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At bedtime, a child reaches for a padded cube. The room goes quiet. A story begins.

There is no screen to unlock, no feed to refresh, no algorithmic rabbit hole waiting. The interaction is deliberately simple. It’s a device that feels like play.

That scene captures one of the more interesting shifts in children’s media today. After years in which childhood entertainment was pulled toward smaller screens, faster formats, and more compulsive platforms, a group of companies is moving in the opposite direction. Over the past decade, players like tonies, Lunii, Yoto, Merlin, Joyeuse, and Eddi have turned children’s listening into a market of its own. Part toys, part media platforms, and part parenting aids, their products borrow the warmth of analog childhood and rebuild it for a generation raised inside digital ecosystems.

The timing is not accidental. Modern parents have grown anxious about attention, overstimulation, and the invisible mechanics of mainstream platforms. This makes them increasingly willing to pay for products that feel educational, developmentally sound, and aligned with family rituals. At the same time, a set of economic catalysts have given the industry both the content supply and the market opening it needed.

But the business is more complicated than its charming hardware may suggest. Scaling means confronting a series of trade-offs. Licensed IP accelerates adoption, but taxes margins. Original characters improve the economics, but take years to earn trust. Subscriptions can smooth seasonality, but require a deep and constantly refreshed catalog. Openness can expand the catalog, but may weaken curation. Interactivity can extend relevance, but risks drifting toward the engagement mechanics these products were designed to avoid. And as children grow older, every player eventually has to compete with video and gaming.

While many of these dynamics may feel familiar, the category’s real opportunity lies in taking audio seriously as a medium of its own.

This piece looks at the business of kids’ audio hardware: how the market is structured, why it’s gaining momentum now, and the forces and challenges that will shape its next phase.

Mapping the kids’ audio landscape

At first glance, the kids’ audio category may look like a single, uniform whole. In reality, it’s a stack of strategic choices across distinct but interconnected axes spanning age, form factor, catalog strategy, and more. Mapping those dimensions upfront will make it easier to understand what the next competitive battlegrounds may be for the space.

Age focus

A first way to segment the kids’ audio market is by developmental stage.

At the youngest end, the device functions mainly as a reassuring, highly mediated object tied to early routines. Joyeuse, for instance, has positioned itself almost from infancy onward, even describing Ma Première Conteuse as “the all-in-one toy for a child’s first 1,000 days”. At that stage, simplicity and parental control matter more than breadth of choice.

For preschoolers and early readers, the emphasis shifts toward independent use. This is where tactile interfaces such as figurines, cards, knobs, or large buttons become effective, allowing children to access content on their own without relying on literacy or abstract menus. This remains the category’s core segment.

For older children, the challenge becomes retention. As tastes broaden, expectations around content rise, and video’s pull becomes harder to ignore, some companies extend their catalogs toward podcasts and documentaries, while others introduce more advanced devices altogether, as Lunii did with FLAM, its player for 7- to 12-year-olds. For this age bracket, hardware can also sustain more elaborate interaction mechanics, with greater room for choice, progression, and active engagement.

Beyond just UX, age defines the length of the customer relationship. The narrower the developmental fit, the more intuitive the product may be, but the shorter its window of relevance is likely to be.

Device interaction logic

Another useful way to segment the category is by how children are expected to operate the device.

The first model is device-led: here, children navigate through buttons, dials, or other built-in controls to start, skip, replay, or switch content. That’s the approach Lunii, Merlin, and others have opted for. The main advantage is simplicity: the same device can support a broad range of listening uses without tying each piece of content to a separate physical object that could get damaged or lost. At the same time, it also makes the interaction feel slightly more abstract, especially for pre-literate children.

The second model is object-led: playback is triggered through a figurine, card, or similar physical item. This makes content selection concrete and easier to grasp and facilitates independent use, while turning content into something displayable, collectible, and giftable. Cuddle Tonies and Eddi’s Crafties — larger-size, “huggable” plush toys — are obvious examples here.

A related question is how much visual feedback the device introduces without becoming a screen-based product. Although these devices broadly position themselves as alternatives to video-based entertainment, some still incorporate limited visual elements. The Yoto Player features a low-resolution pixel display, while Lunii’s “My Fabulous Storyteller” uses light-based cues. Absent physical activators, the parent’s phone often becomes the hidden control layer in order to upload content, manage subscriptions, and oversee specific modes.

Catalog strategy

A third dimension has to do with how content is selected, packaged, and controlled.

On that front, players first need to offer a minimum viable catalog — enough size and breadth to reassure parents that the device will not be exhausted too quickly. At the time of writing, Lunii and Joyeuse each list more than 300 titles; tonies’ French store offers 241 Tonies figurines, each tied to a discrete piece of content.

Once that threshold is met, differentiation shifts from quantity to editorial identity. In some ecosystems, the catalog is built around familiar kids’ franchises that help drive brand recognition and purchase: tonies, for instance, routinely features some of its largest brand partners including Disney and Hasbro through what it calls “cross-franchise” marketing campaigns. Others, like Lunii, rely more on original stories, educational formats, or a broader editorial promise.

Either way, the real value lies in the curation: parents trust the company behind the speaker to assemble an age-appropriate universe, while children browse within a bounded set of safe options.

Ecosystem openness

Catalog strategy has an obvious corollary: how willing each player is to let families move beyond it.

In practice, this is not a binary “open or closed” divide. Most products now allow some form of uploading or recording, from Joyeuse’s Moulinette to Creative Tonies.

The more revealing question is not whether openness exists, but how central it is in the experience. For some players, it remains an auxiliary feature, useful for grandparents’ messages or a few personal files but clearly secondary to the proprietary catalog. The product still behaves primarily like a curated media environment, with the company deciding what belongs inside the child’s listening universe. For others like Yoto or Merlin, however, openness points toward a broader platform strategy, where the device can integrate content from multiple sources — publisher catalogs, podcasts, and even indie creators.

That distinction changes the boundaries of the product and business. A tightly curated ecosystem maximizes trust and editorial control. A more open one increases use cases and long-term relevance, but raises new questions around moderation, quality, and consistency.

Monetization

The final segmentation lens is monetization. Most kids’ audio businesses are built on a simple split between hardware and content. It’s worth unpacking their respective characteristics, and how they overlap to form a cohesive ecosystem.

Hardware is the entry point. The speaker is usually a one-off, or at least infrequent, purchase whose main job is household penetration. In practice, this emphasis means hardware is often deliberately priced and promoted in ways that prioritize adoption over short-term margin. Lunii, Joyeuse, and others all offer a 10% discount on the purchase of their signature speakers in exchange for subscribing to their newsletters — a sign that they value long-term customer engagement and ecosystem growth over a one-time revenue boost.

Content presents a far more attractive profile. Once produced or licensed, it can be reused, translated, and repackaged across markets far more efficiently than new hardware can be manufactured. Content also lends itself naturally to recurring revenue models like subscriptions, which help smooth out revenue over time and increase predictability. However, a subscription model requires sufficiently deep and continuously refreshed content libraries, something only established players such as Yoto, Lunii, and tonies have been able to implement so far.

The differences between the two segments are clearly reflected in the numbers. According to tonies’s FY2025 earnings presentation, Tonies figurines — which, despite technically being physical products, represent the content side of the business — generated 71% of total group revenue, versus 26% for Tonieboxes (hardware), and 3% for Accessories & Digital. The split still fluctuates, especially around holidays and major launches, but the direction is clear. Overall, content has been accounting for an increasingly larger share of total revenue over time: from 62% in FY2022, to 63% in FY2023, to 68% in FY2024, to now 71% in FY2025.

Still, things are not as binary as they may seem. For one, hardware still leaves room for higher-margin products. More than the speakers themselves, accessories including themed cases, backpacks, and headphones allow companies to extend monetization deeper into the household through purchases that sit closer to lifestyle and gifting than to core hardware. This improves revenue per installed device without materially increasing supply chain complexity.

Meanwhile, despite its scalability, content isn’t necessarily as profitable as it may appear. Similar to major platforms like Netflix or Spotify, kids’ audio companies will often forgo a substantial chunk of revenue in order to lure consumers in. At the time of writing, Lunii’s subscription offering, Lunii+, is offered at a discount, putting it at €6.90 a month for 3 months versus its usual price of €9.90 a month. Offers like these may accelerate adoption, but they only make economic sense if long-term retention can offset the lower ARPU upfront.

For the category, monetization depends less on the first sale than on what happens after the device enters the household. The strongest players are those that can turn hardware adoption into ongoing content consumption, repeat purchases, and broader ecosystem spend.

Taken together, these axes show that kids’ audio hardware is really a competition between ecosystem choices, not just devices. Those choices also reinforce one another: for example, a product like Joyeuse, built for very young children, can rely on simpler hardware mechanics and a narrower catalog.

Catalysts

These dimensions help explain how the category is structured. They do not, by themselves, explain why it’s gaining momentum now. To understand that, we need to unpack the cultural anxieties and economic conditions that make its proposition unusually timely.

Cultural catalysts

Screen fatigue and digital guilt

After more than a decade of screen ubiquity, parents are growing increasingly uneasy about the role digital devices now play in their children’s daily lives. Screen time has become one of the defining anxieties of modern parenting, linked to concerns over attention, self-image, and emotional regulation.

In that sense, kids’ audio hardware benefits from a first cultural tailwind, simply by offering a media experience that does not depend on a screen at all. For parents, that makes it feel less entangled with concerns over overstimulation and dependency. There are more practical considerations, too. With their rounded corners and soft materials, today’s audio devices are built to be handled, carried around, and dropped. That puts them in stark contrast with screen-based devices, which are often too fragile or too expensive to be handed over without supervision. In turn, kids’ speakers feel like a lower-stakes, more acceptable presence to bring into the home.

The unease is not just about the hardware, however. Within that broader digital anxiety, video raises a more specific set of concerns. On platforms like YouTube, the medium combines visual saturation with highly effective engagement mechanics — whether in the content itself, through bright colors and rapid cuts, or in the interface, through thumbnails, feeds, and autoplay. By contrast, audio asks children to build the scene themselves, largely avoiding the visual saturation and retention mechanics that shape so much of video consumption. For parents, that makes it easier to see it as a medium that preserves, rather than crowds out, their children’s creative autonomy.

Taken together, these qualities make kids’ audio feel like a more mindful and guilt-free form of technology — modern enough to entertain, yet insulated from more compulsive media patterns.

Enhanced parenting

As distrust of digital media grows, the bar for children’s products rises. If a child is going to spend time with technology, parents increasingly want that time to feel developmental rather than just entertaining. In that process, technology becomes a parenting tool.

The industry at large has embraced that language. Lunii says it offers “interactive audio experiences to support parents in educating their children” and is “establishing itself as a major reference in educational entertainment for future generations.” Eddi (formerly known as Storypod) describes itself as “an immersive Learn-and-Grow Audio System.” Meanwhile, tonies provides “a screen-free learning tool that focuses attention, enables creativity, and supports early learning.” Several players back their claims with hard numbers: a 2024 study conducted by the University of Wisconsin found that tonies users scored 32% higher than children who did not on their emergent literacy scores.

But these products do more than promise developmental benefits. They also let parents signal something about themselves. Buying a Toniebox, Lunii, or Eddi is a way of performing a particular ideal of contemporary parenting, one that’s intentional and curated. In that view, kids’ speakers become a marker of parental self-image.

Nostalgia for analog childhoods

Many of today’s parents are millennials who grew up with cassettes, CDs, and radios — specialized hardware that imposed a slower, more linear, and arguably more intentional relation to sound. Today’s kids’ audio hardware companies understand this perfectly. With their knobs and wheels, their products aren’t just appealing to children’s tastes but also echoing the physical vocabulary of 80s-90s audio devices that their parents grew up loving.

Some companies lean more heavily on this aspect than others. Yoto’s cards, for instance, directly mimic the insert-and-play experience of tapes or CDs. Similarly, tonies’s RFID-powered figurines, placed on top of the Toniebox, lean into the sort of physical interaction that’s reminiscent of loading media into a device. These design affordances do two jobs at once: they make the product easier for children to understand and easier for parents to trust.

Desire for rituals

The larger opportunity, however, is not entertainment alone. More and more, companies are trying to capture a larger share of children’s time by embedding themselves into rituals central to early development and to family life at large. Addressing such moments ensures repeat usage and anchors these platforms in emotionally charged, high-trust contexts where convenience and reassurance are key.

Nowhere is this strategy more apparent than around bedtime. As a ritual, bedtime is one of the day’s most codified moments, one that brings together routine, sensory calm, and emotional regulation, all under parental supervision. Audio content fits naturally into that window, receding into the background as a companion rather than a point of focus.

Companies have now leaned heavily into this use case, designing products that physically and behaviorally align with the ritual itself. Every player offers a variety of sleep-focused content, from bedtime stories to so-called “sleep sounds” or Yoto’s “sleep radio.” Both Lunii and tonies, for example, have developed bedtime-specific variants around their own proprietary IP, embedding them more deeply into everyday family life. The hardware actively supports these efforts. The Yoto Player includes a sleep timer and volume play limits “for night time curfews,” and turns into a nightlight when flipped down, with brightness controlled via a physical knob and colors by parents through the app. The second generation of tonies’s Toniebox offers similar features.

The point is not to maximize time spent — at bedtime, success means disappearing into the routine. The more tightly their devices can fold into these everyday rituals, the less they need to compete for attention at all.

Economic catalysts

Cultural demands help explain why parents have proven so receptive to kids’ audio. But the category’s growth also depends on a set of economic conditions that gave specialized players both the content supply and the market opening they needed.

Maturity of audio ecosystems

The rise of podcasts, audiobooks, and voice technology has normalized listening as a primary mode of media consumption and engagement. In the U.S., Edison Research estimates that audiobook listening among people aged 12+ rose from 21% in 2015 to 36% in 2025, while weekly podcast consumption reached 40%. Weekly podcast time has grown even faster, from 170 million hours in 2015 to 773 million in 2025, a 355% increase over the period.

With the audio habit now deeply ingrained, child-appropriate formats were a natural extension. In 2023, UTA found that around 48% of U.S. children consumed podcasts weekly. This opened the door for a myriad of kids-focused studios that are now producing a diverse range of content to feed that demand. Kids’ audio hardware is the child-facing expression of a much broader media habit.

Licensing and IP integration

The space is also riding a broader industry shift whereby IP owners increasingly treat audio as a must-have rather than a side format. In recent years, prominent rightsholders including Marvel and Ubisoft have extended their worlds through a mix of IP-centric educational podcasts and scripted audio series. Audio is now part of the standard transmedia toolkit, a way to keep worlds alive between larger releases and to multiply points of contact with audiences.

Kids’ rightsholders understand that logic too. For properties like Disney Princess, Paw Patrol, or Peppa Pig, audio storytellers are a way to cultivate and monetize beloved properties without the heavy lift of animation or film production and in a medium that parents already trust. This opportunity is especially relevant in France, where an unusually rich catalog of children’s classics — from Le Petit Prince to Babar and Yakari — remains largely underexploited outside books and traditional audiovisual adaptations. Lunii and Merlin are making the most of this dormant stock.

At the same time, a new generation of IP is entering the market. After dominating video, YouTube-native companies like CoComelon and France’s Animaj have been actively expanding into audio with fully-fledged soundtracks. At the time of writing, Animaj’s Spanish-speaking property Pocoyo has 1.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify; CoComelon has more than 3 million. As they continue to both acquire established properties — Animaj acquired France’s iconic Maya L’abeille in October 2025 — and launch new ones, the kids’ speaker category will be a logical outlet.

Premiumization of kids’ tech

Another tailwind comes from the gradual premiumization of the broader kids’ category. As parents have grown more skeptical of the average piece of digital entertainment — with its low-quality content and often aggressive monetization — they have become more willing to pay for products they perceive as developmentally sound and more aligned with their values. Today, that willingness is reflected across both physical and digital offerings, from premium developmental play kits like Lovevery to craft subscriptions like KiwiCo and all-in-one digital services like BayaM.

That trend changes the price logic of the entire category. Given the upfront cost of the hardware and the recurring spend on content, products like the Toniebox and Yoto Player compete less with low-cost toys than with high-consideration gifts. Their premium look-and-feel, educational claims, and the promise of repeated use enable them to command relatively high prices and reinforce their giftability.

Premiumization also makes the ecosystem economics more palatable. Parents may resist endless low-value digital upsells, but they are more open-minded when additional purchases are framed as additive to a durable and high-quality product. Premium positioning helps legitimize the ongoing sale of content, accessories, and subscriptions, supporting stronger lifetime value.

Platform gaps left by big tech

For all their scale and sophistication, big platforms have largely failed to crack child-safe UX. Some of the largest kids-focused products still inherit adult logics, whether in content, interface, or monetization. When safety controls do exist, they are often layered on top of discovery systems designed for adults, leaving parents to manage settings rather than trust the product by default.

That gap created fertile ground early on for independent players to emerge with radically different propositions. Hopster and Kidoodle, among others, emphasized editorial control and age-appropriate navigation and blurred the lines between entertainment and education. With limited but premium libraries, they traded needless abundance for clarity and control.

A similar dynamic has played out in audio, a medium the major platforms had long treated as secondary. Spotify Kids debuted only in 2020. As for hardware, while Amazon’s Echo Dot Kids came out as early as 2018, it remains a voice-first device, making it unfit for younger or pre-literate children.

The specific affordances of children’s audio — imagination, autonomy, ritual — remained largely underexplored as a result. This opened the door for specialized players to rethink audio from first principles and treat it not as a smaller version of adult streaming, but as a standalone medium. Lunii, tonies, and Yoto launched in 2015, 2016, and 2017 respectively and had years before large players made any serious push into child-centric audio hardware or UX. By the time Amazon or Spotify’s broader kids initiatives gained traction, the mental model for safe kids audio had already been shaped by these independents and their purpose-built systems.

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Growth vectors

The category’s momentum is clear, but the next question is where growth can actually come from. For companies in the space, expansion is less about selling more speakers than extending the role these devices can play across content, use cases, and channels.

IP development and management

The IP conundrum

In kids’ audio, IP is both the growth engine and the margin tax.

The upside is twofold. First, premium IP facilitates consumer adoption: for a busy parent standing in a toy aisle or scrolling a marketplace, recognizable characters are a shortcut for trust and quality. That makes licensed franchises a powerful acquisition tool, especially when the hardware itself is still a new behavior to adopt. tonies underscored this in its Q3 2025 earnings presentation by highlighting the Ms. Rachel deal and its pull on consumers. Second, IP unlocks distribution. Familiar franchises make a product easier to list and promote, giving retailers a ready-made hook and increasing the odds of prominent placements.

But the same mechanism also comes with downsides. First, top IP comes with punishing economics, as royalties scale with success. Unlike other levers that may benefit from economies of scale, licensing costs remain structurally tied to revenue. In practice, IP can become a material tax on gross margin — tonies’ investor reports show that its licensing costs have varied from 18.7% in FY 21 to 10% in FY 23 to 12% in Q3 2025, driven by product mix, renegotiations, and a growing share of in-house content.

Second, IP rarely stays differentiated for long. Indeed, IP owners have a vested interest in making their properties as ubiquitous as possible. The more licenses they grant, the larger their surface area and the higher the revenue potential. Given these incentives, exclusivity is hard to secure for long. That’s why the same top properties routinely appear across competing ecosystems. Premium IP may be necessary to play, but it’s rarely sufficient to win. Nor is the answer simply to add more content indiscriminately.

The limits of diversification

One possible response is to broaden the catalog beyond pure children’s storytelling and entertainment, into adjacent use cases like family rituals, music, or education — a form of diversification that increases engagement, embeds them deeper into household life, and strengthens their overall utility in the eyes of parents. Merlin offers a useful boundary case here: it shows both how far these ecosystems can stretch, and where that stretch starts to break down.

On the company’s store, parents can now find not only obviously kids-focused audio content, but also music from mainstream artists including Bob Marley, Queen, and ABBA.

On paper, the rationale is clear. Like nursery rhymes, mainstream music can help foster intergenerational listening moments — especially for older children, who are transitioning away from kids-only content and starting to more deliberately take inspiration from their parents’ tastes. The description for the Queen album, for example, presents it as “the ideal album to introduce kids to these rock classics.”

The problem is not editorial; it’s economic. Price is the main challenge: each of the aforementioned albums sells for roughly €14. While that may not seem excessive in isolation, it almost inevitably comes on top of a household’s existing subscription to a music streaming service like Spotify, which already provides access to virtually the entire global music catalog for a comparable monthly fee. In effect, families are being asked to repurchase access to content they already pay for elsewhere, and not for additional exclusivity but for format and convenience. The value proposition therefore shifts from content access to hardware compatibility.

Ultimately, Merlin’s experiment highlights both the upside and the limits of diversification. The further the catalog moves from child-first use cases, the more it rests on the hardware alone to make the content feel newly appropriate for children. Not every adjacent format will carry the same willingness to pay or the same fit with the ecosystem.

Three strategic responses

Merlin’s experiment shows that breadth alone is not enough. Once a catalog is large enough to feel credible, the challenge becomes how to expand relevance without diluting the proposition or surrendering economics, coherence, and control. In practice, three responses stand out: original IP, platformization, and localization.

Owning the catalog: Original IP

The first response is to increase the share of content the platform actually owns. In kids’ audio, original IP is not just a creative nice-to-have, but a foundational strategic lever.

Virtually all companies in this space understand the stakes. Lunii has My Lunii Heroes, Yoto has Yoto Originals, and Eddi has developed its own original learning sets. Yet few seem to frame owned content as centrally, or pursue it as systematically, as tonies. In 2023, two of its top five franchises were proprietary. In 2024, the sleep-focused Sleepy Friends were the 4th best-performing IP in its global portfolio. And in Q1 2025, over 40% of its 68 new launches were “own content” Tonies.

The benefits are obvious. By owning their characters, story worlds, and the associated audio content, companies limit royalty exposure and improve their economics. More importantly, they gain total control over how a franchise is extended across products, formats, and geographies, without having to renegotiate rights at every step. This also makes it easier to build genuine exclusivity: if a proprietary character or format resonates, the value accrues to the ecosystem that created it instead of being redirected to a third-party.

That said, original IP is no panacea either. It bypasses royalties, but only to shift the burden onto the slower, and riskier, process of brand creation. Licensed hits borrow trust; original franchises have to earn it from scratch. The endgame is not to replace licensed IP altogether, but to use owned franchises to improve the mix over time — preserving the pull of major brands while building a more differentiated and ultimately more profitable content base underneath.

Opening the catalog: Platformization

Owning more content is only one way to scale the catalog. Another is to widen the supply base itself, while preserving the platform’s editorial and commercial boundaries. Producing high-quality content is slow, demanding, and hard to scale. Opening the system to outside creators expands the catalog without proportional in-house investment, while changing the device into a participatory medium.

Not all players are approaching the opportunity in the same way. Most companies treat user-generated audio as a household-level personalization feature, where users can generate or upload content within tightly controlled boundaries. tonies’s Creative Tonies let users upload their own files and store up to 90 minutes of custom audio. Lunii and Joyeuse both offer their own version of a “studio”, where family members can record their own stories and songs to make them available from a kid’s speaker. These capabilities make the hardware part of a collective and transgenerational media ritual, rather than an individual one, reinforcing positive association.

Yoto has pushed this logic the furthest. In addition to Make Your Own cards, which offer the expected family customization layer, it has built a more public-facing creator funnel. Through Open Mic, creators can publish free digital audio for the broader Yoto community, test concepts, and gather feedback. Through the Creators Program, some can then move into paid distribution via printed Yoto Cards sold either through Yoto’s own store or through their own channels “for total flexibility.” This amounts to a lightweight creator marketplace, with discovery, progression, and monetization built in.

The strategic leap, then, is from personalization to publication. In the first model, household-level customization may increase engagement, but it doesn’t fundamentally solve the catalog-scaling problem, since supply remains fragmented and private. Yoto is testing a different logic, one in which creator activity can start to benefit the wider ecosystem. What is created by one user is no longer just consumed by one family, but can feed catalog expansion, and eventually commerce, across the platform.

Still, platformization has clear limits in this category. The more public and open the model, the harder it becomes to preserve the editorial qualities and curation that underpinned these products. The risk is not just weaker content, but a catalog that feels less coherent and ultimately less trustworthy.

And those constraints do not apply only to proprietary content. For licensors like Disney or Hasbro, brand safety depends on context; too much openness could strain valuable business relationships. Maintaining control is therefore not just about safeguarding the user experience, but about preserving the partnerships that sustain the catalog and give it much of its appeal.

Extending the catalog: Localization

Increasing the supply is only one part of the scaling equation. The other is making the catalog travel — a challenge that becomes increasingly central as these companies expand internationally. This makes localization the third major lever, a driver of both growth and operational leverage, for structural reasons.

First, children need native-language content from day one: unlike adult video platforms, where subtitles or partial fluency can bridge gaps, kids’ audio relies on immediate comprehension. When sound is the whole product, there is no room for linguistic friction.

This matters all the more as these companies continue to scale internationally. Families in more than 100 countries have activated a Toniebox, and tonies’s growth is now increasingly concentrated outside its home market of Germany: in FY 2025, revenue rose 16% in DACH, versus 31% in North America and 64% in Rest of World. The further these businesses expand, the less growth can come from simply exporting a domestic catalog.

But localization does more than meet commercial necessity; it also strengthens these platforms’ educational case. As companies push further into learning, language stands out as an especially compelling category for parents who want playtime to feel productive. Foreign-language stories, songs, and vocabulary-based formats thus help their products align more closely with those aspirations.

The more global the IP pipeline becomes, the more localization turns from a cost center into a leverage point. The point of licensing Disney Princess or Peppa Pig is not to sell one market at a time but to use and amortize recognizable properties across as many territories as possible. Localization unlocks the full operational benefits of international licensing.

Capturing that potential is far from straightforward, however. International expansion still has to be rebuilt territory by territory, through local licensing negotiations, talent networks, and production workflows, and often cumbersome approval processes with rights holders. That capability can, in turn, become a competitive advantage in its own right. The better a company becomes at localizing major franchises across markets, the more attractive it becomes to IP owners looking for partners with genuine international reach.

On that note, it’s worth noting that the burden is not distributed equally across players. For tonies and Lunii, whose home markets are German- and French-speaking respectively, cross-border growth quickly implied linguistic adaptation. For UK-born Yoto, by contrast, English provided a much broader built-in runway across major markets, allowing the company to scale internationally before localization became equally urgent.

Yet despite this advantage, Yoto may well be the most forward-looking player in how it’s approaching the challenge. In July 2025, the company announced a partnership with AI voice scale-up ElevenLabs to let users switch supported cards into additional languages such as Polish, Romanian, German, Portuguese, and Hindi, “as simply as you can on Netflix.” If successful, this initiative would essentially decouple global catalog expansion from the slow, expensive, one-territory-at-a-time logic of traditional localization. Even with disclosure and quality checks, Yoto will need to tread carefully. Efficiency gains are only valuable if they do not erode the trust that made these ecosystems valuable in the first place.

At the end of the day, content is not just inventory in this category; it’s one of the main ways the business model either compounds or breaks. The objective is not to add IP, multiply formats, or broaden the catalog at any cost, but to build a content system that can grow while remaining economically sound and editorially coherent.

Product expansion

Once these companies have mastered storytelling and embedded themselves into family rituals like bedtime, the next logical move is to expand on that relationship. The opportunity here is to capture — and, of course, monetize — more moments of a child’s day.

No product exemplifies this dynamic better than Tonieplay. Introduced in 2025, it’s an interactive hardware add-on that brings audio-based gameplay to tonies’s core product, the Toniebox. As the audio unfolds, players respond to quizzes, make choices, and progress through the experience, turning what was previously just a listening device into a simple, tactile game interface.

Despite its novelty, Tonieplay closely follows tonies’s established playbook.

First, its promises are directly in line with tonies’s overall claims. Tonieplay Games, the company writes, “improve focus, enhance listening skills, and boost hand-eye coordination. Tonieplay’s engaging content helps kids develop problem-solving, decision-making, and critical thinking skills while supporting their self-confidence and empowering them to set and achieve goals.” In short, interactivity not only doubles down on the developmental benefits of listening, but extends them into more active forms of learning and cognitive engagement.

The model is familiar on the commercial side, too. Like the Tonies figurines, it opens up opportunities in both proprietary (e.g., Lalalinos, Time Academy) and licensed content (e.g., Gabby’s Dollhouse, Paw Patrol). In the latter category, tonies is already drawing from a diverse pool of properties, some of them coming not from film or television, but from the traditional board game industry. In Q3 2025, tonies extended its existing partnership with Hasbro — the owner of properties such as Peppa Pig, My Little Pony, and PJ Masks, all of which already have their own Tonies figurines — to the Tonieplay platform. In addition to Monopoly, two more of Hasbro’s board games are set to debut on Tonieplay “with new twists, concepts, and interactive moments.”

Where Tonieplay diverges more meaningfully from the rest of the tonies ecosystem is in the type of play it enables. While the Toniebox has embedded itself into family rituals, most of its core use cases remain inherently solitary. By contrast, Tonieplay Games allow for both solo and collective play from the same device. The format naturally lends itself to friendly competition or parent-child play, effectively turning the Toniebox into a screen-free alternative for family game time. In doing so, Tonieplay further expands the product’s role within the household, capturing moments of play that previously belonged to consoles or board games.

Educational offerings

The efforts kids’ audio companies have deployed to highlight their products’ educational merits were never aimed solely at parents. For the industry, schools and libraries represent a parallel, highly attractive channel, with not only scale and recurring budgets but also strong signaling power. Over the past few years, several players have made explicit moves in that direction.

tonies, for instance, has formalized its push through the “Tonies for Teachers” initiative. Though information is scarce, the company’s 2022 investor report suggested the program was active across multiple school districts and thousands of classrooms in the US, supported by teacher ambassadors. Meanwhile, Merlin recommends content adapted to different educational stages and lets teachers and administrators self-generate a quote directly from its website. It’s worth noting that the company already has a foot in the door through its co-owner Bayard, whose educational magazines are distributed at scale through long-standing school partnerships.

Realistically, these products are no substitute for teachers, nor are they adaptive learning platforms. Their appeal lies less in bold pedagogical promises than in their general benefits for kids’ attention and behavior. Today, companies like Merlin and Lunii cover nearly the full spectrum of everyday school needs: nursery rhymes for early learners, white noise and ambient music for rest time, audio documentaries and literary classics for older children... In practice, the device becomes less a teaching tool than a versatile classroom aid — tonies goes so far as to describe its Toniebox 2 as “an extra pair of hands in your classroom.”

There is, however, a clear tension: these devices were designed as a tactile, individual experience. The child is meant to operate the object on their own, with touch complementing sound. This aspect is largely lost in a classroom setting, where budget is constrained and kids are unlikely to have one device each. At home, these devices foster independence; in the classroom, they risk reverting to a more traditional, centralized listening experience.

Ultimately, the most compelling aspect of this educational expansion may not be institutional revenue per se, but rather the creation of a continuum of habit. Whether it be the morning listening circle at school or bedtime story at home, the same object, or at least the same interaction, anchors multiple moments throughout the child’s day and across multiple settings, reinforcing familiarity and attachment. Schools act less as a standalone revenue stream than as a high-trust funnel back into the consumer business.

Refurbishing

As installed bases grow, so does the flow of returned, replaced, and upgraded devices. The strategic question is whether that hardware becomes waste or productive inventory once more. At the same time, normal household churn is pushing more and more devices onto the secondary market, where brands can’t exert quality control and capture no share of the resale value. Together, these dynamics have pushed the industry to take action. What was once operational leakage is increasingly being captured and re-circulated in-house, turning refurbishing into a structured secondary channel with distinct but surprisingly compelling economics.

Companies are operationalizing this in distinct ways. Lunii sells officially reconditioned devices directly via its online store, clearly positioned as lower-priced entry points while maintaining in-house quality control. Tonies’ “Preloved Tonieboxes”, which are sourced from returns inventory and resold with a full two-year warranty, follow the same logic. Refurbished products unlock price-sensitive households without diluting the flagship line. Crucially, since content drives the bulk of lifetime margin, bringing more families into the hardware ecosystem, even at a discounted device price, enhances the overall economics of the platform.

Meanwhile, Yoto integrates refurbished units into its warranty process, reserving the right to replace faulty devices by sending a “refurbished one, tested and graded.” By reworking returned devices instead of scrapping them, it has turned support logistics into a circular loop rather than a cost sink, effectively improving gross margin over time.

The company also runs “Project Second Chance,” a donation program that repurposes returned or unused players via donations to local causes, a deliberate alternative to destruction while broadening access. While not a resale channel, strategic recirculation of that kind still indirectly supports the business. Not only does it reduce disposal costs, it also functions as a brand flywheel by improving visibility in schools without undercutting pricing in retail.

Where reconditioning becomes a real business opportunity is when it’s embedded into product lifecycle design. Lunii’s refurbished SKUs and Yoto’s warranty loops serve the same purpose: they keep hardware circulating within a controlled ecosystem. Lunii’s official exchange program goes one step further, letting customers return their old devices in exchange for a discount on the newer FLAM player, an attempt at managing upgrade behavior. In a category where hardware is the gateway to recurrent content sales, controlling and incentivizing circulation helps brands capture value across multiple usage cycles.

Experiential listening

As I’ve emphasized throughout this piece, kids’ audio is fundamentally a private medium. Its core value lies in solitary listening, family ritual, and everyday use inside the home. Even when the category reaches into more collective settings — most notably, schools — it’s still imagined through intimate use cases.

Precisely for that reason, public activations can do something ordinary advertising can’t: give otherwise private products greater cultural visibility and attach them to moments of play and togetherness.

tonies’ international go-to-market is a case in point. In the US, the company has backed family-facing events such as Los Angeles’s Great Big Family Play Day and built Toniepalooza, which blends live music, creative activities, and giveaways. Around the launch of Toniebox 2, tonies ran multiple activations across markets. In February, it marked the French release of two new Tonies figurines by throwing a kids-focused day party.

This has two main benefits. First, it helps brands move from mere product ownership to deeper brand affiliation. That’s especially valuable in a category where long-term economics depend not only on the initial hardware sale, but on repeat content purchases and ongoing engagement. As companies in the space invest more heavily in original IP, live events may become more central to franchise attachment and monetization. Top properties such as Miraculous Ladybug, PJ Masks, and PAW Patrol have already expanded into musicals with strong commercial results.

Second, activations give retailers and licensors visible proof of real-world traction. In the ecommerce era, a company that can generate buzz and attract families in-person looks more commercially credible. For retailers, that can justify more prominent placement. For licensors, it signals that a platform is not just a passive distribution channel but an active brand-building partner capable of amplifying demand around their characters.

Challenges

If the growth opportunity is real, so are the constraints. The more these companies expand beyond their original promise, the more sharply these pressures will be felt.

Competition

The easy phase of category creation is now long gone. In France, Lunii was once the undisputed category leader; then came Merlin, Tikino, tonies, and a growing cohort of challengers. Several of these players were able to break through with genuinely differentiated hardware and content propositions, reshuffling the competitive deck almost overnight. The impact is visible in Lunii’s own numbers. In December 2023, the company estimated it accounted for 63% of kids’ audio storyteller sales — a dominant share, but one that implicitly acknowledges erosion from what we can assume was a monopolistic position only a few years earlier. More tellingly, Lunii expected to sell 260,000 of its Fabulous Storytellers that year, down more than 25% from 350,000 the year prior, suggesting that category growth alone is no longer enough to offset competitive pressure.

Competition has only intensified since. Merlin has received sustained media attention and appears to be gaining commercial traction. Yoto, fresh off its 2024 funding round, has invested aggressively in brand awareness, running multiple campaigns in the Paris metro and positioning itself as a mainstream alternative rather than a niche import. Meanwhile, even though disclosures have been sparse lately, France also stands out as one of the most clearly localized markets in tonies’ communications, with country-exclusive Originals and ESG pilots.

The competitive landscape may soon shift again. Joyeuse was acquired by France’s Seico, its manufacturer, in 2023, then sold again to MGM Jouet in 2025. Bugali was placed under administration in October 2024, with a divestiture planu nveiled in February 2025. Whether this leads to consolidation, a brand relaunch under new ownership, or a quiet market exit remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the era of easy category creation is over; what comes now is a much tougher contest for attention, shelf space, and long-term household loyalty.

Supply chain disruption

Content may account for a growing share of value creation, but hardware and its underlying supply chains remain a critical constraint on the category’s economics. Narrower product portfolios increase dependence on a small number of components or manufacturing partners; when a crisis hits, that concentration sharply increases exposure.

Again, tonies’ investor disclosures offer a clear window into how these pressures have actually played out. In its 2021 annual report, management acknowledged being “confronted with shortages on key components like chips as well as higher prices for our raw materials.” What initially appeared as a temporary, COVID-era supply disruption would soon prove to be more structural. In 2022, the company described “significant and persistent macroeconomic challenges, characterized by drastic raw material price increases” and “tense supply chains.”

These headwinds were not prohibitive. By diversifying suppliers early, tonies even managed to improve its gross margin from 50.1 % in 2020 to 54.1 % in 2021, at a time when less operationally resilient players were scrambling for emergency sourcing. Supply chain robustness turned out to be a real competitive advantage.

Still, no matter how effectively they’re anticipated or absorbed, rising input and logistics costs add up. While temporary pricing adjustments can buy time, cost increases can only be passed on for so long before consumers start looking for cheaper alternatives. More importantly, even the most carefully designed supply chain only goes so far. Every major hardware refresh or new accessory reintroduces complexity, resetting parts of a company’s cost structure. Ultimately, supply chain resilience is not a permanent attribute but a capacity that is bound to be tested time and again.

Medium constraints

So far, an audio-first focus has served these companies well. By design, they’ve successfully framed audio not as a lesser substitute for screens, but as the superior medium, one that fosters concentration, imagination, and calm. That positioning has been central to their cultural legitimacy and commercial success.

But it also creates a structural constraint. Historically, the strongest children’s IP has usually scaled outward from visual formats. Starting from animation, Disney was able to branch into books, audio, toys, games, and theme parks. Today’s digital-native players like CoComelon operate on the same logic, establishing characters and aesthetics at scale on YouTube before naturally expanding into music, merch, and live entertainment.

Audio-first companies face the inverse problem. It’s not that they lack material. As I’ve explained, many have invested heavily in original IP, complete with characters and visual identities presented in apps and marketing assets. The issue is consistency. Having positioned themselves in explicit opposition to screens, they are largely locked out of experimentation with video. That effectively excludes them from the biggest and fastest-growing children’s medium and from the business that comes with it.

Moreover, video doesn’t just drive engagement; it imprints a character’s appearance and a world’s visual grammar in a child’s mind. Those cues lay a foundation that later sustains merchandising and long-term franchise value. By staying audio-only, these companies preserve coherence and trust, but at the cost of participating in the mostly visual economies that have historically turned children’s IP into global platforms. They can’t simply “add video” later without challenging the narrative on which their entire brands were built.

Aging out

However large their content catalogs may be, all kids’ audio hardware companies face the same structural challenge: their users will age out. As children grow, these devices stop competing mainly with books and toys and start competing with video — and increasingly, gaming too. The more constrained and single-purpose the product, the earlier this obsolescence is likely to kick in.

That leaves companies with two imperfect options. The first one, which I discussed earlier, is to broaden their content offering in order to follow users as their tastes mature. On that front, Merlin is arguably the best positioned. Backed by Radio France, the device gives access to a steadily expanding slate of podcasts aimed at older children and teenagers, including documentaries and even a weekly news format. It also integrates audio versions of Bayard magazines, extending the speaker’s relevance beyond pure storytelling and into everyday listening.

The second — more costly, but potentially more defensible — option is to transition users to a new device designed specifically for an older age group. This is the path taken by Lunii. After My Fabulous Storyteller (3–8), the company launched FLAM, an interactive audio player for ages 7–12 that introduces choice, progression, and reward mechanics inspired by choose-your-own-adventure books. Notably, the suggested age ranges overlap slightly, a smart way to smooth the handover from one device to the next rather than forcing a hard break.

It’s also telling that FLAM’s form factor edges closer to a handheld console or smartphone. Even in Lunii’s own marketing, children hold it the way they would a phone or a Game Boy. Coming from an audio-first company famously wary of screens, this feels like a quiet admission: to remain relevant as children grow, audio devices must increasingly borrow the ergonomics and interaction codes of the devices they’re competing with.

Kids’ audio hardware may still look like a niche, but it reveals a broader shift in what families now want from technology.

For decades, the dominant interfaces of childhood entertainment were visual: the television, the game console, the tablet, the smartphone. Each brought more content, more choice, and more stimulation. Even when parental controls exist, the underlying model remains centered around engagement: the goal is to keep the session going.

Kids’ speakers move in the opposite direction. Instead of screen abstraction, they strip the interface back to touch and sound. Their catalogs continue to expand, but the experience itself is finite. They support repetition without inducing fatigue. Today, that restraint is a strategic advantage. By making media accessible without making it bottomless, kids’ audio presents children with an environment parents can trust. At its best, it is not a lesser form of entertainment, but a different cognitive and emotional space.

That framing has profound consequences. If kids’ audio remains positioned only as a guilt-free substitute for video, it will stay defensive, its ceiling defined by what parents want to avoid. The better path is affirmative: audio as a medium of imagination, autonomy, and ritual.

Of all the challenges the category faces, aging out may be the clearest test of its ambition, because it comes with a built-in expiry date. The goal, then, should be to build a relationship strong enough that children can outgrow the hardware without leaving the medium behind.

Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please consider giving it a like and take a minute to share it with others. It really helps.

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Fever’s Rise

On a beautiful evening in Madrid, hundreds of faux candles flicker to life inside a centuries-old concert hall. A string quartet begins to play Coldplay’s Yellow. The crowd — young, connected, affluent — leans in. In that moment, the experience feels unique; it isn’t. That same week, thousands more will enjoy the same performance in a church or a museum, somewhere in New York, Paris, Sao Paulo — or any one of the 150 cities where Candlelight now operates. The same format, the same aesthetic, the same programming, the same quiet magic. What began as a one-off experiment is now a global franchise.

This is Fever’s genius.

Fever was founded in 2010 by Josep “Pep” Gómez, an 18-year-old from Castellón, Spain who launched the company from the dining room of his shared San Francisco apartment. His idea was simple but early: a mobile-first ticketing app at a time when events still lived on desktop. To set it further apart, Gómez added a social layer that turned users’ ticket purchases and attendance announcements into recommendations for others. It was a clever hack, but not yet a revolution.

The real breakthrough came with Fever Originals, a roster of immersive experiences available exclusively through the Fever marketplace. Designed and named after Netflix’s own original content initiative, the label was originally meant only to entice users into adopting the app. What began as a handful of eccentric pop-ups — a “Mad Hatter’s (Gin &) Tea Party” here, a TOTAL RECALL-themed immersive cinema there — has evolved into a disciplined and global catalogue of Insta-friendly experiences spanning intimate music shows, multisensory escape games, immersive exhibitions, dining experiences, and large-scale festivals. Today, Fever Originals is the company’s most defining product and primary growth driver.

Gómez is long gone, but Fever is still run by the same team he hired in 2015 — Ignacio Bachiller, Francisco Hein, and Alexandre Perez. (Interestingly, Gomez’s LinkedIn insists that he was the company’s sole founder, whereas the trio is listed as co-founders both in Fever’s marketing and in the media.) Building off its ticketing core, the company has gone on to cover the entire event lifecycle — from production to discovery and promotion (Secret Media Network), to on-site access & inventory management (Fever Cashless), to live operations and analytics. The result is an end-to-end, data-driven operating system for live entertainment: a platform that doesn’t just sell tickets but helps organizers predict, design, optimize, and scale what audiences want to buy.

And momentum is building. On June 4th, Fever announced it had raised over $100 million in a Series E round led by L Catterton and Point72 Private Investments, bringing total funding to $527 million. The round followed what Fever called a “remarkable” 2024, marked by 20x revenue growth from pre-pandemic levels and full-year profitability. The announcement emphasized that the new capital “[would] fuel Fever’s continued growth in music and sports, two verticals where the company has gained significant traction over the past year.” A day later, Fever revealed the acquisition of DICE — a music- and nightlife-focused ticketing platform — to build what it called “a live entertainment tech powerhouse.”

With these moves, Fever is entering a new phase — one that makes it impossible to dismiss as just another event platform. This makes now the perfect moment to unpack its playbook. Where traditional players like Live Nation are doubling down on blockbuster, hit-or-miss entertainment, Fever is A/B testing its way to success and building franchises from scratch to maximize upside.

This is a look inside the company’s strategy and singular vision for the future of live entertainment. Here’s what’s in store:

• A Primer on Fever

• Fever’s Formula

• Strategic Arenas: Sports and Music

• What’s Next: Opportunities and Risks

• Parting Thoughts

A Primer on Fever

From its humble beginnings as a ticketing app, Fever’s business has vastly expanded over the years. Today, its activities consist of three segments.

Online marketplace & event solutions

Fever operates a global event discovery and ticketing platform that lets users browse and book a wide range of local cultural experiences across sports, music, food, wellness, and immersive entertainment. The company is the exclusive ticketing provider to prominent sports organizations (e.g., FC Barcelona, Real Madrid), event organizers and promoters (e.g., Primavera Sound, Cercle, and Pitchfork Music Festival), and venues (e.g., Clapham Grand and Brooklyn Storehouse).

In June 2025, Fever acquired DICE, an independent music ticketing platform, to bolster its scale and capabilities in music specifically. Since its inception in 2014, DICE has positioned itself as a user-friendly service focused on price transparency, and personalized recommendations. The app notably includes a Wait List feature that lets fans buy tickets returned by other fans, bypassing resellers and allowing artists and promoters to assess demand for additional events.

