The Brilliant Strategy Top Creators Use to Bypass Platforms and Keep 100 Percent of Revenue
A business that depends on resources it doesn’t control isn’t really a business; it’s a hostage to the whims and vagaries of others.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN
Photo: Getty Images
A decade ago, when Cameo first started in Chicago and was working out of 1871, the tech incubator which I ran there at the time, only a few of us understood what the company’s long-term roadmap looked like and how utterly disruptive this little firm (with ugly videos from jocks in their cars and “D” level celebrities holding forth in their basements) was going to be for the entire entertainment industry.
One of the great ironies at the time was that the most cogent observation came from no less an authority than Snoop Dogg, now a noted Olympic commentator, who said: “There is no platform or middleman filtering my message anymore.” The idea that artists and musicians could bypass many expensive and controlling layers of agents and managers and directly reach out to and connect with their fans wasn’t exactly revolutionary, but Cameo and others were the earliest players to provide painless technology solutions and easy access to anyone and everyone who thought they had something important to say. However, the economic problem for the creators and content providers was still a sizable concern because Cameo as the platform provider took a healthy cut of the revenue earned in each transaction. It was a better deal, but not the right deal.
A business that depends on resources it doesn’t control isn’t really a business; it’s a hostage to the whims and vagaries of others. Even Steven Galanis, one of the co-founders of Cameo, advises creators to own their audience rather than rent it, which he defines as building monetization that does not depend on any single platform’s algorithm or content policies remaining consistent.
So, a few years later, along came bemyfriends, riding on the huge success of its first major customer, the South Korean pop group BTS, and offered musicians and other creators their own platform with all the basic features required to build direct and lasting connections to their own fans without any intermediaries. This platform enabled special fan events, merchandise sales, access to the performers themselves, data analytics, advertising opportunities, fan voting mechanisms and numerous other tools which permitted the platform owner to focus on their principal activity while all the commerce and other business concerns were handled by the b.stage and b.stage+ platforms provided by bemyfriends. Most importantly, all the fan contacts and other proprietary data were owned exclusively by the artists and not by the platform operators. But the glaring omission in their offerings was the very critical area of ticketing which was controlled for almost all of the major U.S. concert venues by Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment.
The recent Ticketmaster and Live Nation litigation, where the suing states secured an initial determination that these two industry overlords were engaged in illegal monopolistic behavior (and notwithstanding the sad fact that they took the Trumpian payment path to bail themselves out of the federal proceedings), has energized talented musicians to be more entrepreneurial and aggressive in addressing the whole ticketing swamp. Here again, for artists with substantial fan bases and international followings, the attraction of building their own ticketing app and controlling their own interactions with their fans is very attractive and potentially quite lucrative.
One very significant example of direct-to-fan ticketing is the recent successful sold-out tour of Australia by GiaNina Paolantonio which employed a new free iPhone app that allows her to sell tickets worldwide to her fans without any service fees. She can sell tickets through the Headquarters app (which also works on Android phones) for dance classes, performances and concerts to her followers which number over 4 million on TikTok alone. Add another 2 million fans for Snap, Insta, and YouTube and you can begin to understand the reach and power of what she’s doing.
These are not thin or casual connections but rather relationships she’s been building since her work on Dance Moms first gave her a persistent global audience. She’s choreographed viral dance moves for Jennifer Lopez, Billie Eilish and Sombr, among others, and is now recording her music with Atlantic Records. The global app was built by GiaNina and her partners at a development firm named Clique Apps. GiaNina’s also got her own Selfie, an online digital twin that fans and followers can ask questions and get instant responses about everything GiaNina.
I wrote a piece quite a while ago noting that we’d probably all reached peak apps and that no one was looking to add more applications to their phones, but it’s a whole different story and a dream marketing scenario when an app developer is an artist who can speak directly to 6 million fans and tell them to get with the program and install her app to keep up with everything she’s doing – new music drops, hosting dance classes, extending her tours and, of course, other merch opportunities. And that’s only half of the really bad news for the twin ticket ogres.
The viral flywheel aspect of her launch goes like this. Once a fan sees how easy, cheap (actually free) and speedy this app is, they’re never going back. All consumers’ expectations are perpetually progressive and—just as Amazon set a brand-new curve and standard for delivery times and goosed the world’s expectations—every one of GiaNina’s fans will be asking her to add other artists, acts, creators and tours to her app. And every one of those fans will also be asking every other act, musician and performer why they’re still doing things the old, slow and costly way. It’s only a matter of time with millions of consumers waiting worldwide at the end of the channel that GiaNina’s building until every artist will be speeding their way to GiaNina’s door. You can never go wrong counting on smart people to act in their own self-interest.
