Guest
Anna Lidell
Anna Lidell is Founder at Sleeve, as introduced on the show.
Episodes (1)
Sleeve founder Anna Lidell explains why streaming pays artists too little and how a small paying fanbase can earn a musician more than thousands of streams.
Questions these episodes answer
Why can't artists rely on streaming income alone?
Lidell says streaming pays less than half a cent per play and the rate keeps falling, so an artist needs billions rather than millions of plays to make a living from it. She adds that even going viral, as she experienced with half a million plays in one day, does not reliably turn into paying fans.
From: From Musician to Founder: How Sleeve Helps Artists Earn Real Income
What does the Sleeve platform actually let artists do?
Sleeve is a direct-to-fan platform built only for music, where artists give paying supporters things like early access to unreleased songs, a mailing list that can import an existing newsletter, and a link-in-bio page, so fans move from casually following an artist to directly signing up to support them.
From: From Musician to Founder: How Sleeve Helps Artists Earn Real Income
How much can a small paying fanbase actually earn an artist?
Lidell gives the example of an artist with 130,000 monthly Spotify listeners who has only 60 people paying on Sleeve, and that artist now earns more money from those 60 paying members than she does from Spotify streaming, showing a small paying group can outearn a much larger passive audience.
From: From Musician to Founder: How Sleeve Helps Artists Earn Real Income
Why did Sleeve build in copy protection for songs?
Lidell says almost no other platform besides OnlyFans stops a song or video from being downloaded or screen recorded, and that protection matters to musicians because it lets them safely share unreleased material and higher quality audio with paying fans instead of risking it leaking for free.
From: From Musician to Founder: How Sleeve Helps Artists Earn Real Income
Why does Anna Lidell think a music platform doesn't need mass reach?
She argues music is a global niche market, so success comes from deeply serving the smaller group of fans who already care rather than chasing every listener, since a platform like Sleeve only needs the fans willing to pay for a closer connection to the artist.
From: From Musician to Founder: How Sleeve Helps Artists Earn Real Income