Forgive me for going quiet.

Raising our pre-seed, iterating the product, continuing to validate, building a "label as a service" engine as infrastructure for artists, adding gamification for fans, and hiring six people to hit the ground running after the round... yeah, it's been a lot. I put OFFTRACK on the back burner. Mea grandissima culpa. Everyone says consistency is the key, and honestly, I dropped the ball.

But I kept reading. Always. I've been consuming a ton on AI, growth, and the music industry, because I've always believed that curiosity is what keeps me moving forward, and with everything running at 400 km/h, there's really no alternative.

And what I've been reading lately made me want to open this space back up. Now.

A big part of this issue comes from two pieces by Joel Gouveia, who runs the Substack The Artist Economy. I'm linking them here because if you haven't read them, you should: The Death of Spotify and 1 Million Monthly Listeners. 12 Tickets Sold.. The concepts I develop here build on his thinking, but I've tried to take them somewhere he didn't quite go, and make them a little more OFFTRACK. And a little more Fankee.

Jimmy Iovine, co-founder of Interscope Records, father of Beats by Dre, architect of Apple Music, one of the people who built the bridge between music and tech like no one else, said something simple and brutal about Spotify and Apple Music: streaming services are minutes away from being obsolete. Minutes. Not years.

Now, to be fair, he's building a superfans platform himself, so he's got a stake in this narrative. But when I read it, I stopped in my tracks. Because the industry has spent years optimizing algorithms, chasing editorial playlists, begging for a spot on Discover Weekly. And now one of the people who knows this business better than almost anyone is saying the foundation we built everything on is cracking. The more I think about it, the more I think he has a point.

Throughout the twentieth century, the majors didn't just control artists' rights, they controlled the pipes. They were vertically integrated monopolies dressed up as music companies. RCA owned RCA Records, had Elvis and Bowie in its catalog, and also invented the 45 RPM vinyl format and built the record players you needed to listen to it. Philips owned PolyGram and invented the cassette tape. Sony owned CBS Records, had Michael Jackson and Springsteen, co-invented the CD in 1982, and built the Walkman. They owned the artist, the plastic the art was printed on, and the machine to play it on. They controlled the entire chain.

The break didn't come with Spotify. It came with Napster, in 1999. Digital piracy did what no market force had managed before: it ripped distribution control out of the majors' hands, forcing them to sit down with tech players just to survive. Streaming didn't take control away from the labels, it just made it official. The majors signed deals with Spotify accepting a role as content providers, giving up equity stakes that looked like a win and turned out to be a gilded trap.

And here's the revelation we finally arrived at.

When a product is everywhere, identical, always available, it stops having perceived value. It becomes a utility. Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal: same catalog, a hundred million songs, zero real differentiation. Compare that to video streaming: Netflix, HBO, Disney Plus are in a blood war, but each one has a weapon. You need Netflix for Stranger Things. You need HBO for The Last of Us. In music, the commodity is total, and that has a mathematical consequence Wall Street has always hated.

In a normal tech business, the more subscribers you acquire, the more your margins expand. Costs are fixed. Netflix pays 20 million to produce a series: whether one million or a hundred million people watch it, the cost doesn't change. Music streaming works in reverse: platforms pay out roughly 70% of every dollar earned back to rights holders, labels and publishers, so costs scale linearly with the user base. Every time a song is streamed, a fraction of a cent leaves the building.

Iovine put it bluntly: streaming services are in a terrible spot, no margins, not making any money. This model only works for Apple, Amazon, and Google, because they don't need their music platforms to be profitable. Amazon uses music as a loss leader to keep you on Prime. Apple uses it to sell iPhones. Spotify, as a standalone platform, is structurally squeezed. And when the platform's margins are under pressure, guess who gets squeezed first.

The mechanism Spotify uses to distribute payments is called pro-rata: all subscription money goes into one giant global pool, distributed based on total stream share. Imagine you're an indie rock listener paying your monthly subscription, but your fourteen-year-old is on your family plan streaming Drake and Taylor Swift for eight hours a day. Your money doesn't go to the indie bands you love. The vast majority of your monthly fee ends up with the top 1% of pop stars, because they command the highest global volume.

To understand how much this hurts in practice: an independent artist with 100,000 monthly streams, which for many is already a meaningful milestone, earns roughly 350 euros gross before label and publisher cuts. With a million streams, you're looking at around 3,500 euros. Gross, before the label takes its share, before the producer recovers production points, before the publisher calculates composition royalties. The system is built to subsidize mega-artists and starve the middle class of music. And it's not a bug. It's a deliberate architecture.

And here's the most cynical part of all: Spotify doesn't want you to have a relationship with your fans. Incredible, but true.

Spotify wants your fans to have a relationship with Spotify. They guard listener data like a fortress, because that data is the only competitive moat they have left. So the question becomes pretty obvious: if you build your entire career on a platform that actively prevents you from getting your fans' email addresses, are you building a house on rented land? You're an unpaid employee of a Swedish tech company that considers your life's work "content" to fill their servers.

But let's be honest about something.

You, reading this, maybe just a music listener like most people, like the mass market, do you actually care that Spotify pays artists fractions of a penny? Probably not. People will always choose convenience over morality, always. Spotify isn't dying as a consumption platform. It's becoming obsolete as a business model for artists. The difference is enormous. Tap water isn't going anywhere, as Gouveia says, but that doesn't mean you can't sell Fiji.

And here's the number that should make anyone building a music career in 2026 stop and think: you can have a million monthly listeners on Spotify and not sell 12 tickets to a show.

Yeah. One million. Twelve tickets.

This isn't a paradox. It's the logical consequence of a system that optimized distribution at the expense of relationship. Those millions of plays are algorithmic reach, not fandom. They're people who heard your song on a playlist generated by a system that doesn't even know your name. They're not fans. They're data points.

And when you talk to artists every day, you immediately see the difference between those who are constantly trying to build a real relationship with their fans, and those who think the label should handle their social media and tell them how to communicate, what tone of voice to use, what caption to write. They think there's a pre-packaged recipe.

There isn't, guys. Wake up.

The direction the smartest part of the industry is moving is away from algorithmic reach optimization and toward building direct relationships. Fandom has a funnel structure: discovery happens on streaming, fine, that's its role and it won't change. But the moment a passive listener becomes something more is when you capture a contact, email, phone number, something that's actually yours. And from there you build the real value: VIP, merch, real tickets, community, direct experiences.

The artists making this transition well aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest numbers. They're the ones who figured out that 1,000 real fans, with an email address and the willingness to buy something, are worth more economically than 500,000 monthly Spotify listeners. An artist with a mailing list of 5,000 people and a 40% open rate has something no algorithm can take away. A direct relationship, unmediated, not subject to the policy changes of a Swedish platform.

The industry spent a decade obsessed with getting a million people to listen to a song once. The next decade will be defined by who figures out how to get 1,000 people to care forever.

Why does Spotify force artists to use Laylo for messaging, Discord for community, Patreon for subscriptions? Why do we have to build communities on other platforms? By refusing to build these tools, Spotify is pushing the most valuable, highest-margin interactions in the music business completely off their servers. They're terrified: if they give artists the data, the artists will leave.

The real infrastructure for direct-to-fan in the independent era doesn't yet exist in the form it should. Or rather, it exists in pieces, fragmented, clunky, built for people who already have the resources to put the puzzle together. I've been trying to answer this question for a few years now. I don't have all the answers yet, but I know where to look. And this is the conversation I want to keep having here, about who's building it, what's missing, where this industry is really headed.

OFFTRACK is back. And this time it's not stopping.