Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.

There’s been a good deal going on over here, and here’s one snapshot of that: I’m on deck to speak at SXSW 2026, but you have to vote for me in their PanelPicker platform! “Digital Dopamine: The Science Behind Modern Music Marketing” is a talk that goes into how traditional approaches to music promo and emerging tech have combined to shift the playing field over the last couple of years. That includes the AI-shaped elephant in the room, and also the increased importance of knowing what audiences want when going direct-to-fan. It’s going to be unusually good.

You’ve got until August 24 to vote, and all you need is a free or existing SXSW account. I’ll remind you again, but I would greatly appreciate your support. And if you look into Brainchild, SET, and KiTBetter, you’ll realize pretty quickly that these are three of the people you most want to see speaking with me on this topic.

Today, we’re taking a look at a big recent artist-friendly change Spotify made, and how it’s just one of many steps that still need to be taken by the industry as a whole to catch up to what artists and their businesses need in the modern age.

Ads From Businesses You Can Trust: 

Music’s Data Problem

When you have a business, you live and die by the data you have.

Accounts receivable. Outstanding leads. Customer churn rate. Operating and working capital. Those are the things most businesses can see. And in the modern age, we have more access to data on where customers are coming from - and what they’re interested in! - than ever before.

So in a world where we’re constantly asking musicians to be entrepreneurs, why is there such a gap in what the average artist is able to see from their data, compared to a corporation that understands how to harvest and analyze it?

A couple weeks ago, Spotify alerted everyone who uses Spotify for Artists about a new listener segment it’s showing called Super Listeners. What does Spotify qualify as a Super Listener? From their blog about this:

Yep, that’s pretty wild. Kind of seems like the recipe for success, if you’re an artist. And it sounds a whole lot like the “superfan” we’re all obsessed with trying to find in the direct-to-fan era of artist marketing, a wild unicorn-but-for-real of a music buyer that has more resources to spend on music by orders of magnitude compared to a regular person. (They’re more common than you think, and I’ve personally seen that superfans outside the US may be smaller in number but often have way more buying power on average because they value access to music differently.)

Would you like to see where those Super Listeners are coming from?

You can’t.

Not through Spotify, anyway.

And beyond that, you can’t even see them at all unless you have a reasonably new release; this is the company that raised eyebrows a while back by removing audience analysis from plays farther back than 28 days. Indeed, you can’t see this kind of listener segmentation on releases older than 6 months. That’s true even if your record is still getting a healthy amount of streams, which is a little surprising in an age where one album track may randomly blow up on TikTok or Reels a year (or more) after its street date.

Lest you think I’m piling in on Spotify today, they’re actively one of the better streaming services for showing listener data to artists. Their active audience is divided into “super,” “moderate,” and “light” listeners, which is useful, and more than you are likely to get elsewhere for now! Apple Music doesn’t currently do this kind of segmentation, despite better access to lifetime data which is a perennial issue with analyzing Spotify traction. Tidal doesn’t either, despite being one of the friendliest DSPs in terms of royalty payments.

This is not, in my opinion, a Spotify problem. It’s an industry problem.

Yes, the costs of holding data on countless millions of artists are surely real costs, but we’re not talking about a particularly complex level of analysis. Setting “lifetime plays of artist track > 5” as a condition on a spreadsheet to show who a bigger fan is, for example, shouldn’t be enough to break a streaming library with significant investment in it. But somehow, we keep collectively looking at the semi-mystifying data we’re giving artists (save ratios, anyone?) and saying, “We need to prioritize other things.”

Music companies that deal with artists have two consistent elephants in the room: they don’t typically give artists access to high-quality data, and artists themselves are often low in data literacy. 

The second point could be helped more directly by music companies (Symphonic’s SEO-friendly blog articles are one pleasant exception), but it’s often left to artists to figure out what data is useful and what data is noise, let alone how to capture it. Do most artists understand that you can use Shazam spikes, radio play, and streaming attention together to find a local market to develop through touring, for example? No, because industry professionals know that these things can be connected together, but artists are a different kind of professional. They typically haven’t worked on hundreds of campaigns; they’ve worked on themselves, and that’s often what they’ve got.