In addition to its online marketplace, Fever also offers organizers and operators a wide range of on-location services under the Fever Cashless brand. Spanning the entire event lifecycle, these solutions include mobile access control, capacity control, cashless payments, inventory and staff management, self-service kiosks, and more. Clients on this side of the business include MotoGP, Bigsound Festival, and X Games California.

Events production and operations

Fever is directly involved in the production and operations of experiences, with a focus on immersive entertainment. It does so in two ways. Historically, the company has worked with IP owners to co-produce live entertainment formats, including Stranger Things: The Experience with Netflix, Harry Potter: A Forbidden Forest Experience with Warner Bros., JURASSIC WORLD: THE EXHIBITION with Universal Pictures, and, most recently, Dexter: The Experience with Paramount+.

In addition, Fever has also been developing its own range of original experiences, Fever Originals. Despite what the name might imply, not all Fever Originals are owned by Fever alone — many of them are, in fact, co-productions. Today, the category spans a wide spectrum of entertainment experiences, with a focus on multi-sensory and often technology-enabled concepts. This includes Candlelight Concerts, a series of intimistic, (battery-powered) “candle”-lit acoustic concerts; Neon Brush, “a retro-futuristic pop-up painting workshop”; The Jury Experience, an interactive theater experience; and many more.

Despite their thematic variety, all these formats share Fever’s hallmarks. First, they are deliberately social-first. From Neon Brush’s glow-in-the-dark canvases to Bubble Planet’s Insta-friendly backdrops, every detail is engineered for shareability and user-generated content, the lifeblood of modern cultural marketing. Fever doesn’t just rely on this organically: it systematically builds influencer programs into each experience, ensuring built-in distribution among digital-native audiences.

Second, these events are scalable by nature: by focusing on simple, high-appeal concepts, it creates experiences that can seed locally and then blossom into full-fledged franchises globally. Prison Island, for instance, now operates in over a dozen European cities, while Bubble Planet has already landed in 13 cities across Europe, the US, and APAC — with more in the pipeline. Combined with first-party data harvested from its marketplace, this modular approach allows Fever to identify high-potential markets and rapidly replicate its hits with precision.

These two guiding principles laid the foundations for Fever for Business, a dedicated corporate division that serves enterprise clients with custom-built private events and tailored experiential perks. This initiative transformed Fever from a pure ticketing and entertainment brand into a B2B partner capable of orchestrating turnkey branded gatherings and activations.

Secret Media Network

Secret Media Network is Fever’s sprawling ecosystem of over 200 hyper-local digital channels collectively attracting 300M+ monthly interactions.

These channels serve a dual purpose. On the one hand, they generate revenue through a mix of branded content, giveaways, and email campaigns for third-party clients. On the other hand, they act as a powerful in-house marketing engine to drive discovery and ticket sales — particularly for Fever Originals, where the company captures margin not just as the ticketing provider but also as the event operator.

As of recently, Secret Media Network also launched Secret Club, a subscription-based community that gives consumers access to exclusive content, discounts, and perks in their city of choice — only New York and London for now.

Fever’s Formula

Each of these segments could make for an interesting company in its own right, but the real magic is in how they interlock. From its inception, Fever has been building towards a cohesive ecosystem in which data and value are continuously flowing from one business line to the next to uncover new growth opportunities. Audience insights gathered in one corner of the business feed product innovation in another. Mastery over distribution reinforces operational profitability. Brand partnerships make room for proprietary ventures. It’s worth diving deeper into each initiative’s contribution to the whole.

Fever’s “marketing fee”: A value-add take on ticketing

Ticketing, in its basic form, is a low-margin business. On its own, a ticket is essentially just a permission slip, a standardized product with little room for price differentiation from one platform to the next. Try to charge even a few percentage points more, and consumers will defect to another platform, unless the event is locked in by exclusivity. Regulators are paying close attention too. In the US, the FTC recently cracked down on bait-and-switch tactics and hidden fees, forcing companies to disclose the total cost upfront. In such an environment, competing on the ticket alone is a dead end. The real battle lies in the surrounding services: discovery, user experience, data, and everything that can turn a simple transaction into a broader relationship.

Fever opted to turn these constraints into a business opportunity early on. Instead of a traditional, single-digit booking fee, it charges a “marketing fee” “based upon [its] ability to drive additional ticket sales and attendance to [an] event or experience.” Information is scarce and the exact amount is unclear, but in 2018, the company estimated this commission to be “around 3-5 times” that of a “ticketing fee.”

I reached out to Fever to confirm that the model was still current. Here’s what Santiago Soler, the company’s VP Global Communications, Public and Institutional Relations, had to say:

Our philosophy has not changed: organizers pay a commission that reflects the services Fever provides — from marketing and distribution to customer support and technology. The specific structure can vary depending on the type of partnership, the needs of each event, and the preferences of each organiser.

Compared to a normal ticketing fee, this model unlocks several advantages. Chief among them is, of course, the take rate: by serving organizers across more of their needs, Fever can capture a much larger share of value. Just as important, it shifts the narrative. Instead of just “ticketing,” organizers are paying for incremental demand and operational support — services that are both more strategic and harder to commoditize. This framing not only justifies the premium but also deepens the partnership, making Fever less of a vendor and more of a growth engine for its clients. This ensures greater alignment, tying Fever’s upside to its partners’ success.

Still, the model works only if Fever can credibly prove its impact. Unlike a ticketing fee, which is justified simply by processing a transaction, a marketing fee demands evidence: where did the buyer come from, which campaign or channel nudged them to convert, and how much of that revenue can be traced back to Fever’s efforts? Attribution is notoriously difficult in live entertainment, where the customer journey is rarely linear. Someone may hear about an experience through a TikTok clip, see a reminder on Instagram days later, and finally buy after a friend shares a link in the group chat. Untangling this web of influence requires a sophisticated system to track, measure, and attribute sales with precision.

Fever has made these capabilities central to its pitch. Today, it combines user-level tracking — via UTM parameters, pixels, and affiliate links — with higher-level techniques like marketing mix modeling (MMM), which uses aggregated data and regression analysis to assess the impact of both online and offline channels. Because the media rails are Fever-owned, the company can trace the path from a Secret Media post or paid unit to an organizer’s checkout with unusual clarity. In that regard, recent job postings point to a sophisticated internal stack, with real-time data collection from platforms like Meta, Google, and Tiktok; AI-driven pipelines for creative and budget optimization; and the use of causal inference to “determine the true impact of specific marketing interventions.” The result is a system designed not just to monitor performance, but to continuously improve it on behalf of its partners.

In this configuration, filling seats becomes an optimization game — a calculated and ever-evolving equation balancing customer acquisition cost against expected profit per attendee. The better Fever gets at targeting, tracking, and tweaking each lever, the more confidently it can justify its premium and the more value it can capture.

Fever Originals: An all-weather, high-margin roster of experiential concepts

Fever Originals weren’t always what they are today. While one article from 2014 suggested Fever would leverage exclusive events to entice users into using its app, it wasn’t clear then that those exclusives would also be original creations. Fever Originals as an entity was officially mentioned only years later, with early experiments spanning artisanal pop-ups — a “Mad Hatter’s G&T Party” in a derelict double-decker bus in Brooklyn — and hybrid formats — Total Challenge, a TOTAL RECALL-themed immersive cinema experience.

Much has changed since then. Today, the label covers everything from intimate music shows to multisensory escape games, to immersive exhibitions, dining experiences, and large-scale festivals. Some of these concepts are still barely emerging; others have already scaled and can be found across the globe. More than Fever’s flagship, Originals are now also its main economic engine.

What exactly makes something a Fever Original, however, remains hard to pin down. The company’s FAQ describes them as in-house creations, but executives are clear that partnerships are the norm.

Fever Originals [...] is in the business of producing experiences. The strategy is to partner with best-in-class content creators, and to empower them, helping them throughout the production process with data from the decision on the concept until the very end of the journey.

In practice, Fever appears to be highly opportunistic: it may originate a format (Candlelight), co-develop one alongside a creative studio (Astra Lumina with Moment Factory), or take an existing show and put it on a global tour (Titanic: The Exhibition with Musealia). Making a project happen will sometimes require some financial engineering: in some cases, even city governments now sign on as co-producers to secure a local run of a particular attraction.

The throughline is less about ownership than about control. Originals allow Fever to step out of the role of vendor or middleman and occupy the center of the value chain — shaping the product, steering its economics, and, crucially, owning the relationship with audiences. They are Fever’s bet on building a repeatable and highly profitable cultural machine.

Data discipline

The Fever Originals name didn’t come from a vacuum. From the start, the team was “inspired by Netflix’s use of extensive data collection and analysis to make informed decisions about content creation and strategy”, and intent on taking the same approach to live entertainment. Said Global VP of Original Experiences Isabel Solano:

When Netflix started, one of the ingredients that they found would maximize the probability of success when shaping content was the background narrator voice where one of the characters is telling firsthand how they feel, what’s happening, what’s next, et cetera. [...] We wanted to be able to do the same; to identify those ingredients that maximize the probability of success when we’re shaping experiences so that we combine that information coming from the data with creativity to give the result the best chance of success. [...] You need to know whether you should invest $200,000 on a carpet, say, or if there is a better element of the experience that you should invest the money in that will give you a better return on investment.

Data informs every stage of the process, starting with ideation. As TechCrunch once put it, “[Fever is] using anonymised behavioral data-mining to algorithmically predict untapped demand for events that don’t yet exist — and then serving them up as an own brand event.” The “Mad Hatter’s G&T Party” in New York, for instance, was deemed “‘a clear winner’ during [Fever’s] analysis, when it tried out alternative theme options (such as Aladdin and the Lion King), as well as alternative city locations (in other parts of New York), and venues (rooftop, double-decker bus, indoors).” If an experience proves successful, the same kind of analysis can then be used to help determine the optimal route and duration of a tour.

On that note, Fever makes good use of one particular tool: waitlists. On its marketplace, each instance of a particular concept receives its own unique webpage. In some cases, consumers can’t yet buy tickets but are given the option to join a waitlist to “get exclusive access to pre-sale tickets before they are released to the public.” This enables Fever to assess demand locally and make sure an experience settles only where it has the best chances of success. When the time comes, it can use the contact info it collected to retarget those who previously showed interest, lowering customer acquisition costs and decreasing time-to-profitability at the city level.

Engineered scalability

While Fever follows demand closely, its productions also need to satisfy its own business goals. Each and every one of the company’s concepts is designed from the get-go to scale quickly and globally.

No experience exemplifies this fact better than Candlelight. Since its 2019 debut in Madrid, the concept has grown into a blockbuster business that’s now active in over 150 cities and 2,000 venues worldwide. As I wrote in my previous piece, this rollout was made possible by a number of factors:

• Broad, evolving repertoire: Originally conceived as a purely classical series (Vivaldi, Mozart, Chopin), Candlelight has since expanded into tributes to pop legends (Queen, ABBA, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran), genre-focused nights (R&B, K-pop, film scores), and seasonal specials (Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s). Local variations — like a Charles Aznavour homage in France — exist, but the overall editorial stance remains safely culture-agnostic.

• Instrumental focus: Performances are instrumental-only, enabling seamless localization without linguistic barriers.

• Short, repeatable format: A one-hour runtime lowers audience commitment while enabling two shows per night, maximizing venue yield.

• Asset-light model: Candlelight avoids the costs of owning venues or employing permanent performers. Instead, it partners with local musicians and rents existing spaces, reaching scale with minimal overhead.

• Operational streamlining: Fever actively recruits new venues and artists through inbound forms on its official site, allowing it to rapidly prioritize high-potential cities and reduce market entry friction.

• Integrated promotional machine: As with other Originals, Candlelight rides Fever’s full-stack marketing infrastructure — from affiliate and influencer programs to its Secret Media Network, which subtly plugs shows via seemingly neutral listicles and branded highlights.

Admittedly, not all Fever Originals are music-related, the way Candlelight is. Still, whether that’s duration or operational streamlining, many of the above drivers can be observed across the entire portfolio — proof that the playbook is well established by now.

Importantly, these traits aren’t just design principles for Fever’s own roster; they also serve as a checklist for identifying the third-party experiences most worth courting and bringing onto the Fever marketplace. While some operators may be content pursuing only local success, the most ambitious teams now take a global approach from day 1. To achieve their goals, companies like SENSAS and Paradox Museum standardize set design and deployment, structure clear franchising programs, and share best practices across locations. This emphasis on operational efficiency constitutes the best possible proxy as to a partner’s prospects, and how much business Fever might be able to generate off it.

Asset-light deployment

Among the many factors driving scalability, Fever’s asset-light model deserves emphasis. It stands in stark contrast to Live Nation’s strategy of owning and controlling a significant share of the live music infrastructure. As of December 2024, Live Nation fully owned 32 venues. In Q1 2025, the company announced plans to open “at least 20 large venues (stadiums, arenas, amphitheaters, and large theaters) globally through 2026.” In June, it committed $1 billion to 18 new and renovated venues across the U.S. over an 18-month period.

Ownership benefits Live Nation in several ways. It allows the company to capture a greater share of each fan’s “total concert spend,” especially through ancillary revenue streams — which, at its U.S. amphitheater shows in 2024, averaged more than $44 per head. It also gives Live Nation freedom to act on opportunities at its own pace. At Estadio GNP, for example, per-fan ancillary spend rose more than 30% following refurbishment, proof of the upside that comes with direct control over an asset’s condition and monetization potential.

Fever, by contrast, thrives on flexibility. Concepts like Candlelight or We Call It rely on a global patchwork of small and medium-sized partner venues that are rented rather than owned. Meanwhile, larger ventures, including music festivals or hybrid formats like DroneArt Show, remain too infrequent to justify tying up capital in land or buildings. For these, Fever is better served working opportunistically with cities and venue owners and trading long-term control for agility. This minimizes capital intensity, reduces fixed risk, and makes it possible to scale quickly into new markets.

The trade-offs are real, however. For starters, renting means ceding a portion of the value chain in the form of ancillary revenue — though the focus on short formats would arguably leave little dwell time and few opportunities to consume anyway. Fever also faces recurring exposure to landlord negotiations, local regulation, and availability constraints. Tellingly, a job posting for a Regional Real Estate Expansion Manager position emphasized the need to operate “within demanding time frames.” Securing suitable venues for high-demand events can become a bottleneck, especially when formats rely on distinctive aesthetics or large capacities. For projects with proven staying power, Fever may well seek long-term leases or multi-year agreements with host cities — if it hasn’t already.

Brand extension

If scalability maximizes reach, brand extension maximizes depth. Once an Original has proven it can travel, Fever works to stretch its commercial surface area. Once again, Candlelight serves as the prototype. Originally a stripped-down recital format, it has since evolved into a flexible stage for third parties, from Warner Bros.’ centennial and Netflix’s Bridgerton tie-ins to bespoke artist showcases. Each partnership layers new meaning onto the brand, ensuring its appeal outlives any single repertoire.

The same logic underpins Fever’s move into B2B. With Fever for Business in 2024, then the dedicated Candlelight for Business in 2025, the company began repackaging its hits as corporate, fully-customizable solutions. Candlelight’s modularity makes it especially attractive here, enabling it to be turned into a client dinner, a team-building perk, or a branded activation without losing its core identity.

In both consumer and corporate channels, the strategy is clear: extend the lifespan of winning formats by reframing them as platforms. This extracts more value per format — increasing the ROI of creativity — and reinforces the Originals brands as a system of reusable, adaptable experiential IP rather than one-off shows.

Endless ideation

As the Originals portfolio grows bigger, coming up with new formats gets more difficult. To make sure it never runs out of concepts, Fever has largely systematized the ideation process. Today, a new experience will usually come from any one of the following tactics:

• Derivation: Once a concept has proven itself, Fever will often just… create more of it. For example, We call it Jazz, itself part of the We call it franchise, now includes a “Tribute to Soul” variant. This improves repeatability, extending both a concept’s cultural lifespan and its commercial runway.

• Mix-and-match: Fever will sometimes mix and match two distinct concepts to come up with a new, third one. DroneArt Show, a “unique fusion of drones and live classical music,” is essentially a drone-enhanced Candlelight.

• Commonality: Despite very different concepts, multiple experiences often share the same trait. For example, We call it Ballet, Glow Circus, or The Colorbeat Drums all draw much of their appeal from their LED-enhanced costumes and set designs. This likely enables Fever to pool equipment, resources, and possibly even talent across multiple cultural offerings, thus dramatically streamlining operations. For example, all three experiences (and several others) are currently live from the same venue in Paris.

• Imitation: Inspiration can come from observing culture at large — or just competitors. The First Round, “an exclusive social dining experience”, draws from the exact same promise as a company like Timeleft.

• Replication: If a concept proves commercially successful but its first run comes to an end, Fever will gladly support new iterations, often with new partners. Since Titanic: The Exhibition (with Musealia), Fever has been involved with The Legend of the Titanic (by Madrid Artes Digitales and FKP Scorpio Entertainment), Titanic: An Immersive Voyage (a coproduction with Exhibition Hub), a second Titanic: The Exhibition (this time alongside Imagine Exhibitions), and even its own Original, Titanic: A Voyage Through Time — which is also made available to operators on a licensing basis.

Together, these various methods ensure that Fever can continue to grow its catalog while also doubling down on its successes. At any given time, the company is sure to have a steady flow of formats that can be tested, scaled, and monetized with minimal downtime.

Strategic resilience

Last but not least, Originals insulate Fever from most of the volatility of the wider live entertainment industry. Live Nation’s own risk disclosures admit how dependent it is on a handful of artists willing and able to fill stadiums. Per its annual report:

Since we rely on unrelated parties to create and perform at live music events, any unwillingness to tour or lack of availability of popular artists could limit our ability to generate revenue. [...] In particular, there are a limited number of artists that can headline a major North American or global tour or who can sell out larger venues, including many of our amphitheaters. If those artists do not choose to tour, or if we are unable to secure the rights to their future tours, then our concerts business would be adversely affected.

By contrast, the concept-centric Candlelight or We Call It build loyalty around the experience rather than the headliner. This gives Fever a hedge against the vagaries of touring schedules and the superstar economy. The stronger the concept’s own brand equity, the less reliant the company is on any one performer or intellectual property, and the more bargaining power it retains in negotiations with partners, sponsors, and rightsholders.

Of course, Fever is not quite self-sufficient. By leaning harder into big-ticket partnerships in music and sports, the company arguably re-exposes itself to the very dependencies it has so far managed to escape. Even within immersive entertainment, a few key partners still account for disproportionate ticketing volume, meaning Fever must devote white-glove resources to them. Nonetheless, Originals give Fever optionality — the ability to keep experimenting and monetizing even when external supply wobbles.

Secret Media Network: Multi-channel demand generation

Secret Media Network is Fever’s universal demand engine for its own formats and for third-party organizers on the marketplace.

Today, the company creates content in more than 20 languages across more than 200 city-specific channels spanning dedicated websites and social accounts on all the major platforms. Together, these channels bring the network’s reach to 31M+ monthly page views and 100M+ videos watched per week.

Naturally, these numbers are unevenly distributed, with major cultural hubs like New York, Paris, and London getting the bulk of the engagement. However, Fever is careful not to overlook any of its markets, and creates channels even for seemingly secondary cities. Whether it operates original experiences of its own locally is irrelevant; as a ticketing provider, it benefits from serving local businesses and institutions nonetheless. The content of each city-specific guide is made available in multiple languages — Bordeaux has two, whereas Paris and New York have seven — to make sure it’s able to tap not just local but time-sensitive, international demand as well.

As mentioned, the network’s model is twofold. On the one hand, it works with third parties big and small that are interested in tapping its audience to generate local awareness in their products and services. To that end, these companies can pick and choose from a wide range of options including branded posts, email campaigns, and more. On the other hand, Secret Media Network’s various touch points are used to direct traffic to Fever’s event marketplace. Crucially, Fever’s editorial control allows it to subtly (and, sometimes, not so subtly) prioritize its own experiences in supposedly neutral city guides.

This tactic is all the more impactful that few consumers even realize that media and marketplace share the same parent company. Pick any one of Fever’s concepts and you’ll find the city-specific instance of the network featured as one its “Media partners” — global franchises like Candlelight Concerts and We Call It, which operate across dozens of territories, list the more generic Secret Media Network. But nowhere is it mentioned that Secret Media Network itself is run by Fever. That information is displayed only on Fever’s and Secret Media Network’s corporate-facing websites, far from (most) consumers’ eyes, helping preserve the air of objectivity that’s key to Fever’s covert cultural curation.

The recently launched Secret Club complements Secret Media Network perfectly. Beside the subscription revenue — the community is currently priced at a reasonable $3.99 a month, or £3.99 in London —, it offers yet another touchpoint for brands and businesses to tap into Fever’s audience. In line with Fever’s habit of streamlining every aspect of business development, an open form on Secret Club’s website already lets prospective partners reach out to propose their preferred form of collaboration.

Like the rest of Social Media Network, Secret Club will drive traffic back to Fever’s marketplace, where the company can take its fee and further refine its understanding of consumers’ tastes and purchasing behaviors. Importantly, Fever benefits on both the demand and the supply sides of the equation. The more perks and discounts it offers, the more attractive the Club becomes, thus driving subscription revenue; in turn, the more consumers there are in the Club, the more attractive it becomes for brands as a marketing channel, driving advertising revenue. In the process, Fever gets to be the interface and kingmaker through which consumers engage with everything their city has to offer in terms of culture and entertainment.

Fever Cashless: From operational excellence to insights generation

Planning and running events is a logistically challenging endeavor, with vendors to source and orchestrate, staff to recruit and train, software to pick and often debug, and countless unforeseen emergencies to resolve. The bigger the venue and the more numerous the crowd, the higher the stakes and the more potential failure points organizers need to consider. This makes operational support all but necessary for most.

Fever has turned these pain points into a business opportunity with Fever Cashless, its proprietary suite of cashless payment and access control solutions for the entertainment industry. Covering the entire event lifecycle, Fever Cashless lets event organizers and venues “reduce queues, reduce staff, enhance security, manage prices and stock in real time, track staff performance, and understand user habits.”

The go-to-market is straightforward. By starting as the ticketing provider, Fever already sees which events are growing fast and which organizers may be hitting operational limits. It can then upsell Cashless services into the same accounts, turning ticketing into a wedge for deeper integration. As of August 2025, Fever claims to have served 8M+ guests and processed $250M in transactions across 1,000+ events.

This isn’t a white-space idea. Live Nation has run Nexus, its own partner network, for over a decade, connecting clients with vetted third-party solutions for everything from entry systems to analytics and loyalty. The initiative has proven successful: 90% of Live Nation’s clients have an integration with one or more of its partners. But Nexus is essentially a directory, whereas Fever offers an integrated, unified stack under its own brand. In practice, it means that ticketing, access, concessions, and vendor management all flow through a single system rather than a patchwork of providers. This makes the product easier for partners to implement, and for Fever to sell.

Operational benefits are clear: frictionless events drive revenue. Festivals that go cashless see faster queues, more transactions, and higher spend per head. One operator found cashless systems boosted the number of transactions by 20% and spend per transaction by 24%, overall amounting to a 16% boost in revenue per head. It’s no surprise that many of Fever’s own Originals now run “cashless only,” both to maximize margin and to showcase the technology to prospective partners.

Yet the deeper advantage lies in the data exhaust. Organizers typically have little insight into how individual participants spend their time and money once they’ve passed the gates. Meanwhile, their sponsors often rely on clumsy surveys or social mentions to prove engagement. With RFID wristbands and digital wallets, Fever can map a participant’s journey across time and space — what they buy, where they linger, which activations they interact with. Every additional touchpoint enriches organizers’ understanding of their guests, enabling them to fine-tune pricing and programming and strengthening sponsorship packages.

For Fever, those insights have even broader value. Embedded into dozens — and soon hundreds — of events big and small, Fever Cashless paints a comprehensive picture of the industry’s inner workings. Which concessions perform best? How much staff is needed? What can be optimized or, better, fully automated? These learnings can then be passed down to future Cashless clients on an advisory basis or implemented across Fever’s own portfolio. In anonymized form, they could also form the basis for future content marketing, much like Live Nation’s regular industry reports.

Fever learns just as much about event-goers as it does about events. On that note, its view of consumer behavior isn’t just individual but indeed nominative. By encouraging guests to credit their wristbands ahead of time, it’s able to connect their on-location behavior to their prior purchases, potentially even their online interests if they happen to have connected their socials. This enables it to form a detailed profile for every participant, including everything from their dwell time to their spending habits. In turn, these insights can be used to prioritize the highest-value consumers when promoting events. The more granular the data, the more Fever can charge others to access its audiences, whether that’s for online campaigns (i.e., Secret Media Network) or experiential activations.

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Strategic Arenas

With its ecosystem firing on all cylinders, Fever has turned its attention to the most fertile testing grounds for its model. Two in particular have become central to its growth story: sports and music. Here, I’ll cover its efforts in each, why these two industries were the best possible match for the company’s offering, and what I believe is the greater opportunity at play.

Sports

Fever is an exclusive ticketing partner to a growing list of prominent sports organizations. These include FC Barcelona, LIV Golf, and IFEMA MADRID, the operator of Madring, where the Formula One Spanish Grand Prix is set to take place starting in 2026.

However, these deals expand beyond just ticketing and into areas like demand generation and on-location fan engagement. For example, while the main goal of the FC Barcelona partnership is “to facilitate buying match tickets, tickets for events and all types of experiences related to the Club”, the two entities also aim “to improve the spectator experience [...] through a wide offering of events, activities, and other exclusive content.” On a similar note, Fever’s recent fundraising announcement stated that Fever is now exploring opportunities to work with the New York Mets (owned by one of its newly added investors) “to further enhance fan engagement through experiences.”

Not content with remaining in the background as just a service provider, in recent years, Fever has also started aiming for a more visible type of partnerships. As part of its short-lived deal with Chelsea, its branding was meant to appear on the kits of the club’s men’s, women’s, and academy teams. In March this year, it became the official front-of-shirt partner to Bristol City. In July, a sponsor to French rugby club ASM Clermont Auvergne. The list goes on.

These two types of deals serve very different purposes. In the first case, Fever acts as a vendor — a prominent and comprehensive kind of vendor, but a vendor nonetheless. As such, the company is being paid for the services it provides to a club; the more of those services are included in the deal, the greater the revenue. In the second case, Fever is a sponsor. As such, it’s the one paying for the right to be featured on a club’s various brand assets — the Chelsea placement, for instance, was valued at between €6M-€8M. The goal here is to convert a club’s fans into consumers of its own products and experiences, awareness into adoption.

Some deals may opportunistically blur the lines between these two formats. Beside its role as a sleeve sponsor, Fever was reportedly meant to “offer access to Chelsea benefits and experiences through an exclusive page on its events platform.” Similarly, Fever is not only Bristol’s front-of-shirt sponsor but also its official “ticketing and experience partner.” As the company doubles down on sports, it’s likely that it will continue to experiment with different roles and levels of involvement to optimize for varying business goals.

Music

While Fever has been making strides in sports, its track record is mostly in music, where it has partnered with prominent music promoters and venue operators. In addition to the aforementioned Primavera Sound, Cercle, and Pitchfork Music Festival, the recent acquisition of DICE significantly boosted Fever’s roster, with clients now including Spotify, Redbull, and Amazon Music Live. In July, Fever also announced a multi-year strategic partnership with promoter TCE Presents and premium venue operator Broadwick Group to “power” the NYC-based Brooklyn Storehouse. The agreement “designate[d] Fever as the primary ticketing and audience growth partner for all events at Brooklyn Storehouse” as well as all of TCE’s events in New York.

Up to this point, this playbook doesn’t look too different from the one pursued in sports. Fever appears to be focused on landing large accounts that can ensure substantial business thanks to either the frequency (e.g., Cercle) or the sheer size of their events (e.g., Pitchfork Music Festival). As in sports, it also seems to be seeking increasingly comprehensive partnerships that will enable it to deploy more and more of its solutions. For example, its role as an “audience growth partner” to TCE and Broadwick Group will likely leverage Secret Media Network.

Where Fever’s approach to music differs from its strategy in sports is through Fever Originals. Rather than solely serving clients, as it does in sports, Fever also produces and operates a growing slate of its own music-related experiences. Today, these include:

• Candlelight Concerts

• We call it, a series of live music shows celebrating specific dance styles (e.g., tango, flamenco) and music genres (e.g., jazz, cabaret)

• Ballet of Lights, a glow-in-the-dark ballet show that’s itself a spin-off of the “We call it” series

• Eonarium, a travelling, immersive music and light show co-produced alongside Zurich-based artist collective PROJEKTIL

Monitoring this portfolio can be tricky. What is known as Ballet of Lights in Paris and Stockholm is We call it Ballet in Lisbon. Meanwhile, We call it Jazz only exists as the New Orleans-inspired The Jazz Room on the Fever marketplace. Temporary partnerships may also overlap with more evergreen offerings: for example, Authentic Flamenco — a co-production with Teatro Real and SO-LA-NA — is not to be confused with the fully Fever-owned We call it Flamenco. Overall, Fever’s portfolio appears to be in a state of constant experimentation, with concepts alternatively expanding or spinning off to match demand while maximizing brand recognition.

Among all these experiences, a few stand out. As I explained in “The new spectrum of music shows”, Candlelight has become a poster child for Fever’s editorial vision, business strategy, and operational savvy. Already a thriving consumer business, the format took another dimension with the launch of the enterprise-focused Candlelight for Business. With fairly similar requirements in terms of venues and talent, We call it now appears the most likely to follow the Candlelight playbook.

Fever has also ventured into much larger-scale events. Spain’s Polar Sound festival has been running since 2019. In France, the company now runs both Initial, an electronic music festival whose fourth issue took place in Bordeaux in late August, and the freshly launched hip hop festival Hypnotize. Elsewhere, the startup has experimented not only with the aforementioned Eonarium but also the transparently named DroneArt Show — “a unique fusion of drones and live classical music.”

As with sports, these two categories contribute to Fever’s goals in different ways. Smaller, more intimate formats like Candlelight and We call it are highly scalable and, when successful — which these two specific series certainly are —, serve as cash cows to fund the rest of the business. By contrast, large-scale events like Initial and DroneArt Show stand out as these high-stake, high-impact experiments in which Fever gets to push the envelope of what live entertainment can look like.

Perfect playgrounds

Despite tactical differences in how Fever has approached them, sports and music share a few traits that make them both a perfect match for the company’s vision and offering.

Scale

In “The new spectrum of music shows”, I pointed out how the blockbuster concert era is starting to show cracks, as ticket inflation and market saturation push more and more consumers to choose more selectively who to shell out for. That being said, large-scale events continue to make bank. According to Pollstar, arenas accounted for 49% of tickets sold and 52% of gross worldwide live music revenue in 2024. Smaller venues including theaters, amphitheaters, and clubs collectively accounted for the remaining 34% of tickets and 25% of revenue. The largest music festivals like Coachella, Las Vegas’s EDC, or Montreal Jazz Fest are well over the 500,000 mark.

Meanwhile, sports essentially runs on scale. In the US, average match attendance during the 2024-25 season was 18,147 for the NBA, 40,421 for the English Premier League, and 69,555 for the NFL. And that’s before even mentioning so-called mega-events such as world cups, Grand Prix races, or the Olympics, which routinely draw crowds of millions.

Simply put, celebrations such as these represent tremendous business. For Fever, being the exclusive partner to a top festival or a sports team and its home stadium ensures not just considerable but also recurring volume. Instead of having to heavily promote a myriad of smaller third-party events, the company can confidently lean on its partners’ unique pull. And that’s only existing demand — as recent deals show, Fever is increasingly involved in helping its partners grow their reach. Finally, landing large, prestigious clients also has tremendous benefits in terms of brand recognition and legitimacy, streamlining future business development efforts across every industry.

Stadium experience

Stadiums and arenas are no longer satisfied with serving as mere containers for a single show or match. Owners now treat the main event as the centerpiece of a longer narrative designed to keep visitors on-site, engaged, and spending as early and as late as possible. In sports, the Savannah Bananas offer a textbook example. Each game — the team calls them “shows” — is preceded by Pre-Game Plaza featuring live performances and player and “cast” appearances, and followed by a DJ-led after-party that encourages fans to linger. Beside entertainment, each segment adds fresh monetization touchpoints without inflating the ticket count.

That temporal stretch is matched by an aggressive re-imagining of the venues themselves. Owners are turning both their interiors and surroundings into multi-use experiential and commercial zones designed for year-round activation. Sports organizations everywhere are entering public-private partnerships that anchor their stadiums into entirely new districts and expand their commercial and cultural footprints in-between match days. In North America, 37 projects of at least $1 billion, each linked to teams in the five major sports leagues, are in various stages of planning. These districts capitalize on a full calendar year of events, reach a net-new and more diverse audience, and create new inventory for advertising and sponsorships, flattening sports’ usual seasonality and stabilizing cash flow.

For Fever, this evolution is a boon. By expanding beyond ticketing and into fan engagement, the startup profits not just from the main-event ticket purchase but also from all the adjacent monetization opportunities. Accordingly, its partnership with IFEMA MADRID will include “immersive fan zones, live entertainment and city-wide experiences” spanning “concerts, DJ sessions, live shows and other special performances.” The more diversified a partner’s offering, the more reasons fans have to come back and spend time and money, the more transactions Fever gets to take a commission off and the more revenue it can generate. Its cashless wristbands and mobile wallets accelerate checkout speed, push average order value higher, and generate granular transaction data that can be re-routed into its marketplace or Secret Media Network for precise audience targeting. In short, as stadiums grow more experiential, Fever evolves from ticketing gateway to revenue engine for everything that happens before, during, and after the headline act.

Superfans

Both sports and music are notorious for the level of engagement they can spark. Over the years, event organizers across these sectors have learned to better identify and cater to so-called superfans — the highly engaged, high-spending fans hungry for access and exclusivity.

In music, this segmentation is still done somewhat rudimentarily, primarily through pricing. Festivals big and small have for years offered VIP packages, with perks including fast-track entry, premium lounges and viewing spots, better food options, and more. In 2025, a VIP pass at Coachella will set you back roughly $1,200 inclusive of fees, about double the price of a general admission ticket. While these upsells are certainly margin-additive, they ignore the non-monetary forms of engagement that are so essential to artists’ long-term success.

In comparison, segmentation in sports seems light years ahead in terms of both comprehensiveness and granularity. All prominent sports teams and organizations now run extensive loyalty programs that enable them to measure and reward every level of fandom. These programs enable fans to engage beyond just transactions and through a multitude of activities, whether digitally or in-venue. In exchange, members of Club Maverick or NASCAR’s Fan Rewards receive a variety of perks, from discounts and cashbacks to early access to members-only experiences. Revenue is secondary: being free to join, these programs prioritize long-term engagement. Fans are incentivized to complete their profiles in order to access personalized content and offers, further enriching these organizations’ understanding of their communities.

For Fever, the growing focus on superfans is a huge opportunity. As a ticketing provider, the company stands to benefit the most from premium purchases. By plugging into its partners’ increasingly refined view of their audiences, it can dramatically improve its targeting and conversion rates for both its partners’ offerings and its own.

Additionally, there’s a clear white-space opportunity for Fever to build — or enable — loyalty infrastructure across its ecosystem. While the platform has so far focused on one-off purchases, the recent launch of the subscription-based Secret Club marked a first step toward more durable customer relationships. This logic could be extended further, either through Fever-branded loyalty programs or as a white-label feature offered to partners. Precedents already exist: Ticketmaster is an official partner of Audience Rewards, Broadway’s points-based loyalty program, which incentivizes repeat purchases and helps organizers consolidate audience data in an otherwise fragmented landscape. For Fever, a cross-vertical rewards system would unlock new levers for retention and cross-selling.

Sponsorships

Ticket sales may be the primary way event organizers make money, but it’s far from the only one. Today, sponsorships represent a substantial and high-margin revenue stream for both sports and music organizations.

This fact is especially prevalent in sports. From the Golden State Warriors’ pre-sales newsletter (presented by Ticketmaster) to the Lakers’ mobile app (presented by bibigo), there isn’t a single brand asset in professional sports that’s not for sale. The same is true of the venues. Beside venue-level naming rights, high-traffic areas like entryways, parking lots, and concessions are increasingly being turned into brand activation zones by displaying sponsored signage. NBA teams collectively earned a total of $1.62B in sponsorship revenue during the 2024-25 season, up 8% from the previous year and 91% from the $850M earned five years prior. Importantly, this growth was driven not by more deals — deal volume grew just 2.5% year-on-year — but by the number of assets included in each deal, signaling a move toward more comprehensive partnerships.

Meanwhile in music, sponsorships have been a lifeline for many festivals. Today, they take many forms, including naming rights (e.g., the mouthful that is “American Express presents BST Hyde Park”, in London), online and in-app advertisements, exclusive partner rights (e.g., Airbnb x Lollapalooza), and on-site signage and brand activations. In 2025, the Berlin edition of Lollapalooza had no fewer than 22 different sponsors across categories.

In this context, Fever’s own established relationships with brands seems like a perfect match. Today, the company already interacts with advertisers through both Secret Media Network (for brand content and digital campaigns) and Fever for Business (for custom events and perks). By partnering with venues and event organizers through either ticketing, Fever Cashless, or both, it now has access to high-value real-estate it can make available to brand partners. Importantly, Fever’s operational prowess and expertise in experiential marketing allows it to go beyond just signage and instead develop the kind of truly engaging and memorable activations that fans crave and premium brands will pay big money for. The IFEMA MADRID announcement, for instance, suggested that Fever “may also produce parallel events across Madrid,” including brand activations.

Sports and music are more than just verticals for Fever: they are laboratories where the company can stress-test its capabilities at scale. From ticketing to payment systems and from event production to brand activations, each piece finds sharper relevance in these industries because the audiences are massive, the fandom visceral, and the willingness to pay virtually limitless.

What’s Next

Fever is delivering on its original vision. Whether it be its portfolio of Originals or Fever Cashless, it continues to find new ways to engage and monetize, all the while generating the data and insights that can inform its strategy, refine its products, and improve profitability. As the company enters its next chapter of growth, it will find no shortage of opportunities, but also new risks that may test the resilience of its model.

Opportunities

Doubling down on immersive

Fever’s track record in immersive entertainment is undeniable. On the ticketing front, it has partnered with some of the industry’s most prominent players, including Exhibition Hub, Culturespaces, and Moment Factory. As these companies continue to develop new concepts and deploy them around the world, Fever as their ticketing provider, promoter, or both, gets to build off their brands and grow alongside them. Meanwhile, on the events side of the business, virtually all Fever Originals have emerged from the genre.

As it enters its next chapter of growth, Fever should double down on the category that has served it so well. This means not just keeping what’s working, but also identifying and locking in the most promising concepts before someone else does. Companies like Sweden’s Prison Island, Croatia’s Paradox Museum, and France’s Science Experience and SENSAS — all of which Fever has already signed — have made no secret of their ambitions and continue to expand across territories thanks to efficient franchise strategies. Somewhere around the world, small, resourceful teams are already iterating their way toward the industry’s next blockbusters; finding them should be a top priority.

To my knowledge, Fever currently either develops concepts in-house or partners with third-parties to help them scale their businesses. But as immersive entertainment continues to mature as an industry and an asset class, I believe the company may begin to act as more of a financier, opportunistically acquiring promising concepts at the earliest stage to fully capture the upside or, conversely, divesting proven franchises at high multiples once they’ve reached their potential.

One last opportunity lies in finding synergies with more of Fever’s activities. Fever Cashless seems like a primary candidate in that regard. Compared to large-scale manifestations like music festivals and sports events, location-based entertainment franchises are unlikely to need capacity control or inventory management, but they likely have challenges of their own. Can Fever’s software help eliminate workflow bottlenecks and reduce “days-to-dollars” for new openings to improve both location-level and franchise-level profitability? Can its network help operators find local talent, source vendors, or license content? The more invaluable the company can become to immersive entertainment specialists, the greater the opportunity.

Industry diversification

Fever’s focus in terms of business development has been on landing large partners whose business can bring it scale and legitimacy. While sports and music have received most of the attention so far, a little LinkedIn sleuthing and the company’s job board show it has set its sight on a third industry: culture.

A number of factors make this space an attractive target. At a high level, it fits Fever’s ambition to make all of culture available on its platform. But there are more practical arguments, too. Collectively, cultural institutions receive dozens of millions of visitors every year, meaning just as many tickets for Fever to take a cut off. Despite fragmentation — the International Council of Museums estimates there are at least 55,000 museums worldwide —, the top institutions garner the most of the volume and revenue: in 2024, total attendance across the top 10 museums amounted to over 51 million visitors, with Le Louvre alone accounting for 17% of that total. This distribution means that here, too, Fever can focus on a small number of deals to generate appreciable revenue.

Compared to industries like music and sports, much of the museum world also lags behind when it comes to digital readiness. Years (or decades) of technological debt, together with limited budgets, have hindered institutions’ ability to collect and monetize insights about their visitors. This is despite them being increasingly dependent on earned income — as opposed to the public subsidies that have long kept them afloat. In short, Fever is finding in culture a large, global, under-digitized market eager to adopt any solutions that can help it become more efficient and profitable.

It’s worth noting that Fever isn’t starting these conversations from scratch. Original concepts like Candlelight and We call it routinely take place at some of the most prestigious cultural locations. By renting their available spaces for its own use, Fever has already established valuable relationships with many of these institutions. Additionally, it has always presented these formats as a way for them not only to generate revenue but also to engage younger audiences. In short, Fever’s events activities have already enabled it to demonstrate goodwill toward the industry; they can now serve as a wedge to take over more of these partners’ operations, from ticketing to inventory management.

Margin-additive ticketing

Fever’s wide-ranging “marketing fee” has already enabled it to move away from the traditionally low margins of the ticketing business. Still, a few additional monetization levers could help it take this activity to the next level.

The common denominator is event desirability. The more exceptional the event, the more options it unlocks: fans will pay up for perks, tolerate price adjustments, and usually find happy buyers for their seats if they somehow can’t make it.

Fever’s portfolio of Originals has arguably been designed to avoid frenzy. Scalable, evergreen, and available across dozens of cities, formats like Candlelight simply don’t spark the scarcity-driven behaviors that make upselling, dynamic pricing, or reselling truly lucrative. But as the company expands its roster of IP-backed shows and major partnerships, those tools may find new relevance.

Upselling

The more exceptional the event, the more willing consumers are to splurge in addition to what they see as the base price. For event organizers — and, by extension, Fever as their ticketing provider —, this unlocks new opportunities for monetization.

Upselling comes in many shapes and forms. These days, tickets can be profitably bundled with everything from merch to food & beverage vouchers, parking passes, and more. For example, Ticketmaster offers “upsell opportunities, curated travel packages, digital collectibles, and more.” Combined, these options can contribute to a material uplift: 58% of Ticketmaster users have purchased an add-on of any kind, with the average incremental spend amounting to an impressive $300.

Travel and accommodation appear particularly promising as a category. In the U.S., actual ticket cost accounts for only a fraction — 24% on average — of the total cost of attending a concert, far behind accommodation at roughly 38%. Bank of America found that half of respondents (50%) have traveled out-of-state and/or internationally to attend a concert, sporting event or festival in the past two years; 41% of Gen Z and 44% of Millennials have flown within the U.S. to attend one such event. The trend shows similar numbers in Europe. Dedicated players like Vibee are now catering to the so-called “gig-tripping” crowd with exclusive packages that include hotel stays, complimentary entry at local attractions, themed gift kits, and more. The more destination-worthy events Fever serves, the more relevant these extras will become in the purchasing journey.

Reselling

From a consumer’s perspective, reselling is a valuable feature to have no matter what. Anyone who, for some reason, can no longer go to an event they had every intention to attend — in other words, anyone who’s not a professional reseller — will usually be glad to find an easy and secure way to break even from the same place they made the original purchase.

While they may swear that this is all about convenience, the platforms certainly benefit too. One recurring complaint against ticketing providers is that they essentially “double-dip” by charging fees on top of both the initial and the secondary sale. Big or small, any resale is a positive when you’re getting a cut.

Still, the upside only reaches its full potential with the most in-demand of events. In its 2024 annual report, Live Nation noted that “in states where resale caps aren’t allowed, average resale prices are 2x higher — with some markups reaching 10 to 50 times face value.” Because the fees its charges on each transaction are proportional, Ticketmaster profits most when prices are the highest. For example, the service charge for one standing ticket to see Oasis in Manchester was £53.48, or 15% of the resale price of £357.95. Artists or local legislation may at times impose caps on resale price, but the platform can still make a hefty profit in the aftermarket.

As far as I can tell, Fever doesn’t currently enable reselling — as mentioned, most of its portfolio doesn’t call for it — but as it onboards more partners and their “can’t miss” events, the company will have the perfect excuse to implement it. What remains to be seen is what it will make of this opportunity. DICE, which Fever acquired in June, has been praised by consumers and promoters alike for its Wait List feature, which enables fans to resell their unused tickets only at face value to get a full refund. While this pricing policy is certainly fan-friendly, the prospect of a real markup may be too compelling to pass on for long.

Dynamic pricing

The continued rise and professionalization of reselling is proof enough that event organizers and their providers are still leaving a lot of money on the table. Rather than let scalpers siphon up the upside after the fact, platforms have been working on capturing willingness to pay at the source. Dynamic or “surge” pricing — the practice of having ticket prices adjust to demand in real time — has been a primary tool in this strategy.

Live Nation has long been among the model’s primary proponents and beneficiaries, as its emphasis on the higher tier of venues and events made it an ideal target for scalpers early on. In February 2024, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino described the practice as the company’s “great growth opportunity,” as the system gets rolled out in more countries, is implemented more systematically, and trickles down to mid-tier venues.

As with reselling, the very nature of Fever’s portfolio has arguably made it ill-suited to dynamic pricing. Nevertheless, the feature is listed among its “event management capabilities”, a sign that it might be an important selling point for its partners. Though I haven’t been able to see it applied in the wild, the marketplace already includes a “Selling fast” category, which is where this kind of feature would make the most sense. As the company takes on more one-off spectacles and event scarcity becomes more crucial to its business, it should be able to monetize demand spikes accordingly.

