The Hamster Wheel and the Patron of the Arts: Inside Spotify's Push to Monetize Fandom

Camille Hearst describes her team at Spotify as focused on helping artists and fans connect in ways that put more money directly in artists' pockets. She points to the economic effect of this summer's Taylor Swift and Beyoncé tours as proof of how passionate fans can be, and notes that the same devotion exists around artists far below superstar level.

The most mature offering today is merch, which many users do not realize can be bought on Spotify. Her team is making it more prominent and letting artists attach it to rewards such as exclusive discounts, special designs or early access for top listeners. They have also run listening parties and are exploring further ideas for bringing groups of fans together and monetizing the moment.

The best part of working with artists, Hearst says, is being around people brave enough to turn a creative passion into a living. The hardest part is that many want to give everything away for free because they are so moved that people love their work. She calls this "starving artist ethos" far more pronounced among musicians than among Substack writers or Patreon creators, who have embraced the idea that patrons see supporting them as a badge of honor.

Lenny admits he feels uneasy charging for his own work, and Hearst says that is typical: when the product is art, emotions make it hard for creators to see what the market will bear. That is why she thinks platforms that aggregate demand and handle pricing, payment, tax and finance are such a natural marketplace solution. They also smooth out the feast-and-drought rhythm of creativity so that a creator has a predictable paycheck.

Lenny points out a downside of subscription businesses: once annual subscribers sign up, you must keep producing, and stopping would mean losing the revenue. Hearst says it is known internally as the "hamster wheel of content creation". You get on because you love it, and then it is unclear how to get off.

She sees this as a real opportunity for platforms. They could make creation easier, offer services when a creator has no time, provide financing that traditional banks would not, or even generate content so a creator can take a break. She is careful to say this need not be AI, and might be as simple as aggregating data or writing summaries. Lenny mentions his own LennyBot, an AI chatbot trained on his content, as a playful experiment in this direction.

Lenny asks whether the creator economy has faded, given that a few big platforms now dominate. Hearst says it was predictable that platforms would win, because aggregation produces strong network effects, and the large platforms were strategically sharp about building features so creators would not churn. The funding rush, she says, was a search for room for new platforms or vertical-specific tools, and it did produce huge successes such as Twitch and arguably TikTok.

To show how real the phenomenon is, she describes a Twitch streamer named Kai who announced a giveaway of PlayStations and computer gear in Union Square. She says roughly a million teenage boys showed up and the center of New York had to be cleared. She also cites studies quoted at Patreon that over 60 percent of young people want to create content for a living.

Hearst argues that you cannot lower the cost of making content and raise the scale of distribution without a creator economy emerging. She likens a creator such as Michelle Phan to a "mini Disney" whose intellectual property can become comics, shows, plushies and merch. Whether or not venture-backed startups win, she sees room for more companies and for individuals to build on their own without big platforms taking so large a cut.

Asked what is not obvious about succeeding as a creator, Hearst names consistency and predictability first. Turning out steady quality work, like putting in 10,000 hours, goes a long way. She recalls writing creator playbooks at YouTube around 2010 and says that this advice has remained near the top ever since.

Second is collaboration: working with other creators and sharing audiences. Her startup Kit hosted events so creators could meet and cross-pollinate. Third is curators, who play a role similar to a publisher, record label or radio station. They have a brand and an ethos, and audiences trust them to say what is worth consuming, so creators should align themselves with curators whose taste matches their own.

Kit was built on exactly that curator idea. It let trusted recommenders curate gear that people could follow, on the logic that a recommendation from your cycling brother-in-law beats reviews from strangers on Amazon. Lenny agrees, noting that influencer marketing grew out of this organic trust before people started paying for it.

Hearst began Kit in 2015 and raised more than $2 million, which she calls a real accomplishment given venture capital's track record with founders who are not white men. After several years of growth, the team had to decide between a bridge round, a Series A or an exit. She went through the StartX accelerator at Stanford, learned how selling a company works, and ultimately sold Kit to Patreon in 2018, where she met Adam Fishman, who later introduced her to Lenny.

