Building Sustainable Careers for Artists

This week's interview features Lucie Watson, founder of goodtwin. goodtwin is a label services company based out of London that serves as a bridge for artists between Australia/New Zealand and the UK.

Lucie talks a lot about the big questions that artists are facing today. What does a sustainable career look like? How do artists penetrate saturated markets? What metrics actually matter for artists?

Learn more about goodtwin here: https://goodtwin.ai/

Follow goodtwin on Substack: https://goodtwin.substack.com/

Select Quotes

On the Shift in Music Economics

"With goodtwin, ... I just don't believe in the streaming economics anymore. And it's incredibly, incredibly hard to try and break artists under the current streaming economics. We work our absolute asses off for these artists and the [streaming] income just trickles in."  

"I've been saying streaming shouldn't be the metrics that we're looking at. We need to be really building communities around your art and your brand and your music."  

On Building Real Fan Communities

"For all of our artists, we sort of obsess over the number of actual fans that they have that would go and pay for a ticket or something that they release into the world."  

"We sort of obsess over this fan counter with all of our artists and every time they get a new email address or a new phone number or they can really see someone championing them on social media, then we'll get the artists to reach out and sort of get to know that fan a little bit."  

"This, what you're doing here, it is a two way value system. You know, you can't just be saying, listen to my music, listen to my music. You have to actually show that you understand and your fans and your audience and why they might be following you in the first place."

On Master Ownership and Industry Strategy

"I think wherever possible, artists being in control of their masters, even if it's licensing them for a certain period of time like they do when they come to oodsin, but then having those masters revert back to them and setting themselves up for the future."  

"The best feeling that an artist can give any music company is that feeling of: they're going to do it with or without me and I can either sit here and let them go ahead and do it or I can jump in and get involved and help them get to those goals."

Here are the most informative and compelling quotes from Lucie regarding her career, the music industry, and her approach at Good Twin:

On the Artist's Work Ethic

"I you want anyone to work hard for you, you're to have to work harder than them."   

"It needs to be a true partnership. We will show up and we will work into the evening, we'll do whatever we can to help you succeed, but we need you pushing as well and doing the exact same."

On Breaking Out of New Zealand and Australia

"The narrative, the exact line that we get told all the time, is that artists hit a ceiling very quickly in terms of opportunity and scope of what's available to them."  

"[Artists] come over to the UK and you know they've left everything behind. A huge leap of faith. They've left their family behind, and they come to the UK, and it's just huge. And suddenly it's that feeling of like, yeah, I'm tiny here. I'm insignificant, really, you know? And all the groundwork that they've done growing their fan base in New Zealand to then come over to the UK... it really does feel like you're starting from the ground up again."

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