing actually sounds quite similar to what the majors are talking about as part of “Streaming 2.0”: monetizing superfans by giving them exclusive content and access and perpetuating the old model.
The whole language around “superfans” grosses me out. They’re saying “Oh, these people really love the artist” when they’re really saying, “This is our chance to exploit them and extract as much value as possible.” That isn’t what this is about — this is about creating a community.
So how does the new ticketing model you’ve been experimenting with work?
I was fed up with never receiving data [from ticketing companies]. I’ve played to upwards of something like a million people in my lifetime, and imagine if I had the ability to contact all those people and tell them that I’ve got a show — I would never have to worry about selling out a show again.
So I thought, who’s got those emails? I started asking around, and, of course, Universal has emails for people who’ve bought my albums; Spotify and Apple Music and Tidal have the email addresses of everybody who’s ever streamed my music, so does YouTube; the companies that control the live-music industry have the email addresses for everyone who buys a ticket. If you ask for those emails, they’ll make you jump through an insane number of hoops to get them — and good luck if you’re trying to get emails from last year or the year before that.
Clearly I needed a partner where tickets are sold straight to the fan and I can get feedback directly — what did they think of the show, the venue, the entry process, the ticket-buying experience, all that. I don’t want to just do the show and move on. So I partnered with a company called Bside. In New York, we did an 800-ticket drop and didn’t tell people where the venue was. But then we found a venue that was of the appropriate size and said, “Would you like to put on the show? No risk for you, no risk for us: It’s already sold out.”
Then we did shows in a more traditional way, where we did announce the venue and all that, but that’s the concept — go direct to consumer, and I can contact them directly and tailor the experience: personalize messages through the platform, include merch or a month’s free access to Vault or other things; people on Vault might get better seats or get into the venue first, things like that. And we were able to keep the ticket prices uniform and not have any “dynamic pricing” bullshit. The artist is actually able to broker the deal and negotiate it, and not have to split that money with either a venue or a ticketing company; plus, those people know that they bought the ticket directly from me. We’d cut out the middlemen.
How did you do financially on those shows, compared with what you were getting with Ticketmaster?
I don’t have an exact comparison, but I was positively surprised by the margins. Clearly what we were experiencing was the lack of additional fees and hidden costs and [money lost by the artist from] deals between the ticketing companies and the venue, because for the most part they own the venues, the parking lot, concessions, and more. And this way if I want to get a brand to sponsor the show, rather than a branding deal where I don’t see the contract — so I don’t know how much they’re being paid and how much value it’s actually adding to my show, which is probably not very much — we do the deal directly and it adds an extra source of income that normally we wouldn’t have access to.
What would that sort of branding look like?
If a brand sponsored a show, they could include their imagery on the website, on the ticketing link and places like that. Or a beverage company can sell their drinks at the show or whatever. It’s just a way of helping musicians put on shows with no extra cost to the fan.
Let’s just say that, independently of you, one of your older songs took off on TikTok and became a global hit, and all of a sudden, the demand for your shows increased exponentially. Would you be able to do this in arenas, or might you have to do a tour using Ticketmaster or Dice or somebody like that?
I mean, it’s just selling tickets to people, so I could do it on a bigger scale, but I don’t think we’re in a place yet where an arena wouldn’t have the kind of deals that prohibit this kind of thing. I wouldn’t want to say this model couldn’t work there, because I do think that every venue should be a place where an artist can sell direct to fans and be able to contact them later.
My vision is that all of these things work together, but we’re not there yet. And I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said before — I’m just trying to offer new alternatives.
This has been an enormous amount of work. How do still have time to actually make music?
I just took some time to really isolate myself away from [the business] and focus on it; I’ve made an album recently but I don’t plan on releasing it for a while. I want to be able to create this community, so I have pretty much cleared the decks this year to jump out the label system and do it my way and try things — and doing this helped get me into a position where I can. When I signed my deal with Good Boy on Indify, I recouped on the songs that I released through them before they even came out, through sync and Vault and these different revenue streams, without needing to do as much of the other stuff. It’s something that had to wait until now for me to have the stability to do it.
So an up-and-coming artist wouldn’t have the fan base to do what you’re doing on this scale, but they could use elements of it?
Yes, they could join Indify and find a deal there, and build their own team of people who are working from equity. These are all things that are open to every artist, which is why I deliberately chose these models.
This is the kind of career I want to build for myself — I wish I could have built it 10 years ago. I’m not saying this is the solution to all your problems, but I am saying there are ways you can supplement your income, figure out a different model that works better for you, and get away from predatory contracts.
And don’t feel that taking control of your business in this way has distracted you from your art?
Well, at one point I was having regular panic attacks about not being in control of anything and being exploited and worrying about money, and I wasn’t being very creative at that time. And the feeling of regaining control and autonomy is empowering to the point where I rediscovered a sense of creativity that I hadn’t had in many years.
The romanticized idea of the struggling artist is actually harmful. Getting yourself to a place of coherency in your mental state and your business actually makes you more productive. It’s artistic freedom turned up to 11.
