Patreon Nets Income For Many Creators, But Not For Musicians [Unless You’re Amanda Palmer]
When Patreon – which monetizes fans via subscription – launched, the belief was that it would provide musicians with much needed income. But the patronage platform works much better for YouTubers and podcasters than it does for makers of music.
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Amanda Palmer collects $34,428.40 from 7800+ patrons every time she releases a piece of content on fan patronage subscription platform Patreon. After the 5% that Patreon takes to facilitate each transaction, that's more than $32,000 in direct artist-to-fan income to Palmer.
Patreon, which launched in 2013, has facilitated more than $50 million in fan payments to artists to date; but very few of its most successful creators are musicians. After Palmer, only one other of its top 25 creators, based on their number of patrons, are musicians, according to stats provided by Graphtreon. At #11 is acapella group Pentatonix, who net $20,000 each time they post.
Further down the Top 40 at #28 is country acapella group Home Free, followed at #37 by Patreon founder Jack Conte's own group Pomplamouse, which earns a little over $5000 from 1874 patrons.
Most of the 8000 creators on the platform make far less. 4700 creators in all categories earn less than $300 per transaction and only about a thousand earn $1000 or more.
YouTube Drives Success On Patreon
Except for Amanda Palmer, whose artistic offerings to fans go well beyond music, every one of these musicians built their following first on YouTube. The same is true for many of the music related creators further down the Patreon chart as well.
Collectively, Patreon creators have more than 726 million YouTube Subscribers
