MBW Views is a series of op-eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say. The following MBW op/ed comes from Daniel J. Carucci, MD, MSc, PhD, the Founder and CEO of Tipify, a direct fan-to-artist patronage platform.
He is a former U.S. Navy Captain, former Director of the U.S. Navy Malaria Vaccine Program, former Global Chief Medical Officer at McCann Health, and directed the Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed articles and holds two U.S. patents on malaria vaccine discovery.
Here, he argues that the music industry has spent the streaming era building ever-more-elaborate ways to sell fans things they never actually wanted, when the data shows its most devoted supporters aren’t seeking more content, but simply a direct way to back the artists they believe in.
I am not an artist or music executive. I am a physician and research scientist who spent more than three decades working on problems most people considered intractable.
I have led global health programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and in support of the United Nations. I spent twenty years as a U.S. Navy flight surgeon and research physician focused on the development of next-generation vaccines, before I ever gave serious thought to the economics of the music industry.
I came to the music industry the way scientists sometimes stumble onto their most important scientific endeavors: not by design, but by noticing that something was structurally wrong, and that no one was asking why.
What I found was something scientists recognize when examining a problem from a different angle or lens: a field operating on a false hypothesis. A foundational misassumption baked so deeply into the architecture of the industry that it is now taken for granted.
The hypothesis is this: fans must receive something tangible in exchange for financially supporting an artist.
To understand why that assumption took hold, you have to understand where it came from. For most of the twentieth century, the music industry was built on a simple and unavoidable transaction: if you wanted music, you bought it. The quid pro quo was not a philosophy; it was a mechanical fact. The transaction was inescapable.
Then digital distribution dismantled that model almost overnight. First came downloading, then streaming. Suddenly, music required no purchase of a physical product. The transaction that had defined the industry for nearly a century ceased to be necessary. But the mental systems built around it did not disappear. Platforms carried forward the old assumption that fans need a reason to pay. While the marketplace changed, the artist mindset did not.
Of course, it sounds reasonable. Every existing platform is built for artist monetization. Patreon, Bandcamp, merch stores, subscription tiers are designed around this premise. The entire music ecosystem teaches the same lesson: as an artist, you must offer something tangible to earn support. That lesson is reinforced so consistently, from so many directions, that artists have absorbed it not as platform logic but as fan psychology.
The music economy accidentally trained artists to become fulfillment companies.
And like many false hypotheses that persist for a long time, it is wrong. The data have been saying so for years.
In medicine, we call the mechanism that keeps a false hypothesis alive a confounder. A confounder appears to explain an outcome but is actually obscuring the true cause.
For decades, researchers believed stress caused stomach ulcers. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that a bacterium was actually responsible. The confounder was that stress and ulcers co-occurred, but the actual causal mechanism was entirely different. Proving that one assumption wrong fundamentally transformed treatment.
The music industry’s confounder is the quid pro quo. Fan behavior, buying merchandise, paying above the minimum price on Bandcamp, attending the same show multiple times, is interpreted as evidence that fans want deliverables. But a closer look at why fans actually behave this way tells a different story.
The evidence is consistent across platforms. Patreon’s own user research finds that 47 percent of paying subscribers say they want to show appreciation for the creator so they can stay motivated to create, not to receive exclusive content, but simply to keep the artist going.
Bandcamp’s data tells the same story from a different angle: fans pay above the minimum price 40 percent of the time, driving the average price paid to nearly 50 percent above the floor, with nothing additional unlocked. Goldman Sachs‘ 2023 Music in the Air report found that 44 percent of music superfans take out streaming subscriptions purely to support their favorite artists.
And Luminate‘s research, presented at SXSW in 2025, found that music superfans spend an average of $113 a month on live music, not because they receive proportionally more in return, but because supporting artists they believe in is part of who they are.
Consider the fan who buys three identical T-shirts at the merch table. Those additional two shirts are the nearest available instrument for saying something that has no cleaner outlet: “I love what you are making, and I want you to keep making it.”
Streaming solved access. It left patronage psychologically awkward.
A stream pays an artist approximately four-tenths of a cent. At that rate, an independent artist needs more than 800,000 monthly streams just to approach a minimum wage. The industry’s response has been to layer more transactional obligations on top, more of the same architecture built on the same false premise. The most motivated fans are not looking for more content. They are looking for a direct line to the artist.
I have spent much of my professional life working in support of resource-constrained environments where the gap between what people needed and what was available was enormous, and where the solution was almost never more resources. It was always a different framework, a cultural shift, a change in mindset.
Working on a UNICEF-supported project to improve childhood vaccine coverage in Afghanistan, what we built, The Immunity Charm, drew on deeply entrenched cultural traditions: bracelets given by grandparents to newborns that were thought to protect them against evil forces were redirected toward protecting from disease. It required no new infrastructure. It only required recognizing something that was already there and building the right channel for it.
The principle is the same here. The solution is not inventing new motivation. It is building infrastructure around motivation that already exists.
“Independent artists are not failing because fans are unwilling to support them. They are failing because every tool designed to capture that support has been built on a premise that is wrong.”
Kevin Kelly argued twenty years ago that a thousand true fans is enough to sustain a creative career. That loyalty already exists at scale among independent artists. Their motivation and generosity is documented. What has been missing since the emergence of streaming platforms is not a new incentive, it is a trustworthy, direct, frictionless channel that matches what fans actually want to do – support the artists and the music they love.
The answer is not more exclusive content or more obligations layered onto artists who are already stretched thin. It is a system that simply allows a fan to say directly: I believe in what you’re doing. It moves me, and I want you to keep going.
The music industry has spent a decade building more sophisticated boxes for a problem it refuses to correctly name. Independent artists are not failing because fans are unwilling to support them. They are failing because every tool designed to capture that support has been built on a premise that is wrong.
The fans are already there. They are showing where their motivation is. They are buying extra T-shirts. They are paying more than what is being asked. They are subscribing only to show their love. For the first time, so is the infrastructure to act on it. Kelly’s thesis was never aspirational. It was always achievable. Artists just needed permission to believe it.Music Business Worldwide
