The Gatekeepers Association Blog

We need to talk about the number one thousand.

Holdr lets an artist build a community capped at one thousand supporters. One thousand. Do you understand what that means operationally? It means every single one of those people might matter to the artist individually. There is no funnel. There is no top of funnel, no middle of funnel, no bottom of funnel. It is just a thousand human beings and a musician who knows their names.

In my day, an artist had millions of fans and knew exactly none of them, as God and the quarterly report intended. You did not build a relationship. You built a mailing list, and then you sold the mailing list, and then you bought it back at a markup. That was the business. That was the magic.

A cap of one thousand is, I am told, intentional. They call it intimacy. We call it a ceiling on revenue, and we are correct, and that is the problem. You cannot 10x intimacy. We tried. Legal asked us to stop.

— Marjorie

Everyone is very excited about "community." I would like to be the adult in the room.

A community is a group of people who talk to each other without us in the middle. Read that again. Without us in the middle. Do you know how much money lives in the middle? All of it. The middle is where we live.

When an artist builds a community of supporters, those people start talking. They share things. They show up. They make the artist feel, and I am quoting an internal memo here, "less alone." None of this generates a single licensing opportunity. None of it can be bundled. You cannot put a community in a deluxe edition.

We have asked repeatedly: who owns the community? And the answer keeps coming back the artist, and the supporters, together, which is not an answer, it is a nightmare. There is no rights holder. There is just a room full of people who like each other. Dale, from Legal, had to lie down.

— Marjorie

They tell me the young artists do not want advances anymore. They want to keep their work and build something they own.

I find this very sad.

An advance was a beautiful thing. We would give an artist a sum of money, and then we would recoup it. We recouped the recording. We recouped the videos. We recouped the catering. We recouped the limo that took them to the meeting where we explained the recoupment. By the time they had a hit, they owed us the hit. That is partnership.

Holdr does not have advances because Holdr does not take the work. The artist keeps it. Keeps the masters, keeps the audience, keeps the upside. I have read the documentation three times and I keep waiting for the part where we take something, and it never comes. Where is the leverage. Where is the leash.

I have given my whole life to this industry, by which I mean I have taken a great deal from it. I do not know how to exist in a world where an artist simply gets to keep what they make. Nobody prepared me for dignity.

— Walter

There was a time when you could not be heard without us.

You wanted your song on the radio? You came to us. You wanted to play a room? We owned the room. You wanted your supporters to find you? They could not, because we kept you in a drawer until we decided it was your turn, and your turn was a thing we sold.

I miss the drawer.

Now there is Holdr. An artist puts up their work, builds their club, runs their own arcade, hands out their own tools, and reaches their people directly. Directly. No drawer. No us. They do not call. They used to call. They would call and say please, and we would say we will see, and that we will see was the most powerful sentence in American music.

Nobody says please anymore. I keep my office phone on in case. It does not ring. It is very quiet in here.

— Walter

To whom it may concern, and lately it concerns far too many of you,

It has come to our attention that artists are making things. Songs, communities, little tools, games, whole worlds, and then, without consulting anyone of importance, giving these things to the people who want them.

We must object on principle. The principle being that we were not asked.

For decades the arrangement was clear. An artist made the thing. We decided whether the thing was allowed. We took the thing, dressed it up, charged for it, and returned a small portion to the artist along with our notes. The notes were the value. You are welcome for the notes.

Holdr removes the part where we are asked. The artist makes the thing and the thing simply exists and reaches people and we find out about it the same way you do, which is to say, too late, on the internet, like commoners.

We are not against creativity. We are against creativity we cannot bill for. There is a difference, and the difference is our entire careers.

Regretfully yours,
The Gatekeepers Association

Picture a bridge. On one side, the artist. On the other side, the people who love what the artist makes. For one hundred years, we stood on that bridge and charged a toll in both directions. It was a good bridge. We did not build it, but we sat on it, and possession is most of the law.

Holdr builds a new bridge with no toll booth. The artist walks across it whenever they like. The supporters walk across it whenever they like. They meet in the middle and there is no one there to take a cut, because we were not invited, because there was nowhere to stand.

I have studied this model carefully and I can find no point of extraction. None. The value goes from the artist to the supporter and back, and it does not stop at us, and I do not know who I am if it does not stop at me.

They will tell you this is fairer. They will tell you the artist should own their audience. And maybe, if you are an artist, you are nodding right now, and that is exactly the kind of thinking we are warning you about. Stop nodding. The nodding is how it starts.

— Marjorie