Sponsorships

I’ve discussed earlier how Fever strategically turns single experiences into fully-fledged entertainment platforms, improving their range, repeatability, and business potential. With Fever for Business, it now makes its portfolio available for every corporate occasion. But there’s another key modality in which third parties can engage with the company’s roster: sponsorships.

Possibilities abound. On its website, Fever lists options that include on-site branding, product placement and distribution, and, as always, the ability to amplify the partnership digitally through a Secret Media Network campaign. The Bridgerton-themed Queen’s Ball featured Lindt chocolates, while a Candlelight concert was sponsored by Brazilian craft beer brand Baden Baden. On the platform, an ABBA-themed Candlelight concert in Paris was apparently sponsored by the perfume brand Nina Ricci. In total, a dozen Originals are already up for such activations.

The business case is obvious on both sides. For brands, these deals are an opportunity to engage young, urban, and affluent audiences across premium moments — which also happen to generate copious amounts of user-generated content — in order to create lasting positive associations. For Fever, they add another layer of revenue on top of ticket sales. Interestingly, sponsorships are also available for IP-backed experiences like The Magic Box (with Disney) and Harry Potter: A Forbidden Forest Experience (with Warner Bros.), a sign that Fever isn’t afraid to monetize the same event twice. With this strategy, every experience becomes a high-margin stackable asset.

Experiential layer

I’ve highlighted earlier how RFID adoption through Fever Cashless can enhance event operations for consumers and organizers alike, while also surfacing valuable insights into participants’ on-site behavior.

Still, I believe Fever is after more than efficiency gains or data: its own events suggest that it’s trying to create an entirely new experiential layer on top of the physical one. The last edition of Initial, for instance, came with a new identity and marks the beginning of “Mission Saturne”, an “intergalactic journey where music and space come as one” and “an immersive experience that extends beyond the festival.” While details remain scarce and this could be only marketing parlance, such language suggests big plans around worldbuilding and gamification.

There are precedents for this: some of the world’s largest players in live entertainment have for years been trying to enrich the guest experience through a mix of technology and storytelling. Disney has MagicBands, which let visitors enter its parks, pay for items, access fast lanes, and more. Another notable feature, now discontinued, was the bracelets’ integration with the attractions themselves, which would display a guest’s name as they passed by. Nintendo’s Power-Up Bands let guests collect digital coins and stamps and play interactive games. In music specifically, major festivals like Coachella have been using augmented reality for everything from navigation to brand activations.

With its expertise in immersive entertainment, Fever could turn both its own and its partners’ events into interactive experiences, with event-specific side quests and content to unlock. This would not only increase dwell time but also spark conversation both during and after the event, boosting visibility for organizers. Of course, not all events would lend themselves to this vision. Smaller venues lack the space to deploy such activations, and many artists may be wary of these activities competing with them for fans’ attention. Still, if Fever can inject even bits of its know-how into more traditional events, it will have found a unique differentiator.

Risks

The opportunity set is real, but so is the friction. As it continues to scale, Fever will expose itself to several failure points.

Execution risk

Fever has so far been able to scale without major hiccups. Yet the more global it grows, the more experiences it offers on its marketplace, the more it risks spreading itself too thin operationally.

When it comes to third-party experiences, Fever is ultimately dependent on its partners’ execution. Yet as the interface through which consumers first discover and pay for these experiences, it stands on the front line if anything happens. A poor performance, broken equipment, or a mismanaged venue, and Fever will be the first place unhappy consumers turn to to complain. The reputational risk is only heightened by the company’s insistence on having its name featured prominently on its partners’ websites: “Powered by Fever” may sound great when everything is going well, but it comes with unwanted associations if or when things go awry.

Poor integration with a partner’s systems could also cause issues. For instance, a Reddit user who bought movie tickets via Fever was later hit with an extra $6 per ticket by AMC because it happened to be an IMAX screening. This sort of confusion is sure to leave consumers disappointed and could well deter them from using Fever’s app ever again.

Despite promising greater control over the output, the company’s own experiences come with their own share of uncertainty. After all, many Fever Originals rely heavily on local musicians, performers, and small creative partners. This human factor poses significant execution risk as any visible slip-up could erode consumer trust in the overall concept or even the company at large. As mentioned, Fever maximizes replicability thanks to simple formats, repeatable programming, and streamlined processes — Candlelight artists, for instance, are vetted through an online form. Still, when operating at that scale, mistakes are bound to happen.

Ultimately, the damage is somewhat lessened by the way experiences are compartmented at the interface level. Because of Fever’s hyperlocal focus, each version of each concept in each city gets its own profile page on the platform. The Bridgerton-themed Candlelight show has one, whereas the Ed Sheeran one has another. With each variant getting its own reviews, no particular instance of a concept can drag down the others’ perception because of its ranking.

Competition

As a young company and a challenger, Fever is fortunate to be able to learn from the successes of those that came before. At the same time, it itself is not safe from imitation. In fact, because it operates across several, and vastly different, activities, competition is coming from multiple fronts at once.

On the media front, the success of Secret Media Network has already attracted attention. In July 2025, Ticketmaster unveiled City Guides, its own “curated, city-focused pages” meant “to drive event discovery and connect fans with local experiences and events” across live music, sports, theater and entertainment. Currently live for London, Los Angeles, and New York, these guides are meant to make the most of the “more than 2 million monthly Google searches for city-based event queries”, an opportunity Ticketmaster had so far largely ignored by focusing on travel-worthy rather than local entertainment. While it has a long way to go to catch up with Fever’s hyper-local media empire, this initiative shows that the strongest differentiators are also the most worth copying.

The same risk applies to Fever’s Events segment. Despite their operational demands, many of Fever’s concepts are simple enough that they could be replicated fairly easily by others, including in territories where the company does not yet operate. In this scenario, a fast-paced “copycat” strategy could preempt high-prized cities or even entire countries before Fever has had time to settle in. In locations where Fever is already established, any competition would inevitably increase customer acquisition costs, hindering the profitability that today is one of the company’s markers.

As for ticketing, the space is notoriously crowded. Companies like Vivid Seats, SeatGeek, StubHub, and others have been lurking in Ticketmaster’s shadow for years. Another upstart, France’s Shotgun is currently making strides in the US after first focusing on Europe. All these players are hard at work to lock the most valuable event organizers and IP into long-term contracts, leading to a game of musical chairs in which success is achieved not by growing the pie but by displacing a predecessor. And competition keeps growing. As mentioned, companies like Vibee and Quint — a property of Liberty Media, itself a major shareholder in Live Nation — are going after the most affluent fans with exclusive experiential packages.

Simply put, Fever is poised to face increasing challenges across the entirety of its business.

Brand fragmentation

When it comes to branding, Fever’s strategy is subject to two contradictory forces.

On the one hand, the company’s brand building has grown more deliberate over the years. Today, this vision manifests in a number of ways. The first one has to do with how the company enforces brand consistency across its many properties. The websites for its original concepts, as well as many of its partners, all visibly draw from the same template, from their influencer-filled hero videos to their structure, copywriting, and fonts. The company’s name is visible no matter what: Originals are “Presented by Fever” or “An original experience by Fever”, while third-party experiences are “Powered by Fever.” Second, Fever’s recent involvement as a sponsor in sports attests to its ambitions around becoming a true consumer brand rather than a nondescript service provider. The acquisition of DICE, with its recognizable brand identity, was another step in that direction.

On the other hand, the sheer breadth of Fever’s portfolio runs almost counter to those efforts. While Fever’s original experiences can all be loosely described as “immersive”, they still span a wide spectrum of concepts — individual or group activities, quiet or active, technology-enabled or not. This eclecticism is further heightened by these concepts’ respective brands. Candlelight, for example, has by now taken a life of its own; We Call looks well on its way to do the same. The more awareness these individual experiences attract, the less Fever as the umbrella company seems to matter in the consumer’s eyes.

Granted, there are still synergies to be found, for example, by bundling together experiences with somewhat similar concepts or shared traits — the music-centric Candlelight and The Jazz Room or the dance-related Ballet of Lights and We Call it Tango. Going beyond recommendations, it could also offer discounts for specific packages as a way to steer consumers toward experiences they might otherwise not have considered. Such a strategy would be especially valuable for kickstarting demand for newly launched concepts. It could also be used to regularly boost basket size across the entire marketplace. In 2025, July 22 and 23 were declared “Fever Days,” during which consumers could enjoy “48 hours of epic discounts” on the top experiences in their cities — most of which, conveniently, already happen to be Fever Originals.

The biggest risk of brand fragmentation is in how it prevents the company from creating precisely the sort of synergies that make for the strongest and more durable engagement: narrative ones. In immersive entertainment, Meow Wolf is now tying its various installations together into a single creative universe. This encourages its most passionate fans to visit one location after the next in order to compare experiences and gather more of the company’s lore. In comparison, Fever is only able to expand on a concept through discrete variations — e.g., The Jazz Room’s soul version — rather than narratively.

Parting Thoughts

Fever appears to be on the right track. From its humble beginnings as yet another ticketing provider, it has grown into a multifaceted business that now produces and monetizes culture at lightning speed and industrial scale.

Underpinning this success is an ever-growing stream of data flowing from both digital and physical touchpoints, which the company then methodically leverages into new offerings. The result is a highly holistic system in which each new business line works in lockstep with the rest. Data brings out local demand and helps prioritize deployment. Media drives sales. Events make room for brand activations and are streamlined with cashless payments, generating deeper insights into industry workflows and consumer behavior. B2C opens up to B2B. Across all those initiatives, the benefits are compounded by a focus on operational excellence and profitability.

Today, music and, increasingly, sports, stand as the best possible arenas to deploy the playbook. With these industries, Fever uses online ticketing as a wedge to spark more meaningful partnerships and to sell more of its services, from demand generation to on-site capabilities to brand activations. As it embeds itself deeper into its partners’ activities, it gradually shifts from being a transactional vendor to an indispensable operating partner. In doing so, it captures a larger share of each fan’s journey while reinforcing its own ecosystem with the data each interaction generates.

Whether that machine can sustain its rhythm will depend on what comes next. Continued portfolio expansion; deeper incursions into sports; experiments with on-site gamification, loyalty, margin-additive ticketing, and subscriptions — all of these carry strong promise. But Fever will also face challenges. By operating across so many activities, it risks overextending and leaves itself wide open to equally ambitious but potentially more focused competitors. Meanwhile, fragmentation across an ever-growing portfolio means that individual concepts may thrive only at the expense of the company’s own brand power. Finding long-term success will mean resolving these tensions.

Fever began with a simple question: what if Netflix’s data playbook could be applied to real life? Over a decade later, the opportunity looks bigger than ever.

But scale and operational prowess won’t be enough. Netflix didn’t just pioneer and dominate its category; it created new schedules (binge releases), new behaviors (binge watching), new defaults (autoplay), new language (“Netflix and chill”). Fever’s next frontier is to do the same for live experiences. If it can define the culture of going out the same way Netflix shaped the culture of staying in, it will be a giant in its own right.

Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please consider giving it a like and take a minute to share it with others. It really helps.

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Setting the stage

While Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Billie Eilish have made headlines with their sold-out global tours, live music is in a state of quiet crisis: for every blockbuster exception, there are thousands of artists facing half-empty venues. In May 2024 alone, both The Black Keys and Jennifer Lopez — two acts previously thought to be guaranteed stadium-fillers — canceled their upcoming North American tours due to weak ticket sales.

Part of this slump can be attributed to market corrections after the post-lockdown boom. Skyrocketing ticket prices are also starting to alienate fans: at $120 in June 2025, the average ticket price for a top 100 tour may be down 6% from last year but is still up nearly 70% from 2010. The surge was especially sharp in recent years: Pollstar reports an overall 27.4% increase from 2019 to 2023. And then, there’s the matter of oversupply. With artists big and small racing to make up for pandemic losses, the market has reached saturation, forcing fans to choose more selectively.

But beneath these economic tremors lies a deeper cultural shift: audiences are increasingly craving concerts that feel intimate and emotionally charged. Eventbrite’s 2025 TRNDS report found that 64% of event organizers expect demand for niche events to grow this year, with attendance at so-called micro-events up 23% last year across major metros. Among Gen Z respondents, nearly 40% favor immersive, intimate music experiences.

These events may not draw stadium headlines, but they have numerous benefits. Unburdened by the huge overheads of arena and stadium tours, organizers can experiment with unexpected venues, original formats, and deeper artist-fan connections. Meanwhile, a carefully crafted sense of exclusivity allows them to command attractive premiums without needing tens of thousands of attendees.

As the industry doubles down on superfans — the highly engaged, high-spending listeners hungry for access —, this trend signals an opportunity at the intersection of exclusivity and intimacy: smaller-scale, premium music experiences designed not for the masses, but for the most devoted.

The three cases that follow — Sonorium, Cercle, and Fever’s Candlelight — illustrate how different players are betting on this shift. Rather than chase stadium crowds, these companies are building new rituals and business models around intimate, immersive, and highly curated music experiences. In the process, they are quietly redefining what concerts can sound and feel like.

Three visions for intimate music experiences

Sonorium: A home for mindful listening

Sonorium is a French startup that organizes immersive music listening sessions. Founded in 2019, it was formed from the reunion of The Slow Listener and Disco Alto, two companies that had launched earlier off the same concept.

Sonorium events aim to provide a superior listening experience. This goes down to a few components:

• Hi-fi audio: Sonorium is focused on delivering the highest possible audio quality. On the hardware side, the company has worked with French high-end speaker manufacturers like Focal and Hark; on the software side, it uses high-resolution files from Qobuz, an audiophile music streaming company. One particular event also involved Ircam Amplify, a French audio tech company with deep expertise in spatial audio.

• Context & commentary: For each session, Sonorium invites either the artist themselves, a close collaborator (e.g., their producer), or a music journalist to present the featured album and answer questions from the audience afterwards.

• Location: To date, Sonorium has hosted sessions in 100+ prestigious sites in France — though most of them in Paris —, including Le Louvre, the Grand Palais, Centre Pompidou, and Jardin des Tuileries. Because most of these historical venues were not designed for music, Sonorium retrofits them for the duration of an event or, in the case of Le Louvre and Jardin des Tuileries, provides participants with individual bluetooth headphones so they can listen to the same program in sync while roaming freely.

Both the concept and the company itself are positioned firmly in opposition to the current state of music consumption. Where digitization has largely flattened audio quality, Sonorium uses state-of-the-art audiophile set-ups. Where music listening is now playlist-driven, Sonorium is bringing back the album as a cohesive and self-contained unit. Where discovery is algorithmic, Sonorium focuses on curation and context. Where music is mostly consumed alone and on the go, Sonorium makes it collective and sedentary. All in all, the company is betting on a slower and richer relationship to music and those who make it.

Its programming has so far spanned a wide spectrum of eras and genres. A look at past sessions on the company's website shows a healthy mix of cult names and albums — e.g., Kanye West's Graduation, Radiohead's OK Computer, The Fugees' The Score — as well as more up-and-coming artists. In line with Sonorium's roots, the latter category includes mostly French artists like L'Impératrice, La Femme, and others. In that regard, Sonorium's geographic and cultural proximity to these artists' and their labels will likely continue to influence which music the company features in its events.

Six years in and with a track record of over 130 sessions (98% of which sold out), Sonorium is now expanding into two directions.

On the one hand, the company now makes its concept available to music labels interested in connecting with fans for an album's release or anniversary. Through this offering, the labels get to engage fans in an intimate setting while leaning on Sonorium's years of experience as a turnkey event organizer. While the core concept remains the same, this offering likely presents a more attractive margin profile for Sonorium. For each of its usual, Sonorium-branded shows, the company would normally be required to pay a clearance fee to the music's owners — both the publisher and the label — for what is called the "public performance" of an album's recording. In contrast, label-supported shows are part of a partner's own marketing budget, what you might call "Fan Acquisition Cost". This essentially shifts Sonorium's costs (i.e., the rights clearance, the space rental, the staff...) onto the label, while Sonorium can take a commission for handling the logistics.

On the other hand, Sonorium plans to open the first venue specifically dedicated to music listening. It envisions "a comfortable space providing immersive audio (high-end speakers surrounding the audience with spatial audio) and visuals (projection mapping, light shows). A can't miss third place for a new kind of music listening, with an engaged community." The space would be open both during the day and in the evening, with album listening sessions available to all upon reservation, similar to a movie showing. Details are still being fleshed out, but in an open form aimed at music industry professionals, Sonorium suggested that the venue's capacity could be between 40 to 150 people.

These two initiatives are, of course, meant to be complementary. Sonorium's questionnaire emphasized privatization as a key destination and asked music professionals about their target use cases (e.g., previews, new releases, catalog), audiences (e.g. press, DSPs, internal, or fans), how often and when they might be interested in booking the venue, and how much they would be willing to pay per session (from <1,000€ to €2,000+). It also assessed the industry's interest in spatial audio (as opposed to stereo only), immersive visuals (in addition to just audio), and memberships as a way to lock in regular sessions. At a hypothetical €2,000 a session and with multiple sessions a day — though not all of them would be private —, this new activity could prove highly lucrative. Sonorium has also hinted to a potential bar and dining area, a notoriously high-margin add-on for entertainment businesses.

With this new chapter, Sonorium is making a bold wager: that in an era of infinite choice and shallow consumption, music still deserves intention and reverence. By creating the first permanent home for immersive listening, the company is positioning itself not only as a curator of taste but also as a long-term strategic partner for an industry hungry for authentic and memorable fan engagement.

Cercle: Aspirational dancefloors

Cercle is a premium music experience organizer and media company. In the company's own, more eloquent words:

Cercle is an artistic movement that hosts and curates experiences, events, festivals, a record label, and immersive musical journeys. At the intersection of music, aesthetics, heritage, and video, Cercle aims to create and produce innovative experiences on a global scale, highlighting unique artists on unique stages, offering a new perspective on the cultural and natural legacy of our world.

The vision wasn't always so encompassing. Founded in 2016, Cercle started out as a series of DJ sets and interviews uploaded to YouTube and informally set up out of founder Derek Barbolla's own Parisian apartment. When the noise complaints started pouring in, these shows moved to more suitable locations in Paris, from a restaurant's basement to a moving barge on the Seine. A breakthrough moment came in October 2016 with a live DJ set at the Eiffel Tower. The first of Cercle's shows to go viral, this show kicked off "Lundis Cercle" (French for "Cercle Mondays"), the company's long-running weekly series of live DJ sets staged in cultural heritage locations.

A lot has happened since then. In July 2022, Lundis Cercle transitioned from its intense weekly or bi-weekly shows to one per month, a shift towards more sustainable growth and larger, more complex projects. By 2024, the company had organized over 240 shows everywhere across the globe, each in a location more surprising than the last, from a French castle to a mountain peak, from a lighthouse to a heliport, from a salt flat to a moving hot balloon. Over the years, Cercle has gradually diversified into adjacent experiences and activities:

• 2019 : Cercle Festival, a 3-day music festival in France

• 2020: Cercle Records, a record label that releases music from Cercle artists

• 2022: Cercle Moment, exclusive, luxury travel and music experiences in remote destinations, combining private performances with curated activities

• 2024: Cercle Odyssey, a multi-city tour of immersive 360° concert experiences

Throughout this evolution, the company has quietly redefined the look and feel of live electronic music shows. Four key pillars explain how this transformation took shape.

Content-first ubiquity

The remoteness of Cercle shows may make them inaccessible to most, but it was always balanced by the team's digital savvy. Born on YouTube, Cercle quickly expanded to other platforms in order to maximize reach and capitalize on emerging opportunities. Møme's October 2016 DJ set at the Eiffel Tower, which propelled the brand onto a global stage almost overnight, was the first show to leverage Facebook Live, then only a few months old. Today, Cercle boasts a combined following of roughly 7.2 million across platforms, including 3.5 million on its historical home base, YouTube.

This digital presence offers two major advantages. First, it likely generates meaningful revenue through the platforms' ad-sharing programs. Cercle's YouTube channel alone features over 260 videos, some of which have amassed tens of millions of views. DJ sets, by nature, encourage long watch time and high engagement, creating more opportunities for ads and boosting potential earnings. However, the team has emphasized in interviews that shifting platform algorithms and generally low CPMs make this income stream too volatile to rely on as a primary source.

More importantly, Cercle's content serves as the strongest entry point into its event portfolio — the true revenue engine of its business. While the company uses newsletters to directly notify fans of upcoming events, no channel travels as fast, scales as broadly, or sells tickets as effectively as its striking video content. With hundreds of hours of content, Cercle is now perfectly positioned to leverage short form-focused platforms like YouTube Shorts and TikTok for ongoing discovery.

A cohesive ecosystem

Cercle has strategically woven a brand universe where every initiative acts as both a self-contained experience and a promotional gateway to the rest of the company's offerings. As just mentioned, content was designated early on to be at the core of this strategy. Today, Cercle's shows, festival, and immersive tour are working hard to convert online, low-value viewers into on-the-ground, high-value participants. The relationship doesn't end there: Attendees often return online to rewatch the exact same set they experienced live, transforming a fleeting moment into a lasting memory and reigniting anticipation for future events. The more shows, the more footage, the greater the reach and the stronger the brand — and so the flywheel keeps going. Long-tail content can drive business just as efficiently as new releases. For example, the team updated even its oldest video descriptions to include links to upcoming Odyssey tour dates.

These various initiatives are unified not just commercially, but also semantically and aesthetically. Consistent naming conventions signal coherence and help build trust from one event to the next, while a shared visual language — a testament to founder Derek Barbolla's background in film — ties things together at both the video and portfolio level. To celebrate the simultaneous release of nine tracks on its in-house label Cercle Records, the company premiered Cercle Story, an anthology film "featuring 9 amazing artists, from 9 stunning locations with the idea of recreating a full day from sunrise to sunset around the world." This visual and narrative continuity helps turn casual viewers into loyal fans who actively seek out and advocate for the "Cercle feel" in both digital and physical settings.

Productized chaos

The frequency at which Cercle organizes and broadcasts these events belies their complexity. In that respect, success only made the team more ambitious over the years. Rather than rest on its laurels, Cercle continued to seek out ever more exceptional and more unreachable locations. The logistic impact is obvious: from location scouting to financing to day-of production, each show now requires on average about a year of preparation, sometimes two. The diversity in formats — interior vs. exterior, public vs. non-public — adds another layer of difficulty and prevents a one-size-fits-all approach. In the team's own words, "Every show comes with its own business model."

Still, that the company was able to not only go on but thrive is proof that there is a method to the madness. While Cercle may face extreme variability from one event to the next, it has demonstrated a rare operational discipline across its growing offering. Cercle Festival, Cercle Moments, and Cercle Odyssey not only built off the team's years of production expertise, they also drew from the same editorial tenets. Like the Lundis Cercle of old, they too rely on aggressive curation, focus on scenography, and look to convey a sense of place, scale, and awe. The requirements in time, capital, and equipment may vary greatly, but these ideas remain as guiding principles, helping turn an otherwise chaotic ambition into repeatable productions.

Music's luxury ladder

There's something else that the events have in common: their premium positioning. With its focus on electronic music and aspirational content, Cercle found a natural market in young, urban, and affluent audiences willing to shell out decent money for quality entertainment.

Admittedly, the diversity of Cercle's offering can make it hard to discuss pricing. On YouTube, non-public shows — where the artist is performing without an audience — make up a significant part of the company's portfolio. But as far as public shows go, the range appears fairly consistent across the board. This year, tickets for a 2-hour Cercle Odyssey show in Paris went for €100, while 3-day passes for the next year's edition of Cercle Festival are currently going for €270. People on Reddit have reported paying between $200-$400 for individual shows in New York, Mexico City, and other locations. Overall, this puts Cercle events in line or (well) above industry averages: according to Pollstar, the average ticket price for the top 100 tours in the world was $120 for the first 6 months of 2025.

Cercle fully entered luxury territory in 2022 with the launch of Cercle Moments, a new kind of travel experience that includes multiple private DJ sets per trip, 5-star accommodations, and location-specific activities spanning boat parties, wine tasting, and paragliding. The upcoming 4-day trip "Cappadocia Legacy" in Turkey, for example, will set participants back anywhere from €5,250 to €7,500, or between €1,300+ and €1,800 a day. With a capacity of 55 guests, that makes for a lucrative format.

Granted, not all of this will be profit. While Moments are all-inclusive from the participants' perspective, the team is actually covering some very high costs. By and large, I suspect that Cercle still makes the bulk of its revenue and profit off large-volume, lower-price formats like Odyssey and Cercle Festival. Still, the very existence of Cercle Moments is proof that the company's years of efforts building brand trust have paid off.

Overall, Cercle has built a global brand by turning striking, unexpected locations into unforgettable live stages. By blending music, travel, and aesthetics, it has created a unique form of entertainment that has proved to resonate with audiences far beyond traditional club or festival settings. With its latest initiative, the technology-enhanced Odyssey, the company is once again pushing the limits of what a music show is supposed to look like. This aligns with a broader move toward experiential culture, where music is expected to be not just heard but embodied.

Fever: Pop music with a classical touch

Fever is a global live entertainment discovery platform that designs, produces, operates, and markets cultural experiences. Its activities consist of four main segments:

Online marketplace

Fever operates a global event discovery and ticketing platform that lets users browse and book a wide range of local cultural experiences across sports, music, food, wellness, and immersive entertainment. The company is also the exclusive ticketing provider to prominent IP owners and event organizers, including FC Barcelona, Primavera Sound, and... Cercle! In June 2025, Fever acquired DICE, an independent music ticketing platform, to bolster its scale and capabilities in this area.

Events production and operations

Fever is directly involved in the production and operations of experiences, with a focus on immersive entertainment.

It does so in two ways. Historically, the company has worked with IP owners and entertainment specialists to co-produce live entertainment formats, including Harry Potter: A Forbidden Forest Experience with Warner Bros., JURASSIC WORLD: THE EXHIBITION with Universal Pictures, and Stranger Things: The Experience with Netflix.

In addition, Fever has also been developing its own range of original experiences, Fever Originals. (Despite the name, not all Fever Originals are owned by Fever alone — many of them are, in fact, co-productions.) Today, the category spans a wide spectrum of entertainment experiences, with a focus on multi-sensory and often technology-enabled concepts. This includes Paradox Museum, an immersive museum of optical illusions, Neon Brush, "a retro-futuristic pop-up painting workshop"; Bubble Planet, a multi-sensory immersive exhibition; and Candlelight Concerts, a series of intimistic, (battery-powered) "candle"-lit acoustic concerts; and many more.

Despite their thematic variety, all these formats share Fever's hallmark: they are deliberately social-first. From Neon Brush's glow-in-the-dark canvases to Bubble Planet's Insta-friendly backdrops, every detail is engineered for shareability and user-generated content, the lifeblood of modern cultural marketing. Fever doesn’t just rely on this organically: it systematically builds influencer programs into each experience, ensuring built-in distribution among digital-native audiences.

Scalability is Fever’s second foundational principle. By focusing on simple, high-appeal concepts, the startup creates experiences that can seed locally and then blossom into full-fledged franchises globally. Prison Island, for instance, now operates in over a dozen European cities, while Bubble Planet has already landed in 13 cities across Europe, the US, and APAC — with more in the pipeline. Combined with first-party data harvested from its marketplace, this modular approach allows Fever to identify high-potential markets and rapidly replicate its hits with precision.

Secret Media Network

Fever operates a sprawling ecosystem of over 200 hyper-local digital collectively attracting 300M+ monthly interactions. These channels serve a dual purpose. On the one hand, they generate revenue through a mix of branded content, giveaways, and email campaigns for third-party clients. On the other hand, they act as a powerful in-house marketing engine to drive discovery and ticket sales — particularly for Fever Originals, where the company captures margin not just as the ticketing provider but also as the event operator. Crucially, Fever's editorial control allows it to subtly prioritize its own experiences in supposedly neutral city guides, a tactic kept largely invisible to consumers who rarely realize that media and marketplace share the same parent company.

Fever For Business

Expanding beyond its consumer core, Fever launched Fever for Business, a dedicated corporate division to serve enterprise clients with custom-built private events and tailored experiential perks. This initiative transforms Fever from a pure ticketing and entertainment brand into a B2B partner capable of orchestrating turnkey branded gatherings and activations.

While the company arguably deserves its own deep dive, for the purpose of this piece, I'll focus on Candlelight Concerts.

Candlelight Concerts

As just discussed, Candlelight Concerts, or Candlelight for short, are "candle"-lit live acoustic concerts. In the company's own words:

Candlelight Concerts are a series of original music concerts created by Fever aimed at democratising the access to classical music. This innovative format represents a unique live musical experience through a varied offer of programs to meet all tastes, played by local musicians, in emblematic venues, with the space and performers illuminated by thousands of candles. Candlelight invites a broader audience that might have never considered a classical music concert before to connect with the most iconic pieces of the greatest composers and listen to the top hits of well-known artists in a different way.

Launched in Madrid in 2019 and now the crown jewel of Fever Originals, Candlelight is both the company’s most recognizable and, by all indications, its most successful concept to date. As of 2023, Fever reported active Candlelight shows in over 100 cities, reaching more than 3 million attendees — a figure that has almost certainly grown substantially since. Today, Fever claims partnerships with more than 2,000 venues worldwide, underscoring the franchise’s astonishing global scale.

In many ways, Candlelight perfectly encapsulates Fever's broader strategic playbook.

Built-in scalability

From its 2019 debut to today, Candlelight was meticulously engineered to scale. This global rollout hinges on an asset-light, highly replicable formula:

• Broad, evolving repertoire: Originally conceived as a purely classical series (Vivaldi, Mozart, Chopin), Candlelight has since expanded into tributes to pop legends (Queen, ABBA, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran), genre-focused nights (R&B, K-pop, film scores), and seasonal specials (Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s). Local variations — like a Charles Aznavour hommage in France — exist, but the overall editorial stance remains safely culture-agnostic.

• Instrumental focus: Performances are instrumental-only, enabling seamless localization without linguistic barriers.

• Short, repeatable format: A one-hour runtime lowers audience commitment while enabling two shows per night, maximizing venue yield.

• Operational streamlining: Fever actively recruits new venues and artists through inbound forms on its official site, allowing it to rapidly prioritize high-potential cities and reduce market entry friction.

• Integrated promotional machine: As with other Originals, Candlelight rides Fever’s full-stack marketing infrastructure — from affiliate and influencer programs to its Secret Media Network, which subtly plugs shows via seemingly neutral listicles and branded highlights. This mix of paid and owned media keeps Candlelight omnipresent and top-of-mind globally.

Of course, Candlelight’s model isn’t without friction. Sourcing "emblematic venues" remains a significant bottleneck, since many historic or cultural spaces may be reluctant to host heavily branded, social-first events that might clash with their public image. Convincing these partners requires careful negotiation and trust-building. Fever also faces the inevitable operational headaches of live events — vetting musicians, staffing, and last-minute crises. Yet, overall, Candlelight stands as a masterclass in strategic design and operational execution.

IP partnerships

While Candlelight is nominally a Fever Original, it smartly borrows from Fever’s broader IP partnership strategy. Beyond its core repertoire, the format has expanded into co-branded shows with entertainment giants eager to deepen fan engagement. In 2023, Fever launched Candlelight: 100 Years of Warner Bros., an international concert series spanning 100 venues and featuring iconic scores from franchises like Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Batman. In 2024, Fever teamed up with Netflix and Shondaland for a Bridgerton-themed show, reinterpreting series hits in a candlelit acoustic setting. These collaborations continue today, reinforcing Candlelight’s cultural relevance and refreshing its appeal beyond classical purists.

Beyond film and TV IP, Fever actively collaborates with music rights holders to diversify Candlelight’s creative palette. Tribute concerts remain the primary lever, repackaging artists’ catalogs into intimate acoustic tributes that resonate with superfans and casual listeners alike. Fever has also experimented with original artist showcases — for instance, a 2023 three-night special with Australian electro-pop artist JOY, who performed her own material in the Candlelight format. While still rare, these artist partnerships hint at a potent future use case: helping musicians and labels launch new music in a uniquely immersive, high-touch environment that traditional tours rarely match.

For Fever, these partnerships aren’t optional embellishments. While Candlelight initially pitched itself as a vehicle to “democratize classical music,” the reality is that audiences will only sit through so many Vivaldi or Mozart renditions. In fiercely competitive cities — take Paris, where pay-what-you-want classical concerts abound —, Candlelight needs fresh hooks to maintain cultural relevance. If Fever’s IP strategy is any indication, the company is not so much “democratizing classical music” as giving popular culture the "classical treatment" in a timeless aesthetic that feels premium and conversation-worthy.

Corporate events

As mentioned earlier, Fever has expanded into the corporate space through Fever for Business — a division designed to repackage its experiential catalog for private and enterprise clients. Among these, Candlelight is the star asset. In May 2025, Fever officially launched Candlelight for Business in the US, aiming to “[transform] traditional corporate events into immersive, multisensory live music experiences.” This offering invites brands to weave candlelit concerts into product launches, galas, milestone celebrations, and VIP gatherings, providing a ready-made premium atmosphere.

Fever underscores that these B2B iterations are fully bespoke — from repertoire curation to venue selection — to align seamlessly with each client’s brand narrative and objectives. Notable examples include a 2023 one-night collaboration with Apple to launch Apple Music Classical, and a recent Mastercard member-exclusive concert in New York designed as a loyalty perk. These projects illustrate Candlelight’s adaptability as a branded storytelling tool, not just a concert format.

From gala dinners to VIP receptions, product launches, film premieres, and industry conferences, countless brands are eager to deliver premium, conversation-sparking experiences for employees, partners, and clients. Traditionally, orchestrating such an event requires weeks of planning and coordination across a patchwork of vendors. By contrast, Fever for Business — in this instance, Candlelight for Business — offers a turnkey solution: a pre-packaged, highly polished cultural experience that brands can drop directly into their event calendar with minimal friction.

Candlelight took the codes of classical music and masterfully reframed them for a generation fluent in visual storytelling and hungry for experiential consumption. Building off a simple concept and with the help of Fever’s integrated operations and marketing infrastructure, it has grown into a versatile, scalable, and — from what little inside knowledge I was able to gather — highly profitable business. This success is proof that smaller-scale music experiences can thrive within a deliberately mainstream and global cultural vision.

Connecting the dots

Sonorium, Cercle, and Fever are reimagining music shows through radically different lenses. Having unpacked their unique backstories and visions, let’s examine the broader cultural and business opportunities they illuminate.

Thinking beyond sound

That music is a visual medium is hardly new. From MTV’s peak to YouTube’s endless stream of music videos, visuals have long helped propel songs into mainstream culture. As of June 2025, 5 of the top 10 videos on YouTube were music videos — 10 out of 10, if you count nursery rhymes. TikTok’s ascent then rewrote the rules, replacing label-produced polish with short-form user-generated. True to its musical.ly roots, music became the platform’s creative backbone. By 2023, 85% of TikTok videos featured music (up from 70% in 2019) and short-form video was the primary way (82%) in which 16-24s engaged with music, well ahead of audio streaming (72%). In 2024, 84% of Billboard Global 200 hits went viral on TikTok first. More than ever, songs are discovered as soundtracks to videos rather than as their pure audio selves.

But TikTok and YouTube only tell part of the story. Sonorium, Cercle, and Fever show that concerts, too, have become visual experiences. These companies are deliberately leaving behind traditional music venues and opting instead for less acoustically optimal but more majestic, singular, or unexpected locations that imbue their events with an air of exclusivity and help them command a premium. Location scouting is further enhanced by these companies’ production savvy. Fever’s "candles", Cercle’s wraparound LED screens and surreal visuals, and Sonorium’s hints at projection mapping for its upcoming venue all signal a move from mere listening to full multimedia immersion.

These visuals aren’t just for those present; they’re designed to entice everyone watching from afar. In a social-first world, word-of-mouth starts with the eye, and event organizers need to think deeply of how their shows will translate and resonate online. By doubling as Insta-worthy backdrops, these companies' carefully crafted atmospheres directly contribute to their business goals.

Framing perception

In theory, event organizers should chase maximum visibility. More exposure means more awareness, which should mean more ticket sales. Major festivals like Coachella and Glastonbury have certainly leaned into, and benefitted from, user-generated content (and FOMO). But such ubiquity, combined with the debatable quality of the average piece of UGC created at these events, can end up diluting an event's brand and ultimately hurting its desirability.

For their part, Sonorium, Cercle, and Fever know that controlling perception is as important as controlling the stage. The strict no-phone policy, for instance, isn't simply about “preserving the moment” for everyone involved. By restricting content creation to in-house teams, professional partners, and vetted influencers, these companies ensure that what circulates online is either meticulously produced or strategically aligned with their storytelling and business goals.

Yet even with this level of control, execution can falter. Cercle’s Odyssey is a case in point. To make sure that Odyssey participants would still be able to show off online despite not being allowed to film the event themselves, Cercle sent over a ... a Dropbox link with a few made-for-social photos and vertical snippets from the shows. Lacking both the cinematic polish of Cercle’s signature productions and the authenticity of raw UGC, the material left many unimpressed. This was a reminder that while curation protects brand equity, it also risks alienating audiences if it feels sterile or performative.

Scaling intimacy

The success of Sonorium, Cercle, and Fever hinges on a paradox.

On the one hand, these companies are obsessed with giving their events an atmosphere of intimacy. This is most obvious in the (relatively) small scale of their productions. Sonorium's future venue is set to host just 40-100+ people; Cercle's upcoming Cappadocia trip caps at "around 55 people, for a premium experience with the Cercle Family!" And while I wasn't able to find a definite number for Fever, I believe Candlelight concerts typically seat no more than 150-200 guests. This makes these shows closer to private showcases than to mass-market concerts.

But intimacy isn't just about headcount. An important corollary to size is the proximity to the artist — another focal point for the three companies. Sonorium ensures this connection by inviting the artist or a collaborator to discuss their work informally. Cercle's public shows place the DJ within arm's reach, even centering them on the dance floor as with Odyssey. Meanwhile, Fever emphasizes that, "compared to traditional classical performances", Candlelight attendees can interact with musicians between pieces — an unthinkable luxury at a packed arena show.

Yet intimacy alone doesn't pay the bills. While these companies aim for a white-glove feel, their business relies on their ability to scale. No matter how magical, a single event means nothing if it can't be replicated and monetized repeatedly. Scalability is made possible through aggressive standardization, whether it's in duration (e.g., Candlelight's hour-long shows), programming (e.g. "Hommage to Coldplay" everywhere), or processes (e.g., Fever's streamlined venue intake form). It also calls for adequate tooling, to avoid having to reinvent the wheel for every new production. On this front, Fever is at a clear advantage, as vertical integration puts it in total control of the distribution and monetization of its events. By contrast, Cercle's reliance on third-party ticketing exposes it to reputational risk when things go awry.

Building rituals

Scalability is about replicability — how to make an offering easy for a company to deploy rapidly and profitably. But as scalable as these formats are, they only work if audiences come back — repeatedly. Without retention, companies burn through early adopters and must constantly chase new faces, driving up acquisition costs and eroding returns. This begs the question: Are these events one-off spectacles, or can they become regular cultural rituals?

Retention, like scalability, sits on a spectrum. Cercle is firmly on the “one-off” end, as its remote, high-concept events are built for singular moments rather than repeat visits. By contrast, Fever’s Candlelight concerts are not just widespread thanks to Fever's already global footprint, but also frequent — virtually any artist- or genre-centric show in the Candlelight roster is performed one or several times each month. This availability, bolstered by the company's aggressive marketing, naturally offers more excuses to return.

Of the three, Sonorium is the most deliberate about fostering loyalty. As mentioned, it envisions audiences booking listening sessions as they would a cinema ticket. A teased subscription model, which would provide access to unlimited sessions per month, borrows directly from the film industry’s playbook, reframing immersive music listening as a habitual outing rather than a luxury splurge.

Of course, we can't discuss retention without addressing pricing — desire doesn’t matter if the wallet can’t keep up.

On this front, the three companies diverge sharply. Sonorium’s survey suggests a price range from under €10 to over €20. For comparison, roughly 83% of movie theater tickets sold in France last year — a good proxy considering the company's vision — cost less than 10€.

The pricing of Fever's Candlelight Concerts is harder to pinpoint, since it's influenced by factors like seating options, location (i.e. both the city and the specific venue), seasonality, and more. In Paris, “Hommage to Céline Dion” runs from €19 to €49; in Sydney, “The World of Joe Hisaishi” starts at $72 and climbs to $135 for premium seats. For context, a Paris opera ticket averaged €102 in 2024, while the top seats for a recital by world-renowned pianist Lang Lang went for €110. This positions Candlelight as an accessible luxury: affordable to some, yet forced to compete with more traditional high-end cultural options.

Cercle, meanwhile, lives at the "premium" extreme of the spectrum. Its local shows can vary, but the $7,500 Cercle Moment trips seal its positioning as a bucket-list indulgence. Like remoteness, high prices firmly anchor it in the “exceptional" category, inevitably limiting repeat attendance.

Concept over artist

While price and logistical friction shape repeat attendance, there’s a more fundamental axis at play: artist-centric versus concept-centric appeal. In other words: Are these events about whose music is playing, or about what the experience promises?

In an artist-centric model, fans show up because of the artist. They may have heard about an event locally, from fan communities they're part of, or from following the artist on social media or streaming platforms. In any case, due to both scarcity and price point, a concert stands as this high-commitment event that complements lower-touch interactions like social posts or simply streaming the artist's music.

In a concept-centric model, the entertainment format itself is the star. Consumers attend because they want the experience, regardless of who is playing. The artist is, if not indifferent, at least secondary. For example, many music fans report attending festivals religiously no matter the line-up: what they're after is "the festival experience", with its scenography and effervescence.

This distinction isn’t just theoretical; it has deep business implications.

In the first case, concert-goers will attend an event only because of its programming. A Coldplay fan might buy a Candlelight ticket for a Coldplay hommage, but wouldn’t show up for a Joe Hisaishi evening. This essentially forces event organizers to either feature only mainstream artists that they know have the greatest appeal possible (at the show level), or cast a wide and diverse enough net in terms of programming that they can still appeal to everyone in aggregate (across multiple shows). This dependence on top music IP makes them vulnerable when negotiating with third parties for talent (e.g., Cercle) and rights clearance (e.g., Sonorium and Fever).

A concept-centric configuration, on the other hand, gives organizers more freedom to experiment with curation and reduces their reliance on headline artists or major IP, enabling them to build loyalty around the format itself rather than the programming. Essentially, the stronger the concept’s own brand equity, the less reliant the company is on any single artist's name to draw in crowds.

Of course, it's not all black and white. Some concert-goers (or, I suspect, most of them) may really enjoy a concept but still only be willing to shell out if they're interested in the programming. Others may love an artist but have no interest in consuming their work in a certain form.

As discussed, even the most exciting concept is also competing for attention against a myriad other cultural options. Sonorium's success, for instance, hinges on its ability to convince people that slow, hi-fi listening is an entirely different (and better) experience than shuffling through a Spotify playlist of the same artist from the comfort of their homes. In that regard, a flipside of its approachability in both price and business model is that consumers may feel like the overall concept lacks exceptionality. To address those concerns, the company would need to highlight the things that make it truly destination-worthy, namely, spatial audio — although that too is now increasingly available at home — and the artist's presence.

Ultimately, Sonorium, Cercle, and Fever can’t just declare what matters more to audiences. But the more they can convince consumers to buy into their unique concepts — not just the music —, the easier it will become to build repeat audiences and ultimately control their own destinies.

Cultural touchpoints

Sonorium, Cercle, and Fever are building exciting businesses around unique concepts. Each in its own way, they are embracing music’s experiential shift and delighting fans with smaller, more exclusive gatherings where music feels part of a comprehensive creative vision.

Importantly, these companies are not merely cannibalizing existing concert formats but indeed unlocking new layers of consumer demand. With its upcoming venue, Sonorium is not taking business away from live stages but elevating the otherwise isolated state of recorded music listening. By taking electronic music out of the club and into cultural heritage sites, Cercle exposed it to crowds who might have never listened to it, let alone danced to it. As for Fever, considering Candlelight’s overall mainstream programming, it is not so much poaching patrons away from traditional orchestras as it is introducing classical culture to new audiences. By tapping new consumer behaviors, they are expanding the cultural and economic possibilities of the industry itself.

Sizing this opportunity borders on guesswork, but there are clear parallels. In tech, history shows that value tends to migrate to whoever operates closest to the end user — at the infamous “interface layer.” For their part, by designing and orchestrating where and how listeners experience music, Sonorium, Cercle, and Fever own a highly valuable cultural touchpoint.

Though being French admittedly makes me partial to Cercle and Sonorium, Fever seems the best positioned to thrive. Six years in, Candlelight continues to grow rapidly and open new territories, paving the way for more Originals, music-related or not. Today, Candlelight’s weekly pulse on what sells in 150 cities (and counting) gives Fever a living map of global taste. As labels and promoters scramble to derisk touring, they might need Fever’s global, asset-light, data-driven network more than it needs them.

Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please consider giving it a like and take a minute to share it with others. It really helps.

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Thanks to Jimmy for reviewing a draft of this piece.

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I’m excited to share a piece I co-wrote with my friend Jimmy Stone, who runs a research, consulting, and investment firm called Alderbrook. You might know Jimmy as the writer of Leveling Up, Alderbrook’s authoritative newsletter, where he shares often data-packed insights on music and technology. Jimmy and I share the same love for music and the business around it and had been discussing writing something together for a while. I’m glad we got to finally do it!

Our analysis was informed by data provided by Alderbrook friends Luminate, a leading analytics platform revealing the most important trends across film, television, and music.

Today, we’re unpacking the origin story, strategy, and ambitions of Pophouse, a global entertainment and music investment firm that is taking a unique approach to the music catalog investment game.