Her first lesson is to treat a sale like a fundraising process, running it deliberately with many conversations rather than waiting for it to happen. Her second is to talk to potential acquirers from the beginning. When she first met the executive who would become her boss, it was their first meeting, whereas a fifth meeting would have meant an existing relationship and more time to absorb her vision.

Lenny, who sold his company to Airbnb, says this matches his experience: you want future buyers to think of you when they have a problem you could solve. Both agree that framing early conversations as partnership explorations rather than "do you want to buy us?" works better, which Hearst compares to dating.

Lenny notes that both he and Hearst spent their careers on the supply side of marketplaces. Hearst says her early pull was her musical family's interest in helping artists earn a living, but her deep understanding of marketplace dynamics came at Hailo, a London startup that competed with Uber and Lyft. There she worked on getting enough cars to meet demand and saw firsthand how unhappy drivers, strikes or regulation could damage the business.

She launched Hailo's U.S. competitor to Uber, which had to recruit private-car drivers since Hailo in Europe had only worked with taxis. Her conclusion: no amount of marketing or slick design matters if no cars are available when a user opens the app. She prefers to describe marketplaces as two-sided rather than chicken-and-egg, with the supply side usually where to start.

Lenny agrees from his own research, comparing supply to stock on a store's shelves. He recalls Rover as a rare case where supply was easy, since many people would happily earn $50 watching a dog. Hearst raises eBay as the usual counterexample, but suspects that even eBay had to go find its key suppliers before demand could be aggregated.

Hearst was the second product marketing manager on iTunes, starting with an internship in label relations after grad school and then full-time work in 2005. She recounts the Apple lore that Steve Jobs would ask people in elevators what they did and that a bad answer might be a last day. She tells of a colleague who frantically hit the wrong button and fled down the hallway.

On her first day of the internship, a few days after attending the Stanford graduation where Jobs gave his commencement speech, he sat at the next table in the cafe. Colleagues warned she was only an intern, but she had been raised to thank people who inspired her, so she introduced herself and thanked him. He asked who she was and what she was doing there, wished her luck, and from then on would wave back with a confused look when she saw him on campus.

Her actual job included the unglamorous work of setting up press rooms for iTunes launches, with a library of tracks that Jobs curated for months, adding his favorite Beatles and Bob Dylan records and cutting anything that did not cross the bar. She says this showed how much detail he cared about.

Asked about Airbnb's move toward an Apple-style product organization, Hearst says Apple was led by design and engineering craftspeople rather than strategists, a stark contrast with Google's consultants. At Apple, product marketers planned the key messages and consumer positioning for a launch well before features were built, and that framing shaped what got built, instead of a metric to push forward.

For anyone building a creator platform, Hearst says the key is solving a real problem. Every creator needs to grow an audience and get paid, and she thinks audience growth is more important because it unlocks monetization. There are also freelancer problems such as financing and health insurance, plus issues unique to creators like bursts of creative energy, and she does not think the space is anywhere near solved.

Her parents, whom Wikipedia calls "radical Buddhist artists technologists", shaped her path. Her dad, a drummer, turned a closet into a recording studio and built PCs from salvaged parts, with young Camille helping to solder. She also remembers handing out Nichiren Buddhism pamphlets from behind the gate of their San Francisco house at seven or eight years old.

Her favorite product framework comes from Marty Cagan, whom she learned about through a manager at Hailo: dual-track agile, where discovery and delivery happen in parallel. Its lesson is to tackle the riskiest ideas first instead of favoring predictable small swings, with leaders accountable if they fail. She also loves Twilio's "draw the owl" value, a reminder that you sometimes have to start with circles and just go for it.

In the lightning round she recommends The Three-Body Problem, A Wrinkle in Time and Octavia Butler's Kindred, and likes asking interviewees about something they are proud of. Her mottos are that a frog in a well cannot know the ocean and that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best is now. She closes by urging listeners to support their favorite creators and become patrons of the arts.