By Tom French, Co-Founder, Beataboutmusic
Every so often, an entire creative field slips its leash.
Not because the industry grants it permission or because a new platform appears that drastically shifts the fabric of time and space.
But because the people inside it decide they’re done waiting, and want to start doing.
Comedy reached that point a few years ago.
They didn’t ask TV for permission (or sanitisation). They definitely didn’t pitch to producers. They didn’t bend their personalities and work into transfiguring themselves into something they aren’t.
They spoke in their humour.
The audience that listened loved them and the middle people vanished.
Have A Word – 30,000 strong Patreon, 100k subs on Youtube etc.
Finn vs The Internet. 400,000 monthly consumption hours.
Thousands of others.
The truth is that this didn’t happen because comedy suddenly got funnier or trendier.
It got just got freer, and it shook itself of its gatekeepers, allowing individual comedians to be accessible on their own terms.
And music, which once led culture, is now watching its younger sibling sprint past with a blueprint musicians should have invented first, as it is and always has been the way bands, artists and all musicians love to perform – direct to fans and the front of stages.
The question is no longer why did it happen?
It’s how long until music follows?
What Comedians Saw Before Any Musician
1. If you don’t own your crowd, you don’t own your career
A comedian with a couple thousand loyal fans can fill a room anywhere in the country. No playlist needed. No algorithmic blessing. No label meeting. They decide the time, the place and routine.
Meanwhile, musicians are told to chase a million passive listeners, those of which vanish the moment the feed refreshes or tickets go on sale.
Artists have known this instinctively for years. But there’s never been a place designed to build that unique artist-to-fan relationship – only platforms designed to skim from it and throw you in a washing machine of ‘other things’ and surface you when it suits.
2. Fans want proximity, not perfection
Comedy exploded because fans got access to the rough drafts, which reveal who the comedian in question really is – the crowd work, the riffs, the work-in-progress nights, the stuff that wasn’t “polished”. Comedians became authentic people, not actors with a funny routine.
Fans loved it even more.
Musicians have been conditioned to hide all that. Wait until the mix is right. The artwork is perfect. The rollout is “strategy approved”. Blah blah blah.
But fans don’t fall in love with polish. They fall in love with the human behind it. Music as the output has always been the summary of a thousand different feelings, experiences, nuances, talents, times and places.
Ironically, as we look around no other industry of independent creators gives away as much for free as emerging artists – you can scroll today to see the endless streams of bedroom recordings etc. But these aren’t turned into; community content, that creates insight into the artist, that breeds deeper relationships with a select few. But generic content for a social feed for everyone.
3. The long tail isn’t a dead end – it’s where the real demand lives.
Comedy saw what music keeps overlooking:
The middle isn’t missing.
It’s unsupported.
Music knows this pain better than anyone:
- pennies per stream
- gigs that don’t pay
- algorithms that bury you
- audiences that can’t find you locally
- venues gambling on nights that might lose money
- fans who want to support you but have no simple path to do it
Comedy solved its long tail by building a direct connection.
Music can solve it by doing the same – with better tools.
To read more and find out about Beataboutmusic, click here.