After starting its life as a real estate and branding business, the Pophouse team and its backers made a huge financial bet (and appear to have been proven right) on their ground-breaking ABBA Voyage show. Just recently, the company made another splash, announcing it had closed a $1.3 billion music rights investment fund.

We wanted to better understand why and how this team did it. In the process, we learned a lot about where the music catalog space may be heading.

“We don’t buy catalogs to put them on a shelf and let them grow slowly … is there a brand that is not utilized or being exposed for a generation to discover?”

Pophouse CEO Per Sundin

In 1800s America, hundreds of thousands of people traveled West into unexplored territory looking for a new life. These pioneers embarked on an uncertain future and embraced risk to maximize their potential opportunities.

These days a few entrepreneurs from Sweden are carving out a new trail in the catalog investment space. Unlike many music intellectual property (“IP”) investors that seek to insulate themselves from risks, Pophouse Entertainment (“Pophouse”) is embracing innovative ideas to bring older artists’ music to new generations of fans. Along these lines, Pophouse is well known, in music circles at least, for its groundbreaking ABBA Voyage show, which has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue over the past three years. More recently, in March 2025, Pophouse announced that it had closed a $1.3 billion fund to purchase music IP. But its plans appear somewhat different from the typical music rights fund.

Today, Jimmy and I are going to uncover most of what we could find on the company’s backstory, strategy, growth, risks, and future.

• Meet Pophouse

• What Is Pophouse’s Vision?

• How is Pophouse Currently Faring?

• Looking Ahead for Pophouse

It’s our pleasure to go deep with you on Pophouse!

Meet Pophouse

Pophouse is a global entertainment and music investment firm that acquires select music properties and develops them across multiple mediums and formats, with a focus on location-based and interactive entertainment.

Based in Sweden with offices in London, the company was co-founded in 2014 by Björn Ulvaeus, one of the four members of legendary Swedish pop music band ABBA, and Conni Jonsson, the founder of private equity giant EQT. Today, it’s led by CEO Per Sundin, a music industry veteran who earned his stripes at Sony Music Nordic and Universal Music, where he was instrumental to Spotify’s first deal with a label, and chaired by Lennart Blecher, EQT’s Head of Real Assets.

Pophouse’s activities consist of two main segments. On the one hand are productions, a growing range of location-based and often technology-enhanced entertainment experiences. These include:

• ABBA The Museum, an interactive museum in Stockholm celebrating the legacy of ABBA

• Mamma Mia! The Party, an immersive theatrical dining experience with productions currently ongoing in London, Stockholm, and Rotterdam

• ABBA Voyage, a virtual concert residency in the purpose-built ABBA Arena, and developed in collaboration with all four ABBA members

• Avicii Experience, an interactive museum in Stockholm dedicated to the life and work of the late Tim “Avicii” Bergling

• Pippi at the Circus, a now discontinued original circus musical based on Astrid Lindgren’s kids IP that performed in Stockholm, and

• An upcoming KISS avatar show, planned to launch in Las Vegas in 2027

As of March 2022, Pophouse is also a music investor, focusing on three categories of rights: publishing, master recording, and importantly, artists’ Name, Image, & Likeness, or “NIL”. Today, the company’s portfolio of rights includes (ordered by the time of their acquisition):

• The master recordings and publishing rights for Swedish House Mafia’s back catalog

• A 75% stake in Avicii’s master recordings and publishing

• A majority share of Cyndi Lauper’s master recordings and publishing, and

• The music catalog, brand, and NIL, “including the world- famous face paint designs”, of KISS

As we’ll explain throughout this piece, the production and investing components of Pophouse’s activities are not just complementary; they are indissociable. The team’s entrepreneurial savvy, as well as their branding skill and success, has convinced artists or their estates to entrust the company with their lives’ work. As Per Sundin put it in an interview, “We have a different approach to pursuing music rights deals than traditional investors. [...] There’s a parallel in private equity, when acquiring companies from founders — understanding the founder’s perspective significantly facilitates the transition.” Tellingly, while only the KISS acquisition included brand and NIL rights, the announcements for the three other deals all specified that Pophouse would be collaborating with the artists or estates on creative initiatives through dedicated joint ventures.

The Pophouse that ABBA built

It’s worth going back to Pophouse’s origins, because the initial business plan did not focus on acquiring music rights. Originally, the Pophouse project appears to have come together over a music-related… real estate investment.

In 2014, Pophouse co-founders Björn Ulvaeus and Conni Jonsson co-acquired the property that housed ABBA The Museum and the Swedish Music Hall of Fame, alongside professional hockey player Peller Lindberg. The announcement for the deal modestly stated that the goal was “to further develop the vision of a House of Music in Stockholm.” Whether the team was just playing its cards close to its chest or the vision evolved over time, it’s fair to say that Pophouse has turned into something far more ambitious.

Pophouse’s origins were very much built around ABBA. ABBA The Museum and the dine-and-dance Mamma Mia! The Party aimed to refresh the ABBA brand for fans old and new. Throughout the years, Ulvaeus has remained involved not just as a business person but also creatively, lending his name and credibility to every one of the firm’s initiatives. He was one of the originators, and is still an executive producer, of Mamma Mia! The Party; the announcement for the 2016 opening of the Stockholm production read: “Björn Ulvaeus Invites You To Mamma Mia! The Party”. The Pippi at the Circus adaptation was another personal project of his — though ABBA colleague Benny Andersson was also involved. Only with the November 2021 opening of Space, a “gaming and digital culture hub” in Stockholm, did the company begin to diversify outside this core IP.

From ABBA Voyage To $1B+ Music IP Fund

Pophouse’s development of the ABBA brand culminated in the creation of ABBA Voyage – a virtual concert residency that performs out of the ABBA Arena, a purpose-built, 3,000-seat venue located in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. If you’re unfamiliar with ABBA Voyage, we recommend watching these two Youtube videos. One shows a short clip of the show and fans’ reactions to it. The other is a behind the scenes look at some of the technology, thought, and people that make the show happen.

The show blends live music with high-tech immersive visuals, chief among which the digital avatars, or “ABBA-tars”, created in the image of the 1979 selves of the band’s four members — Ulvaeus, Andersson, and their female counterparts Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog. Over the course of 90 minutes, the four avatars perform a fixed “setlist of ABBA’s biggest, most popular hits – each handpicked with great care by the band.” The show premiered in May 2022 and has been running uninterrupted ever since.

One lesser-known but interesting bit of trivia about ABBA Voyage: it reportedly wasn’t always meant to be a residency. When NME reported in 2017 that ABBA was “set to return to the stage in 2019” in digital form, the article mentioned “a ‘virtual’ ABBA tour”. Technical issues, then the COVID-19 pandemic, put these plans, and the release of new music, on hold. By September 2021, the plan had seemingly changed, with the media first mentioning London’s ABBA Arena, still in the works at the time. In the process, the two new tracks that had been teased early on had also grown into a full album: Voyage, the band’s ninth and final studio album. Although one article suggested that “the arena can be broken down and transported to venues across the world”, no further tour locations have been announced so far.

As you may have guessed from the above description, ABBA Voyage was a herculean undertaking. The show took ~6 years to develop, starting in 2016 and premiering May 27th, 2022. It was developed and produced by entertainment professionals with decades of experience working with some of the biggest artists, cultural institutions, and IP. Outside help was involved, too. The band’s physical costumes were made in collaboration with Dolce & Gabbana, while the motion capture and avatar creation process were done by an army of 140 animators from Industrial Light & Magic (“ILM”), the Lucasfilm-owned visual effects pioneer.

Then, there was the arena itself, a venue equipped with state-of-the-art light, sound, and screen tech, which had to be rushed into existence once plans of a tour definitely fell out. To add even more hurdles, development was postponed temporarily by COVID. In a recent interview on the ILM podcast, one team member joked, “Someone should have said you need to stop [the project]. You just need to stop.” In the end, ABBA Voyage cost an eye-watering ~£140 million (~$188 million), one of the most expensive live music experiences in history!

As we’ll discuss in more detail shortly, it seems to all have been worth it in the end. Earlier this month, Pophouse’s Per Sundin revealed that fans “[had] purchased more than 3.3 million tickets to over 1,000 ABBA Voyage shows.” With the momentum of ABBA Voyage, Pophouse has seemingly set its sights even higher.

In March 2025, fourteen years after its inception and roughly three years after the launch of ABBA Voyage, Pophouse revealed it had successfully raised over €1 billion ($1.3 billion) for its debut fund, with an additional €200 million in follow-on capital via dedicated co-investment vehicles, bringing its total funding to over €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion). In its announcement for the deal, Pophouse described it as “one of the largest first-time private equity funds raised in Europe in the last decade”.

Although this achievement may appear obvious in hindsight, it’s anything but. Bloomberg reported that Pophouse had started its fundraising process in March 2022, months before ABBA Voyage had even premiered and certainly years before it could be deemed a blockbuster success. In other words, the show back then was “all cost, no revenue” — certainly not the selling point it is now. Of course, discussions must have gone well over time, as reality, and revenue, continued to build.

From Pophouse’s genesis to its recent fundraise, it’s been quite the ride! The below graphic compiles some of Pophouse’s key milestones over the past decade.

What Is Pophouse’s Vision?

With all the above context, let’s hit on the vision that Pophouse has for its future. In interviews, Pophouse’s CEO Per Sundin has made no secret of his plans to replicate the ABBA playbook when making new catalog investments for its fund. From the company’s website:

After investing in artists’ rights, Pophouse aims to implement a “value-add strategy” or what Pophouse co-founder Conni Jonsson describes as the “ABBA toolbox”. This consists of artist-focused experiences to reinvigorate an artist’s brand and hopefully boost their back catalog royalties. We would bucket the themes underpinning this strategy into six categories that attempt to capture the future Pophouse is building towards.

1) IP Expansion: This involves expanding an artist’s music and brand into new formats, such as interactive museums, dining experiences, biopics, avatar concerts, and more. By doing this, the goal is to expand that artist’s audience and reach. In interviews, Per Sundin has highlighted his admiration for what Disney has done with legacy IP like Marvel and Star Wars. Similarly, Sundin has pointed out how the Queen-based Bohemian Rhapsody movie led to a massive increase in demand for the band’s music. As pictured below, this is confirmed by Luminate data, which shows that Queen’s US weekly on-demand audio streams saw a ~400% spike following the release.

In short, Pophouse’s strategy is acutely focused on the need to not just engage existing fans, but also to seek out and onboard new ones. For example, ABBA Voyage offers 16-25 year olds tickets for the Dance Floor area, which is described as “perfect to meet up with friends and dance the night away.” Given Pophouse’s focus on iconic (i.e., older) catalogs, finding these kinds of opportunities will be crucial.

2) Narrative Due Diligence: When exploring potential catalog acquisitions, music rights investors will typically run thorough financial and legal due diligence processes. They will consider everything from streaming consumption to the geographic distribution of an artist’s audience. Numbers like these help paint a picture of the upside that might be unlocked through more active administration. Meanwhile, Pophouse’s focus on NIL rights calls for different, more culturally savvy insight, something Sundin has defined in interviews as “brand and narrative due diligence — understanding the music, the catalog, and the lyrics of the songwriter. Is there a story about the artist? Could there be a documentary, a biopic, a TV series, or a musical?” This research might end up informing not just the medium but also the format and content of a product. It can also provide a blueprint for long-term franchise development. In the same way that the plot of Mamma Mia! was shaped by ABBA’s songs, it gave the dine & dance show Mamma Mia! The Party its Greek theme. Digging deep into an artist’s lore can surface myriads of throughlines or Easter eggs that are sure to excite the most loyal and perceptive of fans. As it happens, Pophouse makes good use of their input. Here’s Sundin again:

“With KISS, there are fans that have been fans for 50 years. We did deep research and collected 10 people into a superfan panel and invited them to Vegas [in mid-March]. In workshops, we asked them what they would expect, what they liked and didn’t like because we respect them. That doesn’t mean we will do everything they say. We will adapt their feedback for the next 50 years.”

By engaging with superfans early on, Pophouse is not only collecting valuable feedback, but also tapping into the best and most influential ambassadors for whenever its next offering is ready to launch.

3) NIL Rights: Music IP investors that deploy an active management strategy typically look to unlock upside via improved administration, which involves activities like renegotiating administration agreements and enhancing monitoring capabilities. Investors may also pursue synchronization opportunities or organize workshops to let artists give older musical works new cultural relevance. Pophouse will likely follow the same playbook as it delivers its promise to investors. What sets the company apart from many of its peers is its interest in Name, Image, and Likeness rights. Whereas music IP investors traditionally focus on masters rights, publishing rights, or a combination of both, Pophouse’s more diversified range of rights enables it to create value off an artist’s name in ways that other music investors can’t.

4) Concentrated Bets: Another one of Pophouse’s differentiators is its concentrated approach to rights acquisitions. Per Sundin has said in interviews that Pophouse plans to acquire eight to ten catalogs in its fund. As mentioned, in April 2025, it was also reported that Pophouse had “already deployed 30% of its fund through four deals with artists such as KISS, Cyndi Lauper, and Swedish electronic dance music icons Avicii and Swedish House Mafia.”

There are a few observations to make from this. First, this is a lower number of deals than what we’ve seen from any similarly-sized music IP fund. Second, the remaining 4 to 6 deals will likely be significant ones. If we assume that Pophouse will add leverage at a 30% to 50% loan-to-value ratio to its total $1.3 billion of equity commitments, that’s $1.9 to $2.6 billion of total buying capacity.

With $900 million of equity left — the remaining 70% of its funding round — and depending on the amount of borrowing capacity and the number of future deals pursued, we estimate that the team likely has an average of $200 million to $450 million to spend on each individual deal. For context, below is a list of a few recent catalog sales in that price range. While only the Beach Boys sale included the sort of brand rights that Pophouse is after, it’s clear that a $200+ million check size could go a long way, and enable the team to court superstar artists.

5) Multidisciplinary Team Experience: The varied nature of Pophouse’s strategy requires the company to draw talent from outside of just music. ABBA Voyage is a prime example of this. From real estate and construction (e.g., the specifically-built ABBA Arena) to technology (e.g., motion capture, immersive light and sound systems) to consumer products (e.g., merch), this single experience took the combined effort of hundreds of people across dozens of trades.

6) Experimenting With Technology: Like the rest of the industry, music rights investors have the difficult task of monitoring technological change and understanding the ways it might impact their portfolios’ for better or worse. Pophouse appears aptly suited for the task. As mentioned, Ulvaeus himself has extensive experience with technology as both a startup investor and the president of CISAC, where he deals with disruption on a daily basis. Pophouse’s relationship with EQT, an experienced investor, also brings a direct connection to the technology world. This know-how is manifest in the type of experiences that Pophouse has developed so far. The Avicii Experience includes a “VR karaoke” and a wrap-around DJ booth meant to mimic the live experience from the artist’s perspective. Of course, no project so far embodies that trait better than ABBA Voyage, with its high-tech screen and light show. Embracing technology is especially key to engaging with younger fans. In that respect, the bar may be higher for Pophouse than for any of its peers. Indeed, other music rights investors only have to bring their music to wherever “the kids” are going online, whether that’s social platforms or gaming. Put differently, theirs is a distribution problem. On the other hand, Pophouse’s success rests on its ability to draw fans to its physical locations — a much bigger ask for digital-first generations.

In more ways than one, Pophouse is blazing a trail for how music catalog investors test the limits of what’s possible for older catalogs. The key question is: “Can Pophouse deliver on its plans?” While this will take years to answer, we can look at how things are going so far.

How is Pophouse Currently Faring?

Pophouse’s plans for the future look exciting. But to ground this analysis, let’s review how the company is performing by analyzing the performance of some key aspects of its strategy, namely:

1. Projects in the “ABBA Toolbox”

2. ABBA’s back catalog

3. Other parts of Pophouse’s ecosystem

#1: Performance of Pophouse’s “ABBA Toolbox” Strategy

As mentioned above, Pophouse has worked on several projects with ABBA to keep their brand and music alive for existing and new generations of fans. Among the various “tools” that Pophouse has developed for ABBA, ABBA Voyage is its most ambitious, expensive, and financially successful bet so far.

Despite various challenges, the show has been a success from a cultural and financial perspective. Reviews have been very favorable. The show has played 7 times per week for the past three-plus years to, on average, a nearly sold-out audience. Here’s one ABBA fan’s reaction:

“There is an emotional connection between the audience and the screen…It’s such an immersive experience. Here’s your favourite band, playing your favourite songs and you’re in the room dancing like no one’s watching. I’ve been to so many gigs in my life and I can’t describe any other that made me feel like this.”

Meanwhile, the financial results have been impressive for a novel concert experience from a band who hasn’t performed live in ~40 years. According to Pophouse CEO Per Sundin, ABBA Voyage needed 3 million people to buy tickets for the show to break even. As of May 2025, over 3.3 million people have reportedly bought tickets, meaning the show has broken even in just under three years.

Aniara Limited, the entity responsible for managing ABBA Voyage and ABBA Arena, has publicly reported financial results through 2023. However, we had some trouble figuring out why the company’s cost of sales were so high in the financial statements, we take our analysis of Aniara’s profit with a grain of salt!

Regardless, the key drivers of ABBA Voyage’s financial results to date include:

• ABBA Voyage averaged more than one show per day through 2023.

• Almost every show was sold out (98%+ utilized per show) through 2023.

• The average revenue per ticket sold actually grew in 2023 to £92.50 (~$124).

• The project generated ~98% of its revenue from the show in 2023, with ~2% from film rights and stage rights.

• The reported breakeven analysis suggests that the show’s profit margin is ~50%. (Again though, the financials are somewhat confusing relative to management’s commentary.)

• Finally, ABBA Voyage has reportedly made a significant economic impact on London’s economy, generating £1.4 billion in related sales between 2022 and 2024.

With the show reaching 3.3 million visitors as of May 2025, our math suggests that the above trends were likely similar in 2024 and early 2025. And given that number of paying attendees multiplied by an average revenue per ticket of ~£90, we estimate that ABBA Voyage has generated roughly £300 million (~$400 million) to date!

It is worth noting how successful ABBA Voyage has been relative to other artist residencies and concert tours. For context, Aniara’s financial results suggest that ABBA Voyage has already outperformed every other concert residency in history 🤯. One of the primary drivers for this is ABBA Voyage’s virtual artists enabling significantly more shows compared to other residencies over the course of a year. Along these lines, ABBA Voyage’s revenue per show is well below other top concert residencies.

Meanwhile, ABBA Voyage ranks just outside the top 20 highest grossing concert tours of all-time.

From my perspective, these comparisons highlight how Pophouse and the project’s other investors made a gutsy bet. In order to recoup their investment, they needed to believe that ABBA Voyage would be one of the top selling concert experiences of all-time. The finance nerd in me is curious to know how this investor group structured their ~£140 million investment in ABBA Voyage. Was it all equity? Were they able to borrow a portion of the amount secured against assets? (We aren’t real estate experts but ABBA Arena is likely a valuable asset that can be used as collateral for a loan. Aniara’s financials suggest ~£40 million was owed to “other creditors” in 2022). Regardless, in sports terms, Pophouse stepped up to the plate, called their home run shot, and then hit the ball out of the ballpark.

Given all of the above context, it is fair to ask if Pophouse or someone else can reproduce the financial success of ABBA Voyage with other artists. One thing that will hopefully help is lowering the cost to develop a similar-type of avatar show. For example, we estimate that the time to breakeven for a comparable project can be reduced by ~1 year for each £50 million reduction in development costs.

Another potential mitigant for the large development cost could be a public-private partnership, where Pophouse works with a local government to finance an experience in hopes of replicating ABBA Voyage’s positive economic impact in London.

Either way, Pophouse has blown through ABBA Voyage’s breakeven goal and is attracting other successful artists who want to apply the “ABBA toolbox” to their brands and music catalogs. For instance, as mentioned earlier, Pophouse recently acquired the band KISS’s music catalog and NIL rights for $300 million.

As part of the acquisition announcement, Pophouse teased plans for a KISS biopic, experience, and avatar show. Since the novelty of an avatar concert experience can’t go on forever, longevity will likely be determined by tapping into aspects of a given artist’s connection with their unique fanbase. Along these lines, it will be interesting to see what learnings from ABBA Voyage are incorporated into the KISS avatar show, as well as how Pophouse adapts the experience to a different type of audience.

#2: Performance of ABBA’s Catalog

As previously mentioned, a key strategic rationale for producing groundbreaking experiences, like ABBA Voyage, is to increase the value of an artist’s music catalog and associated IP. It’s not just about the production being innovative and profitable on its own. From a financial standpoint, it’s arguably more valuable to reengage existing fans and introduce the music to new generations of fans.

To that end, it’s worth noting that Pophouse developed its “ABBA Toolbox” without owning the band’s music and NIL rights. Based on our research, these rights appear to be owned by Universal Music Group (“UMG”) and ABBA’s band members. That said, there is still overlap between ABBA’s rightsholders and ABBA Voyage. For example, as mentioned above, Pophouse co-founder Bjorn Ulvaeus is a member of ABBA. Meanwhile, UMG invested in ABBA Voyage.

Regardless, this is a slightly different approach than Pophouse’s new music IP fund — discussed in the next section — which will buy music and NIL rights and then seek to develop thoughtful productions related to the acquired music and artist IP. It seems like Pophouse wanted to build out its platform and operational capabilities before raising an investment fund. Driving successful outcomes first should help Pophouse win future catalog deals and enable the team to better underwrite risk. It’s also a powerful marketing tool for raising capital to be able to show to potential limited partners that the Pophouse platform has the capabilities to drive value.

The data suggests that Pophouse’s strategy has worked extremely well for ABBA’s music rightsholders. According to Luminate data, ABBA’s catalog has seen its global weekly on-demand audio streams increase ~3x from May 2020 to May 2025! In other words, ABBA Voyage’s success appears to have produced a positive halo effect for ABBA’s music catalog.

Whereas many artist events — like a new album release, biopic (e.g., Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody discussed above), or high-profile synchronization placement — will create a shark fin shape in the consumption data (i.e., consumption spikes and then gradually or quickly declines before hopefully leveling off at a higher baseline), ABBA Voyage’s ongoing run appears to be contributing to the band’s catalog experiencing sustained growth over the past three years.

For context, let’s look at two other legacy catalogs: The Beach Boys, and KISS.

The Beach Boys music and NIL rights were acquired by music IP investor Iconic Artists Group in 2021. According to Luminate data, the catalog has seen short-term spikes in consumption during specific events over the past 5 years. However, the catalog’s baseline growth has only increased modestly.

Conversely, Pophouse’s recently acquired KISS catalog has grown consistently over the same time period — albeit not as fast as ABBA’s catalog. It’s worth noting that KISS was pursuing several legs of their final world tour. Pophouse will presumably look to continue this strong momentum with the eventual release of the KISS avatar concert.

Simply put, Pophouse will seek to energize legacy catalogs that it acquires in a similar fashion to what it’s done with ABBA.

#3: Other Parts of Pophouse’s Ecosystem

As discussed above, Pophouse’s ecosystem extends beyond projects with ABBA. While details about these projects are scant, we can get a rough idea through publicly available sources. From our perspective, Pophouse’s other platform projects can be broken down into three buckets:

1) Music Catalog Investments – Pophouse’s catalog investment activity appears to be going very well. As discussed above, in March 2025, the company announced it had closed a $1.3 billion music rights fund, and it has already deployed 30% of the fund.

2) Music-Related Productions – Pophouse’s music-related productions seem to have done reasonably well, although at a much smaller scale than its ABBA Voyage project. Pophouse worked with electronic artist Avicii’s estate to launch an interactive tribute museum located in Stockholm in February 2022. The Avicii Experience museum has received good reviews, with fans of the artist calling it “nothing short of amazing”. On the other hand, Pippi at the Circus received some favorable reviews but closed in 2023.

3) Other Investments — Pophouse has also made some real estate and venture investments, which appear to have performed less favorably. Pophouse created a multi-purpose venue in Stockholm called Space. Covering 5,000 square meters of customized entertainment experiences across three levels, it included a video gaming center, a multi-purpose arena, content creation studios, restaurants, and cafes. According to Google and Linkedin, the venue permanently closed in 2024. Pophouse has also made several early-stage investments in Sweden-based Snafu, an AI-enabled record label and A&R tool. It is difficult to know how well this particular investment is performing because the company is private. That said, Linkedin shows the company’s headcount has declined ~33% over the past two years, suggesting that growth may not have materialized as envisioned.

In summary, Pophouse’s investment results appear a bit more mixed than its ABBA Voyage experience. That’s not too surprising, as many of Pophouse’s bets have been at an earlier stage, which typically means higher risk. Regardless, investors felt good enough about the Pophouse team’s track record to support its inaugural music rights fund.

Looking Ahead for Pophouse

Given what we now know, let’s consider three questions about Pophouse’s future:

• What are the unique benefits of Pophouse’s strategic approach going forward?

• What risks does Pophouse face?

• What characteristics will Pophouse look for in future catalog investments?

What are the benefits of Pophouse’s strategic approach?

One of the things that makes the catalog investment game difficult for investors is that most don’t have very deep moats. What are competitive moats? In his book 7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer defines them as “those barriers that protect your business’ margins from the erosive forces of competition.” Dumbing this down, a deep moat means it’s harder and less likely that competitors will show up and take your profit.

Another key aspect of moats is that a business is best positioned to create the foundations of a long-term sustainable moat while there is greater uncertainty. As soon as product market fit is obvious and a business is having success, competitors are much more likely to copy that insight. Packy McCormick summarizes it well: “The more obvious your idea is and the easier it is to build, the faster you need to dig moats. Conversely, the less obvious your idea is and the harder it is to build, the longer you have to dig moats.”

Let’s apply these concepts to music catalog investing. If we were to rewind back to 10 years ago, the consensus view on Wall Street was that music IP was a “risky asset class”. That perspective made a good deal of sense at the time. The recorded music industry had been shrinking for ~15 years after piracy gutted industry revenues. In the early- to mid-2010s, there were a small number of music IP investors as well as the traditional labels and publishers to buy music catalogs.

Then Spotify and music streaming came along and changed everything. Industry revenues surged. The consensus view of music IP shifted to a consistent, non-cyclical asset. Earlier entrants — like Primary Wave and Round Hill Music — were able to realize strong returns. As a result, more funds have raised capital to enter the space. Bigger funds have been raised. Simply put, nowadays, there is hardly any uncertainty about music IP as an “asset class”.

This trend has been a very good thing for artists and songwriters looking to sell some or all of their music catalog. The chart below from Shot Tower Capital shows how much multiples have increased over the past 15 years. With prices rising, investor return expectations have been declining in many cases. And there is a smaller margin of error when making new investments. In the current environment, moats are more important than ever for music IP investors trying to differentiate and generate solid returns.

We’d categorize the ways most music IP investors look to differentiate into 1) active management approach; 2) cost of capital; 3) investment size; 4) right type focus; 5) genre focus; 6) geographic focus; and 7) catalog age focus. Of these seven buckets, we’d argue that number 1 — active management approach — is the only one capable of creating a deep moat. This is because we believe that operational capability is much harder to replicate than the other six, particularly number 2 (cost of capital).

And this is one of the primary reasons that Pophouse’s strategy is exciting. The company appears to be digging a pretty deep moat right now via its “ABBA Toolbox”. Yes, unlike many other music IP investors, Pophouse wants to acquire artist’s NIL rights in addition to their recorded music and publishing rights. But it’s the other artist-related productions, especially the avatar concerts, that will be difficult for competitors to copy. Again, ABBA Voyage took 5+ years to complete, required some of the best branding and visual effects talent in the world, and cost $185+ million. Maybe it will be easier for competitors to fast follow Pophouse, but these types of productions still don’t feel like easy things to reproduce. The avatar concerts and other catalog-related productions have other strategic benefits, including:

• Attracting other top artists — like KISS and Cyndi Lauper — who want to see their legacies treated in a similarly unique fashion;

• Attracting investors who want to participate in Pophouse’s differentiated strategy; and

• Enabling Pophouse to pay more for investments given their ability to increase catalog cash flows in the future.

Pophouse CEO Per Sundin has said that an avatar concert will not be a fit for every one of its catalog acquisitions. Coming up with creative productions that aren’t as technically difficult and expensive makes sense on several levels. We expect that Pophouse will continue experimenting with innovative artist projects, some of which will focus on quicker wins.

Still, for the strategic reasons outlined above, we’d argue that avatar concerts should be a key lens through which to evaluate potential acquisitions. Our sense is that the music IP investment market is still catching up and on to the multi-faceted success of ABBA Voyage. Now feels like the time for Pophouse to lean in and continue digging an even deeper moat.

What risks does Pophouse face?

To be clear, the long-term success of Pophouse’s strategy is still uncertain. It’s unclear if they can produce similarly impressive results with future avatar concerts as ABBA Voyage. Similarly, it’s not guaranteed that they will deliver their fund investors attractive returns. Some of the key risks facing Pophouse’s music catalog fund include:

• IP Management Risk: In theory, rights holders have every incentive to make their properties as ubiquitous as possible. After all, more visibility means more opportunities for engagement and monetization. But in reality, they have the difficult task to strike a balance between proliferation and scarcity. If Pophouse hopes to not only preserve but grow the value of its own IP, it will need to tread carefully. The viability of ABBA Voyage for example rests in large part on the show’s scarcity, which ensures that demand is “sufficiently underserved”. If Pophouse could debut an exact copy somewhere else overnight — an unlikely event considering the show’s special requirements — it’s unclear if current consumer demand would be enough to sustain multiple venues operating at once. Instead, a second venue may end up cannibalizing the first one, leading to lackluster attendance, and revenue, at both.

• Team Risk: Pophouse has been able to attract and partner with top technical, investment, and creative talent. However, will the company be able to retain its existing employees and partners as well as attract new ones that are necessary to continue scaling its platform?

• Diversification Risk. Pophouse wants to buy 8-10 catalogs in its fund. This means it intends to build a more concentrated investment portfolio relative to other music catalog funds. As a result, there is a smaller margin of error if it miscalculates the future of any one catalog in its portfolio.

• Underwriting Risk. This is related to the previous point. Pophouse’s work with ABBA appears to have been a win/win. However, will this success continue, especially in a scenario where a Pophouse production doesn’t live up to expectations or broader market growth slows?

• Competitor Risk. There are a couple other music IP investors (e.g., Primary Wave, Iconic Artists Group) that have focused on acquiring rights — including NIL rights — from legacy music artists. It remains to be seen if any of Pophouse’s competitors seek to enter the virtual concert residency space.

• Technology Risk. According to Pophouse, it will take 3-5 years to launch an ABBA Voyage type experience for another artist. Could a technological advancement enable a shorter lead time for competitors? Will new technology emerge that produces a better experience than what Pophouse currently uses?

In summary, we think Pophouse is uniquely positioned in the catalog investment market. Of course, their future success isn’t guaranteed and there are several hurdles that must be overcome in order to realize the team’s vision.

What will Pophouse look for in future catalog investments?

Before wrapping up, we thought it would be fun to speculate on catalogs that may be prime acquisition candidates for Pophouse. To do so, we developed the below framework of 7 criteria to guide our search and applied it to ABBA, based on our research for this article. Note that some of Pophouse’s catalogs (e.g., Swedish House Mafia) don’t check every criteria on our list, but we’d still expect catalogs, particularly those that have avatar concerts, to check most of them.

With the above framework in mind (and ignoring any artists’ interest in actually selling their rights in the near future), we made a speculative Pophouse acquisition list. Also, once we did a tiny bit of digging, we realized that it’s harder than you might think to find successful legacy artists, who haven’t already sold a portion of their music rights in the past 5-10 years. Anyway, our top 11 list includes, in no particular order: Madonna, Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty, Jimmy Buffett, Guns N’ Roses, Van Halen, The Allman Brothers Band, George Michael / Wham!, Black Eyed Peas, James Brown (in partnership with Primary Wave because we selfishly want to see this avatar concert happen 🤞), and The Beatles (of course).

Which ones on our list did we get wrong and which ones would you add? Drop us a note!

Closing Thoughts

What Pophouse wants to build is ambitious and will require blazing a new trail. Pophouse has certainly had one mega success with ABBA Voyage, a project that went a long way in enabling the firm to raise a significant music IP fund.

As we’ve discussed, developing large-scale innovative projects like ABBA Voyage requires a great deal of effort and a healthy dose of luck. So the jury remains out on if Pophouse’s approach can drive a similar degree of value creation again and again.

Regardless, in a success case, the ultimate goal — to combine music rights with branding and creative opportunities to maximize artistic and financial potential — can be a win/win/win for artists, fans, and investors.

In summary then, to ultimately understand Pophouse’s impact, we’ll have to wait and see how things evolve over the next several years. That said, we wouldn’t be surprised if Pophouse continues to rewrite the rules for an artist’s longevity. Eventually, their vision could be adopted by both music catalog investors and the Major labels, looking to expand their proven IP across new experiences to reengage existing fans and to attract new generations. This is particularly important now, as the Majors seek to find new drivers of revenue growth.

The band KISS sums it up well in their new Pophouse avatar concert trailer video: “The future is so exciting. We can live on eternally.”

Pretty wild stuff for what appears to have started as a boring real estate investment!

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Welcome back to another installment of A Playbook for Playful Publishing.

In Part I: The Promises and Trappings of BookTok, I unpacked BookTok’s workings, why the platform might have looked so appealing to publishers when it emerged, and why its ever-growing influence actually threatens the industry’s long-term prospects.

In Part II: On Judging Books (and Publishers) by Their Covers, we explored exactly why we care about a book’s cover so much, what messages it sends and to what purpose, and why its pull has never been stronger.

In Part III: The Playbook, I laid out five interconnected strategies that publishers can explore to generate engagement and revenue and to grow awareness beyond individual IPs and toward their own brands.

This here is Part IV: Monsieur Toussaint Louverture: Publishing as Craft, a deep dive into the work of Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, a small French publisher whose playfulness and attention to detail represent the best of what indie publishing can be.

Enter Monsieur Toussaint Louverture

Monsieur Toussaint Louverture is a French indie publisher of fiction based in Cenon, near Bordeaux. 

It was launched in 2004 as a literary review focused on contemporary fiction by Dominique Bordes and Julien Campredon. At the time, Campredon was a seller for French daily newspaper Le Monde and had been dabbling with novella writing. Bordes was no stranger to books either, having worked successively as a layout artist, an editorial assistant, and a book seller. What he truly wanted, however, was to become a publisher; the journal was, in his own words, his "Trojan horse.”

Today, the company publishes seven to ten books a year. You’ll hardly find more indie than that. For comparison, as of 2022 Hachette Book Group (HBG) published "around 2,100 books a year in the adult segment as well as 500 children's and YA books and 750 audio book titles." Hachette Livre, HBG's parent company, publishes an average of 15,000 books per year.

Size would be enough to make many self-conscious. But Bordes, who has been steering the ship alone since Campredon’s departure in 2012, wears his difference with pride. In interviews, he likes to describe his boutique as “in the margins”, and himself as an outsider. Geographically, first — located in the South-West of France, and with a population of 25,000, Cenon is certainly far removed from the overwhelmingly Parisian milieu that is the French publishing industry. Symbolically, second — Bordes says he’ll always feel a natural kinship toward marginal literature.

Marginal or not, the company’ quest for singularity has materialized in two main ways: bold editorial choices, and beautifully crafted books.

Experimentation as a Rule

At first glance, trying to pinpoint Monsieur Toussaint Louverture can feel misguided. In an industry so dependent on marketable labels, the company seems to refuse simplification. In a marketing blurb from 2012, the company alluded to three main threads: "the forgotten, the unknown, and the unusual." Today, we're told it publishes books "regardless of their themes or genre, focusing only on their respective quality, power, and richness."

The vagueness of this scope may come as a surprise. Unlike the giants that dominate the industry with their all-encompassing catalogs, most indie presses opt to specialize in one genre or another from day one. By niching down, they avoid competing for the same rights as their deep-pocketed peers, and make their offerings easier to market to readers — as I wrote earlier, “The more specific the editorial stance, the easier it should be to come up with a unique aesthetic that reflects it.” Eclecticism, on the other hand, seems to afford optionality only at the cost of editorial and commercial clarity. That Monsieur Toussaint Louverture would take that path nonetheless is worth unpacking.

The decision can, in large part, be traced back to the company’s origins. In its first few years, the company-to-be already displayed what would remain one of its most defining traits: a love of experimentation. Monsieur Toussaint Louverture’s first book, a collection of novellas titled Brûlons tous ces punks pour l’amour des elfes, conveniently came from Campredon. First-time contemporary fiction, a continuation of the company’s beginnings as a journal, lived alongside a few oddities, including the Livre du Chevalier Zifar, an adventure tale written in 14th century Spain.

The first commercial win came in 2011 after years of labor with a new translation of Frederic Excley's A Fan's Notes, which sold 40,000 copies. Success prompted the company to double down, rejuvenating one overlooked American or European author after the other with ambitious new takes. Translations have made upf almost the entirety of its output since at least 2014, a statistic that makes it akin to the small but mighty foreign literature specialists that have been raking in many of the most prestigious awards for the past few years. 

This interest is no coincidence. In the English-speaking literary world, large publishers often reject non-English literature for being hard to market or for requiring translation work in the first place in order to reach global audiences. As a result, those willing to put in the work and translate a book on their own dime can often acquire interesting work for cheap. Meanwhile in France, “foreign literature” also includes… English. This means that publishers have at their disposal an enormous backlist of authors whose work they might be able to dust off and present in a new light with a little marketing magic. Monsieur Toussaint Louverture followed this script to the letter in 2017 when it repackaged Jack Black’s 1926 novel You Can’t Win —  which was already available in France at the time — under not just a new translation but even a new title.

Last but not least came the graphic novels, another category where the company has earned critical and popular acclaim thanks to singular picks. The first volume of Moi ce que j’aime chez les monstres, a translation of Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, earned it its second commercial success (160,000 copies sold to date) as well as a number of industry awards. Other titles, notably a luxury set of Lynd Ward’s six “wordless novels,” have been sold out for months.

A Certain Idea of Literature

How this portfolio came to be is more art than science. Bordes, who says he doesn't like to read in English, rarely reads a book before acquiring the rights for it. Instead, he will look at comments, Amazon reviews — anything that might give him a sense of what a book is about, and who it speaks to. He acquired the rights to Excley's A Fan's Notes on a whim after coming across the author's name serendipitously in the preface to another book. 

This comes in stark contrast with the industry’s state of affairs. On the one hand, many of the largest publishers are unashamedly demand-driven — as I wrote in Part I of this series, “Wherever you look, BookTok — what the community wants, and how to deliver it — is now the single biggest motivation behind the industry’s every move.” On the other hand, indie presses are usually perceived (and sometimes, paint themselves) as governed by sheer taste and intuition, the last bastion willing to take risks to support bold literature irrespective of its commercial prospects. From this view, Bordes’s bottom-up research process certainly stands out.

For all its variety, the catalog also displays some striking commonalities. The first one, length, is hard to miss. Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion is 896-page long; David James Duncan's The Brothers K, 832-page long; Mariam Petrosyan's Дом, в котором... (La Maison dans laquelle in French), 1088-page long. Even its graphic novel picks are on the longer side. Such expansiveness, too, can be explained by Bordes's influence — he has said that big books are "in [his] DNA." At a time when people's attention spans are supposedly getting shorter every year, supporting longer works is notable in and of itself. It's a sign that Monsieur Toussaint Louverture stands for a certain idea of literature, one where both authors and readers give stories the time and space they need to unfold.

But these books have more in common than just their size. Browse through enough of them, and you begin to notice similarities in theme, tone, or form. Misfits and outcasts (J. Robert Lennon's Mailman or Steve Tesich's Karoo). Coming-of-age tales (David James Duncan's The River Why or Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker). Singular prose (Riddley Walker), typography (Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves), and creative workflows (My Favorite Thing Is Monsters). Whether narrative or formal, the same sense of rebellious freedom, something decidedly punk, seems to run from one book to the next. Bordes’s own marginality, in editorial form.

Publishing as Craft

While there is much to say about the company’s curatorial track record, equally significant is its interest in books as objects. On its website, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture proudly presents itself as "a publishing house driven by a passion for literature and an attention to details" and advocates for "a return to the pleasure of beautiful books." Of its collection "Les grands animaux", the company cheekily says it wants the books "beautiful enough that you'll want to steal them, but accessible enough that you won't have to."

These aspirations manifest in a number of ways, from the commission of original illustrations — a line of spending most indie publishers tend to avoid — to the quality of the materials used and the variety of the techniques involved. Dabbling with graphic novels, in particular, meant Monsieur Toussaint Louverture had to hone the sort of skills that may evade less eclectic publishers. For Lynd Ward's "wordless novels," the process combined a specific type of ink (for "deeper, softer blacks"), tinted paper (to soften the contrast with the artworks), and a recto-only layout to honor the artist's original intent and allow for a better reading experience.

Maintaining such high standards is not just a source of pride, it's also a unique selling point. Accordingly, the company seizes every opportunity to showcase its craft and give readers a glimpse into the printing process. The profile page for the Wakonda edition of Kelsey’s Sometimes a Great Notion features a whole section packed with the books’ specs and technical printing terms. Meanwhile, on Facebook and Instagram, virtually every post contains glamourous close-ups of one or several books in various stages of development — some in staged photoshoots, others, literally, hot off the press. In the comments, readers old and new can be found raving about the artifacts, sharing pictures of their growing collections, and impatiently awaiting new releases. If testimonials are to be trusted, it’s not uncommon to see readers switch from ebook to paperback midway because they liked the physical version so much.

On paper, such craftsmanship has only upside: it catches people's eyes both off- and online, travels farther on social media, and offers valuable supporting material for marketing through behind-the-scenes content. But it also comes at a price, one that not every reader might want to pay. To someone who complained on Facebook about the price of a particular pocket-sized book, the team obligingly listed the many factors that had contributed to it. Still, it’s hard to explain away someone’s price sensitivity. Though anecdotal, this instance evidenced the paradox of premium: craftsmanship simultaneously expands a book's "Total Addressable Readership" by appealing to book collectors as well as to actual readers, and limits it by possibly deterring the more budget-minded buyers.

At the end of the day, craftsmanship is a stance and a matter of positioning — nothing to feel sorry about. As hard as Monsieur Toussaint Louverture may try to reconcile desirability with affordability, there is only so much expenses it can squeeze. Today, its website can feature as many as three different editions of the same book, each at a different price point, and it’s the most luxurious ones, admittedly the most limited series, that tend to run out. It might as well lean into it.

But however nice the books may look on the outside, the most striking insight into the company’s vision lies inside them. At the end of each volume is a page that includes specifics such as the name, type, and density of the paper, the name of the font or fonts used, and even the dimensions of the book. Though this sort of minutiae might feel gratuitous, they're presented in a way that makes them an integral part of the work itself, wrapped up in the story and its lore. For Mariam Petrosyan's La Maison dans laquelle, whose story takes place in a larger-than-life orphanage, the publisher points out that, regardless of the book's actual dimensions, "the world it contains is limitless." For Russel Hoban's post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker (Enig Marcheur in French), we're told the paper was "collected from here and there amidst the ruins of the ancient world." The list goes on. One lyrical endnote at a time, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture is proving that even a book’s technical specs have creative value. In the publisher’s eyes, craftsmanship is an extension of literature, and no detail is too small.

Unpacking Blackwater

Having just reached the noble age of 20, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture has plenty of interesting books to show for it. Here, however, I’d like to highlight one in particular: Blackwater.

Blackwater is a Southern Gothic family saga by Michael McDowell, an American novelist and screenwriter known primarily for his work on Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas. It covers several generations of the influential Caskey clan as they make their fortune in the fictional town of Perdido, Alabama during the first half of the 20th century. The series weaves together historical events like the Great Depression and the Second World War, themes of symbolic and physical violence, and a supernatural undertone inspired by folk culture.

Blackwater was first released in the U.S. as a monthly serial by Avon Publications (now part of HarperCollins) between January and June 1983. Today, U.S. rights are managed by Valancourt Books, which last published it in a single volume in 2017. For its part, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture published it in six biweekly volumes between April and June 2022.

It was a breakout success, selling 35,000 copies by May 2022, 120,000 by June, 300,000 by August, 500,000 by November, 800,000 by May 2023, and a million copies by April 2024. These numbers understandably piqued interest from elsewhere in Europe, with indies Neri Pozza and Blackie Books respectively snagging the rights for Italy and Spain, and Doubleday (a Penguin subsidiary) recently acquiring the rights for the UK. By August 2024, over 1,150,000 copies had been sold in France alone, along with 300,000 in Italy and 300,000 in Spain. 

There are three reasons why Blackwater makes for a great case study.

First, Dominique Bordes himself has declared that the series epitomizes his approach to publishing; it's worth understanding why.

Second, Blackwater’s huge commercial success has generated more visibility — more reviews, more interviews, more social posts — than what Monsieur Toussaint Louverture had historically received, and thus, more research material for me to unpack. The fact that other publishers have now entered the fray has only reinforced that fact.

Thirdly, and crucially, Blackwater wasn't a one-off, but the beginning of what is now "La Bibliothèque Michael McDowell" (literally, The Michael McDowell Library), a collection that will see the release of five more of the author's books. Monsieur Toussaint Louverture released Les Aiguilles d'or (Gilded Needles) was published in October last year; Katie debuted in April, and Lune froide sur Babylon (Cold Moon Over Babylon) in October. Two more books are scheduled for release in 2025. Now, there’s every indication that Neri Pozza in Italy and Blackie Books in Spain have similar plans. Given such a packed calendar, I was especially interested in exploring how Blackwater is paving the way for the rest of the collection in terms of both brand guidelines and marketing practices.

Pushing Craft to the Max

It’s fair to say that Blackwater pushed Monsieur Toussaint Louverture's obsession with craft to the max.

As with every other book, the company set out to produce something differentiated and enticing — desirable — that would also honor the spirit of the original work. For Blackwater, Bordes envisioned the covers as playing cards, each book its own unique combination of colors and ornaments yet still part of a coherent set. With its Southern Gothic influences, rich historical backdrop, and multigenerational family intrigue, the series provided ample material for interpretation.

