"If he goes back to being independent and ditches Spotify in 3 years, he has lost all of his new subscribers during that time, and some of his original subscribers as well."

I'm a naive small-time player but I don't really think this is how a creator–audience relationship works https://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/1263886403810717696

If I were in Joe's shoes, the main thing I'd care about is producing great content, period. Get the best possible guests, ask the best possible questions, make stuff that really resonates with people. And that stuff has to be like... moderately accessible

Framed another way: suppose my Twitter account gets banned or deleted. It would be disappointing, yes. But like... I trust that the people who like my stuff will Google me to find me, wherever I am. They'll sign up for my newsletter or subscribe to my YouTube channel, whatever

If there are people who really only cared about my stuff in the specific context that they saw me in (Twitter in this case), and they don't care to look me up afterwards, in a sense they aren't really "my" audience. The real thing that matters is the people who *really* care

A thousand true fans really is all you need; I really believe this. Once you have enough $$ to pay the bills, you have your health insurance and everything sorted out, you can afford to take trips whenever you like... what is the extra money for, really?

Guy like Rogan doesn't even need to invest his own money in anything he wants to see flourish. If he runs into somebody who's running a cool business, he can say "man, somebody should invest in this cool business!" – and it'll happen. What an excellent deal, lmao. Goals

starting to see there are at least two conversations happening here

1- paywalling making you less accessible in the general/abstract sense

2- getting paid to be behind someone else's "paywall" (spotify) makes you a sucker for losing out on building your own

I think 1 is a matter of skill and information architecture on the part of the creator in terms of managing their body of work. I sincerely don't believe that my patreon or my ebook makes me any less accessible to the world. I tweet like a motherfucker regardless, lol

re: 2, the question that matters to me is the opportunity cost of building your own infrastructure

I wanna make content, not be a goat farmer. so what if goat farming is more profitable https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1110459804894392321

"oh but you can hire someone else to farm your goats" yeah but then you have to manage that relationship, do meetings with them, pay their salary, address their grievances...

my personal frame is roughly

1. always make some stuff in the public domain that's accessible to everyone, so that even a poor nerdy kid from a distant country can find your work and enjoy it

2. make money by building advanced/polished versions of 1 for people who want to pay

I suppose I'm realizing while writing this that my attitude towards discoverability is maybe different than how most people probably think about it? I very rarely care what the youtube algorithm suggests I watch. I care very much about what my friends tell me to watch

if I wanted to grow my twitter audience to 100k, and I didn't care about anything else, I could do it. I have the marketing background &skillset. Which means I deliberately choose not to do it. Because that would dilute the *quality* of my audience. Which makes a difference to me

I think this is something that the profit-maximizing subscriber-squeezing short-term folks cannot understand and cannot relate to. "but why wouldn't you wanna 10x overnight?" because there is such a thing as growing too fast. it dilutes the culture. it drives away the best people

anyway, a lot of this is mere conjecture and emoting on my part. the cool thing about following me, though (and I would say this about anybody else, if they were in my shoes) is that you get to see how I deal with it and how I make decisions as the following grows