By and large, most artists are flying blind. This starts in simple ways. They may know that one shirt is the most popular bit of merch they have, and they may know which size sells the best, but a lot of them aren’t looking at obvious things like percentage of merch sold against turnout per night. If you are selling 30 shirts in a room of 90ish people one night and then 20 in a room of 200 the next, you’d want to go back and build within a couple hours’ drive of where you sold 30, right? 

But a lot of artists aren’t tracking this kind of thing, because they don’t have a team to point it out to them other than other artists or Reddit. And I can tell you, because I’ve been an artist myself and didn’t start most conversations with other bands with “I’m a marketing executive,” that a troubling amount of marketing advice from artists to other artists comes from a place of half-truth and overconfidence in the name of appearing to know what’s up.

And it’s not like artists can’t learn this sort of stuff, which I know because I’ve taught several, and still do!

So, expecting an artist to compare, say, shirt sales against where they had streaming listeners or radio play in advance might sound like a lot on paper, but creative businesspeople aren’t dumb. They just have to know where to look.

A musician does more math on the fly just to play a song start to finish, let alone when improvising, than many occupations ever require. Is a lot of it stored in the gut and not in the more deliberate mind? Sure. But let’s not buy into the popular myth of the dumb musician. They exist, like in any profession, but I find that most good ones are plenty clever.

And yet, we could do so much more to educate them. We have short-link companies that either paywall their back-end data or offer minimal data even for premium users (looking right at you, Linktree). I’d say half or less of the artists I’ve worked with in the last two years knew what Google Analytics was when I mentioned it. And if you’re a newcomer, it’s hard to feel much incentive to set up tracking pixels on a website when digital music platforms are just now starting to try and add value to what they’re giving bands.

This stuff amounts to digital marketing basics, in nearly any other industry. It’s strange, at best, that we collectively perceive it as too much to offer in the self-made artist game.

A little change here and there in favor of giving creative businesses better data is worth celebrating. But there needs to be a good bit more of it. 

One Thing You Can Use Today

Here’s something a lot of incorporated businesses know, but a concerning number of musicians don’t:

In the US, professional services are a tax write-off.

That doesn’t just mean legal and accounting. It also means anything you paid to an industry professional for marketing assistance, myself very much included. 

What kinds of professional services can you write off as a recording artist? Here’s a quick list that will look familiar:

• Studio time

• Travel expenses (that includes touring and one-off shows)

• Instruments (note that extravagant purchases are more likely to be audited)

• Website and hosting fees

• Ad spends, including socials and elsewhere

• Email marketing services (such as the paid versions of Beehiiv if it’s mission-critical)

• Creative hiring fees (editors, designers, photographers)

• Laptops and phones (if used for work, likely to be a partial deduction)

• Vehicle mileage and maintenance

• Streaming subscriptions

• Production and shipping costs of merch (yes really)

• Stage setup costs

• Radio promo campaigns

• Publicity campaigns

• Legal fees

• Consultation fees (that’s me)

• Airfare and lodging for out-of-town work events (performances/conferences/fests)

You can also write off show tickets themselves if you’re in music and going for research purposes. This one’s the trickiest and should be used sparingly.

I am not a financial advisor, so please consult with one on what you can safely deduct (this is a great partial guide)! But take heart in knowing that most of the annoying parts of being a recording artist - you know, the expenses - can come back your way at tax time with the right documentation.

Track of the Week

Loveth Besamoh - “Heavy Eyes”

While post-punk has a pretty wide set of outlines to color in, Loveth Besamoh is doing it in a way I haven’t seen too many artists manage. “Heavy Eyes” finds Besamoh and his namesake quartet blending stacked guitar parts with lo-fi synths, a relentless sparse beat, and a fuller-bodied vocal that uses a closed-range drone without sounding totally disengaged. Other songs of theirs have even more melodic variance, but it’s neat to hear the Rotterdam-via-Cameroon project pull the right things from Joy Division (and Ian Curtis’ famously flat but still completely invested delivery) when making a song that owes more to them than others they have. The soul shines through no matter what, and it makes them one of the more exciting artists like this in Europe right now.

Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp (only previous material)

Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…

The Club List is a newsletter from MeInTheClub.com. All issues are available at TheClubList.net. To inquire about marketing services for your work, contact [email protected] and include "Services” in the subject line.