To make the most of it, Bordes turned to Pedro Oyarbide, a Spanish illustrator who had experience designing card decks. One year later, Oyarbide turned over the final identity for the series, a set of six illustrations with Art Deco-inspired adornments, insignia, and symbols referencing the story, places, and characters inside.

At that point, the work was only half finished. Along with the visuals, Bordes also wanted the books to have texture; they needed to not just look good but feel good, too. After the coloring, this required using a combination of relief printing techniques, namely foil stamping, whereby pre-dried inks are transferred to the surface of the paper at high temperatures, and embossing, which gives the paper stock dimensionality by pressing dies into it. Together, the two manifested a level of care rarely seen in books sold at that price range.

It’s hard to overstate how much conviction all these efforts must have taken. For starters, Bordes's decision to have entirely distinct illustrations for each volume, instead of, for example, mere variations in color, not only raised costs but also lengthened time to completion due to the inevitable back-and-forth with the creative. That Oyarbide was allotted an entire year to deliver his work is remarkable in itself.

Looking further along the production line, the book’s elaborate design meant the covers and pages had to be printed separately by two distinct companies, whose respective production timelines then had to be reconciled for the final product to be completed in time. With their foil-stamped details, the covers required a special kind of press and “at least 13 or 14 days” of patient iteration to make sure the output was as good as it should be.

For such logistics to make economical sense, a certain threshold thus needed to be met in terms of volume. Monsieur Toussaint Louverture aimed for a first run of 100,000 copies, with an estimated breaking point at 48,000 copies sold. Those were lofty goals to say the least. For context, roughly 66% of frontlist books from the top 10 publishers sold less than 1,000 copies over 52 weeks in the U.S., per Kristen McLean, lead industry analyst at NPD BookScan. Taking into account small presses and independently published titles, about 98% (!) of new books sold fewer than 5,000 copies in the “trade bookstore market” that NPD BookScan covers. The bar was especially high for a small publisher and a dead author most readers in France had never heard about.

As if that wasn’t enough, the team would also have to go through all the practicalities again — the special machinery, the manual revisions, the distinct production timelines — in the event that consumer demand would call for reprints. And, as mentioned, it wasn’t long before reprints were, indeed, very much needed. In short, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture was all-in.

Ultimately, all those efforts paid off. Mainstream media put the covers front and center at launch, calling them “gorgeous” and “hypnotizing.” As with previous releases, the sheer length and complexity of the design process became the publisher an opportunity to embark readers on a greater creative journey, with every new development teased on social media with tantalizing close-ups and descriptions. One month after the last volume of the series was released, a short behind-the-scene look at the process and those that had made it possible received praise, with many readers sharing that the cover was what had drawn them to the books in the first place. Yet another confirmation that craft was not a cost, but an investment.

Serious About Serialization

Looks were not the only aspect of publishing that Monsieur Toussaint Louverture ended up disrupting for Blackwater. Equally important was how the team single-handedly brought back the serialization model of old.

Initially, the plan was to publish the whole of Blackwater as a single volume — the “normal” way, and how it was last published by Valancourt in the U.S. That plan was scratched after Bordes learned about the book’s original monthly cadence. In the publisher’s own words, "Sticking to the author's intent felt like a no-brainer." (Interestingly, a more recent interview surfaced another story: in this version, it’s waiting for the translator to deliver one volume after the next that prompted Bordes to think of serialization as a creative device).

Once that choice was made, the matter of periodicity remained. Too little time between two installments, and readers would feel rushed. Too much, and Monsieur Toussaint Louverture would struggle to reengage them. In an era where book serialization was no longer part of people’s cultural habits, the team’s choice of a biweekly cadence instead of the saga’s original monthly one meant it would have an easier time keeping things fresh in readers’ minds. Perhaps secondarily, it also allowed it to make use of the industry’s notable seasonality, with the upcoming summer vacations giving new readers the opportunity and time to take on a saga they had heard of in the months prior.

Like the book’s design, serialization paused its own sets of challenges.

As I explained last week, serialization took off in the early 19th century as an engagement tool for the modern newspaper industry, at a time when circulation was booming thanks to rapid advancements in printing technology and literacy. With books now the default delivery mechanism for fiction, the model has lost most of its relevance and appeal: the industry — its value chain, its incentives — is simply no longer built to accommodate it.

For Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, going with six smaller tomes rather than with a single large one meant more steps in the printing process, possibly hindering economies of scale, as well as more complex logistics and warehousing, which likely meant higher distributor fees. Business-wise, there was also no guarantee that bookstores would stock the series as Monsieur Toussaint Louverture needed them to. Had the first tome underperformed, they would've had no incentive to promote the rest of the series in the following weeks.

In these circumstances, failure was not an option. Not only could the sunk costs of the French translation and the original illustrations only be amortized if the entire series did well, the printing process was likely already in motion in order to stick to the heavily marketed timeline of one tome every two weeks.

Riding the Wave of Success

After the runaway success of Blackwater, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture is no longer just a quirky indie press; it now has a proven bestseller under its belt, and a blueprint for how to capitalize on that momentum. It seems posed to leverage its growing brand recognition and fan engagement to drive continued success. Here, I’ll highlight three avenues that I think will be contributing factors.

“La Bibliothèque Michael McDowell”

Traditionally in the publishing world, each marketing campaign tends to be designed and run in isolation. Not only do publishers universally avoid referencing their competitors' rosters, they also abstain from mentioning similar books from their own back catalogs, even when pointing out such similarities could help get the sales of a new release off the ground. Each book is treated as a product of its own both creatively and commercially, with its own distinct identity, marketing, and business goals.

The one exception to that rule is, of course, when the same author publishes a new book. In that instance, a publisher can safely build off readers' brand awareness to generate anticipation and ultimately sales for "the latest [Insert famous author's name]." Success's compounding effect is undeniable here. The Harlan Cobens and Elena Ferrantes of this world receive premium visibility across out-of-home advertising, earned media, and bookstores, which vastly improves their odds in the marketplace. The longer the streak of success, the more appealing the prospects, the more incentives every stakeholder in the industry — publishers, distributors, booksellers — has to promote an author's next book.

That is the enviable position that Monsieur Toussaint Louverture finds itself in at this time. As mentioned, Blackwater wasn't just a sweeping commercial success, it was also the start of what is now a dedicated collection, “La Bibliothèque Michael McDowell.” It’s hard to say now how serendipitous the initiative truly was: did Monsieur Toussaint Louverture come up with the idea only after seeing the success of Blackwater, or was it all planned from day one? In any case, the saga has laid out a solid foundation on which the company can now base all future marketing efforts.

It’s been making the most of it. Out-of-home advertising for Gilded Needles (Les Aiguilles d'Or) emphasized both the author's name and the richly adorned cover reminiscent of Blackwater. (The illustration for the new book was made by the same artist.) For Blue Moon Over Babylon, the team had the opportunity to name not just Blackwater but also Beetlejuice, piggybacking on the synchronous release of Tim Burton’s movie. This, of course, is a perfect case of eventization, one of the five strategic pillars I recommended publishers embrace. Finally, the same benefits apply online. While doing research for this piece, I was also repeatedly targeted with ads for Gilded Needles on both X and Instagram. Though anecdotal, this alone is proof that the company has been savvy enough to market the book specifically to Blackwater readers, which I don't think is such a common practice despite its obvious potential.

These efforts are also being bolstered externally, as every new McDowell release is now covered across mainstream media. As Monsieur Toussaint Louverture continues to add to the magnum opus of the "Bibliothèque McDowell," brand awareness will only grow, making reengaging readers easier with every new release.

Operationally, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture is also at an advantage in that all the novels in the ongoing McDowell collection came out a long time ago. The texts may still need to be translated, the illustrations designed, the copies printed and the distribution optimized, but the source material is readily available for the team to exploit. In that way, it can take a long-term view and conceive its marketing holistically from the start to develop and maintain consistency across all releases. This kind of visibility is more than most publishers can ever hope for working with more contemporary authors, whose own writing cadence will often force a publisher's marketing to operate in a reactive, rather than proactive, mode.

As for Monsieur Toussaint Louverture’s European counterparts, they can simply replicate the publisher’s proven roll-out strategy in their own markets. Tellingly, Neri Pozza, Blackie Books, and Penguin are all using Oyarbide’s original design, simply translating it to their native languages.

Objects of Desire

In Part III, I pointed to merchandising as an opportunity for publishers to grow and monetize affinity around their IP. Unsurprisingly, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture is one of the few houses to have fully embraced that potential. 

Like others, the publishers started selling merch based on several of its books. For Anne of Green Gables, prints of the covers' original illustrations, along with bookmarks, brooches, and a tote bag. For Blackwater, a "Blackwater Fishing Club" tin mug and a tee-shirt. Ornate cases, packed with exclusive goodies, are also available for readers of both series who would like to put the finishing touch to their sets.

Though limited in range, the collection has been well received. For this first experiment, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture notably bet on IP that, based on book sales and reviews, it knew had an existing fanbase eager to extend the reading experience through whatever token the publisher had to offer. The bookcases, in particular, were the perfect segue. Not only do they acknowledge the growing trend that is shelf staging, they enable the team to apply to merchandising the same craftsmanship it has displayed in the making of the books themselves. As the company continues to grow its catalog and to learn more about the kind of products that speak most to readers, merch may turn increasingly important a revenue stream.

Further down the line, however, the greater opportunity lies in fostering attachment to the umbrella brand, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture itself. As I’ve mentioned, it's a strategy that has been executed to great success outside the publishing world by A24, the disruptive film distributor turned cultural conglomerate. Now, indie presses like Zando are applying the same playbook to books and trying to turn themselves into full-fledged lifestyle brands. With its highly recognizable name, eclectic and singular editorial stance, and direct connection with fans, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture appears uniquely equipped to make the most of this opportunity.

Experiential Everything

Last week, I pointed out the power of experiential storytelling for bringing IP to life. In my view, book publishers should do everything in their power to prolong and heighten readers’ attachment to the stories, places, and characters in their favorite books. And if there’s one rule of immersion, it’s this: Don’t break it. From a book’s cover to its packaging — we’re in the ecommerce era after all — to how and where it’s marketed, every aspect of the experience should be part of a greater narrative and injected with the book’s lore. 

Monsieur Toussaint Louverture understands and applies these principles perfectly. Says Bordes: “A book is not just something physical or literary: it’s an economy, a way of thinking, of speaking, an environment, a Wikipedia page, a website, tweets, repetition, reviews…” Accordingly, along with fully-fledged merch, the company has been using various items to promote its roster to early readers and professionals alike. Its translation of Anne of Green Gables came with a 19th century-like newspaper, the fictional Charlottetown Guardian; Blackwater, with postal cards and a letter from the books’ Osceola Hotel. For Katie, it was a business card selling the services of a “medium extraordinaire.”

Thoughtful items are a book’s dream companions, providing memorable and collectable new touchpoints for engagement. At their best, they’re conversational: an opportunity for readers to picture themselves as not as the targets of a clever marketing stunt, but as the participants in an ongoing multimedia experience.

Following the Vision

In a publishing landscape too often defined by the relentless pursuit of the next big trend, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture offers a refreshing alternative. This small indie publisher has carved out a space for itself not by chasing the whims of the market, but by stubbornly staying true to its founder’s taste and vision.

From its eclectic catalog to its beautifully designed books, the company has shown that passion, innovation, and a willingness to take risks can be the keys to success. Blackwater is a testament to this bold approach. By doubling down on craft and reviving the lost art of serialization, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture has not only found commercial success but has also built a devoted following of readers who are now eager to dive deeper into the worlds it creates.

As the "Bibliothèque Michael McDowell" continues to grow, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture can take on its next challenges from what is undeniably a position of strength. It’s living proof that there are still experiments to be run, and fun to be had, in the world of publishing.

That’s it for Part IV — and this series! I hope you enjoyed the journey.

Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please consider giving it a like and take a minute to share it with others. It really helps.

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Thanks to Jimmy for reviewing a draft of this piece.

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Welcome back to another installment of A Playbook for Playful Publishing.

In Part I: The Promises and Trappings of BookTok, I unpacked BookTok’s workings, why the platform might have looked so appealing to publishers when it emerged, and why its ever-growing influence actually threatens the industry’s long-term prospects.

In Part II: On Judging Books (and Publishers) by Their Covers, we explored exactly why we care about a book’s cover so much, what messages it sends and to what purpose, and why its pull has never been stronger.

This is Part III: The Playbook, where I lay out five interconnected strategies that publishers can explore to generate engagement and revenue and to grow awareness beyond individual IPs and toward their own brands.

Up next is Part IV: Monsieur Toussaint Louverture: Publishing as Craft, where I’ll dive deep into Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, a French publisher whose opinionated curation and attention to detail represent the best of what indie publishing can be.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe so you get this last installment straight into your inbox.

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Thinking Past BookTok

In the first part of this series, I made the case that the publishing industry's reliance on BookTok is a ticking bomb. Let's recap the argument.

In the four years since the community started to take off, publishers have come to lean on BookTok for everything from market research to content acquisition, discovery, promotion, and sales. Despite their best efforts, they have submitted themselves to continued commoditization. BookTok's wariness of corporate messaging prevents publishers from marketing their titles themselves and pushes them instead to go through "bookfluencers" who have no real incentive in the success of any particular book.

Meanwhile, the platform's feed-first experience means publishers have no stable digital home that they can build to their image in order to embark readers onto a fuller experience. Last but not least, under the pretense of supporting authors and publishers, TikTok has been encroaching on more and more of the industry's value chain. The company is now not just a major influence on discovery (especially among young readers), but also a retailer (through TikTok Shop) and a publisher in its own right (through 8th Note).

Individually, none of these points should be cause for too much concern. But they do add up. All in all, publishers have put themselves in a precarious position.

On the one hand, it's clear by now that they are not thriving on the platform — even though their books, and the influencers who promote and live off them, might be. On the other hand, BookTok is now so central to their business that they can't afford to disengage overnight. Years ago, in a very different industry, cosmetics company Lush became "anti-social" and deleted its accounts across all the major social platforms. At the time, Lush had a beloved consumer brand, dozens of stores of its own and, I presume, what must have been a solid CRM. Book publishers, meanwhile, have none of that, and therefore, no clear plan B.

But pointing out the problem is the easy part; what publishers need are solutions.

For that, we need to go back to what pushed them to so naively embrace TikTok’s disruption in the first place. Namely: structural reliance on intermediaries and, as a result, weak brands that have hindered their ability to engage and monetize readers in novel ways. Only by overcoming these issues can publishers stand on its own.

Here, I'd like to explore five interconnected avenues that I believe can help them regain control of their destinies. Crucially, I want to focus on strategies that can succeed with or without BookTok — strategies that would certainly benefit from building off it for amplification, but can bring value regardless. After all, if platform dependency is the problem, the solution can't possibly be to double down; publishers need to play to their own strengths.

This is the Playbook:

• Going deluxe

• Doubling down on merch

• Experiential storytelling

• Mastering eventization

• Bringing back the serial

Now let’s get to it.

A Playbook for Playful Publishing

Going deluxe

It may be hard to fathom in the ebook era, but books weren't always so fungible. Centuries ago, back when publication depended on royal or religious approval (read, censorship), it was the custom for publishers to thank their patrons with luxury versions of their books. These copies were produced in larger formats — hence their nickname of "grand papiers," French for "great papers" — with wider margins and higher-quality paper types that allowed for finer prints and more comfortable reading. Censorship and the need for patronage eventually ended; "grand papiers" stayed. Now reserved for the publishers themselves, authors, and select individuals, they were meant to stay out of circulation. However, there's nothing people want to buy more than something they're told is not for sale, and it didn't take long before bibliophiles started seeking these copies specifically.

At the end of the 19th century, technical advancements dramatically improved the output of the printing press. Mass production lowered costs, then prices; books became a commodity. To differentiate from mass market prints, publishers started using luxury editions in a more systematic and strategic fashion. "Grand papier" turned into a small but lucrative business — the smaller the batches and the finer the paper, the higher the price of a book. In interwar France, it wasn't uncommon to see a novel debut on a dozen types of paper, in batches ranging from a few thousand to as few as three copies.

Very little of this tradition remains today. As the industry continued toward mass production, production time and material costs — in 2005, a single sheet of Japan paper cost 15 euros — made these editions increasingly unviable. The manual adjustments required to produce them slowed production and represented an opportunity cost for printers. Whereas "grand papier" prints used to be printed first, they were now printed last, if at all. The vicious circle was in full swing. The fewer deluxe editions came out and the less publishers promoted them, the smaller the market. With the advent of film, reading slowly but surely lost its seating in the cultural hierarchy, and the book as an object lost its luster. Today, only a handful of publishers are keeping "grand papier" alive — partly as a nod to the old days, and partly to attract those few authors who still care, or even know, about the practice.

It's time to revive it. As I wrote last week, the Venn diagram between BookTok and book collectors is almost a perfect circle — there is a reason why the community’s flavor of reading is often derided as performative. The way books look and feel, what materials they’re made of, how well they pair together on a shelf, all these things are central to how reading is practiced and, more importantly, staged on the platform. Whatever you may think of these consumeristic impulses, they signal real shifts in reading culture. Together, shelf aesthetics and what I’ve called readers’ longing for analog are the perfect excuses for bringing luxury to the book world. 

For publishers, a luxury strategy brings two potential benefits: monetization on the one hand, and engagement on the other hand.

Let's start with monetization. Produced in deliberately low volume, with paper types of varying quality and price, "grand papier" prints are publishers' best shot at customer segmentation through price discrimination. In contrast with the paperback vs. hardcover dichotomy, these editions aren't about practicality or solidity but about prestige and aesthetics: they're an opportunity to draw out and engage the collector that, if BookTok is to be trusted, secretly lives inside every reader. Other parts of the creative industries — music with vinyl, film with the revered Criterion collection — can attest to the merits of this strategy.

Still, it's crucial to meet expectations. Indeed, readers are growing wary of publishers overusing the same aesthetic lures to squeeze a quick buck from them. (“Every book has sprayed edges now”, someone complained on Reddit.) Like the “grands papiers” of old, modern luxury editions will need to ensure both quality and scarcity. This will necessarily impact the strategy’s revenue potential: whatever price these prints go for won't change the fact that sales volume remains insignificant.

Which brings us to engagement. Ultimately, revenue can't be the only metric. Every fandom counts in its ranks people who make up in excitement what they lack in purchasing power. Despite not directly contributing to an artist's or company's bottom line, these fans play a crucial role inside their communities, for example by circulating important information or creating fan content. Assessing readers' involvement solely based on their willingness to pay would not only be misguided, it would be, quite literally, exclusive — the exact opposite of what we're trying to achieve here. Whether that's sending deluxe copies for free to top readers or exhibiting them for all to see, publishers should aim to draw more people in, to excite, and to inspire.

But going deluxe is not a cure-all. If they want these releases to feel exceptional, publishers should be intentional about which of their books truly call for a premium edition. Is an author's anniversary coming up? Has a book been receiving new (and, hopefully, sustained) interest online? Can publishers align their calendar with an adaptation?

A great example of the latter is France's Robert Laffont, which in 2020 published a new collector's edition of Frank Herbert's Dune ahead of Denis Villeneuve's movie release. (Villeneuve also prefaced the book, adding to the excitement.) After the first volume was released, the company continued to work on the rest of the cycle at a time when reader interest was the strongest in decades. While few books offer such opportunities, this is precisely the level of exceptionality that publishers should be striving for.

Doubling down on merch

Both culturally and commercially, the beautification of books finds its natural companion in another phenomenon: the rise of book merch. In our aesthetics-obsessed world, books and their tie-ins complement each other. Bought and unpacked together, placed on the same shelf, they have come to form a cohesive experience in the modern reader's mind.

To make the most of this convergence, astute publishers are now distributing increasingly elaborate Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) to book influencers. For Emma Cline's novel The Guest, Random House Books sent packages that contained "a tube of Supergoop sunscreen, a box of Tate’s Bake Shop cookies, a pair of sunglasses color-coordinated to the book’s cover, and a handful of other goodies, all aptly themed around the novel, which takes place at the end of summer on the East End of Long Island." This strategy isn't limited to deep-pocketed conglomerates — with merch as with book covers, smaller publishers can make up in cultural awareness what they lack in resources. Zando, for example, has made a reputation for its cheeky publicity campaigns. Half book reviews, half unboxing videos, the content that comes out of these partnerships performs exceedingly well on social media.

While these efforts so far have been limited to promotional purposes, there is potential for more. Done well, merch directly contributes to a book's desirability — one of the key ingredients in what I’ve called the Book Cover Trifecta. By embodying characters, plots, and themes, it prolongs the reader's exposition to a narrative universe and strengthens their emotional connection with it. (Amelia Olsen, a former marketing coordinator at Zando, said "a good book box is a world-building experience that starts as soon as the package arrives at our readers’ doorsteps.”) This is especially beneficial for book series. Not only does merch serve as a token of fandom in between installments, every new book is also a chance for publishers to imagine, and readers to collect, more merch.

For publishers, this is an opportunity to think of merch not discretely, but continuously, or better: narratively. The implications are as creative as they are operational. In the same way that a series's graphic identity needs to be established from the start so it can be enforced throughout, merch should be planned with a long-term view. Going beyond tees and bookmarks, what products can publishers offer that would make up a coherent whole? How do they encourage collecting, while ensuring that readers can still join in at any time without feeling left out because they missed out on earlier items? If books and merch are two sides of a larger reader experience, it's on publishers to make it a compelling one through and through.

This is easier said than done. Merch is a hard business, and publishers already have a lot on their plates with books; taking on another logistics-intensive line of business hardly seems like a good idea. It's also difficult to ascertain this strategy's commercial potential. As both creators and brands well know, having an audience for a product does not guarantee sales. In the BookTok era, where an author's name can rack up billions of views and hashtags in a matter of months, it's easy for a publisher's marketing team to overestimate the demand for their IP. Finally, it's worth remembering that merch does not make a property's commercial success; it feeds off it. It takes strong brand affinity for a consumer product strategy to bear fruit. Save for runaway books or established series, in most cases, merch may bring only meager results.

Still, this is nothing insurmountable. Manufacturing and logistics, for example, don't have to be handled in-house. Even Disney, a company famous for its consumer product prowess, licenses its IP to third parties rather than owning and operating toy manufacturers. There is no reason why publishers couldn't take the same approach.

Assessing demand is (partly) solvable, too. Beside royalties, a licensing deal will typically include what's called a Minimum Guarantee (MG), a flat fee paid upfront by the licensee to the licensor based on forecasted sales. If a product sells better than expected (thus breaking through the MG), the licensee makes additional royalty payments to the licensor; if it sells worse, the licensee still pays the full MG. In that way, licensors minimize the downside while also maximizing the upside. With that structure in place, publishers would be financially preserved if any of their products were to bomb. 

However, profitability shouldn't be the main goal here — this goes back to the monetization vs. engagement issue. As with deluxe sets, publishers should treat merch more like a wedge into readers' lives than a cash-generating business. It's about small batches, not mass production; superfans, not unknown buyers. Monetization is possible, and welcome, but obsessing over it at the expense of deeper engagement is likely to lead only to disappointment.

Further down the line, the greater opportunity lies in fostering attachment not just to the IP, but to the companies bringing them to life. A good precedent can be found outside the publishing world in A24, the disruptive film distributor turned cultural conglomerate. A24 was founded on the premise that digital-first marketing could be used to promote movies and create engagement in novel ways and at a lower cost than the industry's standards. Merch would soon turn central to this strategy, with limited-edition drops and hip collabs consistently sparking cultural commentary around the company's releases. Over time, A24's logo became "a seal of quality for smart, challenging, fresh US cinema"; its name, "synonymous with aspirational indie cool." Today, to buy any piece of A24 merch is to buy into, and put on display, a certain idea of cinema. It's the same kind of halo effect that publishers should aim for.

Experiential storytelling

If there is one thing every rightsholder dreams of for their IP, it's this: a home. While merch represents a valuable entry point into fans' lives, immersion remains the Holy Grail of worldbuilding. As Matthew Ball observed a few years ago about Disney's theme park advantage:

There is nothing that can compare to the impact of a child being hugged by her heroes. The ability to enjoy your favorite IP as “you” is unique and lasts a lifetime. [... ] Fans simply cannot enjoy DC or Lord of the Rings or Dragon Ball the way they do Disney’s Princesses, Pixar, most recently, Star Wars, and soon, the Avengers franchises. This fundamentally limits a franchise’s ability to grow love — the lifeblood (and profit driver) of all IP-based companies.

The entertainment world has woken up to that fact in recent years. In 2023, Nintendo opened not one but two Super Mario World parks in partnership with Universal Studios. This year, Netflix announced "Netflix House," "a year-round home for fans to live the stories they love," and Japan's Toei Animation partnered with Saudi Arabia's Qiddiya Investment Company to build the world's first Dragon Ball theme park in Riyadh. Even freaking Peppa Pig now has several parks to its name.

Meanwhile, book publishers have no such place to call their own. Today, readers gather in one of two ways: in small groups at local, community-forward bookshops, or in mass at large-scale events. Romance is a case in point. For years, the genre found fertile ground at fan conventions like Comic-Con, known for drawing in primarily comics, TV, and movie enthusiasts. Now, its growing cultural acceptability is attracting large enough crowds, and enough capital, that romance-specific conventions have emerged. There's Kansas City's GenreCon, Anaheim’s Steamy Bitcoin, Salt Lake City's Bookery Con, Atlanta's LOVE Y'ALL, or the mouthful that is the Romance Slam Jam Virtual Romance Book Convention. Like their non-book precursors, these events offer everything from signings and photo-ops to cosplay and memorabilia, providing publishers with numerous opportunities to engage readers. Still, even the most visited booth at a convention is only rented space. Without a stable home to invite fans in, publishers are missing a key piece of the engagement puzzle.

Some have tried to fill that void. Around 2016, a number of indie presses across the U.S. started to open their own stores. This had several benefits. First, it enabled publishers to get closer to readers' tastes and to influence them through curation, a chance to elevate the more niche genres and authors in their catalogs. Second, it was an opportunity to showcase the full extent of the creative journey, rather than just its output. Minneapolis-based Milkweed Editions foresaw "rotating exhibits related to the publishing process, such as cover designs and manuscript pages to offer insights into what they do as a publisher."

Now a few years in, book-and-mortar has maintained its appeal, though new attempts remain few and far between. Penguin opened its own bookshop in May 2022 in the lobby of its head office in Toronto. Drawing heavily from the publisher's graphic identity, the store showcases an abundance of branded merch including mugs, tote bags, and pencil cases, all neatly placed in paperback-shaped display cases. In June this year, Kazakhstan-based Foliant Books announced it is "launching its own bookstores, book fairs, and exhibitions to connect directly with its customers" across the country. I expect we'll see more publishers move in this direction.

This will come with challenges. Because retail lives and dies by foot traffic, not all publishers start out with equal chances. Penguin, for example, is self-sufficient: its size and longevity mean its catalog is substantial and attractive enough to warrant its own physical space. The company is also one of the few to have invested in its brand, with some memorable advertising campaigns and entire departments dedicated to partnerships and licensing. Tellingly, Retail and Experiential are two of the seven domains of expertise featured on the company’s website. All this has made it a household name uniquely equipped to make this kind of initiative work.

Things look very different for the rest of the industry. At the end of the day, a niche publishing house with a track record of only a dozen books and an audience still in the making isn't going to bring enough foot traffic for a standalone, permanent showroom to make sense. Unless they double as other kinds of businesses — think cafés or community spaces — to offset the seasonality of book sales, or join forces with similarly sized and ambitious competitors — something that, in an attention economy, many may feel wary of —, smaller presses will struggle to make the math work for them.

Fortunately, owning and operating an evergreen space isn't the only option. In the film & TV world, IP owners routinely use short bursts of real-world marketing to grow awareness and affinity around their projects. Netflix's activations, for example, have spanned limited-edition products (e.g., the McDonald's x Emily in Paris baguette), pop-up installations (e.g., the life-size Squid Game doll in Sydney Harbor) and full-fledged immersive experiences (e.g. the traveling Stranger Things Experience). By enabling fans to step into the worlds of their favorite shows and movies, activations like these heighten engagement, drive conversation, extend a property's shelf life, and provide valuable opportunities to gather data on fan preferences that can inform future marketing strategies and even content creation decisions. There's a lot here that publishers could learn from as they try to expand on their own IP.

But there's one particular area that I'd like to see them explore: contents tourism.

Whether or not you're familiar with the term, you probably know what it means — in fact, you may even have practiced it yourself. In media studies parlance, contents tourism (a literal translation from the “kontensu tsurizumu” theorized in the “Cool Japan” strategy) is a form of tourism whereby creative works such as film & TV, comics, video games, and novels are the primary motivation for visiting a destination. From writers' homes to set locations to theme parks, contents tourism is a global business.

Today, the concept is associated mostly with photography or film. Think, for example, of how many people visit Abbey Road to, literally, follow in the Beatles' footsteps, or walk around Montmartre reminiscing about Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie. Cultural references such as these enrich visitors' experience of a place, imbuing it with meaning; they turn tourism into a personal and collective pilgrimage. And while older cultural works continue to move crowds, new ones are constantly entering the canon. Earlier this year, France's national cinema body found that "four out of five foreign tourists to Paris got an urge to visit after seeing a movie or TV series filmed in the City of Light." Two of Netflix's shows, Emily in Paris and Lupin, were direct contributors.

Meanwhile, you rarely hear about people traveling because they've read about a place in a book. For all the success of the Harry Potter franchise, it wasn't until the movies came out that King's Cross Station installed its photo-op replica of Platform 9 3⁄4. Unlike visual media, reading doesn't provide ready-made references; there are no scenes to replicate, no tableaux to reenact. However detailed a description, every reader needs to come up with their own representation of a place. Less recognizable in the wild, and therefore less shareable, literary references seem to have less of a pull as destinations.

It's a challenge worth tackling. For publishers, contents tourism is an opportunity to transpose their stories into the real world and to turn the introspective act of reading into a more social and extensive experience. To do that, the first step is to go back to the source material. Does a novel mention famous monuments? Maybe the author took inspiration from their own city and made the protagonist a regular at a real-world spot? Every one of these names is a cue to build off.

Once they have been identified, it's time to bring them to life. Maybe that's partnering with the protagonist's favorite café on a themed cocktail. Or designing a treasure hunt around a city, with its own "I was there" certificate and exclusive merch for sale at the end. (Japan, for example, is famous for its “stamp rallies” that encourage tourists to visit cultural landmarks.) Or having a photographer and props on site to make sure fans leave with memorable pics. Whatever the approach, the goal should be to add another dimension to an IP and to enable fans to forge a stronger connection with it through active participation.

The good thing is, the operational and financial lift doesn't have to be heavy. I'm not suggesting every book publisher launch an in-house travel agency here. It's about creating new touch points and fostering a sense of belonging through shared rituals. Publishers don't have to do it alone, either. Anime tourism, for example, has seen IP owners partner with localities and the fans themselves to come up with mutually beneficial cultural partnerships. So long as the resulting crowds remain manageable, local businesses and governments are likely to be publishers' biggest supporters in these endeavors.

Mastering eventization

For publishers, luxury editions, merch, and live experiences are all accretive opportunities. They’re about exploring new — or, in the case of luxury editions, so old as to be overlooked — paths for engagement and revenue. But expansion isn’t the only way to go: there are quick(er) wins to reap in reassessing the way things are currently done across the industry. The book release is one such process worth challenging.

The problem with “one-and-done” book launches

At the individual level, releasing a book is largely a one-and-done deal. A publisher will promote a book ahead of its release, and potentially double down for a short while if early sales show promise. After that, it will simply move on to marketing the next upcoming title on its roster. With limited shelf space for ever more contenders, physical bookshops ultimately send back unsold inventory, depriving so-so performers of potential long-tail revenue.

Breaking through is therefore imperative. No amount of ebook sales will compensate for a lackluster physical debut, and adaptation offers rarely come knocking at the door of unsuccessful IP. Save for a raving fan randomly bringing it back from oblivion, a book that didn't make it on its first try has zero chances to resurface. In France, over the 2021-2022 period, a whopping 13% of all books produced ended up being returned by retailers to be destroyed

By contrast, other cultural goods enjoy much greater economic longevity. In Hollywood's traditional windowing system, for instance, a feature film goes (in an optimal scenario) through a theatrical window, enters VOD and physical retail, then premium TV networks, then free TV — today, a video streaming platform might also just swoop in the rights at any point along this journey. Together, these distribution channels and revenue streams — some successive, others overlapping — make up a fairly diversified lifecycle.

Granted, all movies do not benefit equally. For example, theatrical releases typically determine how revenue from subsequent windows is negotiated; movies that underperform on the big screen or skip it entirely remain handicapped throughout the rest of their lifecycle. But multiphase distribution and monetization mean that laggers at least have a chance to catch up.

Because they lack such optionality, book publishers should be doing everything in their power to make the most of what little time they get in the public eye. A book needs to enter the marketplace with a bang, lest it go forever unnoticed.

Timing as a differentiation strategy

Like the film industry with its summer blockbusters, horror-heavy October, and animated movies around Christmas, the publishing industry is highly seasonal. Summer vacations, the holiday season, and New Year's resolutions are some of the cultural landmarks that publishers have learned to build around in order to sync up with consumers' wants, needs, and means.

This cyclicity is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, publishers can rely on clearly identified periods when they know consumers have leisure time, willingness to pay, or both. For example, self-help does well in Q1, novels in the summer, and children's books ahead of the holiday season. No need to guess, then: depending on what sort of book you're selling, your ideal release date is almost predetermined for you. On the other hand, defaulting to tried-and-true windows can deter publishers from thinking creatively about their editorial calendars. But what if savvy timing could be a differentiator in and of itself?

Publishing's Two Approaches To Timing

For publishers, timing usually serves one of two goals. The first one is about standing out. Indeed, why would you release a book at the same time as everyone else if you can avoid it? All things being equal, hitting the shelves at a less crowded time should allow you to capture more mindshare and be featured more prominently both on- and off-line. The same is true when it comes to avoiding the competition of a particular author, as repeat bestsellers have a way of sucking the air out of the room for everyone else.

The second, perhaps counter-intuitive, approach is about blending in. On this end of the spectrum, the goal is to tap into a general momentum by featuring alongside others at a specific time. It's a bet that a rising tide lifts all books, if you will.

In France, this is exemplified by the "rentrée littéraire," a period running roughly from the end of August to the beginning of November that sees large numbers of new books hit the shelves. For publishers, the benefits are twofold. At the industry level, the rentrée littéraire has become this highly anticipated cultural landmark for readers and professionals alike. It serves as a free collective marketing campaign, with abundant media coverage spanning reviews, interviews, and listicles. At the company level, publishers use the event as a way to garner attention ahead of the holiday season, and to have their books considered for some of France's most prestigious literary prizes, several of which are handed out around the end of the year. Critical and commercial success are inseparable here: the laureate of the Prix Goncourt, France's premier prize, will typically see its sales multiplied overnight by a factor of between 3 and... 33.

Inevitably, the rentrée littéraire also brings about brutal competition. In 2023, 466 books were released over that timeframe, more than market demand could possibly absorb even with all the marketing in the world. (This tally was actually down from a peak of over 700 in 2010.) For publishers, it's a catch-22: either enter the fray at the busiest time of the year to have a shot at winning a prize, or hope to stand out in some way during no-prize season. Call it overconfidence or basic risk/reward math, many in the industry continue to play the rentrée's game.

What book publishers can learn from Barbenheimer

Somewhere in between these two approaches is a potential third one: a middle way that would leverage synergistic excitement yet still allow for differentiation between participants. What could it look like?

Again, the movie industry offers some pointers. It’s no secret that with limited time, attention, and discretionary spending, consumers will only go to the theater to see so many movies. One way producers and distributors typically hedge their bets is by making sure that their movies are not debuting at the same time as similar or overpowered products. For example, any Marvel or Fast & Furious opus will usually come with enough marketing to drown out its rivals; as a general rule, going head to head with these franchises is a sure way to underperform at the box office. Last year, Oppenheimer producer Charles Roven tried to have Barbie's release date changed so that the two movies wouldn't open on the same day.

Yet the success of "Barbenheimer" was proof that things don't have to be quite so zero-sum. Encouraged by ubiquitous marketing activations, fans were quick to seize the event's memetic potential and turn it into a cultural phenomenon. This, in turn, incentivized theater owners to program double features that allowed movie-goers to join in on the fun, with costumes and hats galore — UK cinema chain Vue reported that 19% of people who booked tickets to see Oppenheimer also bought tickets for Barbie. At the end of the day, both movies, and the studios behind them, benefitted commercially from what first seemed like a winner-take-all situation.

Publishing is, arguably, a more conservative industry than Hollywood. But this doesn't mean that publishers can't learn from other corners of entertainment. The more time they spend on BookTok, the more authors and publishers are having to up their own video storytelling game. Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier about romance, cultural practices — from book signings to cosplaying to contents tourism — have grown increasingly similar across media. Fans go to similar events, engage in similar activities, and create and consume content that brings together their various interests. (On Goodreads, "Romances set in nerdy spaces" are their own sub-genre.) Events like the Harry Potter-based, Warner Bros.-managed “Back to Hogwarts Day” are proof that book fans will embrace the exact same codes as their music and movie peers, when given the chance.

What tangible tactics might publishers draw from the Barbenheimer craze as they lean into eventization? Can they, formally or not, pair up with a competitor to generate anticipation for a theme or genre in which they have a vested interest? Can they (playfully) engineer beef to attract attention? Can they sell crossover merch, and co-meme their way to success?

Now, I'm not suggesting that every publisher do all of these things at once; considering the industry's current marketing practices, that would be overkill for most. Still, there's a lot of wriggle room between doing nothing and going all-in. Publishers should view these tactics as add-ons that they can integrate into their typical promotional campaigns to boost anticipation and engagement. Although these components are likely to perform best together, the goal for now should remain experimentation.

One potential pushback I'm expecting here is that these strategies need existing fandoms to work. I simply don't think that is true. Were all those who rushed to see Barbie and Oppenheimer actual fans of Barbie (the fashion doll) and Oppenheimer (the tormented scientist)? Did they expect to someday be cosplaying as the father of the atomic bomb? Probably not, but that didn't prevent them from joining in on the fun! This should come as reassuring news for those publishers who might feel like their own IP doesn't have what it takes to elicit excitement just yet. Eventization is a way to manufacture that excitement, to go from hype to fandom rather than the other way around.  

Bringing Back the Serial

Remember the challenge I outlined earlier: "entering the marketplace with a bang" was only one part of it. Next, a book has to actively sustain attention — ideally both reader interest and media coverage, one often leading to the other. The problem is, the current one-and-done model appears antithetical to those goals.

Here, again, other areas of entertainment offer a sense of what could be. Since the advent of streaming, much ink has been spilled about the respective benefits of the "binge" and episodic release cadences for TV shows. On the one hand, a customer-friendly model that creates a sense of urgency and encourages memeability due to the immediate availability of the source material. On the other, a battle-tested model that leaves room for anticipation, conversation, and conjecture to form around so-called "appointment entertainment." To this day, various streaming platforms continue to experiment with both schedules, sometimes even combining them to make sure they can serve all viewing preferences with a fresh stream of content at any given time.

Serialization exists in books, too. In fact, many of today’s most commercially successful properties — from Harry Potter to Fifty Shades — were conceived as series from day one. As with TV and film, book series enjoy compounding benefits as brand awareness builds up with each new installment, streamlining promotion for subsequent releases. And as with TV and film, fan discourse will usually fill the void in between two volumes, a credible sign that a franchise has struck a chord with readers.

But we're still only comparing apples to oranges here. The discrepancy becomes clear if we phrase the problem as an analogy: if the book is to the book series as the season is to the TV series, then what is the book equivalent of the episode?

The obvious answer to that question would be, the chapter. The difference is, book publishers do not release chapters individually, the way TV networks and streaming platforms can with episodes. Put differently, the book lacks a smaller atomic unit that publishers could split it into for creative, promotional, and monetization purposes. In TV parlance, it's stuck with the binge model.

A Short History of Serialization

Things weren’t always that way. Centuries ago, when books were premium goods unavailable to most, publishers would often publish large works in lower-cost fascicles, some of them only a few pages long. This allowed them to expand the market for the written word and gauge the popularity of a particular work without incurring the expense of bound volumes.

With the advent of modern newspapers in 19th century Europe, serialization changed. Around 1830 in France, more and more papers started using the “feuilleton” — the lower part of the front page, usually dedicated to cultural and educational commentary — to showcase short works of fiction. It was an instant success. In the following years, publishers started commissioning longer and longer works to keep readers coming back. Novels replaced novellas; the “roman-feuilleton” was born.

At first, newspapers only published finished works, with serialization being used to introduce a novel to the public for cheap and pave the way for future publication in volumes. With their large reader base and often vocal political stances, periodicals garnered far more attention than authors could hope to attract on their own. This meant a larger surface area for public scrutiny and moral censorship, which often boosted authors’ book sales further down the line.

It wasn’t long before serialization transformed again. In 1836 France, the introduction of ads alongside the news enabled two papers, La Presse and Le Siècle, to subsidize their publications and massively undercut their competitors, forcing them to follow suit. Incentives changed overnight. To keep readers engaged and advertisers happy, newspapers now needed a steady flow of new literature. Novels got even longer so they could be stretched over even more installments: Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte-Cristo ran for almost two years, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina for four years. The content evolved too, incorporating more riveting adventures and new narrative devices like cliffhangers and recurring characters, and sometimes even responding to the public’s reaction from one issue to the next.

Business was good while it lasted. By 1840, serialization through newspapers was the preferred way of consuming novels, and was supporting hundreds of writers. Beside the aforementioned Dumas and Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, but also James, Doyle, and Dostoyevski all had their work published under this model. By 1875, the continued progress of literacy among the population and the generalization of advertising had led to an explosion in readership, with circulation reaching 5.5 million readers in Paris alone. But harder was the fall. Together, growing competition from other forms of entertainment, the impact of the two world wars on the newspapers trade, and the commoditization of books put an end to the serial’s century of dominance.

Lessons From the Past

Today, serialization has been largely abandoned. With their synergistic delivery method gone, the French roman-feuilleton and its international equivalents remain only as memories, the perfect solution to a problem that no longer exists. They have served their purpose.

Yet the principles they surfaced still stand true. Now as ever, serialization fosters loyalty and creates anticipation, which fuels, and then feeds off, cultural discourse — any TV show that dares to pace itself rather than cave to the binge model can attest to it. That it took off in a different time and a very different media ecosystem doesn’t change that fact. The salons may have been replaced by the infamous watercooler conversation, the “word on the street” by the internet, but serialization remains the surest way to achieve cultural synchronicity.

For publishers, it’s a path worth exploring again. Not out of nostalgia for the golden age of newspapers, but because the format applies just as well, if not better, to the distribution channel du jour. For books, more, shorter installments mean not just a more tangible presence on people's bookshelves, but more opportunities for awareness and connection, through release announcements, interviews, and book signings. With each new release, a chance to reignite the media engine. If publishers are serious about growing their brands, this strategy could hold promise.

Of course, it won’t be for everyone. For serialization to make sense, a few conditions need to be met.

First, a book needs to be long enough to even call for serialization, lest readers view it only as a publisher's attempt to milk their wallets across multiple tomes. Second, serialization also needs to make sense narratively. Without salient cliffhangers, even a thick book might be better off published as a single volume rather than forced into multiple installments. That being said, if a compelling business case can be made, I expect that authors would quickly cater their writing to the format’s constraints, the same way their 19th century predecessors did.

From an operational standpoint too, serialization poses challenges. Back when serials were released in periodicals, production was just-in-time and publication could be stopped as soon as interest started to wane, without publishers incurring sunk costs. Sure, readers would be left hanging, but with writers basically fighting to get into the system, there was enough to go around that papers could just switch to another serial.

With books as the de facto delivery mechanism, serialization is a very different matter. Today, the entire industry is set up around a final, standalone product. Book rights are purchased upfront based on sales forecasts, not gradually based on unpredictable word count. Because publishing and printing have been unbundled, publishers can’t haphazardly print installments themselves anymore. Printers demand predictable timelines and volumes and can’t accommodate the kind of variability that comes with serialization. As for distribution, the combination of overwhelming supply and limited real estate has made physical bookstores painstakingly picky about which titles they carry. For them, serialization means tedious inventory management and logistics. Simply put, bringing back serialization would require reengineering a large part of the value chain.

Fortunately, several catalysts are converging that make now possibly the best time to experiment.

Culturally, readers’ growing enthusiasm around craft — displayed on BookTok and fueled by it — is an opportunity for publishers to rethink what a book can be. While cover art and premium materials are obvious options, the window of opportunity may be closing soon as more in the industry level up their design acumen. Serialization offers another compelling, and, for now, a more differentiating route.

There is clear appetite for the format. In the digital realm, Wattpad — a company I’ve covered in depth in the past — has leveraged serialized fiction into an entertainment giant. As of July last year, the company claimed 97 million Monthly Active Users who collectively spend more than 26 billion minutes a month on its platform, with an average engagement time of 60 minutes (!) per user and per day. The brevity of the writing takes nothing away from its cultural impact: in 2021, research showed that Wattpad clocked more mentions on TikTok than Audible, Kindle, and Goodreads combined.

Serialization applies to non-fiction, too. Cultural critic Ted Gioia leveraged his large subscriber base on Substack to publish his book Music To Raise The Dead. Meanwhile, a dedicated platform can be found in Books in Progress, an online “public drafting tool” where authors can make their drafts available for comment from the public. The platform was developed by Works in Progress in partnership with Stripe Press and multi-author Steward Brand. It is currently being used to publish Brand's upcoming book, Maintenance, with Brand publishing and opening up individual sections as he writes them.

