My Road to Catalogue Activation and Unlocking the Value of Tier C Artists

I was lucky to start my career at Interscope Records in its formative breakout years, working on releases like Marilyn Manson, No Doubt, Bush and Limp Bizkit - crossover alternative records that still went on to sell over 20 million albums and land multiple worldwide No.1s. At Geffen, I then worked on international campaigns for iconic artists including Hole, Counting Crows and Elliott Smith, as the label grew and evolved into what eventually became Universal Music Group.

Those years taught me something that has shaped my thinking ever since: the early hits aren’t the end of an artist’s career trajectory. More often, it’s simply the start and spark of an ongoing relationship with an audience. However far too often, when those initial hits eventually dry up, the industry far too often stops paying attention to the long term value and true potential of that relationship.

Later, whilst writing, recording, releasing and touring as an independent artist and producer in Australia, I ran into the same problem but this time very much from the artist’s perspective. So I created and built Usync, a pioneering audience-fan management system - that was essentially a forerunner to Patreon - and also launched the boutique Festival of the Sun for the independent community as a perfect audience to beta test the assumptions behind that platform. Namely: how do we connect artists directly with their loyal ongoing audience and once that connection is made, help them stay close and be able to continually stimulate and activate that relationship?

Back in the UK, I took this insight into artists to kickstart the first ‘record label for ideas’, developing disruptive thought leaders as pioneering iconoclastic talent via first learning and then leveraging an early-stage tech accelerator model. A crash course orientating around how that sector works in fast, agile sprints - rapidly testing key audience assumptions against real market feedback, often pivoting direction several times based on that iterative insight before launching.

This three decades of experience intersecting the edge of artists, culture and technology has culminated in CIPHA. A new type of studio, coming out of the artistic and creative experimental hub of St Leonards-on-Sea and designed to now rapidly unlock artist value in a new way. By bringing together the artist’s long-term perspective, the direct-to-fan mindset and the agile model of startup thinking into a new agile approach - that we call Preduction.

Sitting somewhere between the nascent demos, voice notes and fragments of early inspiration and the often baked-in sunk creative costs of engaging traditional production, Preduction is a dynamic new phase in agile creative and artistic development.

After trialling and honing every part and component of this pioneering approach via a diverse early Beta roster, including learning how to bring the new role of ‘Preducer’ into the studio’s creative process and artist workflow, we’ve made Preduction the foundation for our next step. Launching ‘Catalogue Activation’ as a timely innovation and much needed market offering focused on unlocking the potential of artists that we call Tier C.

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INTRODUCING TIER C ARTISTS: THE MARKET GAP

Everyone understandably talks about and points to the big Tier A and also Tier B catalogue deals and milestones: Springsteen, Dylan, Sting, Bowie etc.

Since 2020, eight headline deals alone add up to an estimated $1.9bn+.

These are informed by artists who fundamentally defined their eras, who have deep catalogues and global recognition.

But one tier down sits a layer of music rights the market hasn’t properly defined, let alone mapped or tried to unlock the value of:

We simply call this layer ‘Tier C’.

Tier C artists generally roughly fall in the three decades, 1980 to 2010 and share these key common characteristics:

→ 2–3 genuine charting hits

→ 3+ albums, including one the fans still call “the go-to”

→ An audience who are still month-on-month measurably streaming and socially engaging

→ They are still year-on-year touring

→ A brand name and sonic identity that’s still being continually nurtured

→ Are motivated by an ongoing impasse in career momentum and therefore open to unlocking a renewed stage and chapter via new frameworks and approaches

Retrospectively, when I look back, I’ve spent my career around launching and nurturing artists like these and I believe with Catalogue Activation, the right aligned and incentivised ones in Tier C can now potentially have a renewed lease of life.

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MUSIC INTEL: WHAT THE DATA SAYS

CIPHA is delighted to have partnered to deliver Catalogue Activation with Music Intel as our data intelligence and insight partner - in order to begin to lift the lid and for the first time see what’s really going on in the Tier C market space.

To start with we measured 47 UK acts between our target Tier C period 1980-2010:

Across 11,129 songs and 20.6 billion lifetime Spotify streams, three things stand out:

01) One or two songs consistently do almost all the work.

Just 1.4% of the songs carry 80% of the Tier C streams measured. Additionally 60% of all streams sit on a single song per act which means behind each act are often around 200 songs that rarely get heard.

02) The audience never left, and it’s growing.

Combined monthly Tier C listeners are 134.9M, up 16% in a year. With 34 of the 47 acts growing, without a single new crossover single being introduced into the catalogue.

03) The biggest audience is often somewhere else.

For 27 of these 47 UK acts, their biggest audience is in markets outside the UK.

There’s a whole lot more Tier C insight that we’ll be sharing over forthcoming weeks but in summary in Tier C we see: A proven core fanbase. A growing audience. Untapped international markets. And that seemingly no-one is connecting the dots in the data to correlate all three.

That’s the Catalogue Activation opportunity CIPHA is dedicated to exploring and now unlocking the potential of.

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HOW CATALOGUE ACTIVATION WORKS

Catalogue Activation is the missing stage: a data-led loop that starts by: first identifying what material in the current catalogue a Tier C artist’s existing audience is consistently engaging with and then rapidly turns that insight into experimental new material true to the artist’s DNA. That material is then tested in the market to measure real audience reactions, preferences and engagement, from which the insights and results shape up to three new singles that inform the next stage of a Tier C artist’s campaign and also the further evaluation of their rights.

At CIPHA, our dedicated Preducers guide artists and clients through this in three sequential stages.

1 - Soundcheck: finds where an artist’s audience is now and what new material it’s asking for, then runs a 14-day remote rapid virtual writing lab built around CIPHA’s own catalogue of original songs designed for this process, designed to now push artists out of their creative comfort zone and rapidly open up new creative directions.

2 - Feedback: up to three tracks go to the artist as stems to make their own and are shared across their socials for four weeks alongside their own content while we track audience response and the traffic flowing back to their streams.

3 - Cuts: turns that feedback into up to three new recordings - that are positioned to be the singles that inform the bedrock of the artist’s new creative chapter and campaign.

Recorded either at our studio Lab retreat by the sea, with hand-picked musicians curated bespoke to deliver new masters in days, or in the artist’s own preferred studio setup with a CIPHA Preducer working alongside them.

The whole Preduction process is designed to be delivered in weeks at a fraction of the cost, time and logistics of traditional production.

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INTERESTED IN CATALOGUE ACTIVATION?

Catalogue Activation is designed and now ready for labels, managers, publishers, rights owners and investors interested in learning more and unlocking the market potential of Tier C artists.

If this sounds like you please do reach out and I’ll be happy to jump on a call to share more: dan@cipha.co.uk

Dan Am

Head of Catalogue Activation & Lead Preducer @ CIPHA

#TierC #MusicBusiness #MusicPublishing #CatalogueManagement #MusicRights #MusicIndustry #Streaming