Logistically and economically too, the industry has reached a point where smaller, more deliberate batches are starting to make sense. Cent Mille Milliards, a French indie publisher, prints books only on demand. This means zero stock, zero returns, and evergreen availability, an all-out anomaly compared to industry standards. When combined with business models like preorders and subscriptions that afford greater financial predictability, this sort of infrastructure could help publishers and even self-published authors make serialization a viable strategy.

Bringing Fun Back to Publishing

The publishing industry's reliance on BookTok may be a ticking time bomb, but the strategies I've outlined here represent a playbook for publishers to regain control of their destinies. By embracing deluxe editions, merch, experiential storytelling, eventization, and serialization, they can build stronger, more resilient brands that engage readers beyond the confines of any single platform.

These approaches aren't just about monetization — they're about fostering genuine attachment and a sense of belonging. In an age where readers crave analog experiences, publishers have a unique opportunity to position themselves as tastemakers, impresarios, and worldbuilders rather than mere vendors of commoditized content. The path forward may not be easy, but the rewards could be transformative.

Ultimately, the future of publishing lies not in chasing the latest social media trends, but in bringing to life and enhancing the wonders of the written word. By making books into objects of desire, events to be anticipated, and worlds to be explored, publishers can bring the fun back to their industry — and ensure their own survival in the process.

That’s it for Part III! In Part IV, I’ll dive deep into Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, a French publisher whose opinionated curation and attention to detail represent the best of what indie publishing can be.

Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please consider giving it a like and take a minute to share it with others. It really helps.

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As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can find me on X, or just reply to this email.

Thanks to Jimmy for reviewing a draft of this piece.

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Welcome back to another installment of A Playbook for Playful Publishing.

In Part I: The Promises and Trappings of BookTok last week, I unpacked BookTok’s workings, why the platform might have looked so appealing to publishers when it emerged, and why its ever-growing influence actually threatens the industry’s long-term prospects.

This week in Part II: On Judging Books (and Publishers) by Their Covers, we explore exactly why we care about a book’s cover so much, what messages it sends and to what purpose, and why its pull has never been stronger.

Here’s what’s in store for the coming weeks:

• Part III: The Playbook will lay out five strategies that publishers can explore to generate engagement and revenue, and to grow awareness beyond individual IP and toward their own brands. And finally,

• Part IV: Monsieur Toussaint Louverture: Publishing as Craft will be a deep dive into Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, a French publisher whose opinionated curation and attention to detail represent the best of what indie publishing can be.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe so you get every installment straight into your inbox.

Subscribe now

If BookTok Is a Stage, Books Are The Props

Last week, I described the many ways in which BookTok’s rise has upended book publishing. As I wrote then: “From rights acquisition to promotion to distribution, professionals across the industry have rushed to adapt their practices in order to better cater to the community’s demands. […] Wherever you look, BookTok — what the community wants, and how to deliver it — is now the single biggest motivation behind the industry’s every move.”

Equally significant is the platform’s impact on reading itself. I’m not talking about numbers here — if you’ve read Part I of this series, you already know about those. BookTok has, undeniably, boosted sales and grown the reader base. But it has also transformed reading as a cultural practice, making it more expansive and more performative. Many in the community not only share reviews of the books they’ve read, but actually film themselves reading them. Crying Reading, sometimes performed live, has grown into its own category, with sobbing close-ups raking in millions of views.

If BookTok is a stage, then books are unequivocally the props. In fact, the community appears to value them, as objects, at least as much as the stories they contain. From leather spines to sprayed edges and from book swag reviews to shelf staging tips, the overlap between reading and home decor has grown so strong that creators on the platform are striking paid partnerships with… paint companies. Some have seen this interest as a sign of the community’s blatant shallowness. Last year, GQ wrote that “the TikTok books community is more about a lifestyle aesthetic than actual reading” and denounced “a showy nothingness that only approximates bibliophilia.”

Still, we should be careful not to overgeneralize, especially since this criticism happens to be directed at a largely female, younger base. Gatekeepers have a long history of dismissing any cultural practice that they deem unserious, and therefore, illegitimate. From novel reading to Beetlemania to the “Swifties”, young women’s excitement for culture has always faced ridicule. And with its millions of romance-reading, special edition-loving enthusiasts, BookTok leaves itself wide open to sneer.

But what if, instead, we took the matter seriously? With its “book hauls” and aspirational bookshelves, TikTok’s flavor of reading is proof that culture is embedded in a larger system of consumerism. So what? If we abstain from value judgments on what type of literature people ought to be consuming, or what their bookshelves ought to look like, there is a lot we can learn from the way reading is actually practiced on the platform.

However materialistic — or rather, because it’s so materialistic —, BookTok offers the best vantage to analyze what readers expect from books and the companies behind them.

Unpacking the Book Cover Trifecta

Why is the book cover so important? I think it comes down to three things: legibility, recognizability, and desirability. Each of these components aims to convey information in a different way: legibility at the genre level, recognizability at the publisher level, and desirability at the book level. Let's cover them in turn.

Legibility

Take a quick glance at the stands of any bookshop, or your own bookshelf, and you'll find that publishers seem highly predisposed to imitation. From the headless woman to flat design, from the Blob to the Portal, visual styles and themes regularly pop up, grow, and end up taking over the industry's imagination as well as its design budget. Trends may come and go, they may not all be equally fashionable or last equally long, but take any point in time and it's rare that there isn't at least one of these making the rounds from one book cover to the next.

There's a simple reason for this phenomenon: the quest for legibility. For publishers, tapping into a particular aesthetic is an easy way to signal which genre or tropes their books abide by. A blurry silhouette in blue hues? That's a Nordic noir. Vibrant colors and a Tumblr-esque curvy font? That's a quirky summertime romance. With book covers as with movie posters, visual conventions act as heuristics, encoding consumers' expectations as to the actual content by appealing to prior and collective cultural knowledge. The longer a trend lasts, the more the clichés solidify, the clearer the signal. Some of them have been around for so long that it's almost impossible to point to their beginnings, that one cover from which all the others followed. But consider a shorter time frame, and it becomes clear exactly how much a Twilight or a Fifty Shades of Grey can set a genre’s visual standard for years to come.

There are, of course, decreasing returns to imitation. Just like publishers, frequent readers are very much aware of the book cover meta; after a while, they start to get suspicious of yet another lookalike trying to lure them on looks alone. But however formulaic this may seem, the fact that publishers keep following this tactic proves that there is still upside to doing so.

Recognizability

Where legibility is about adhering to industry-wide codes, recognizability is about asserting a unique visual identity. With the former, the logic is extrinsic, imposed by cultural standards solidified over years and sometimes decades. With the latter, the logic is intrinsic, motivated by your company's own guidelines and business objectives.

A visual identity can include many things, from a cover's layout and materials to a color palette or a proprietary font. Together, these components help readers associate a book with a certain publisher, improving the odds that they will turn to the same name again if they're ever looking for similar reads. This explains why specialized imprints and collections tend to be the most aesthetically opinionated: by standing out visually, they can better convey their editorial singularity and stay top-of-mind in a niche branch of knowledge or literary genre. In France, Editions Divergences, Editions Wildproject, Editions Zones, and my personal favorite Monsieur Toussaint Louverture have been pushing the envelope in this regard.

As with legibility, there are limits to this strategy.

First, recognizability takes time and prolonged exposition before readers are able to pattern-match. For this reason, it needs to be considered and standardized as early as possible. Logistically, there is nothing worse for a publisher than to have to redesign its earlier releases after a brand overhaul. The sooner a visual identity is established in the marketplace and the longer it can compound from one book to the next, the stronger and more valuable it becomes.

Second, a unique identity really only makes sense for books that are similar in one way or another — think fiction vs. non-fiction, novel vs. poetry, or fantasy vs. sci-fi. The conglomerates that dominate the industry with a yearly output in the tens of thousands and all-encompassing catalogs can't afford to operate as only one brand ; in publishing, economic consolidation needs brand fragmentation. Once a certain category grows large enough in a portfolio, a new, distinct imprint should be spun off with its own branding to ensure more granular brand recognizability for readers and brand management for the publisher. Hachette Group, for example, has dozens of divisions and imprints, from Balance ("a practical nonfiction imprint built with the whole person in mind") to Redhook ("commercial fiction with speculative elements"). The more specific the editorial stance, the easier it should be to come up with a unique aesthetic that reflects it.

Desirability

We arrive at the third and last component of the conundrum: desirability. On that note, anyone who's ever bought a book at random knows how much first impressions matter. The first job of a cover is to arrest you, to call to your taste and curiosity enough to make a book desirable before you know anything about it.

It doesn't need to reveal much. As I've mentioned, the industry has grown to embrace increasingly abstract or even obscure motifs, to the point where a book's contents and design might feel almost unrelated. The greater the disconnect between the two, the more blatant the cover's role as a decorative or even seductive device, rather than an informative one.

Not all buyers feel this pull with the same intensity. When asked what might prompt them to buy a book, 72% of French 25-34-year-olds and a whopping 78% of 15-24-year-olds mentioned the importance of a book's cover, compared to just 56% among the general population and 35% of readers 65 and more.

This varying sensitivity can be partly explained by age: arguably, the older you get and the more you've read, the more you understand that what matters is a book's content, not its looks. But there's a generational, technology-induced shift at play, too. The 15-34 year-olds who took part in this survey grew up with something their predecessors didn't have: the internet and, more specifically, social media. For younger generations shaped by digital culture, books have transformed into more than just a literary experience; they are at once aesthetic artifacts and status symbols. The cover is, itself, Content material, waiting to be shared and broadcast.

“Pick two of three”

Genre / legibility, publisher / recognizability, book / desirability: these are the three layers of information that a cover should ideally convey in order to make a book's value proposition clear to potential readers.

Balancing all three isn't easy. Lean too heavily on industry-wide visual codes, and your book will lack individuality — and therefore, desirability. Focus too much on making a particular cover stand out, and readers may fail to recognize the brand behind it.

In practice, different categories of publishers will generally favor one goal over the others based on their unique strengths and constraints. Large publishers, for example, enjoy inherently greater recognizability due to their longevity and the sheer size of their catalogs. Meanwhile, what indie upstarts lack in scale, they often make up for in astuteness. More culturally aware, more digitally savvy, they are better able to tap into short-term graphic trends for legibility. Conversely, they might invest more heavily on developing a unique aesthetic to better stand out in the marketplace. Finally, there are the growing numbers of self-published authors who, because they lack both the ability to design a stand-out cover for their work and the resources to delegate that task, may be forced to turn to freelancers and to default to a genre's visual tropes.

At the end of the day, we as readers unashamedly judge books, and the companies behind them, by their covers. Whichever aspects of the Book Cover Trifecta they choose to prioritize, publishers would be wise to remember that fact.

Why The Book Cover Matters More Than Ever

Putting in the effort has never been so crucial. Several catalysts — part technological, part cultural — have reinforced the cover's importance, making it more central a choice criterion and granting it cultural weight in and of itself. Together, they help explain the materialistic impulses that have grown so prevalent among today’s readers.

Ecommerce

The emergence of ecommerce didn't just change how books were bought; it also changed what they looked like. Online, books were visually and symbolically flattened, their physicality compressed into thumb-sized vignettes and drowned in hyperlinks and metadata (ISBN here! Dimensions there!) that crowded every page.

Competition was also orders of magnitude greater overnight. Jeff Bezos famously picked books as the first best product to sell online because "there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category, by far." For Amazon, this meant an endless supply of titles to sell; for authors and publishers, more competition than they'd ever encountered in any bookstore. Unless yours was the type of book that people know and search for by name, your work was now crowded out. Available everywhere, yet invisible.

The combination of the two — the flatness of the interface on the one hand, the overcrowding on the other — meant the need to catch buyers' eyes was stronger than ever. As Vulture wrote in 2019: "At a time when half of all book purchases in the U.S. are made on Amazon — and many of those on mobile — the first job of a book cover, after gesturing at the content inside, is to look great in miniature." Publishers upended their design practices to adapt to the new environment; graphic fonts replaced hand lettering, which translated poorly in a digital setting.

By now, most in the industry have learned to play by these rules. But there is always room for improvement — especially among the self-publishing crowd. Years ago, design marketplace 99designs ran A/B tests to see which version of a book’s cover performed best in Facebook ads. It found that the new, redesigned book covers generated on average 51% more clicks than the originals, with improvements in click-through rate ranging from 6% on the low end to 122% on the high end.

Of course, people still buy books offline. But even then, someone's first encounter with a particular book is likely to have been in pixel form, in a staged photo or a fast-paced video review. The cover-as-vignette, then, serves a double purpose. If it's not enough to instantly elicit a purchase, it can still successfully imprint on the consumer's mind until they come across that same book somewhere else. Here's Vulture again:

In a marriage of irony and logic, a book that pops in a filtered miniature Instagram still life can declare its presence just as loudly from across the room, particularly in the boutique environment of the modern independent bookstore. [...] So we find ourselves in the recursive modern world of bookselling, tumbling through an endless loop from the physical to digital and back again.

BookTok epitomizes this recursivity better than any platform before. Focusing on video from day 1 made the platform inherently conducive to formats like product reviews and hauls, which fed into real-world businesses. This, in turn, made retailers inclined to cater to the platform’s audience in ways that they hadn’t for either BookTube or BookStagram. Finally, with content and commerce now fully integrated via TikTok Shop, virtually every review on the app can lead to dozens more copies making it into dozens more hands — with those same hands creating content, ad infinitum.

Shelf Aesthetics

For as long as there have been books, people have had opinions on how to organize them. Today still, team alphabetical and team color continue to go at it, seizing every opportunity to claim the superiority of their preferred method over the other. Do you prioritize aesthetics, or practicality? Do you go by discipline, or free association? We may fill our shelves with books, but we imbue them with meaning.

A few years ago, COVID-19 pushed these concerns to the max. As work communications defaulted to video and everyone suddenly became privy to their colleagues' interiors, many at home felt the need to upgrade their video backgrounds. Offices turned into Zoom rooms. The credibility bookcase became the quarantine's hottest accessory, equally a token of authority and a puzzle for outsiders to decipher.

It wasn't just about how many books you had, either; it also mattered which books you had. Books can signal not just a person's tastes but their beliefs and allegiances, too. In 2020, Robert Caros's 1974, four-pound, 1,246-page biography, The Power Broker became "a must-have, must-be-seen accessory for several reporters." Tellingly, in Washington, requests for shelf staging tend to shift left and right across the political spectrum depending on which party sits in the White House. You're only one book away from a cultural faux-pas.

It may be tempting to dismiss this trend — many in the industry have. Arguably, the more we consider books for their aesthetic or social value, the less we care about their actual contents. But that phenomenon would be neither new nor specific to the written word. As shared by former Spotify chief economist Will Page:

"60-ish % of the vinyl buyers don't own a record player. So that 40%, how many have bothered to open the record? Maybe half. So that takes us to the point where 80% of what's being sold isn't being consumed. Which, by the way, is how the book industry works. The book industry works off a rule of thumb that 80% of books that are sold are not being consumed by the reader. They are gifts, they sit on a glass table [...] There’s a long history of selling content that’s not there for its consumption."

For some, this disconnect has been nothing but a business opportunity. Dozens of companies now provide ”books-by-the-foot" services, which, as their name entails, sell books wholesale to the surprisingly large number of individuals and institutions that want their shelves promptly yet aesthetically filled. Based on a brief or more in-depth analysis — anything from a client's interests to a hotel's guest profile —, books are first picked by color, size, theme, period, or a combination of those, then curated and shipped as sets, ready to be displayed. In some cases, installation and regular replacements, or "updates," are also possible.

Leading the way is Juniper Books, which provides ready-made libraries and designs and prints bookshelf-enhancing editions of popular books and series, with best-sellers including Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and The Wheel of Time. A "Jackets Only" category also allows collectors to retrofit their hardcover books at a lower cost so they offer a more consistent sight. Thatcher Wine, the company's founder and CEO, boasted how "someone can have the complete works of Jane Austen, but in a certain Pantone chip color that matches the rest of the room or with a custom image."

Though it's hard to say how big the market is, shelf staging is real and only growing. BookTok is certainly contributing — for some reason, the Venn diagram between romance readers and shelf stagers is almost a perfect circle. More generally, though, the books-as-decor trend feels like the logical outcome of centuries of bibliophilia, an unapologetically consumeristic celebration of erudition, or the semblance of it.

The Longing for Analog

Taking a step back, our current obsession with books as objects can be weaved into a larger story: the longing for analog.

Interest in crafts — whether that's practicing them or supporting those that do — has been growing in the West. 2023 marked the 18th consecutive year of growth for vinyl in the U.S. Wired headphones are in again, as are dumb phones. It feels like the more digital stuff we surround ourselves with, the more screens we are forced to use to complete even the most mundane tasks, the more we crave for tangible objects and activities to counterbalance that trend. Discussing the so-called vinyl revival last year, The Observer tellingly called LPs "the antidote to a frenetic digital world" and praised "the heft of things we can hold in our hands."

That craving very much applies to books, too. In the same way that manipulating vinyls in an mp3 world can feel like a ritual of sorts, the sheer materiality of paper books offers a respite from our all-digital day-to-day. The appeal is especially strong on younger readers, with social media fueling the romanticization (or fetishization) of reading and everything that comes with it. (As I wrote last week, this is a striking irony in the fact that we use screens to revel in physical items, and social media to lament the loss of third places. Such is the state of things!)

Memetic nostalgia aside, digital fatigue is real. Due to top-down technology adoption in education and the workplace, textbooks are increasingly being accessed in digital form. According to the World International Property Organization, in 2022, digital and audio accounted for 47.5% of publisher output in the trade and educational sectors in Norway, and over 72% in Brazil. With digital so inescapable, simply collecting physical books on your own time and for your own pleasure is starting to feel not just like an indulgence but like an act of cultural resistance.

Taking a Cue

On the surface, BookTok’s emphasis on books as aesthetic objects, rather than just literary experiences, may seem like a troubling development, a sign that readers are more interested in appearances than substance. But to dismiss it as mere consumerism would be to miss the deeper currents at play.

Whereas the book cover was always used unidirectionnally by publishers to serve their goals, it has taken on new significance as a way for readers to express their identity and find community. With their tactile allure and visual presence, books are tangible things that people can revel in, engage with, and bond over — whether they read them or not. In an increasingly digital world, their pull has never been stronger.

For publishers, this is a valuable lesson that cultural shifts bring tangible business opportunities. Today, readers are seeking out analog experiences that engage their senses and deepen their bond with the texts they love. The book, as an object, is only one of many possible touchpoints. Whatever it takes, publishers should see themselves as in the business of bringing stories to life.

That’s it for Part II! In Part III next week, I’ll lay out five strategies that publishers can explore to generate not just engagement but revenue, and to grow awareness beyond individual IP and toward their own brands.

Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please consider giving it a like and take a minute to share it with others. It really helps.

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As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can find me on X, or just reply to this email.

Thanks to Jimmy for reviewing a draft of this piece.

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If you know anything about me, you might know I love reading. I read fiction and non-fiction, big books and small books, and authors living and dead. A few months ago, I set out to better understand the industry behind the books. Today, I’m excited to share my findings.

Let’s get it out of the way: book publishing is in a weird state right now.

In the past few years, publishers have directed all their efforts toward courting TikTok, its community, and its algorithm. On the surface, they have been rewarded handsomely for it. Sales are booming and younger generations are reading again after decades of attrition.

But there is a flip side. In the process, the industry has given away any semblance of control over the customer journey and exposed itself to a single point of failure — a risky position to be in. In this series, I want to explore how and why publishers found themselves in this predicament, and what they can do to regain control of their destinies.

This here is Part I: The Promises and Trappings of BookTok, where I unpack BookTok’s workings, why the platform might have looked so appealing to publishers when it emerged, and why its ever-growing influence actually threatens the industry’s long-term prospects.

Here’s what’s in store for the coming weeks:

• Part II: On Judging Books (and Publishers) by Their Covers will explore exactly why we care about a book’s cover so much, what messages it sends and to what purpose, and why its pull has never been stronger.

• Part III: The Playbook will lay out five strategies that publishers can explore to generate engagement and revenue, and to grow awareness beyond individual IP and toward their own brands. And finally,

• Part IV: Monsieur Toussaint Louverture: Publishing as Craft will be a deep dive into Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, a French publisher whose opinionated curation and attention to detail represent the best of what indie publishing can be.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe so you get every installment straight into your inbox.

Subscribe now

I hope you’ll enjoy the journey.

Taking Stock of BookTok

If you don’t know already, “BookTok” is the portmanteau used to describe a corner of TikTok dedicated to everything books and reading. There, millions of fans — predominantly teenagers and young women — share book-related opinions, rankings, recommendations, and rants under the hashtag #BookTok, with a variety of complementary hashtags providing ever more granularity for those browsing the platform with specific cravings. 

The size and reach of this community are hard to overstate. BookTok emerged seemingly out of nowhere around the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of people stuck at home turned to reading (and reading-related content) for entertainment. Since then, it has seen continued growth. In July 2023, videos with the #BookTok hashtag had been viewed more than 91 billion times, up from nearly 60 billion views the year before, and only half that in 2020. At the time of writing this, the hashtag has reached well over 200 billion views. BookTok videos have grown by nearly 15% in the first nine months of this year compared to 2023.

TikTok is not the first social platform to attract readers; both BookTube and Bookstagram have been lively communities for years. Last year, an account that goes by Bigolas Dickolas on X (still Twitter at the time) made the rounds for enthusiastically promoting a sci-fi novella from 2019, turning it into an Amazon bestseller overnight. But together, TikTok's scale, social features such as Duets and Challenges, and inescapably perceptive algorithm have given BookTok the kind of visibility that none of its predecessors ever had.

Its impact has spilled over from inside the app and into the physical world. More than 100 authors with large BookTok followings drove $760 million in sales in 2022, a 60% increase from 2021. Sales of romance, thrillers, and young adult novels, all three BookTok favorites, have largely outperformed the overall market. Groups of teenagers who met on BookTok now have bookshop days out, after which they'll go back to the app to tell others about their hauls — a perfect loop from digital to physical to digital again.

Professionals across the industry have rushed to adapt their practices to this new, social-driven reality.

It starts at the very top of the value chain, with rights acquisition. Traditionally, readers learned about new authors from booksellers in a top-down fashion. Now, it’s the publishers who are learning about viral authors from retailers, who come to them with requests from readers, or from lurking on the platform themselves to see which names are trending. Titles whose sales had been flat for years are routinely propelled to bestseller lists after being rediscovered on the platform. With online chatter and virality serving as proxies for reader demand, even backlist titles are up for grabs. In October 2022, Orion Fiction acquired the rights to Jessa Hasting’s romance series Magnolia Parks, whose first three books had already been self-published, in a six figures deal.

Promotion has been similarly disrupted. Because having a social presence can significantly boost sales, many publishers now prioritize authors with a platform they’ll be able to use to kickstart a book's marketing. Meanwhile, self-published authors are being courted by a growing number of BookTok-focused creative agencies and, of course, AI-enabled tools that claim to make them video-ready.

Finally, there's distribution. Brick-and-mortar booksellers now curate dedicated displays featuring books that are popular on the app. At large chains, inventory management, always a hazardous task, now needs to align not just with seasonal peaks but with BookTok-induced surges in demand. Booksellers including Barnes & Nobles, Books-A-Million, and Canada's Indigo Books & Music have all added BookTok categories on their websites to guide online shoppers. Wherever you look, BookTok — what the community wants, and how to deliver it — is now the single biggest motivation behind the industry’s every move.

Smiling In the Face of Disruption

Why were publishers so eager to onboard BookTok? I think the rationale can be boiled down to two reasons. First, the platform represented an opportunity to directly — or so they thought— engage with readers, a major shift from the state of affairs. Second, BookTok's community happened to consist mainly of younger, notoriously elusive, demographics. Let’s see why these promises may have sounded so compelling.

Direct Connection

The notion that publishers should be talking to their readers will sound familiar to most of you. In tech, collecting user feedback has long been a core operating principle when it comes to testing hypotheses, identifying unmet needs, and more generally improving products and services. The tighter the feedback loop, the better.

Meanwhile, the publishing industry still operates under very different rules. The reasons for this are as much structural as creative.

On the structural side, it's important to note that publishing is really a B2B business: publishers sell not to readers, but to bookstores, retailers, libraries, academia, and more. To do so, they rely on intermediaries — namely, wholesalers and distributors — who acquire books from them and sell them to the rest of the industry. Wholesalers and distributors differ in several aspects. For example, the former work with publishers on a non-exclusive basis, the latter on an exclusive basis. One buys books from publishers at a discount off of the list price, sells them to physical and online retailers at a smaller discount, and pockets the difference. The other charges a percentage of net sales and provides publishers with additional services including sales, marketing, and data cataloging. Despite these nuances, however, both play the same key role in the value chain, enabling customer-facing businesses to buy, and, crucially, return books in large quantities instead of transacting with thousands of different publishing houses. Commercially, this makes publishers not just once but twice removed from actual readers.

This intermediation has serious consequences.

The first one is on brand awareness. On the one hand, publishers tend to focus only on "direct response" marketing as a way to drive sales for individual titles, as opposed to brand marketing, which aims to increase overall brand awareness. This is sensible, considering that they are indeed in the business of selling books; with competition high and margins low, chasing brand equity for its own sake may seem like a frivolous endeavor. But this negligence also means that readers remain largely indifferent to whichever publisher might be behind their next picks. Their focus is on the book; their loyalty, to the author. Safe for a select few names, most of us would be hard-pressed to say what it is that a particular publisher stands for.

The second consequence is on engagement and monetization. To borrow from tech parlance, publishers have no control over consumers' discovery and purchase experience; that stage of the journey is in the hands of the retailers. With no direct view of readers' contact info and preferences, no entry point into their wallets, publishers have no way to re-engage even their most avid readers or to complement their legacy B2B models. For example, it's telling that most experiments around subscription boxes have come from startups — in other words, outsiders — rather than from publishers. Likewise, merchandising today is the prerogative of only a handful of publishers fortunate enough to have a strong brand (e.g. Penguin), strong IP (e.g. Bloomsbury, of Harry Potter fame), or some combination of both.

On the creative side too, the relationship with readers is tenuous at best. Due to the medium's nature — a self-contained, definitive product —, communication is, by default, awfully sparse. It can be years before an author publishes their next novel, or even in between two installments of an ongoing series, and any progress is usually kept secret until completion. While the most digital-savvy authors today might share more regular updates or spontaneously comment on a fan's video, the connections they forge doing so are theirs and theirs alone. Publishers, again, remain largely invisible, and benefit only indirectly and further down the line, through book sales.

For the industry, BookTok appeared to be a credible solution to these problems. A chance to bridge the gap: to finally engage readers unmediated, grow brand equity, and set foundations for more direct monetization.

Fountain of Youth

The lure wasn't just any readers, though. Crucially, TikTok's user and creator base skewed young, and BookTok reflected, and continues to reflect, that fact. Here was an opportunity, publishers hoped, to engage, educate, and influence the next generation of readers.

It was not a trivial matter. Reading has seen a marked decline among younger demographics in recent years. In Australia, the portion of children aged five to 14 who read in their spare time fell by more than 6% between 2018 and 2022. In the UK, only 26% of under-18s spent some time reading each day in 2019, the lowest level since the charity's first survey in 2005. In France, the share of people who identified as readers among those aged 15-24 decreased by 12 percentage points between 2019 and 2022. Attrition is rarely good for business, but it's especially alarming when it's affecting those you thought you'd be selling to next.

The irony, of course, is that TikTok was very much part of the problem. An inconvenient truth about why people don't read is that, quite simply, they'd rather be doing something else. These days, that “something” usually takes place in front of a screen. Social media and gaming have been noticeably eating up kids' and teenagers' leisure time and good ol' reading has been getting the shorter end of the stick. This encroachment isn't just metaphorical. A study conducted in France in 2022 found that 47% of young readers often do other things while reading, with 37% stopping to text friends, 27% scrolling social media, and 25% watching videos. Screens are, literally, displacing books in people's hands.

Facing those facts, publishers were stuck between a rock and a hard place. They could either do nothing and watch their readership age out and their prestige and business erode, or enter enemy territory and hope to turn digital to their advantage. As the saying goes, "If you can't beat them..."

Roughly four years after BookTok started its ascent, its sway over young readers appears stronger than ever. In a poll conducted by the U.S. Publishers Association in October 2022, 59% of 16–25-year-olds said that BookTok or book influencers had helped them discover a passion for reading; more than half (55%) said they turn to BookTok for recommendations; and 68% said BookTok had inspired them to read a book that they would have never considered otherwise. It's no small paradox that the same screens that have been hijacking people's attention for years are also what's driving reading's (relative) resurgence. At this point, BookTok looks inescapable.

The Boiling Frog Problem

By and large, the industry has welcomed the change — record-breaking sales tend to make everyone cooperative. But caution is warranted.

To begin with, BookTok-induced growth is not all “up and to the right". After a virtually uninterrupted rise during COVID 19, it was only logical that the platform would start showing some variability. In July last year, sales from the roughly 180 authors Nielsen's BookScan tracker follows on the platform actually fell by 4.5% compared to 2022. Sales for the Young Adult category, normally a significant growth driver, were down 1% after increasing 4% between July 2021 and 2022. Though BookTok is nowhere near done, publishers should prepare themselves for when the momentum ends.

It's also clear not everyone is benefitting equally. For better or worse, success on BookTok is self-reinforcing: the more popular an author appears to be on the platform, the more users are incentivized to post about them to rake in more views and followers. In turn, the algorithm learns to favor the same content over time, pushing the same few names to more and more viewers. In July 2022, videos featuring the hashtags #ColleenHoover, #ColleenHooverBooks, and #CoHo had nearly 2 billion views combined, a level of ubiquity that makes Hoover virtually undethronable. According to Circana BookScan, in 2024 so far, print sales for authors with large audiences on BookTok have seen a 23% (!) increase compared to last year. By comparaison, in the total adult fiction market, print sales are up only 6% over last year. As BookScan analyst Kristen McLean put it, the community "is becoming less efficient or engaged in surfacing new authors overall."

Admittedly, both of these points are manageable. Slower growth is still growth, and publishers still have many levers they can pull to squeeze sales out of the platform. Meanwhile, whatever hierarchy is taking form on BookTok between established authors and newcomers always existed offline; TikTok's digital environment and social features are only amplifying it.

More insidious, and dangerous, is platform risk. As publishers and booksellers continue to lean on BookTok for everything from market research to discovery, promotion, and sales, they are giving away any semblance of control over the customer journey. Even worse, they are exposing themselves — both individually and collectively — to a single point of failure, a risky position to be in no matter the industry.

Commoditization Engine

As it stands, BookTok is a commoditization engine.

Because the community tends to reject any overtly polished marketing, publishers can't directly steer readers toward their catalogs — influence has to be mediated. Today, this is done mainly by tapping influencers that can kickstart traction before organic interest hopefully kicks in. But this practice is problematic for several reasons.

First, this kind of fragmentation can blur a publisher's intended message, as influencers will each be presenting the same book to their respective audiences in their own, unique ways. This comes in stark contrast with the tightly controlled marketing material that publishers would normally be sharing with retailers in a traditional model.

The second reason is fairly unique to books as a category. Some products, like cars or make-up, call for at least some degree of brand loyalty. A beauty influencer, for instance, will usually abstain from jumping from one brand partnership to the next if they want their audience to see these deals as anything else than cash grabs. On the other hand, nobody expects a book influencer to work exclusively with one publisher, no matter how much they enjoy their editorial stance. In fact, when it comes to reading, repeat purchases and eclecticism are not just accepted but praised in ways that they are not in other product categories.

This leniency has been a boon to bookfluencers, some of whom are currently promoting almost one book a week. But since the same influencer could be partnering alternatively (and indifferently) with multiple publishers, the marginal value of each sponsored post tends to only decrease over time. Publishers are therefore left with two options: either work with the same prominent influencers as their competitors and be commoditized as yet another sponsor; or move down the food chain to less courted micro- and nano-influencers, whose impact on sales might not be as great. Not an easy call!

To make things even more difficult, commoditization also plays out at the interface level. In the good ol' Instagram days, brands and content producers could at least use the grid as a canvas for editorialization. With TikTok's feed-centric UI, designing with a clean, static view in mind no longer makes sense. This makes visually conveying what you're about much harder. Today, a publisher's "identity" on BookTok really only consists of whatever users are saying about its books.

TikTok’s Book Strategy

To make matters worse, TikTok has been slowly but surely encroaching on the publishing value chain, integrating more and more touchpoints under its brand and interface.

In July 2022, the company partnered with Barnes & Noble on "an all-new, interactive summer reading experience" that bridged in-app engagement and in-store shopping through a time-limited Challenge and a dedicated social hub. In November, it onboarded partners including HarperCollins UK, Bloomsbury and Bookshop.org to launch a new Books category on TikTok Shop in the UK, enabling users to buy books without leaving the app. Finally, in May last year, the company held its inaugural Book Awards for the UK and Ireland, which encouraged the community to vote for the winning books, authors and creators — again, in-app.

Across these initiatives, a pattern emerges. Firstly, TikTok has made sure to work hand in hand with established players, from publishers to online marketplaces to festivals, in an attempt to show goodwill and position itself as an enhancer to the industry. Secondly, these actions strategically leverage its community's involvement: the more engagement TikTok generates around books — whether that's in content, votes, or sales — the better it can convince future partners to place their trust in its platform.

Behind the scenes, however, the goal isn't just collaboration: like it has in music, TikTok is trying to capture as much of publishing’s value chain as possible. In March, TikTok's parent company ByteDance filed a trademark with the US Patent and Trademark Office for 8th Note Press, describing it as a company that will provide a range of publishing products and services including print, ebooks, and audiobooks. According to the application, the new venture will also be home to "virtual communities that allow registered users to participate in discussions, consumer reviews, and social networking."

While ByteDance insists that 8th Note is a separate entity from TikTok, the synergies are obvious. Katherine Pelz, who was appointed as 8th Note's first acquisition editor, specializes in romance, BookTok's favorite genre. (Pelz has since moved to a similar position at CooTek.) Along with an advance and royalties, pitches to authors have mentioned social media campaigns, a variety of marketing for which TikTok would be the obvious option. In July last year, the New York Times reported that the new company would expand into physical books once TikTok had launched its much anticipated online retail platform, TikTok Shop — which debuted in September 2023. These plans are now near completion: last month, 8th Note Press announced it is teaming up with Zando on a new joint imprint that will release 10 to 15 books a year, with the first titles arriving in early 2025.

All these moves have, understandably, raised alarm. Some in the industry fear that ByteDance could favor its own books on BookTok, forcing others to pay up in order to reach viewers. What's more, given the black box nature of TikTok's algorithms, traditional publishers and self-published authors would have no way to prove wrongdoing. Another concern is that ByteDance could use TikTok's immense trove of data to pick up early signals about trending genres, tropes, and authors. This much has been all but confirmed, with Jacob Bronstein, the head of editorial and marketing at the company, revealing that 8th Note is “‘building backwards’ by acquiring books that feed into those trends and conversations.’ This would give 8th Note a headstart over its less technologically-savvy competitors to buy up rights, or even develop demand-driven books internally.

The Many Flavors of Platform Risk

While some of these concerns might look overblown for now, platform risk isn't to be taken lightly. The history of media is littered with examples of companies, and even entire industries, too eager to rely on an uncertain third-party, only for their own businesses to crumble when the rug was pulled from under them.

Consider the now infamous "pivot to video," the rushed adoption of video content as the new default by digital publishers in the mid 2010s. After Facebook in 2015 shared data claiming that users overwhelmingly preferred video over text, the then fast-growing army of social-first publications including Buzzfeed, NowThis, and Mashable shifted their focus overnight, laying off writers and editors in droves in favor of "snackable" video content supposed to better attract advertisers' money. When it turned out one year later that Facebook had been seriously (and knowingly) inflating key usage metrics for years and consumer demand for the medium just wasn't there, the damage was done and publishers went into disarray.

Recent history has had its share of trickery too. In February last year, TikTok ran a month-long test in Australia that limited the amount of licensed music some users could encounter on the platform. Understandably, many in the industry blamed the company for trying to downplay the significance of music on its platform. Though TikTok denied it being a negotiation tactic, Billboard noted that "the company [was] gathering data during a year when most, if not all, of [its] agreements with music rights owners [was coming] up for renewal." Though TikTok ultimately walked back this initiative, the experiment had a chilling effect.

What is clear from these examples is that platform risk comes in many shapes and forms. Neither in the "pivot to video" debacle nor in TikTok's sound-off test did the underlying platform need to actually shut down for it to impact the businesses building on top. In the first case, an entire industry wasted millions and affected hundreds of livelihoods chasing engagement based on false promises. In the second, a technology platform was able to single-handedly suppress rights holders for a month just to test a business hypothesis. Small(ish) decisions, big consequences.

Trouble could also come from elsewhere. For example, TikTok's ties with China through its parent company make it especially susceptible to regulatory scrutiny. Though the company has so far managed to avoid a formal ban in the U.S., it's already been blacklisted by dozens of countries and government bodies over privacy and security concerns. Top-down intervention such as these can abruptly and irreversibly disrupt entire ecosystems. With all the business that's at stake, are publishers prepared for such extreme scenarios?

The Writing on the Wall

On paper (pun intended), BookTok’s rise has been a boon for the publishing industry. It has breathed new life into reading, sparking younger generations’ excitement for the written word after years of indifference and boosting sales across both new and dormant IP.

But the platform's influence should raise serious concerns. The “pivot to video” debacle and the news industry’s continued struggles with social platforms offer cautionary tales for those that subject themselves to the whims of a single, opaque intermediary. Books may have TikTok’s attention for now, but what happens when they no longer do? Or when the company really starts gunning for more of the value chain? The more publishers scramble to capitalize on BookTok’s momentum, the more they expose themselves to platform risk, with potentially ruinous consequences.

Ultimately, the industry's naive embrace of BookTok reveals deeper issues. Structurally dependent on intermediaries to reach consumers, almost indistinguishable behind even world-famous IP, and faced with the relentless competition of screen-based entertainment, book publishers have, understandably, been desperate for anything that might rejuvenate their business. Even at the cost of their long-term resilience and independence. 

Spray-and-praying on BookTok can’t possibly be the solution to these problems; publishers need to learn how to stand on their own. This means strengthening their brands beyond one-and-off releases, cultivating a diverse array of discovery, engagement, and monetization channels, and overall bringing back a sense of experimentation and playfulness to their age-old trade. Only then can they hope to weather the storms that lie ahead.

That’s it for Part I! In Part II next week, we’ll explore why we care about a book’s cover so much, what messages it sends and to what purpose, and why its pull has never been stronger.

Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please consider giving it a like and take a minute to share it with others. It really helps.

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How much is a URL worth?

I asked myself that question a few months ago when I went about acquiring the learning.media domain and a sales exec at Afternic — a GoDaddy-owned “premiere domain marketplace” — reached out with a $6,000 price tag. I declined, and instead went with the even better understanding.media for 4% of that sum.

Though anecdotal, the process brought to light a larger yet overlooked truth: on the internet, everything is just real estate-in-waiting. Domain names. Usernames. Display names. Profile pictures. Social banners. Eye traffic is the new foot traffic, and any attention-worthy location is an asset that can and will be hoarded, speculated on, rented, and sold.

Individuals and businesses are well aware of the opportunity. On the one hand, netizens are using short bursts of exposure to catch lightning in a bottle by selling their reach for a quick buck. On the other hand, digital businesses are deliberately surfacing their own inventory, using a mix of status and fun to make it desirable — that is, monetizable.

This piece takes a close look at some of the most overt occurrences of this trend. Across all of them, what’s at play is the increasing financialization of our digital surroundings.

Personal billboards

A few years ago, creator economy investor Li Jin tweeted something about her own "digital billboard."

The feature in question was powered by Koji, a company building link-in-bio infrastructure that lets creators engage and monetize their following.

Link-in-bio tools aren't new — Linktree, which pioneered this space and has remained one its most prominent players, launched in 2016. Dozens more followed in its footsteps, as the task of managing a social presence across platforms made the need for a centralized repository more pressing for creators. With investor interest growing, many of these ended up attracting substantial funding over the years.

In an increasingly crowded space, Koji stood out. Whereas competitors only offered a handful of features — typically direct links, ecommerce capabilities, and tipping —, Koji took on building a fully-fledged ecosystem, rich with dozens of apps from third-party developers. This offering lets users compose a profile unique to them, using building blocks that couldn't be found elsewhere including video requests, mini-games, or... a billboard.

This particular add-on makes ad units available to be purchased by anyone who wants to display and advertise something on a creator's profile, via their own image or video. Each time the space is purchased, the price of the billboard increases. The creator is free to set their preferred starting price; how long a billboard is owned before the next buyer can come in and pay up; and the percentage increase kicking in with each new purchase.

From one-off branded posts to partner programs on digital platforms like YouTube, ads have long been a pillar of the creator economy. The reason why Koji's digital billboard feature was transformative is that anyone with a big enough audience could now sell their reach to the highest bidder. No tweet, no Instagram post, no hashtag, no tagging any brand: the space was evergreen and readily available for anyone to tap without the owner's involvement, divorcing work from reach. This made it a novel potential revenue stream for millions of people who have amassed substantial reach yet do not consider themselves influencers and would have never thought of openly looking for brand sponsors.

There are other examples. In February last year, Double Down's Magdalena Kala auctioned off her Twitter presence, with the promise that the winner would be able to "pick whatever image they want: a brand logo, favorite NFT, meme, love declaration, job posting, personal ad," and have it displayed on Kala's profile picture and banner for three weeks. The auction resulted in 0.477 ETH (or about $1,550 at the time) being sent to charity. A few months later, Nick Pappageorge sold "exclusive design rights to the shirtspace worn by [him] during the 2022 TCS NYC Marathon."

Dynamic personal billboards, manually traded Twitter banners, and "shirtspace" all represent new inventory that is opening up to monetization at the individual's level. Interestingly, in all these instances, even the buyers were individuals, not brands. I see this as an early signal of a truly peer-to-peer marketplace, one in which individuals can opportunistically tap into one another's reach to promote their skills, sell their products, and advance their careers.

The present and future of social plugs

Since we’re talking about opportunism… Let me tell you the story of social plugs.

Not so long ago, when one of their tweets went viral, people would try to plug their Soundcloud or whatever else they had to promote. In most instances, however, the author proved desperately unprepared to make the most of the opportunity — to the point where "I don't have a Soundcloud but..." became part of the internet lingo.

With time, some started using their precious 15 minutes (or, as a friend put it, “1.5 seconds”) of fame to direct attention and money to the causes dear to their heart, anything from a GoFundMe campaign to a bail fund or educational resources on social or political matters. Already, this was an acknowledgment that the sudden, unexpected attention could be funneled toward something else than the author of the tweet.

We've now entered a third stage of social piggybacking: one where every viral piece of content can be momentarily leveraged as digital inventory for others to tap. Here's what's happening behind the scenes:

1. A digital-savvy company actively monitors Twitter to pick up tweets that are about to reach escape velocity.

2. The company opportunistically reaches out to the author of a viral tweet via DM to ask for a plug. From the quick chats I had on Twitter with two of the lucky participants, these aren't referral deals, where an individual shares a custom link that can be traced back to them, and earns a commission on sales in return. Here, the URL plugged is always the same, meaning there’s no specific tweet tracking. Payment is made upfront through PayPal on a per-tweet basis: plug several products, and you'll be paid for each.

3. The author posts the link(s) as a follow-up to the initial tweet.

4. The original poster’s organic and extended audiences are exposed to the tweet and, as they browse the comments, to the follow-up tweet, that is, the ad.

I've been seeing more and more of these. It seems a bunch of companies are seeing an opportunity to acquire customers for cheap, aiming for the same kind of "why not" impulse buy they'd typically get from an Instagram or TikTok ad. As you’d expect, most cases have to do with cheap, gadgety products — vibrators, peel masks, a "chubby seal pillow," or the now infamous "sunset lamp" that once went viral on TikTok. Amazingly, some threads manage to feature them all.

I think the trend speaks to a growing understanding of how much value online visibility, no matter how fleeting, can have — and to everyone's eagerness to milk it while it lasts. In this configuration, brands don't need their own tweets to go viral: they're building off those that already have, leveraging someone else's sudden fame for their own promotional purposes.

Still, trailing even the farthest-reaching piece of content will only give a brand long-tail visibility and adequately low conversion rates and, ultimately, sales. It's also rare that whatever goes viral on Twitter can be considered "brand safe." This limits this kind of inventory to the most daring or opportunistic of companies, those willing to mine virality regardless of its source or destination. Searching for the sunset lamp URL on Twitter will return the most disparate bunch of tweets, a constellation of spicy takes and stupid memes whose only common trait was their ability to draw eyeballs for a moment. Pecunia non olet.

While such transactions today remain informal, it's not hard to imagine a future where these sorts of plugs could be seamlessly traded and monetized. Individuals would be able to auction off the follow-up to their tweets with a single click; meanwhile, brands would be able to dynamically place bids based on a tweet's potential for virality, its current likes/replies/RT ratio, or the sort of communities it's reaching on the network. With Twitter's adoption of views as a guiding metric, the infrastructure is certainly getting there.

In that world, does everything, and everyone, have a price? A Twitter user told me that each product they promoted in their follow-up tweets earned them $60 upfront. That’s certainly better than nothing, considering these payments were unexpected in the first place. At the same time, is $60 worth the reputational risk? The same user declined to promote a vibrator, but clearly not everyone has been so prudent. These offers force participants to new arbitrages between fleeting economical opportunities and their long-term digital presence.

Growing the internet’s real estate

However novel the opportunities they represent, neither Koji’s billboards nor Twitter plugs really put individuals in control. In one case, a billboard’s reach and its appeal to potential advertisers are constrained by a punishing conversion rate, since few among a creator’s total follower base will ever click on that person’s “link in bio.” In the other, a user can predict neither the success of their tweet, nor whether a company will slide into their DMs with an offer. The digital inventory is there, but its value is uncertain at best.

By contrast, businesses are in a position to create new inventory from scratch. Let’s see how.

A few years ago, Mobile Dev Memo's Eric Seufert wrote: "Everything is an ad network." He went on to specify:

Not literally everything. But any company with sufficient supply of or access to consumer data — in a first-party environment! — is now presented with the opportunity to build an advertising network where previously that would have been impractical or even somewhat absurd given the competitive landscape.

We've seen this materialize on virtually every large enough consumer app. In 2021, Seufert could already point to companies like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Instacart, all of which had launched their own self-serve ad platforms to let brands promote their products. Others have taken that same route ever since. Airbnb's Brian Chesky said in an interview that sponsored listings are "absolutely on the horizon." From marketplaces to navigation apps, no category is immune to The Great Billboard-ification.

The same phenomenon can be observed everywhere in the physical realm. Wrapify, a "performance-driven ad tech platform for brands powered by OOH [Out Of Home] and the gig-economy," has been wrapping delivery cars with all-over advertising for years. Octopus (acquired by T-Mobile last year) feeds on your attention as you ride-share thanks to the "largest national network of interactive video screens inside Uber and Lyft vehicles." GSTV programs content on the screens of gas station pumps, engaging “on-the-go consumers at unique moments of 1:1 attention.” Last year, an academic paper on "Satellite formation flying for space advertising" estimated that a 3-month, 24-display campaign could bring roughly $111 million.

You get the gist: aggregating demand (i.e., eyeballs), whether on- or offline, enables companies to build networks that can be monetized at scale with ads. Interestingly, only some of the examples above are first-party initiatives, meaning they were launched as an incremental line of business by the company that had built the inventory in the first place. The rest came from third-parties savvy enough to identify underutilized real estate and wedge themselves in as new stakeholders in the value chain.

While there is still plenty of untapped inventory in the physical world, I'm most interested in its digital equivalent. A well-known trait of digital is that it removes the constraints that inevitably cap businesses in the physical realm: unlike Barnes & Noble, Amazon, as an ecommerce business, has unlimited shelf space. Similarly, where Wrapify’s and Octopus’s reach is proportional to (and constrained by) the size of the physical car network, Instacart and Airbnb can, and will, always come up with new ad formats, essentially turning more of their own inventory into sponsored content.

Here, I want to take a look at three companies that, each in its own way, surfaced new, desirable digital inventory to build a business around it: Hey, Toucan, and Yat.

Hey

Hey is a premium email service launched by Basecamp (now 37signals) in June 2020. After debuting to mostly positive reviews, it found itself at the center of a stand-off between Basecamp and Apple over the App Store policy regarding in-app purchases. The service still exists today, though the hype has largely waned.

But the most striking aspect of Hey wasn't what it did with email. It was what it did with email addresses.

With every new social app or service that pops up, the same thing always happens. As people rush to snatch "their" username before somebody else does, it's the Wild West all over again: a digital land grab, taking place on a first come, first serve basis. And while betas and TestFlights can give a happy few early access to their dream handles, most of us are left scrabbling for second best — settling for unwanted hyphens, periods, and underscores.

Why is it that we care so much about social handles anyway? There's two main reasons for that.

First, it's a matter of status: owning a short, recognizable username is, quite simply, proof that you got in early. In a world where digital savviness goes hand in hand with social and cultural recognition, the "early adopter" stamp has value in and of itself.

Second, username consistency helps with visibility. Maintained across platforms, it enables anyone to find and browse through your work and thoughts from a single search term. This has value for individuals and companies alike. On the one hand, it greatly improves discoverability for the growing numbers of individuals looking to build a personal brand online. On the other hand, it helps brands protect their prized IP, at a time when cybersquatting has become a worthwhile endeavor.

Hey saw this potential — and made the most of it, with a tiered pricing model that was based on an address's length. A two-letter address was $999 a year; a three-letter one, $375 a year. Every other email address from four letters on was $99 a year.

According to Hey's cofounder David Heinemeier Hansson, the velvet rope approach proved successful. In any case, it was a clever way to monetize an asset that usually doesn't allow for price discrimination. That anyone would agree to pay up to $900 more (per year!) just for a shorter email address with the exact same utility as a four-letter one — the digital equivalent to a vanity plate — goes to show how lucrative status can be for the companies that build around it.

Toucan

Toucan, which shut down in March, was building web-native tools for language learning. At its peak, the company's Chrome extension had over 300,000 users translating between 11 different languages.

In the early days, growth came, in large part, from the company's marketing savvy. In September 2020, Toucan launched Own The Word, a feature that let users "own" a word so that their name (along with an optional link or/and picture) appeared anytime that word was translated by Toucan on a user's screen. For $1 a week, anyone could claim a word of their choice and have their details automatically show up alongside it.

The campaign took off, as individuals and brands alike seized the opportunity to claim the words they wanted to be associated with in the public's mind. Bill Nye owned the word "science", while Morning Brew owned "coffee;" Monthly claimed "learn," and FaZe Clan had "video game." Toucan had made sure to add built-in virality, by letting buyers show off their ownership on social media with a nifty visual. This mechanism and the novelty effect helped spread the word.

As both a campaign and a business, Own The Word is long gone — Toucan's revenues came solely from its premium plan after that. But it offers a valuable lesson when it comes to creating and monetizing digital real estate.

With Own the Word, Toucan had figured out a way to monetize words. At first sight, this may look similar to the Google Ads platform, which lets businesses bid against specific keywords to display ads or service offerings to web browsers. The difference is, Google Ads monetizes intent, enabling companies to reach people that they know are interested in a specific keyword.

By contrast, Toucan didn't place ads but replaced words in real time with their translation in a user's target language, turning static text everywhere on the web into a custom, dynamic inventory. This made every webpage a place for ambient learning (Toucan's actual promise) or, when it came to Own The Word, ambient advertising — a way of serendipitously using word association to direct a reader's attention. Although Toucan has ceased activities, it's interesting to think of what could have been. As the company kept adding new languages and language pairs to its offering, brands on Own The Word would have benefitted from ever more pathways pointing their way.

Yat

Yat Labs is an internet registrar that manages the y.at domain. The company lets users buy unique emoji-based URLs, named Yats, that can serve as a "universal emoji username, website URL, payment address, and more" — in short, a unique internet identity system. Every Yat is one-of-a-kind and owned forever after the initial payment.

URLs have always been big business. Like social media aliases, they convey seriousness and are key to ensuring consistency throughout the consumer journey. Last year, Teachable founder Ankur Nagpal recommended buying a premium domain name upfront, sharing that Teachable "saw [its] conversion rate dramatically jump when [it] rebranded from http://usefedora.com to http://teachable.com." In October, Mario Gabriele's The Generalist dropped the "the" for the cleaner generalist.com, a move he saw as "important for the business."

As the marketplace got saturated and premium domains became too expensive to buy, businesses had to look for workarounds. One popular option has been domain hacking, which combines the second level domain and top level domain (respectively the parts to the left and to the right of the dot) to compose a recognizable word or a brand’s name — think youtu.be or spoti.fi. Another has been to go for newer, more singular domain extensions that carry signaling power. For example, the .io domain is commonly used for browser games, whereas XYZ has been a web3 favorite. Still, the good old .com remains the Holy Grail of the internet — if only because many of the more original extensions will be automatically sent to spam. Clip-sharing platform Medal, which already owned medal.gg and medal.tv, shelled out a little more than $185,000 to acquire medal.com in an auction last year. Call it business sense or vanity, companies across industries continue to jump at the opportunity to upgrade to a shorter and/or .com domain as soon as it presents itself.

Like Hey had done with the email address, Yat entered the URL game with a twist. On its own, the y.at domain arguably had little appeal: it had neither the prestige of a .com domain, the flair of a .xyz one, or the specificity of a .tech or .media one. What set Yat apart, however, was its focus on emojis, "a universal language" that could be used for effects that evaded the traditional alphanumerical system — from wordplays to rebuses to aesthetics.

Along with that premise came two unique "scoring elements" that together could make Yats more or less rare. The first one was a Yat's Generation, an indication of the time period in which the Yat was created. The second one was the Rhythm Score, a number between 1 and 100 determined by three factors: a Yat's length; the average popularity of the emojis used in the Yat "based on current worldwide usage;" and the Yat's pattern (i.e. repeating emojis or "bookend" emojis).

These variables enabled Yat to both formalize and gamify rarity, sparking speculation around the most interesting combinations. In April 2021, the company ran its first live auction, selling 18 Yats from its vault to the highest bidders. The highest-selling item, the key emoji, sold for $425K; the lowest-selling one, "cat in the hat," sold for $30K. In July 2021, Yat claimed to have sold "almost $20 million worth of emoji identities" in its "Generation zero," or open beta, phase. Since then, the company has continued to release subdomains via multiple drops that each made new emojis available to play with.

Over time, the company started leaning more and more on web3 capabilities, stating in April 2021 that it was “working on developing an oracle service so that Yats can be issued as NFTs on EVM compatible chains.” A few months later, it started selling rare emoji strings as NFTs on OpenSea. At the time of writing, over 12,600 yats have collectively generated a volume of 447 ETH on the marketplace. Other experiments followed, from limited-edition NFT (“Gems”) to the ability to associate crypto addresses with one’s Yat (“Pay with Yat”), to “Yat Fantasy,” a free-to-play NFT collecting game.

A digital Times Square

While internet registrars can be highly profitable businesses, they leave little room for continuous engagement. This was doubly true of Yat, whose consumer-friendly “pay once, own forever” policy prevented it from enjoying the kind of recurring revenue that competitors like GoDaddy normally get from domain renewals. Web3 enabled the company to overcome these limitations and use its identity system as the foundation for gamification.

There couldn’t have been a better match. On the one hand, digital identity has been at the core of web3’s promise. With the wallet acting as both a passport and an inventory, an individual’s on-chain history is a tell-all, real-time log of their assets, credentials, and affiliations. Monetization has received similar interest. From crowdfunding to auctions, from royalty splits to fractionalization, from flash loans to payroll streaming, tokens have unlocked tremendous financial creativity and allowed liquidity to circulate at the internet’s speed. 

Assetization was the logical outcome. In web3, everything from a tweet to an article to a music stem can be turned into its own distinct digital product, enriched with perks, and used to access exclusive content and experiences. NFTs can be fractionalized, collateralized, sponsored, licensed and delegated, or even own on-chain assets themselves. Wherever you look, it’s assets all the way down.

One project at the forefront of this paradigm has been ENS (short for Ethereum Name Service), which allows users to register .eth domains compatible with the Ethereum network.

To anyone who believed in a web3 future, the value of ENS was obvious. Like normal Ethereum addresses, ENS domains could be used to receive tokens and launch and access distributed websites. But unlike the 42-long character strings that normally represent these addresses, the short, text-based nature of these domains made them easy to use, share, and remember. In the team’s own nomenclature, this made them akin to “names,” and the whole project, to “the blockchain-based Internet naming infrastructure of the future.”

This also fostered speculation from day 1.

Originally, ENS allocated available names (7 characters and up) through Vickrey auctions, a type of sealed-bid auction where buyers would lock up Ether to bid on a name, then either reveal their bid or lose the locked amount. If they relinquished ownership of a name at any point, the deposit would also be returned to them. This was meant to “let people test out ENS with low risk” at a time when its value proposition was still unproven.

Unfortunately, it also made it riskless to squat domains indefinitely, since a user could always get their Ether back; as the team noted, “the only losses [for squatters were] transaction fees and opportunity cost.” The secondary market took off, thanks to specialized marketplaces that made domains more liquid and speculation more integral to the system. Two years after inception, in April 2019, an estimated “80% of all .eth names [were] held by squatters.”

Changes were made. In May 2019, the team transitioned “from an auction and deposit system to an instant registration and annual fee one.” An initial reservation period allowed people and brands with an established internet presence to claim a 3-6 character.eth name before it would be put on auction. The team also implemented a decaying price premium, with the goal to “prevent all but a few names from being sniped via high gas prices the moment they expire.”

But speculation was well entrenched, and it never left. In 2020, another gold rush took place as buyers got an opportunity to snatch the domains that hadn’t been renewed (i.e., paid for) by their previous owners. A third one debuted in April 2022 when ENS made all 3- and 4-digit domains available for registration. Over the years, new social-cultural layers added to the appeal of these assets for collectors, as groups like the 10kClub and the Three Letters Club formed around specific domain attributes.

Today, ENS claims to have 697,000 owners who have collectively registered 2.73 million names, an average of 3.9 names per owner. Even if we assume that each person needs two names — one for themselves, the other one for an existing or prospective business — that’s still 1.9 names per person that can be attributed to speculation. About 40% of ENS domains visible on OpenSea “are for sale or have been sold on that platform alone.” Premium .eth domains, and Ether itself, have appreciated so much that containing name sniping required the team to raise the starting price of the temporary premium from $2000 originally to a whopping… $100 million.

Should we marvel, or despair, at the state of affairs?

ENS’s history is certainly a testament to web3’s creativity when it comes to making money. At the same time, there is something depressing in thinking that “the internet naming infrastructure of the future” is so conspicuously, and irrevocably, subject to financialization.

Back in 2019, the team stated: “The more likely that .eth names are operated by the person or organization you’d expect (e.g. brands using their brand’s .eth name), the more useful ENS is and therefore the more likely ENS will be a success.” Four years later, web3-native identity is just a digital Times Square.

After ad blindness

The financialization of the internet is well underway. In every digital nook and cranny, someone is vying for your attention and money.

Not everyone will make a living off it. Follow-up tweets rely on unpredictable traffic spikes, Koji’s personal billboards have more to do with patronage than with any serious ROI, and who knows how much longer people will shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for funny strings of emojis. Still, what matters is not how much money any one of these examples brings in at the individual level, but what kind of digital landscape they weave on the aggregate.

As internet users, we’ve grown adept at adjusting to our surroundings. On the technical side, we shielded ourselves with ad blockers. On the cognitive side, we found salvation in ad blindness, a phenomenon where we consciously or unconsciously ignore what we identify as ads on a webpage. So-called “native advertising,” which matches the form and function of its surrounding content, was the industry’s response to our growing indifference. And it worked: in 2019, a researcher at Boston University found that fewer than 1 in 10 individuals were able to tell sponsored content from its surroundings. Preserving our attention online continues to feel like a cat-and-mouse game. 

The current financialization feels like a continuation of this trend — only more insidious. In a world where every above-average tweet is a potential sales channel, every pixel the object of speculation, and brands can now effectively inject themselves into AI responses, can we still come up with new defense mechanisms to make the digital minefield navigable again?

Many thanks to Devon and Vinay for reviewing drafts of this piece and sharing their insights with me.

Thank you for reading. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can find me on Twitter, or just reply to this email.

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A few months ago, my friend Fawzi came to me with a question he thought I’d enjoy exploring: why is it that so many games look like anime or comics these days? From Fortnite’s numerous character crossovers to the global phenomenon that is Genshin Impact, it seemed like something was brewing and inspiring developers across both game genres and borders.

Fawzi was right, and the trend has only picked up steam since our first chat. It turns out, everyone’s new favorite art style is really only one piece of a much larger moment. With growing cultural legitimacy and legitimate ambitions, Asia’s creative industries are breaking into the mainstream and transforming not just what stories look like, but how they’re told, too. Today, I’m excited to share a deep dive into this phenomenon.

This here is a preview — make sure to head over to Naavik to read the full piece.

Understanding the rise of ACG aesthetics in gaming

Or why all your favorite games look like anime these days

Genshin Impact. Tower of Fantasy. Arknights Tower Defense. Omega Strikers. Hi-Fi Rush. See the pattern yet?

Whether you've played these games or watched their success from afar, you may have noticed a common trait between them: their extensive use of ACG aesthetics. ACG, short for "Anime, Comics, Gaming," is a term popular in Greater China and Southeast Asia to encompass the business and culture that has formed around these three forms of media. In practice, the focus is most often on the "Anime and Comics" part, which makes ACG somewhat similar to its better-known, Japan-born neighbor, otaku. 

While the term may seem foreign to most, the business behind it isn't. ACG is having a moment: manga and anime, already ubiquitous in the West, continue to grow, and webtoons, the South-Korean digital comics that read top to bottom, have been making significant headway, too. Savvy producers are making the most of this momentum ensuring new and existing intellectual properties (IP) spread far and wide, be it as live-action series, LEGO sets, or vinyl figurines.

But what about gaming? As the name indicates, gaming is very much integral to the ACG triptyque. There are historical reasons for this. In Japan, the nascent video game industry not only received a welcome influx of talent from manga and anime studios early on, it also became part of the media mix, a unique production and distribution model underpinning the majority of the country's entertainment output. Meanwhile, in the West, where such a cultural and commercial interlock didn't exist, anime and comics still made their way into games by way of both adaptation and aesthetics.

ACG's influence on gaming is thus no novelty. Yet the current cultural infusion stands out in several ways that deserve closer attention. Growing cultural legitimacy, the upskilling of Asia's creative industries, and the ascendancy of transmedia as the default approach to storytelling are creating a perfect storm for the relationship to thrive. In an era dominated by global conglomerates and their lowest common denominator franchises, ACG is a striking example of how savvy producers strategically hide, or showcase, the geographic and cultural origins of their work to blend, or stand out, across borders.

To understand the outsize influence ACG has had on modern culture, we need to retrace the origins of this moment, explain the business dynamics at play, and lay out some actionable insights game developers can apply to their own creative work to tap into international appeal and create longer-lasting media properties.

Continue reading on Naavik

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You’re reading Part III of a deep dive into the origins, work, and ethos of betaworks.

In Part I, we went back to the firm’s foundational beliefs and building roots.

In Part II, we unpacked how betaworks grew into the multifaceted business its founders always envisioned.

For the third and last part of this series, we’re exploring how betaworks’s ethos has prompted it to build a better internet for all — and which technologies the firm is now leveraging as it enters its next phase.

Thinking tech through

By now, we've covered betaworks' founding principles and strategy. But to understand what the company is really about, we also need to dig deeper into its ethos.

At the heart of it is an ability and a willingness to think tech through — that is, to consider the many ways in which a particular piece of technology could be misused, either intentionally or unintentionally. This, too, seems to stem from Borthwick’s personal ethos, which he eloquently touched on many years ago:

I think the line between computing, the interface, data, and human thought, is a lot grayer than we acknowledge normally. I think we think of this as something else, and it's not, it's us. It's part of what we've created. To me that's hugely important to believe, because it makes us accountable for what we've created, and the follow-on effects of it. Because I think technology has a grain to it, I think it has directionality to it, and I think there are unintended consequences to things we build. And as builders, we need to own those responsibilities and live to them and see if we can make better worlds through them.

This approach has lived on. Through both their words and their actions, the team makes sure to consistently point out tech's potential dangers so as to subdue them before they go rogue. Here are three examples when the firm called the public's attention to a looming issue. 

2015: Media Hacking

Back in 2015 already, shortly after "fake news" had entered the mainstream lexicon and become a tangible threat to democracy, Borthwick published a piece titled Media Hacking. Pointing to two instances where false information had spread inconspicuously across social networks, he made the case for how better discovery, measurement, and attribution tools could enable us to track and assess information propagation.

These tools, of course, are more needed than ever. The speed at which misinformation circulates has only increased as social platforms continue to grow, social graphs get richer, and we get more accustomed to more media — on TikTok, for example, video-based misinformation lives almost unconstrained. Borthwick's analysis was a word of warning.

2019: Synthetic Media

In July 2019, then-Betaworks member Sarah McBride posted a piece titled Investing in Synthetic Media. Its first sentence: "How “we” at betaworks are thinking about this emerging market." There was just one problem: the entire post was written by an algorithm, as revealed one week later by Borthwick.

It was made "using a transformer-based language model (gpt2)" and feeding it with the team's first post on the topic, written 7 months prior. Betaworks described it as "an experiment in synthetic media," noting:

“We” found this experiment instructive — all forms of media, text, audio, images and yes videos are colliding with machine learning requiring whole new systems and frameworks for trust. That is what we actually do want to invest in.

Like misinformation, the capabilities of synthetic media have increased tenfold since this experiment took place. Synthetic faces and voices are now commonplace and will increasingly put our media literacy to the test. I like to think that betaworks's early call for "frameworks for trust'' was heard by the first wave of voice synthesis companies, who together have shown strong ethical commitment.

2020: Fixing the Internet

In March 2020, the team launched Betalab, an initiative that aims to "fund startups and researchers focusing on how to fix the internet from data and privacy to attention hacking and misinformation."

Part of the Camp model, Betalab combines "an early-stage cohort-based investment program" with "a year-long series of workshops and events." At launch, it shared a fascinating list of "Requests for Startups," across categories that spanned:

• "Identity and authentication tools;"

• "Data ownership;"

• "Software that builds trustworthiness into AI;" and

• "Decentralized publishing."

Later in July, betaworks announced that Yaël Eisenstat, a strategist working at the intersection of ethics, tech, and security, was joining the program as a Researcher in Residence. Eisenstat's role there is to ensure that

"the decisions companies make as they grow are grounded in an understanding of the societal implications of new technology."

Of course, not everything betaworks tinkers with poses the same level of threat. It's unlikely that Leo AR, an app that lets you create AR videos, could seriously harm democracy.

Yet malign consequences can indeed come from seemingly benign products. Betaworks's GPT-2-powered article on Synthetic Media, which fooled many a reader, was produced using a deceivingly simple web app. The most fun of face filters can resurface concerns over foreign data mining. And while custom GIFs are fun, the same deepfake technology is already eroding what little trust we have left in the news media. Clearly, we shouldn't judge a book — or a GIF — by its cover.

Betaworks's Red Queen's race

It's notable that one of Betalab's areas of focus is "Software that builds trustworthiness into AI, protecting, detecting, or authenticating synthetic media or data." Through its own investments in companies like Morphin, Facemoji, or Resemble, betaworks arguably played an active role in advancing the technologies it now wants to tame.

But it would be hypocritical to expect the firm to refrain from betting on these technologies in the first place.

We wouldn't have the internet if we'd stopped building it at the sole prospect of fake news and deepfakes. Nor would we have YouTube if someone had warned us of political radicalization or gore kids' content. Technological innovation and fear mongering often go hand in hand as pessimists try to hamper what they intuitively see as a threat. Today's media misuses and attention hacks are the price we pay for accessing what has become vital infrastructure. What matters is that we do see these issues for what they are.

In a way, betaworks is perpetuating its own Red Queen's race, alternatively encouraging technological advancements and preventing their weaponization. That the team is simultaneously excited for and wary of deepfakes is proof that a single technology can legitimately inspire ambivalent feelings — and call for similarly ambivalent treatments.

Discussing our collective longing for truth through technology, Lux Capital's Josh Wolfe aptly described a never-ending struggle between deception and detection, an "arms race for reality." Likewise, betaworks's technological bets aren't competing as much as they are complementing each other: deepfake generation and deepfake detection are two sides of the same technology that we know for certain will need to coexist from now on. As an investor, the only moral option, if you're backing one side, is to back the other, too, and betaworks has repeatedly risen up to its responsibilities in that respect.

Looking ahead

When I started working on this piece late last year (I’m a slow writer), betaworks seemed to be going through a new period of reflection. AudioCamp, the latest edition at the time, had closed in April 2020, and the firm hadn’t publicly set its sights on any particular technology yet. This forced me to speculate a bit, suggesting it might be time for the company to run its first gaming-focused program, or a new and improved VisionCamp that would build on top of AR platforms like Niantic’s Lightship.

The former, in particular, didn’t seem too far-stretched, considering gaming has been on the team’s mind for some time. Half-hidden in betaworks' portfolio of products is Katapult, a digital entertainment company building CHKN, an open-world sandbox game. Additionally, Peter Rojas, previously a partner at the firm, had been prominently using a match-making service, Matchbox.vc, to connect with founders over games, and started sharing his thoughts on social gaming before leaving to join Meta.

While neither of my two predictions materialized, there is no need to speculate any longer. The company itself has laid out its plans for us: its focus, its website states, is now “on web3, crypto media, NLP/CV, applied machine learning and tools for thinking.” Here, I’ll focus on two of these themes and how they relate to betaworks’s history and interests.

Tools for Thinking

In November 2021, the company debuted Nextcode, a series of intimate virtual events dedicated to no-code tools and the experiences they enable, including "GPT3, games that let you create games, & productivity workflows." Enough came out of it that betaworks saw the need for Thinkcamp, a recently announced program dedicated to “tools for thinking,” that is, “tools to relate, organize, scaffold and add depth to the [information] landscape so we can individually and collectively make sense of it.”

Though this may seem like a departure from betaworks’s historical focus on consumer media, it’s anything but. By “tools for thinking,” betaworks means not just the “productivity tools” of old, but indeed a new category of tools now shaping how we think. Like the internet, the home screen, and the notification layer, like bots and voice interfaces, these tools are a sign of the times: an opportunity space brought about by a particular combination of new technologies (e.g. “graph databases and Web3,” the announcement mentions), new interfaces (“dedicated hardware, next-gen web browsers, voice and AR”) and “a massive step function in enabling technologies” (“NLP and LLMs,” respectively Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models).

There’s another reason that makes this field especially compelling: these tools are about networks. Networks of thoughts, conceived and presented by companies like Roam and Obsidian as atomic units all interconnected within ever-spreading knowledge graphs. Networks of thinkers, now able to share said graphs with others to let the world build upon specialized bases (e.g., Startupy) and ready-made trains of thoughts. For a company obsessed with unlocking the potential of the collective, this is well worth exploring.

Web3

Web3 has certainly been on everyone’s mind these past few months. A massive influx of both talent and capital has converged to hundreds of startups leveraging the potential of blockchain technology across a myriad of use cases. As an investor and builder located in one of the world’s hottest crypto spots, it makes sense that betaworks would get involved with the technology and its fast-growing ecosystem.

Yet I think this interest isn’t just opportunistic. Rather, Web3’s ethos and capabilities align with betaworks’s vision perhaps most closely that they do most investors’. Remember the company’s original assumptions? If we try to map them to what we know of blockchain technology, they happen to match almost perfectly. Let’s see how.

“Each new platform shift introduces fundamentally novel ways for consumers to interact with technology.”

Blockchain technology as a whole comes with a number of unique traits, each of which is powering interactions previously not possible. The combination of immutability and verifiability, for example, lets users readily search and pull data on any particular asset using tools like Etherscan. Trustlessness means you can expect a smart contract to run without fail, a prerequisite for automated royalty splits, while composability enables protocols and applications to leverage each other’s capabilities instead of reinventing the wheel.

This premise remains true if we consider more specific aspects of the user experience. Wallet-based login, for example, replaces legacy site-specific methods of authentication based on a user's email or socials. As Seyi Taylor aptly puts it, the wallet simultaneously represents your identity, carries value, provides access, and preserves memorabilia. Through it, the circulation and utilization of a user’s entire online history, tastes, habits, and relationships is just a click away.

“Social was fundamentally changing the way people found, navigated, and shared content online.”

Simply replace “social” with “blockchain” and the assessment is relevant afresh. By leveraging wallet-based identity, a wave of startups have started to build new experiences around content discovery (e.g., Context) and curation (e.g., Cyber). The Worm — “a Share-to-Mint NFT” — uses wallet-to-wallet transfers to grow longer, leaving a copy of itself in every wallet it visits. Creators and communities alike can use granular token-gating (e.g. Guild.xyz) to unlock exclusive content, access, roles, and perks. Finally, mechanics like airdrops and splits help automate the dissemination of cultural and financial value. Across all these use cases, entirely new social graphs are being built.

“A loosely coupled network of companies, connected at the data level, could hope to compete with tech giants and their accumulated advantages.”

What better example of a transversal data layer than the blockchain? Consider Ethereum, which facilitates the recording, security, and connectivity of all data on the network and ensures that it can be accessed, read, and used by the thousands of protocols now building on top of it. Although these protocols may each be working on very different problems, they all have access to the same, ever-growing ledger — “a loosely coupled network” indeed. From there, each of them is able to query transactional data, for example to turn it into quantitative insights (e.g., Dune) or showcase provenance (e.g., JPG).

When it comes to the second part of the assessment, the jury’s still out. On the one hand, the ability to readily tap users’ history enables Web3 players to quickly come up with unique concepts and features. On the other hand, it remains to be seen how much of a threat to incumbents these companies can collectively pose. DeFi overall has proven significantly more capital-efficient than many legacy players, and a company like Pollen is similarly disrupting the capital-intensive process of 5G deployment. On the consumer social front, however, usage on most services undoubtedly pales in comparison to any of the Web2 leaders. Competition, at least for now, has more to do with users’ adherence to what they deem a new, more compelling ethos — of decentralization, openness… — than it does with DAU count.

“A growing technological infrastructure was making it increasingly faster and cheaper to create and iterate on companies.”

Among the blockchain’s most discussed traits is composability — the ability for developers to create new smart contracts by “remixing” components of existing ones, thanks to open-source code. This enables applications and protocols to build off one another’s capabilities and come up with faster, more capital-efficient solutions than currently exist. When combined with forking — “the process of creating a new version of a system by copying it under new ownership” —, composability fosters fast, ecosystem-wide innovation by increasing competition. It pushes individual players to serve users the best they can, most often through financial incentives used to kickstart initial adoption and liquidity.

All this has prompted the emergence of a rapidly growing infrastructure that newcomers can leverage to spin out a new app or to add specific functionalities inside existing products. In gaming, for example, developers can tap highly-specific building blocks to issue tokens, launch an internal P2P marketplace, handle players’ funds and identity, and more. This lets them focus on what they do best and allocate resources to areas like game design where they are most likely to differentiate from their peers. Ultimately, this indeed means faster, cheaper development, go-to-market, and iteration.

Overall, I think Web3 perfectly embodies betaworks’s mindset and goals. At this time, the firm has already made public several investments in this space, including: XMTP, a wallet-to-wallet communication protocol; Unlock, a token-gating protocol for creators and communities; Infinite Objects, which develops consumer hardware for showcasing NFT art; Ink, which lets artists digitally sign any digital content and sell it as an affordable NFT; and Medallion, an artist-to-fan platform. (Superplastic could also be added to the list, although it didn’t start with Web3 in mind). In addition, some light Twitter sleuthing shows that the firm may be somewhat involved with both Deca and Tableland. Except for the more infrastructure-leaning XMTP, all these deals are representative of what the team calls “crypto media,” that is, crypto-enabled creative content and the experiences being built around it. No doubt that exciting products will emerge from this new playground.

With its finger always on the pulse of consumer media, betaworks has been able to make the most of the industry’s never-ending stream of innovations. Over the years, the team’s vision, product acumen, and multidisciplinary network have made it a trusted provider to tech giants like Twitter, Meta, and others.

But times are changing. Today, the acquirers of old are under growing scrutiny as they look outward for innovations they could integrate into their rosters. Meta is facing legal action from the FTC, which seeks to block the company from buying Within, the maker of VR fitness app “Supernatural.” Similar hurdles await on the other side of the Atlantic, where the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has been trying to block the company’s acquisition of Giphy for more than a year. As regulatory concerns over these giants’ dominance grow, the traditional path to exit may be getting bumpier.

Should betaworks be worried? Probably not. For one thing, there are, and will be, other buyers: companies like Unity, Epic Games, Roblox, and Snapchat, among others, have not yet been scared out of the M&A road. Should that door shut too, betaworks can afford to wait. In any case, it will be here, doing what it does best — building.

Many thanks to John Borthwick, Matt Hartman, Billy Chasen, and Andy Weissman for reviewing early drafts of this piece and sharing their insights with me.

Thanks also to Devon, Fawzi, Neer, Pénélope, and Morgan for their thoughtful feedback.

Thanks for reading. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can find me on Twitter, or just reply to this email.

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You’re reading Part II of a deep dive into the origins, work, and ethos of betaworks.

In Part I, we went back to the firm’s foundational beliefs and building roots. This week, we’re unpacking how betaworks grew into the multifaceted business its founders always envisioned.

Backing innovators: the path to betaworks Ventures

For betaworks, building and investing were always one and the same: “Investing has second-order effects in terms of understanding the market, keeping yourself alive to the innovation that's happening out there,” Borthwick once explained. This thinking made the lines between the two intentionally blurry.

But this was true only to an extent. Some semblance of separation was still maintained in practice, with each activity falling primarily to one of the two co-founders. A maker at heart, Borthwick appropriately took charge of the operating side of things; Weissman focused on betaworks’s investment portfolio.

Of the two, Weissman undeniably kept a lower profile, letting Borthwick take care of the storytelling — a task made all the more mandatory by the company’s ambiguous model. From what little coverage I could find, he seemed more at ease backstage than in the spotlight, alternatively a confidant, a cheerleader; and a godfather to New York’s vibrant startup scene.

While Borthwick’s apparitions in the media shaped the public’s understanding of betaworks, Weissman favored sharing his thoughts in writing; his blog, an eclectic journal where the personal still coexists with wide-ranging musings on taste, identity, and, of course, technology. Across decades of entries, Weissman also displays many of the attributes you’d expect from a savvy investor. His strong sense of product and excitement about novelty shine through, natural complements to his reflections on the investing process and mindset. As one observer noted, as an investor Weissman seemed especially intent on backing companies that made people feel unique through self-expression: Tumblr, Kickstarter, Medium, some of the most notable names in the betaworks portfolio, all fell under that category.

In 2011, Weissman jumped ship to join USV. It wasn’t that big of a leap, really: betaworks and USV already shared a few investments at the time, which prompted some to predict a natural alliance between the two. Mostly, it seems like Weissman was interested in expanding his work beyond the seed stage that had been betaworks’s sole focus. From that view, USV, a firm known for its love of reserves, must have seemed like the best place to scratch that itch.

Betaworks’s investing work didn’t end with Weissman’s departure. While there had been plans for a dedicated fund before, the company’s own investors had long pushed against it, for fear that betaworks might end up directly competing with them. Once things were set in motion, however, no time was wasted. In 2015, Peter Rojas joined the firm from AOL’s Alpha group as an Entrepreneur in Residence to support betaworks’s investing activities on the West Coast. (Like Borthwick before him, Rojas had joined AOL in 2013 as the result of an acquisition — incidentally, GDGT, the company in question, had previously received funding from betaworks.)

Betaworks Ventures was made official in 2017, one year after the first $50 million fund had become active, with both Rojas and betaworks’s Director of Seed Investments Matthew Hartman joining as partners. The funding gave betaworks the ability to invest across all three of its main activities, including its startup studio, its thematic accelerator Camp (more on this in a minute), and outside companies.

Five years later, its portfolio speaks for itself:

In fact, the picture above, though taken from the firm’s website, isn't even up-to-date. Workflow, not pictured, was acquired by Apple in 2017. Trash, in December 2020 by VSCO (also a betaworks Ventures portfolio company). Both Squad and Breaker were acquired by Twitter, respectively in December 2020 and in February 2021, while 8th Wall was acquired by Niantic in March this year.

Including deals made prior to the launch of the Ventures arm makes for an even more impressive feat. Betaworks gained a chunk of Twitter stock after Twitter acquired Summize and Tweetdeck, two portfolio companies, respectively in 2008 and 2011. As mentioned, Instapaper sold to Pinterest in 2016. In 2014 alone, betaworks invested in CrowdTangle, a social analytics tool acquired by Facebook, and Product Hunt, acquired by Angellist, both in 2016.

With early entries and numerous exits, all signs point to an impressive track record. Though finding insights into betaworks's performance is not easy — VC is a notoriously hermetic asset class, and the only numbers I could find are from the firm's 2015 shareholder book —, a few elements stand out:

• Between 2007 and February 2015, betaworks invested in 106 companies, excluding the companies built at the studio. By December 2015, that number had reached about 120 deals, from just 71 in March 2014.

• Over the period, an average of 13 deals per year were made. In 2015, the company announced a target of 20 deals per year. The actual number, it wrote, depended on "the quality of companies [it] saw in any given year and [its] perspective on the relative cost of investing in equity external to betaworks compared to building things at the studio."

• It invested an average of $123K in each company.

• Its portfolio was geographically concentrated, with almost half its active portfolio companies in New York. A quarter were in San Francisco, but less than 5% in Silicon Valley. The remainder were in the rest of the U.S., London, Paris, Berlin, Poland, and Israel. (I believe this is still true today, though the share of non-US companies may have increased.)

• Of the $13.1M it invested over the six-year period, it had $72.4M of realized and unrealized returns, split roughly evenly between realized and unrealized.

• The combined Total Value to Paid In (TVPI, the cash-on-cash return of an investment including unrealized returns) was 5.5x.

In short: betaworks invests at a fast pace (an average of 13 deals per year is impressive for such a small team); leans heavily on its local and domestic ecosystems; and generates great returns — Cambridge Associates data for US firms put the average TVPI for the vintage year of 2007 at 2.12x. In 2019, the firm debuted Fund II, with plans to raise up to $55M.

Evolving the venture studio: betaworks Camp

Launched in 2016 as part of betaworks Ventures, Camp is "a thematic investment and in-residence program for startups building in frontier technologies." Highly selective, it takes place once or twice a year at betaworks's offices in NYC (global pandemic allowing), each time focusing on a specific area of technology related to the firm's wider thesis. Past themes include:

• conversational software and messaging (Botcamp)

• voice interfaces (Voicecamp)

• augmented reality and computer vision (Visioncamp)

• live interactive experiences (Livecamp)

• synthetic media (Synthetic Camp)

• audio experiences (Audiocamp)

• fix the internet (Betalab)

Camp was designed from the start as an integrated program. In addition to pre-seed funding of $200K — often a company's first check — participants receive hands-on guidance from betaworks and mentorship from experts, partners, and investors; perks from select vendors; access to betaworks's early adopter network; and an opportunity to present at Camp's Demo Day and Summit events. In other words, Camp integrates the venture studio model with that of an accelerator.

The program has become central to betaworks's offering. For one, it's a recurring source of media attention, as the theme, then the participants of each new batch get their own announcements. It's also a powerful discovery engine that enables the firm to identify and work with great teams in the areas it deems most promising.

Working on specific verticals within consumer media helps betaworks dive deep into the core technologies and behavior shifts that make these new forms of media possible. This maximizes resource allocation, since all efforts are concentrated on a single area over a short period of time. (The idea might have come from Borthwick himself, who TechCrunch reported "takes a few months each winter to look at trends that fascinate him.")

Importantly, Camp's in-residence model fosters collaboration — as one writer put it in 2016, "At the end of the day, betaworks is interested in clusters of companies that can help each other." This works well since the program only hosts a small number of teams all working on the same medium. At the very least, this enables them to pool resources in areas like access to data, user research, and partnerships. At best, collaboration can go much further, as promiscuity enables participants to get a feel for another company's vision and values. For example, Streem, a company that took part in Visioncamp, ended up acquiring Selerio, a fellow company from the same program.

Building bridges: From betaworks's office to betaworks Studios

Camp is also representative of a broader theme at betaworks: community.

Ever since its inception, the company was carefully designed by makers, for makers. To help founders bring the best out of their vision, the team knew it needed to provide not just a bunch of resources, but a full-fledged ecosystem.

At the heart of it would be the firm itself. Because of this, betaworks's offices have always been central to its model. Not only do they host Camp's cohorts a few times a year, they're also a hub for the local tech community, as well as a venue for regular talks on product, ethics, and policy.

This has served the company and its portfolio well. After all, much of a network's value comes from luck encounters: a VC who shows up to meet one of betaworks's partners might end up investing in a company's next round; the sponsor of an event might be a startup's next customer. A strong physical presence made betaworks a de facto connector and enabled it to add value in various, informal ways — in an interview in 2015, Borthwick estimated that “more than a fifth or quarter of [his] day is trying to connect companies together.”

This focus quickly expanded beyond the confines of the betaworks office. From its beginnings, betaworks's goal has been to grow an interdisciplinary network of individuals, companies, and institutions that could support each other and collectively ensure continuous innovation.

That strategy was twofold. Part of it was about sharing data, to enable early-stage companies to compete with incumbents whose troves of accumulated data often made them hard to displace. Part of it was about sharing ideas, to push the industry forward and come up with solutions to its most pressing challenges. Combined, both ideas and data would prove over time that there is strength in numbers.

In 2018, betaworks took these efforts a step further with Studios, "a social club for builders." In line with betaworks's offering, Studios was designed as an interdisciplinary physical place where entrepreneurs, engineers, and creatives could work on their respective projects and collaborate. Launched as a new business under the betaworks umbrella, Studios was a way to extend the firm's community to people outside its portfolio. A live concierge, coupled with dedicated software, would facilitate connections.

Then, COVID-19 happened, and Studios' physical location had to close. As companies everywhere shifted to survival mode, betaworks launched Circles, a peer support system to "help CEOs and senior leaders get the confidential advice, support and connections they need to keep their companies alive and thriving." Only a few weeks in, the program had received overwhelming demand, and new circles continue to form.

But Studios was always designed as a club, “a gathering space for in-person connections and events.” As the project’s website now states, “For two years, COVID and unpredictable post-pandemic social/work habits made it impossible at times, and challenging most of the time, to realize [the team’s] vision.” As a result, Studios (the company) shut down in May this year; betaworks is now reopening the space as a lounge for NFT creators and collectors.  

Taking the long view

From betaworks Ventures to Camp, to Studios and Circles, every new program expanded on betaworks's original thesis: that an evergreen network, complete with ad hoc resources, could help both individuals and companies go places. Each of these added an extra layer to the firm's offering, springing more, and more diverse, connections over time.

Preserving this network's value while gradually broadening access can be challenging. Early on, betaworks Ventures' and Camp's selection process alone meant that only a handful of companies eventually made it to the firm's official portfolio. Later on, Studios' and Circle's paid model appeared to build off a different kind of exclusivity. The fact that they could be accessed remotely did extend their reach, but it might also have loosened what until now had remained a tight-knit community.

Now fifteen years in, it's worth asking how effective betaworks's model has been over the years. Valuable connections take time to form, and forcing things would only lead to clunky one-offs. Yet a few examples, and the many connections they've built both with and inside betaworks, prove the relevance of this kind of networked approach to success — you could call it betaworks’ very own social graph.  Examples abound:

• Matt Hartman: Originally at Hot Potato, a betaworks seed investment, Hartman joined betaworks in 2013 to help structure the venture business. He is now a venture partner and spinning out something new, in which betaworks is set to be an investor.

• Maya Prohovnik, who ran community at betaworks, joined portfolio company Anchor as VP of Product. Anchor was acquired by Spotify, where Maya now serves as Head of Talk.

• Sam Mandel: After starting at betaworks, Mendel moved to Tweetdeck as COO, before coming back to betaworks after Tweetdeck sold to Twitter. He then partnered with Daphne Kwon, the President and COO of Studios, and became the CEO of Poncho. Mendel moved back to betaworks after Poncho sold.

• Julie Zhang moved from betaworks, where she oversaw finance, to become the COO of Charm, a company founded by two other betaworks alums, Christian Rocha (previously at Glitter and betaworks Studios) and Toby Padilla (ex. Tweetdeck).

• Alex Chung: Giphy's co-founder Alex Chung later invested in Uru, a computer vision company that was part of Visioncamp. Now featured as a betaworks Ventures Fellows, he has made multiple seed investments alongside betaworks.

• Hilary Mason: Formerly a Chief Data Scientist at Bitly, Mason went on to found Hidden Door, a new AI creator company seeded by betaworks.

• Paul Murphy launched betaworks’s hacker-in-residence program, which spun out a total of 8 products, including Giphy and Dots — of which he became the CEO. Now investing at Lightspeed, Murphy has led multiple co-investments with betaworks, including in Mason’s Hidden Door.

• Andrew McLaughlin joined betaworks after running policy for Google. Having spent a year with betaworks’s portfolio company Tumblr, he came back to betaworks, where he worked on building Digg and Instapaper. He then moved to Medium, also a portfolio company. 

• Jack Kim, who worked at Bloglovin (in which betaworks invested at both the Seed and Series A stage), later joined Giphy, before founding Duo AI, which was part of Voicecamp in 2017.

• Marco Ament, formerly the CTO of Tumblr, a portfolio company, founded Instapaper, of which betaworks acquired a majority stake in 2013.

• Jake Levine, originally an Entrepreneur in Residence at betaworks, became the General Manager of Digg after it was acquired. He started Electric Objects, a pioneer in the digital display and NFT space, which was sold to Giphy. Giphy then formed Infinite Objects, which betaworks seeded.

• Gilad Lotan: The Head of Data Science at betaworks, Lotan assisted with the creation of a host of betaworks companies. After an entrepreneurial stint, he joined Buzzfeed (a betaworks portfolio company), where he still leads Data Science.

• Josh Auerbach joined betaworks after Summize’s acquisition by Twitter, before moving to Aura, a betaworks company.

I’ll stop here, but the list goes on. From founder to investor and from customer to advisor, the role, or roles, of each individual may change over time. But the network as a whole keeps getting denser as the number and variety of the connections within it increase. This generates valuable network effects, which multiply not only the opportunities accessible to each individual node, but also their appeal to aspiring members. And because access remains exclusive, individuals are incentivized to continuously add value. Meanwhile, betaworks itself remains at the center of it all, a vital catalyst and facilitator for new relationships.

That’s it for Part II! In Part III next week, we’ll take a closer look at how betaworks’s ethos has prompted it to build a safer, better internet for all — and which technologies the firm is now leveraging as it enters its next phase.

Many thanks to John Borthwick, Matt Hartman, Billy Chasen, and Andy Weissman for reviewing early drafts of this piece and sharing their insights with me.

Thanks also to Devon, Fawzi, Neer, Pénélope, and Morgan for their thoughtful feedback.

Thanks for reading. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can find me on Twitter, or just reply to this email.

If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please take a minute to share it with others.

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Today, I’m excited to share something I’ve been working on for a while: a deep dive into the origins, business, and ethos of betaworks.

Betaworks is a company I’ve long admired for its thesis-driven approach to building and investing, and for pioneering some of the most exciting technology paradigms in consumer media. While researching for this series, I was fortunate to get the insights of some of the firm's OGs, which informed the piece you’re reading today.

This is Part I, where we go all the way back to the company’s building roots.

“A platform for incubation and investments.” “A network, platform, laboratory, and set of concentric circles.” “A coder-artist incubator.” “An umbrella corporation.” “A contemporary media conglomerate.”

What, exactly, is betaworks?

The company itself, unlike the many articles written about it over the years, is reluctant to assign labels. Not to preserve optionality, for fear of undermining its scope, but because betaworks's versatility can indeed make it somewhat hard to define.

To put it simply, betaworks is a startup studio, early-stage VC firm, and innovation hub with offices in New York City and San Francisco. It was founded in 2007 by John Borthwick and Andy Weissman, who moved on in 2011 to become a partner at Union Square Ventures.

From day 1, betaworks was built on a clear set of assumptions:

1. Each platform shift introduces fundamentally novel ways for consumers to interact with technology;

2. Social was fundamentally changing the way people found, navigated, and shared content online;

3. A loosely coupled network of companies, connected at the data level, could hope to compete with tech giants and their accumulated advantages;

4. A growing technological infrastructure was making it increasingly faster and cheaper to create and iterate on companies.

These principles proved prescient. Social has long moved beyond the confines of the "consumer social" landscape to apply to all categories. Savvy upstarts continue to hack their way to success by making use of third-party APIs and overlooked data. And the rise of cloud infrastructure and no-code tools is now enabling people everywhere to launch, scale, and operate businesses with little to no friction or overhead.

The founders' thesis also applied to the company itself. The time Borthwick and Weissman spent at AOL had shown them that even a well-entrenched technology giant could lose its footing in the marketplace when it stopped, or failed, to innovate. With betaworks, they looked to build a nimble, adaptable company that would be able to sustain innovation as it continued to grow.

Opinionated yet adaptable, focused yet curious, data-driven yet immensely creative, betaworks has long fascinated me. My goal with this piece is to shed light on its history, its thesis, and its ethos.

In its fifteen years of existence, the company has lived through, and helped shape, successive paradigm shifts that irrevocably changed how people experienced and interacted with technology. In face of change, with its founders’ original vision as a North star, it has consistently built toward a more open internet, one where data, ideas, talent, and everything in between would all flow freely and build off each other. Now, as technologies like Web3 make that ideal more palpable than ever, betaworks looks aptly positioned to make the most of the opportunity.

Learning from Borthwick

Borthwick once suggested that startup studios "are grounded in the individuals that created them." Let's take his word for it and see what this can teach us about his company, its thesis, and its ethos.

Borthwick's career before betaworks was a mix of consulting work, entrepreneurial ventures, and corporate work at large internet companies. Back in 1994, Borthwick co-founded WP Studio, a first pass at a venture studio. Out of it came, among others, Total NY, a local scene guide, and äda 'web, a laboratory for contemporary digital art. In 1997, WP Studio sold to Digital City — a joint venture of AOL and The Tribune Company — where Borthwick became Director of Product Development. When both Total NY and ada'web folded one year later, Borthwick went on to head AOL's product development studio. In 2003, two years after the group's merger with AOL, he became Time Warner's SVP of Alliances and Technology Strategy. He made his comeback to the startup world in 2006 as the CEO of Fotolog, one of the first social photo sharing sites, which he operated until it was acquired in August 2007. Up next was betaworks.

From this short biographical detour, a few important elements stand out that I think have shaped betaworks in more ways than one.

• Collaboration: Whether as a co-founder or a curator, Borthwick favored collective endeavors as the best way to surface, in his own words, “the value of the adjacent possible in creation.”

• Interdisciplinarity: Borthwick's involvement in technology was always intertwined with other creative fields. For example, WP Studio's äda 'web brought together artists, designers, and developers. After Digital City cut its funding, the property was notably acquired by the Walker Art Center, a contemporary art center.

• Big tech, small tech: Having operated at both startups and large corporations, and through multiple acquisitions, Borthwick had a good understanding of innovation cycles and what enables or hinders them. He was always aware of the value of speed and agility in conquering new markets, and the challenges that scale could pose to innovation.

• Ecosystems: Whether that's building a guide to the local New York scene or fighting against Microsoft's control over the OS layer, Borthwick valued local and technological ecosystems and was keen to reflect on the bigger legal and cultural issues surrounding specific products or companies.

All four of these principles are still going strong in betaworks’s core activities today. Let’s work through them in turn.

Building off new paradigms: betaworks (Studio)

However hard it may be to pinpoint what betaworks is and does, one thing has been clear since the early days: betaworks is a builders’ company. It originated as a startup studio with the goal of building and growing internet businesses. This is evidenced by the firm’s original SEC form, where it’s referred to as betaworks Studio — not to be confused with betaworks Studios, which I’ll cover later on in this piece.

The reasoning for a startup studio was manyfold. Part of it was a conviction that the next era of the internet needed a new type of company, one agile enough to iterate and diversify without succumbing to corporate inertia. Part of it stemmed from Borthwick’s own knack for building: “Innately, I'm a tinkerer,” he articulated in one interview, “I love taking things apart and trying to solve problems.” The model had also been widely, and successfully, adopted in the creative industries, from Miramax to Pixar.

But there was one last reason, informed by the team’s singular view of technology. This we can decipher from multiple interviews in which Borthwick described the web in strikingly materialistic terms:

If you could pick up the web and look at it from underneath, what you'd see is just these clusters of data. Just data moving around in servers. Mostly the clusterings would be around these things we call corporations. The corporate structure is something we impose upon the world, but the technology isn't bounded by that. If you look at how people use that data, they want it unconstricted and portable.

He added:

The internet is like a rainforest: it's split between a fertile undergrowth and very tall trees that reach the canopee. It's important to have that middle layer of businesses that bring value to the whole ecosystem.

The studio model was the best way to tap that data, to have it flow and feed into that middle layer of the internet rainforest: “a loosely coupled network of companies, connected at the data level,” was what the firm was building toward.

That’s for the origin story. As for the studio’s inner workings, here, too, years of media coverage provide some insights.

At first, output is all that matters. “To come up with a product,” one article explains, “the team starts with a running list of about 80 things they feel should just be better, from weather apps to business cards. Things were kept voluntarily informal: Billy Chasen, the founder of Chartbeat and the founder and CEO of Turntable.fm, told me ideation often took place during “brown bag lunches.” Every four to six months, the team will go through the list and pick up to a dozen things that they want to prototype.” “Small, very focused teams” will then take on one of these problems and try to come up with a working beta, keeping design minimal.

These products are not yet companies at this stage, but they could be. The ultimate goal is to create “habit-forming things,” products with proven engagement and stickiness. Betaworks supports teams throughout the development process, helping them refine their product, find their first users, and connect with potential partners.

As the umbrella company, it’s also intent on pooling resources — data being chief among them. This helps “grow things faster, better, cheaper, and give them an advantage that they wouldn't have if they were out there on their own.” Teams often share the same engineering and design talent, and can draw on betaworks’s years of accumulated data and UX templates.

Selection is rigorous, and most products are killed early. “We try to fail fast and small," Borthwick said — with one article specifying that he himself would “[weigh] each startup’s growth (or lack thereof) on a quarterly and yearly basis.” Should traction be lacking, the developers and designers can “just move on to the next betaworks idea.”

For some, the journey goes on. Once a product is ready, the firm can help its founding team raise funding from a network of early-stage investors to take things to the next level. Each project is then incorporated as a separate entity, with equity split between betaworks and the founders.

Overall, the model has been bountiful. Many of betaworks’ internal products went on to be acquired, including Bitly (by Spectrum); Giphy (by Meta); Dots (by Take Two Interactive); Poncho (by Dirty Lemon); and Chartbeat (by Cuadrilla Capital). In some cases, this came after reaching massive traction: in 2016, one year before selling a majority stake, Bitly was creating 400 million links and generating about 12 billion clicks a month. That same year, Giphy passed 100 million daily users and was serving 1 billion, or 2 million hours of viewing time, per day.

Beside building from scratch, betaworks also has a track record of buying and reworking second-hand internet businesses that it thinks is undervalued. One example of this is Digg, a once flamboyant news aggregator that ended up being sold in parts in 2012, with betaworks acquiring the Digg brand, website, and technology for an estimated $500,000. Others include Instapaper, which betaworks acquired from Marco Ament in 2013, and Vibe, “an optionally-anonymous,” geo-fenced messaging app. (Digg was ultimately sold to BuySellAds, while Instapaper went to Pinterest.) But judging solely from public information (or, rather, the lack thereof), this side of the business seems to have become more of a secondary concern.

Though these products may be very different in nature, they all plugged into successive paradigm shifts that were transforming how people experienced and interacted with technology.

• Bitly’s URL shortener came into existence as a native solution to Twitter’s original 140-character limit. From there, meteoric online penetration and marketers’ demand for URL analytics made it de facto online infrastructure.

• Giphy epitomized “thin media,” a type of media meant to be “transportable and conversational,” born with and for the social messaging era.

• Having made the rounds during the Occupy Wall Street protests, Vibe showed the appeal of live location-based content sharing — and of pseudonymity as a potential response to digital surveillance.

• Poncho upended the boring but oh-so-sticky weather app category with a singular editorial voice, while also exploiting the potential of the notification layer and chatbots.

In each case, a new consumer habit rose on the back of a particular technology. By operating at the application layer of the stack, betaworks was able to build off multiple platforms and interfaces as they grew in prominence. As we’ll see with Camp, the company’s ongoing series of thematic programs, betaworks’s sense of timeliness has remained one of its more enduring advantages.

At the end of the day, it’s hard to assess exactly how successful the studio strategy has been. Giphy’s purchase by Meta for a reported $400M was an undeniable feat, yet came at a serious discount to its 2016 valuation of $600M. Poncho’s acquisition by Dirty Lemon should be celebrated, but can be considered in part as an acquihire. At the time of the sale to BuySellAds, Digg was certainly in better shape than when betaworks acquired it, but still far removed from its heyday.

By and large, however, these bets have more than paid off — “The most successful stuff we've done at betaworks, financially, has been the stuff that we've played a role in building and developing,” shared Borthwick. Substantial ownership at the time of exit means betaworks can generate solid returns even from seemingly modest price tags, which funds further experimentation. No matter the multiples, the model as a whole has played out as intended, evolving from what was once “a hit-driven start-up factory” into “a data-driven media company capable of building and compounding value over time.”

That’s it for Part I! In Part II next week, we’ll take a closer look at how betaworks has steadily expanded on its original vision to become the multifaceted firm its founders always envisioned.

Thanks for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please take a minute to share it with others.

Share

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can find me on Twitter, or just reply to this email.

Many thanks to John Borthwick, Matt Hartman, Billy Chasen, and Andy Weissman for reviewing early drafts of this piece and sharing their insights with me.

Thanks also to Devon, Fawzi, Neer, Pénélope, and Morgan for their thoughtful feedback.

If you’re new to this newsletter, you can subscribe here or via the button below.

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I’m excited to finally share the 2021.5 issue (more on the .5 part in a minute!) of my media report.

Get your copy

Like the two previous editions, it’s an overview of the trends and companies that pushed Media & Entertainment Tech forward in the past year. It’s structured into seven main sections, each of which covers a particular media category, including:

• Gaming

• Video

• Audio

• Music

• Social

• The Creator Economy, and

• New Media

If this is your first time with one of my reports, here’s a preview of what that looks like:

As always, the whole report is packed full with insights from the best operators, analysts, and investors in the space. Each slide also comes with its own clickable credits so you can always go straight to the source. Whether you’re already involved in Media & Entertainment, or want to ramp up on the industry’s latest and most interesting developments, I think you’ll find this report a valuable resource.

You can now access the full report, along with past editions, for free on my personal website.

Get your copy

A quick note on… timing

Like the 2019 and 2020 issues, the 2021 edition of this report was meant to be a comprehensive review of the most notable events that had impacted Media & Entertainment Tech in the past year. Having actively monitored the space throughout the year, I was confident that synthesizing my readings and thoughts wouldn’t take too long!

Then, life happened, and proved me wrong. Weeks, then months went by, and I endlessly felt like the report was somehow still missing “that last 1%” (or was it 10%?). After so much time, did my insights still have value? The much-needed encouragements of a few friends convinced me to pick up where I had left off and to finally push my work out into the world. Considering the timing, I think it’s only fair to call this the 2021.5 review.

As you may expect, some of my analysis has now lost some of its original relevance. Some of the companies I studied may have expanded on the offering I described at the time I first looked at them. Similarly, you may find the timeline sometimes confusing — unless specified, all dates are, indeed, from 2021.

All this is inevitable. Safe for a few late additions and updates to old slides where needed, this report remains a snapshot of my thinking as it stood at the beginning of 2022. Fortunately, most of the signals I initially picked up have not only endured but indeed bled into the current year, sometimes even heightened.

In any case, I hope this review still reads as a valuable recap of an eventful year, and a primer on a few of the trends that are sure to continue to develop in the coming years.

How you can help

First off, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Send me feedback on Twitter, at hi[at]maximeeyraud[dot]com, or simply direct reply to this email.

More importantly, if you find this report useful, consider sharing it with others!

I’ve also just shared a quick thread on Twitter — any signal boost would be greatly appreciated.

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Thanks, and happy reading!

Maxime

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How creativity became scalable

Painted in broad strokes, the history of art has seen a continuous move towards more replicable, more scalable, and more shareable forms of creativity.

At the technical level, a combination of scientific innovation and creative drive gave birth to techniques like printmaking and photography that allowed artists to accurately reproduce their work from a single point of reference. The mold and the lithographic stone, the engraved metal plate and the negative each became vessels in which artists could imprint their vision. With new tools and processes, art became replicable.

There were complaints along the way — art has its Luddites, too. Charles Baudelaire in his Salons feared the impact of photography, calling the new medium "the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies." In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin similarly lamented over the irremediable loss of the aura — the unique aesthetic authority of an artwork. Critics would systematically pit replicability against originality, painting it as an attribute of lazyness and decadence.

But culture did catch up with technology eventually. Time, and the combined efforts of the artists who dared to experiment with these techniques in spite of intimidation, slowly but surely legitimized these media, granting them a place of their own inside the artistic canon. Though age-old cultural hierarchies have inevitably persisted between art forms, the sheer time and sweat that go into creative production no longer determine the value of an artpiece.

How we define and reward creative work acknowledges this shift. Authorship today extends far beyond an artist's personal efforts; in fact, many of the most revered artists were sometimes barely involved at all after the ideation phase. Rodin's work stopped with clay, with all later stages being handled by trusted craftspeople. Warhol's "piss paintings" — canvases prepared with copper paint that was then oxidized with urine — were sometimes made by "ghost pissers." In more recent times, most of Damien Hirst's "spot paintings" have actually been produced by his assistants — technically speaking, only the instructions are his.

For artists, this technical, cultural, and legal decoupling of their time and work was a blessing, enabling them to produce more and reap the benefits (both financial and reputational) far and wide. Their work was able to reach more viewers and collectors, in more places, and to do so more quickly. Technical replicability at the service of artistic singularity.

Productized worldviews

Fast forward to today, and to the ever-growing Creator Economy.

Low to zero marginal costs in the creation and distribution of digital goods have enabled millions of people to find an audience and monetize their work. From ebooks to songs to digital art, every form of creative production can, in theory, reach consumers globally.

But the change is even more profound. The internet enables creators to distribute not just their work, but their vision, too. To share with others the way they see and hear, at scale - to productize their worldview. The resulting product then is no longer a finished good, but rather a toolkit that consumers can play with and integrate into their own workflows.

A great example of this can be found in the surprising realm of photography presets.

Presets are software adjustments that alter a picture or video's appearance by fine-tuning metrics like lighting, color, and contrast. Think of them as ready-made aesthetics, a convenient way to give your creations a desired look and feel. Whether for action shots, still lives, or portraits, there's bound to be a preset out there that can help you bring the best out of your visual work.

Presets therefore have substantial value — especially to beginners, who haven't yet mastered the intricacies of editing and may be willing to shell out a few bucks to speed up the process. More than a creative shortcut, though, they're a learning tool: because all the minute adjustements are exposed in the software, you can see exactly how a given look was achieved and learn how to recreate it on your own. Every slider and button gives away part of a larger secret.

Accordingly, an increasing number of creators have started packaging them into standalone digital products, leveraging platforms like Gumroad or Sellfy for distribution. Here's an extract from the product page for "HIPSTER AF," a preset collection from photographer Sorelle Amore:

If you’ve ever looked at my photos and wondered how I edit them, wanted to copy my editing style, or just needed some sweet Lightroom presets to give all your photos that extra moody vibe, I’m very happy to present to you all 17 super sexy presets that I use on almost all of the photos you see on my own Instagram.

In this inconspicuous blurb, Amore aptly unpacks the different reasons why someone might want to buy the product as the following:

• learning ("wondered how I edit them");

• imitation ("wanted to copy my editing style");

• convenience ("just needed some sweet Lightroom presets")

In that view, her primary work on Instagram can be seen as a showcase of her skills, a glimpse of something more: it's what sparks interest and, ultimately, buying intent. The presets, however, are the aesthetic enabler. Through them, Amore's creativity becomes available for others not just to consume, but to aspire to. Achievable - for a price.

Artist-driven products

Amore's case is just one of many, as creators big and small can now productize their aesthetics and turn them into hard cash, at scale.

This has become a valuable trend to tap into for innovative companies out there. What if you could somehow aggregate supply to draw the respective audiences of individual creators to artist-driven products? Strategically work with artists on tools that reflect their creative process and vision, and make it all accessible to the people that most want to learn from them?

As it happens, the music space already offers two such examples.

Leading the way is Spitfire Audio, a British music technology company producing high quality virtual instruments and sample libraries for the world's most demanding composers. As I wrote in my primer about the company:

Spitfire releases not just artist-focused content but artist-driven products, too, working with the best composers to release libraries of their sounds - it has six of Hans Zimmer alone. The producers who get these packs aren't buying a bunch of sounds, really: they're buying into an artist's vision. They're using these sounds as a way to instil a little bit of that artist's talent and unique touch into their own work. With these packs, inspiration becomes aspiration.

For example, the Hans Zimmer Percussion pack captures "the highest quality recordings, featuring the same players in The Hall at AIR Studios where Hans records his biggest scores, all mixed and produced by the man himself." In other words, you have access to the exact same material the master would use — it's as if he were peeking over your shoulder as you're creating.

Following a similar strategy is Splice, an online marketplace for sound packs and music production plugins and software. In December 2018, the company debuted Splice Originals, "Splice-produced recording sessions and sample collections from acclaimed musicians with unique perspectives."

Like the rest of the Splice library, Splice Originals include vocals, instrumentals, and live sounds. What's different about them, however, is that their content draws its value as much from the names behind it as from its strictly sonic qualities. Each sound pack explicitly names its influences and revels in metaphors that promise a world of possibilities.

Both Spitfire Audio and Splice point to the same trend, one where fans have access to the same creative capabilities as the artists they admire.

Today, any producer with internet access can choose from hundreds or thousands of sound packs, many of them available for free. To opt for a paid, artist-driven pack instead is a very deliberate act: it means you're hoping that it encapsulates a little bit of that artist's flair. You're collecting the digital bits of brilliance that will let you use "that sound" too. Doing so takes you that much closer to the creative process, compared to merely consuming that artist's work in its final form.

The Diminishing Marginal Value of Aesthetics

From a consumer's perspective, ready-made aesthetics make perfect sense — as Amore suggests, these products allow for learning, imitation, and convenience. As more people try their luck as creators and they, too, need to blow their followers away, we'll see many of them take from the work of more established artists.

From an artist's perspective, however, it takes confidence — audacity, even — to give others the technical ability to copy your best work. After all, if earning consumers' attention is a zero-sum game, creators would have every reason to protect their secrets from current and potential competitors. With a scarcity-driven mindset, your ideas and vision might be the most precious thing you have. So why are artists giving away what makes them unique, and what does that tell us about the state of creation?

In his essay titled "The Diminishing Marginal Value of Aesthetics," Toby Shorin argued that creatives can no longer realistically rely on the uniqueness of their aesthetics to thrive in a crowded marketplace.

The "falling cost of aesthetic production" (thanks to "cheap and efficient tooling") and distribution (thanks to dense social networks and financial incentives) has made it easy - and worthwhile - for anyone to copy a creator's aesthetic. Shorin writes:

Cheap to produce, free to distribute, yet still impossible to meaningfully automate, aesthetic production is an increasingly precarious vocation. The status associated with aesthetic novelty is eroding, and novelty itself has become difficult to eke out of a system in which everything is visible, accessible, and relativized. The graphic design profession is being strangled in a race to the bottom of the market, and the distributed network topology of the internet is largely responsible; aesthetics has, simply put, been disrupted.

This discrepancy between how much time and effort it takes to come up with a novel aesthetic and how little time and effort it takes for someone else to copy it thus makes aesthetic innovation decreasingly appealing. Seeing a somewhat undervalued aesthetic, aesthetic grifters can simply claim it as their own and use it to reach their own goals. Imitators are too many to fend off for long, and a creator only has so much time, or willpower, to do it anyway.

In that sense, increasing productization is both a consequence of, and a possible solution to, the diminishing marginal value of aesthetics.

A consequence, because as aesthetics lose their defensibility, creators are forced to either come up with new ones at a faster pace to stay culturally relevant (i.e. industrialize creativity), or drift in the fray as now undifferentiated producers (i.e. become commoditized). As Shorin points out, this has direct economical consequences: only with original work can creatives command a premium in the marketplace. Without it, their competitive margin all but disappears, and they're left executing on somebody else's ideas.

And a solution, because productizing themselves paradoxically allows artists to reclaim part of their cultural influence. As opposed to letting their aesthetics circulate unchecked across platforms, shamelessly picked up and imitated by others, turning their worldview into software tools offers at least a semblance of control. If your style is bound to be copied into ubiquity, you might as well extract some value from it along the way.

Looking ahead

If Amore, Spitfire, and Splice are any indication, every piece of creative software, from Lightroom to Ableton, could soon see artists productize their workflows and worldviews.

Freelance filmmaker Ezra Klein monetizes such assets as film grain overlays and text animation presets. Design studio BLKMARKET sells wood and chrome texture PNG packs. Filtertune, an app developed by mobile creativity unicorn Lightricks, lets creators design their own personalized preset photos filters and share them across social media as photos with a special QR code attached. In time, every medium will see this sort of productization take off.

From there, opportunities abound. Let's work through a few of them.

DIY educational bundles

To be sure, curiosity wasn't born with the internet. But it was certainly enhanced by it, offered new and faster ways to access knowledge in every field you could ever think of.

On TikTok, educational content repeatedly reaches the top of the platform across categories, from cooking to plant care to beekeeping. Videos with the hashtag #howto have collectively amassed over 9 billion views to date, making the platform a force to be reckoned with in the future of peer-to-peer education.

Growing interest in the creative process offers exciting opportunities for a new kind of educational bundle. Creators could package assets they use in their preferred medium — photos, audio stems, or video clips — together with a handbook or full-fledged course showcasing their thought process and workflow. Selling samples on Splice? How did you achieve that signature sound? Selling photo presets on Gumroad? What slider did you tweak to come up with that particular look and feel?

Providing access not just to the what (the finished product) but to the how (the source material and process), too, would spark a new sense of appreciation for the craft that goes into any kind of creative work, and strengthen the connection between creators and their fans.

Artist-driven software experiences

Handbooks and courses are but a first step. Next, I think we'll see creative tool companies partner with artists to let them take control of the user experience at the software layer — what Tina He last year described as Embedded education:

Embedded education is the practice of educating people through encounters that they already have with systems that exist primarily for non-educational purposes. While the recently popular concept of “embedded finance” distributes financial products at the point of digital transaction, which is the most natural way for consumers to discover options, embedded education delivers learning at the point of getting the job done. From content delivery all the way to community engagement, Embedded Education is an evolution from progressive learning, which follows clear logical steps to intuitive learning, which relies less on the route memory of disparate knowledge nodes, but on the relationship between these nodes.

In the world of enterprise software, WalkMe has done wonders to provide professionals with in-app guidance. By laying contextual calls-to-action and walkthroughs over complex interfaces, the company's solutions increase usability and improve users' onboarding, training, and overall satisfaction with the software they use on a daily basis.

Now, there's an opportunity to do the same in the consumer space.

Imagine having access not just to a creator's filters, presets, or sounds, but also to the "how" and "why" of their creative process, right from your creative software suite — think KHSMR showing you how to use his Splice plugin, or Timbaland teaching you his favorite Ableton tricks. A step-by-step audio or video commentary, enriched with overlays, would guide you through the experience, bringing the product's educational potential to a whole new level. Embedding their insights into digital packages could allow artists to scale their vision even further.

Creative LEGOs

We're entering somewhat more experimental territory, but one I'm excited to watch develop over the coming months and years.

By now, you've probably heard of Web3 - the decentralized internet building on open protocols and enabled by technologies like the blockchain. (I won't get too much into the details here. Others have done it before, and better than I ever could). If Web2 is the internet we know and use today, Web3 could be its next iteration.

Of Web3's many attributes, three seem of particular relevance to the matter of creative work: composability, provenance, and smart contracts. To understand why, let's first see what they're about.

• Composability is the ability to assemble disparate building blocks to develop one's own custom technology stack, using open source code. The result are highly modular solutions that can take the best of existing protocols to come up with faster, more intuitive, or/and more capital-efficient offerings.

• Provenance is the historical record of ownership of a digital asset. Since every transaction on the blockchain is recorded, verifiable, and unfalsifiable, the origin and circulation of a particular asset are public information.

• A smart contract is a self-executing contract that has the terms of the agreement between the parties written into its code. When predetermined conditions are met, the contract executes all or parts of the agreement, with the transaction being recorded on the blockchain. Think of them as digital “if-then” statements.

Each of these qualities is valuable in and of itself. Combine them, and you get something quite special.

Imagine being able to pick and choose from other creators' work to come up with you own personal aesthetic, a collage of ideas drawn from across multiple media and genres. What if you could direct a horror film with Wes Anderson's color palette or Wong Kar Wai's slow motion savvy? No fine-tuning needed: you'd simply plug in the right set of parameters and let the associated aesthetic take over.

All the while, every aesthetic layer you'd be using would come with attribution and monetization built-in, sending recognition and revenue upstream, back to their original creators. If a creator wished to keep control over their aesthetic, they could also make it so others would be unable to mimic their style: combining too many of their signature traits could trigger a copyright infringement. In theory, such a world would enable artists to embrace, not fear, the open circulation of their aesthetics.

I'm not saying this is a desirable future, mind you. Artistic movements from the past were possible because artists were free to use a particular set of aesthetic primitives that they felt personally drawn to. There was no entry cost to consider, no gatekeeper to bribe or circumvent in order to begin painting, filming, or playing music in a certain way. A healthy mix of collaboration and competition enabled artists to both build on one another's work and come up with their own takes by accentuating or dropping specific aspects of that style: general adherence to a school still allowed for singularity. In contrast, granular control over a particular aesthetic, especially when enforced at the technical layer through automatic attribution and restrictions, feels like a serious threat to aesthetic innovation at large.

It also raises questions on what an aesthetic even is: that is, how much, or how little, of someone's distinctive style you're allowed to draw from before it can be legitimately considered plagiarism.

Music is a case in point. While a song could technically be decomposed into distinct components such as its tonality, melody, harmony, lyrics, and tempo, no one element is usually enough to signal an intent to copy an existing piece of work. Consider melody: if your music follows the rules of a particular musical scale, which most music does, there are only so many notes you can play with after all, meaning recognizable patterns are bound to reappear in sometimes vastly different tracks, whether intended or not. This makes the issue of "substantial similarity" — whether or not the average listener can tell that one song has been copied from the other — a blurry one.

In a world of instant composability, distinguishing inspiration from infringement, and homage from grift, could be especially tricky, no matter the medium.

A creator's greatest strength is also their greatest weakness: to be recognizable is to be imitable. The very reason why people can compose, paint, or sing "in the manner or [X]" is because we, as consumers or critics, have reached a common understanding of what constitutes an artist's style. These are the creative idiosyncrasies that homage and pastiche live off: both work only to the extent that the source material remains indentifiable.

With software-based experiences, artists now have an opportunity to disseminate their vision while also reaping the cultural and financial benefits that have long escaped them. In this new paradigm, their influence and viability rest as much on their singularity as on their willingness to share it with the world, ready for anyone to use. As it continues to spread, fork, and mutate, an aesthetic will live a thousand lives.

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Today, we’re exploring the physics of fun and casting away the curse of soulless interfaces.

Soulless interfaces

Lately I've been thinking about digital interfaces, and how our desire for them to be as sleek, fast, and intuitive as possible has left us with screens and apps that all look and feel the same. "Frictionless" to the extreme, the interfaces we use on a daily basis have lost their soul.

Same fonts, layouts, and color codes. It's something like the digital equivalent to the rise of blands - the army of pastel-looking, sans serif-using brands all drawing on the same identikit. The same way DTC companies adopted a single, acceptable aesthetic, digital products have converged into a dull lowest common denominator.

In some instances, you'd be hard-pressed to distinguish between multiple services. So strong is the digital mimetism that slight differences between icons or the name and position of a menu are virtually the only cues as to who built an app. It doesn't matter who was first; once every product follows the same formula, design seniority is forever lost on the user.

This race to sameness feels incredibly misguided. Aesthetics can be a powerful differentiator in crowded markets, and sacrificing visual uniqueness for the sake of familiarity means forgoing perhaps the most direct way to enchant your users. As I previously argued about Spitfire Audio, design is a storytelling tool, and having a distinct look and feel is all the more important that you're aiming for repeat usage.

This lesson should apply to all consumer-focused software - if not to all software, period. As Marc Geffen noted in Commercial Artware:

Branding is increasingly a function of UX/UI. In a world of attention warfare, saturated by messaging, brands need to supply fluidity and experiential novelty in order to cut through [...] Beyond the core product, much of a brand’s aesthetic, vibe, and meaning used to come from its logo and graphic design and ad copy; now we assess those qualities by judging the brand’s sensibilities around human-computer interaction.

We expect more from the products we use than sleekness or nice gradients. What we want is surprise, delight, and fun.

"Judicious expressiveness" and sensory delight

As it happens, those are staging a comeback. Two trends should give us hope: skeuomorphism, and its hype little cousin, spatial software. I'll discuss them in turn.

Skeuomorphism

Skeuomorphism is a style of design that uses ornamental cues to emulate original objects or materials. One example from the physical world could be electric light bulbs shaped like candle flames; in the digital realm, think Microsoft Word's "Save" button (the infamous floppy disk), or Gmail's now disused logo.

Skeuomorphism is perhaps best defined in contrast with flat design. While flat design favors minimalist interfaces, skeuomorphic design postulates that additional visual cues can help point users to an object's or interface's function - what's called affordance in the design lingo. To do that, it draws from real life, using variables such as lighting, texture, and depth to suggest an item's "action possibilities."

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's a great example from designer Adrien Olczac. On the left, skeuomorphic design (🤩); on the right, flat design (🥱).

Credits: Adrien Olczac

The reason why skeuomorphic design feels so different from what we're used to today is because it was brutally pushed to the background in 2013 with the introduction of iOS 7. As Michael Flarup recalls:

iOS 7, with its minimalist UI, white space layouts, and magazine typesetting, represented a shift in the role that visual design had to fulfil. Under the rule of minimalism, visual design for the sake of design took a backseat. A successful interface was one that visually didn’t call attention to itself. The fewer visual embellishments an interface had, the more effective and clean it was considered. As little interface as possible, was the best interface.

It's hard to overstate the impact this had. Apple’s sway over design through iOS was already so strong that flat design spread like wildfire. In no time, digital minimalism had taken over.

And now, Apple is bringing dimensionality back.

At WWDC20 in June, Apple announced Big Sur, which includes a major revamp of the macOS user interface - Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, called it the company's "biggest update to design in more than a decade." Among other changes, Big Sur's icons incorporate perspective and shadow to make things look more lifelike.

Credits: Apple

As others have observed, Big Sur's revamp isn't a return to straight-up skeuomorphism. Standing somewhere between the skeuomorphic and flat paradigms, it's neumorphic: a design middle ground that focuses not so much on imitating textures, but rather "on how light moves in three-dimensional space." In its Human Interface Guidelines, Apple suggests the goal is "judicious expressiveness."

Clearly, not everyone is happy about it — just read the comments here. But I think this marks a step in the right direction.

I've long been convinced flat design has had its time, so I'm excited to see even the tiniest move away from it. That this move is coming from Apple, which so greatly contributed to the demise of skeuomorphism, makes me all the more hopeful, because control of the OS layer essentially makes the company a design legislator. I'm hoping developers take things up a notch with dimensionality in a near future.

Spatial software

Skeuomorphism walked so spatial software could run.

While skeuomorphic design most of the time only applies to static elements like icons, backgrounds, and screens, spatial software takes dimensionality a step further, replicating not just how things look, but how they work. It builds upon our understanding of the world and how elements within it are supposed to react to one another and to their surroundings.

In two must-read essays, John C. Palmer covered a number of use cases that benefit - or could benefit - from spatiality, from calendars to video conferencing, to messaging, conferences, and web browsing. The past few months have only confirmed these intuitions, with examples ranging from Microsoft's Together Mode, to apps like Clubhouse and Roadtrip that rely on shared "rooms." The "internet as a place" discourse is having a moment.

Credits: Microsoft.

At a deeper level, spatial software summons up our most intuitive sense of space, by replicating kinetic models we can recognize and, more importantly, adhere to. As Pasquale D'Silva put it:

The best sofware we can make is an extension of the humain brain. [...] It's designed for human beings that live in the dimensions of space and time.

When applied to digital interactions, accurate kinetic models thus help us think beyond the boundaries of the screen: they let us infer a broader environment than what's visible at a given moment. With them, the button you tap has an origin; the card you swipe away, a destination. They make software spatially, and rationally, grounded.

Some deem most of this unnecessary. For many a designer, interfaces shouldn't burden the user, or themselves, with information that doesn't serve a clear purpose on screen. To them, skeuomorphism, by adding visual complexity, already represents an unneeded cognitive load; it's only logical that spatial software — in many ways a supercharged instance of skeuomorphic design — would be judged even more harshly.

It's a risk worth taking. For one, I think spatial software speaks to some core needs that somehow were never properly addressed, or even acknowledged, by flat interfaces. That we crave dimensionality at a time when our daily lives have been flattened into a never-ending Zoom meeting is significant.

But more importantly — it's just fun. There's a sense of sheer wonder that stems from bridging your analog and digital environments, from being able to grasp them using the same rules. That spatial software might seem uncalled for makes it all the more valuable — not everything always has to "make sense," or "remove friction." Spatiality can make a little complexity delightful.

Case studies

Here, I'd like to emphasize three companies that have done a great job at turning sensory imput into delightful design experiences.

Anchor: Likes you can hear

Anchor is "an all-in-one platform where you can create, distribute, and monetize your podcast from any device, for free". Founded in 2015, the company was acquired by Spotify along with Gimlet Media in February last year, in what marked Spotify's first move towards its audio-first future.

Anchor being "all-in-one," you used to be able to listen to podcasts from inside the app. That all changed after the acquisition, as Spotify was intent on capturing that part of the value chain. While Anchor still enables one-click distribution, the actual listening now happens on Spotify — or whatever app you're using to access your favorite content these days.

Back when it was still a listening app, however, Anchor introduced Applause, a neat feature that let you "clap" while listening to podcasts. Here's how the company described it at launch:

👏 Applause: a Like you can actually hear Anytime you hear something you love, gently knock on the back of your phone a few times while it’s in your pocket to applaud the host (or you can tap the applause button if you’re looking at your phone). It’s a lot of fun.

And it was a lot of fun. Every knock or tap would trigger a clapping sound and send a bunch of emoji falling over the screen - an audiovisual manifestation of your excitement.

Compared to the flat Applause button, the knock-on-your-phone trigger was a formally far superior experience. The simple act of tapping your phone helped reconnect your digital and physical environments. As a result, applauding on Anchor felt tangible — it had a real-world origin (the tap), and a multisensory digital impact (the sounds, the falling emoji).

Zenly: A sense of space

Zenly is a social mobile map that lets you see what your friends and family are up to. If this sounds familiar, that's normal: after Zenly was acquired by Snap (still Snapchat at the time) in 2017, its location-sharing tech became the building block of Snap Map, now one of Snapchat's signature features. (Snap Map actually debuted before the acquisition was made official.)

As a social map, Zenly's whole focus is to give you a sense of space: to help you know, literaly, where you stand in the world, how far or close your friends and family are, and where they're going.

This shines through across the entire experience. The app opens on a map centered on your location; as you zoom in and out, your friends start to appear one by one as map pins. Swiping lets you jump from one pin, or indeed, one friend to the next to check (or spy) on everyone at a glance. Every action closes the distance between you and your loved ones and shrinks the world to a scale that feels personal and manageable.

Spatiality permeates every aspect of Zenly's design, adding both literal and figurative depth to your experience. Send your friends some emojis and they'll flock to them on the map; if you find yourself on the receiving end, they'll appear on your screen like they're flying to your face - with some unexpected consequences:

3 regular 💩 emojis to a friend will result in a giant 💩 covering their whole chat screen. It sticks to the screen and can only be removed by wiping it away 😂!

The app uses every screen as an opportunity to enrich your virtual journey with new dimensions. Most often than not, this is done through a combination of things, including visual depth, sound, haptic feedback, or the gyrometer.

Its website follows the same principles.

On the main page, you're welcomed with a giant globe, rich with the company's vibrant colors and fun graphics. As you spin it, 3D pins pop up that represent people's locations on the planet, like they do on the app.

Scrolling down takes you on a journey through a series of CGI scenes, each of them rotating as you move your mouse, and filled with a myriad of details - trees swaying, flags waving. A combination of hover effects has every menu, button, and section floating, waving, popping, and bouncing.

All these interactions aren't gratuitous: they embody Zenly's product and mission, make them dynamic, interactive, and almost palpable. They're proof that Zenly is all about movement.

Panic: Analog delight

Panic is a software developer known for its quality macOS and iOS apps, and an indie game publisher.

As of last year, it's also a game console manufacturer. In May 2019, Panic announced Playdate, a gaming device designed in collaboration with Sweden's Teenage Engineering.

In the Switch and fablet era, Playdate is a bit of an oddity: it features a 400x240 pixel, black-and-white, non-backlit, 1-bit screen; a directional pad; two buttons; and... a mechanical crank on the right edge of the device. The result looks like a mix between the upper part of a yellow Game Boy Pocket and a coffee grinder.

Credits: Panic.

Here's what Greg Maletic, Panic's Director of Special Projects, said about the device at the time:

We knew we needed something different to make this device feel different people to people. [...] The crank provided us with just enough weirdness and just enough differentness to make this interesting.

Unlike the one you'd find on, say, a hand-crank flashlight, Playdate's crank doesn't power the device: it controls it, letting you interact with games in ways a push of a button wouldn't. In a recent thread, Panic provided multiple examples of how indie developers are using it to come up with novel mechanics, from moving through time, to setting the direction of a calligraphy brush, to firing a chaingun.

More than a charming feature, Playdate's crank embodies Panic's ambitions for the whole project. Starting from scratch, the company was willing to experiment right away on the hardware side. For developers, the crank was an open invitation to design compelling mechanics. For players, it introduced a more direct connection to what's happening on-screen.

This made the crank an entry point into the play experience - a move reminiscent of Nintendo's playful approach to controllers, examplified by the Labo kits. With Playdate, the hardware itself is part of the delight; it enables it. And the more closely the crank's movement parallels the action on-screen, the more magical it feels in your hands. This level of granular control — like you're physically manipulating a microcosm — fosters a sense of wonder.

Coming to our senses

These examples are proof that things don't need to be complicated. In fact, so great is our craving for digital delight that a few well-thought interactions here and there could do the trick — it's like all we need is a little haptic feedback. Is that really too much to ask?

If you're designing and building for consumers, please keep this in mind. It’s OK for your app to have a little “friction,” or to have features that are a little out there, or don’t generate the highest levels of engagement.

To quote Michael Flarup's timeless advice:

[...] design can be anything we want it to be. We should strive to make fun and memorable experiences that are appropriate to the context, but not arbitrarily restricted. [...] Allow ourselves to embellish in the name of orchestrating an experience. Delight as a differentiating factor.

Thanks for reading. If you found this issue valuable, I’d really appreciate it if you could forward it to a friend, or share it with the world.

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As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts about this essay, or really anything that’s on your mind! You can find me on Twitter - or just reply to this email.

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Today we’re looking at Facebook’s latest experiment, what it stands for, and why it’s bound to fail.

A New Experiment

The NPE Team at Facebook recently announced E.gg, a new nostalgia-inspired app for freeform creativity. Part Early Web in its aesthetic, part Tumblr in its intentions, it's the latest addition to the team's growing list of niche apps.

If you haven't heard, NPE stands for "New Product Experimentation." The team was created by Facebook in July 2019 with the mission to launch new consumer-focused apps around specific use cases. As stated in its introductory post, Facebook chose to create a separate developer name to

help set the appropriate expectations with people that, unlike Facebook’s family of apps, NPE Team apps will change very rapidly and will be shut down if we learn that they’re not useful to people, as well as to minimize disruption to the billions of people who use Facebook apps every day.

The team has held good on these ambitions. After a surprising hiatus - almost a year went by between its initial announcement and its first release - it has been shipping new apps at a fast pace, as its blog can attest. Three apps were released in April this year, four more in May, and another one in June. E.gg, announced in July, is currently in a limited beta.

Every new release seems to address a use case more specific than the previous one. Tuned is "a private digital space for couples to create, save and celebrate artifacts from their relationship." Kit is a voice messaging app for the Apple Watch. Forecast is "a community for crowdsourced predictions and collective insights." Facebook's only goal with these is to experiment and see what sticks. In that, E.gg is no different.

Cracking the E.gg

So what is E.gg, exactly? Because it's still in beta, there's very little information out there, but let's take a look at what we do know.

At its core, E.gg is a social app that lets you create freeform mixed-media collages, or "canvases." You start with an empty vertical frame, which you can then fill with pictures, GIFs, text, emoji, and clickable buttons. The app lets you position, tilt, and overlay every element any way you like, like you would with an actual paper collage. Judging from the few canvases currently visible, the initial frame seems to expand downward as you keep adding new elements to it. This makes it essentially an infinitely scrollable moodboard.

Following the same format, your personal profile serves as a meta-canvas, where clickable thumbnails take you to your individual canvases. You can view and share your creations anywhere on the web via a personalized e.gg URL.

E.gg also has this neat feature that lets you see attributions for the content of a specific canvas. When it's activated, hovering over an element surfaces its source. However, the feature currently only works for GIFs - a serious limitation, considering most of the content consists in static pictures.

E.gg very much feels like a work in progress, as you would expect from an artsy app released a month ago, by an experimental team to boot. Though the app's news page shows no recent announcement, the NPE Team has made it clear that every one of its experiments is always subject to change.

A Weird manifesto

To understand E.gg beyond its features, to understand what it stands for, it's helpful to look at its official About page. Here's what it says:

We started working on E.gg after a few of us found ourselves missing a certain raw and exploratory spirit that was so emblematic of The Early Internet. Sure, it was clumsy to use — dangerous at times, even — but in that awkward mess was a weird and enlivening bazaar of manically-blinking GIFs, passionate guestbook entries, personal webpages made by people who cared deeply about a niche interest of theirs and wanted simply to carve out their own digital space. So we wondered: Is this misplaced nostalgia? What if people could express themselves more freely today? Can we make more room for the weird and off-beat? Give creative control back to people? Create a low-pressure space for the really unpolished and mismatched things? We offer to you our experiment at recapturing that atmosphere: E.gg.

There's a lot to unpack here! But mainly, the statement seems to conjure up three different flavors of nostalgia.

• First, aesthetic nostalgia - that of "The Early Internet," a "weird and enlivening bazaar" that supposedly juxtaposed interests and genres ("the really unpolished and mismatched things") in a more permissive fashion than we do today.

• Second, technical nostalgia - the claim that creativity back then flowed more freely because the underlying infrastructure itself wasn't yet constrained. This enabled mixed media experiences (the "manically-blinking GIFs" and "passionate guestbooks") that today live separate from each other. Giving "creative control back to people," then, seems to be mostly a matter of features and formats.

• Third, social nostalgia - the idea that our creativity over time has been curbed by our obsession with likes and our desire to belong. A "low-pressure space" is posited to be a way out of our creative self-consciousness.

All this reads like a very peculiar kind of manifesto. One that wishes to retrieve and revive some supposedly extinct forms of creativity, rather than to design and enable new ones. One that laments what was, rather than celebrates what is. One that looks backward, not forward.

In their call for "the weird and the offbeat," these words also stand in sharp contrast with Facebook's unifying pretensions. In fact, if it weren't for the credits at the bottom of the website's main page ("By NPE Team from Facebook"), or the "Data Policy" link pointing you to Facebook's own policies, you'd be hard-pressed to identify E.gg as part of the Facebook portfolio. It's arguably a bit surprising that the company behind an all-encompassing mega-platform would suddenly seek to appeal not to the masses, but to the niches.

Do we need Weird Social?

E.gg's manifesto and, really, its very existence, raise the following question: Do we need Weird Social?

It's not an obvious one. Today's mainstream platforms have grown to scales that were deemed impossible even a few years ago. Facebook alone closed the second quarter of 2020 with 2.7 billion monthly active users. Instagram reaches over 1 billion users today. TikTok (excluding Douyin) surpassed 1 billion users worldwide in less than four years.

As these platforms continue to grow, reaching ever more diverse audiences wherever they may be, the need for niche services seems to fade. It looks like everyone will just end up on the same few platforms in the end.

E.gg's answer to that question, however, appears to be an unequivocal 'Yes'. Yes, it tells us, we need dedicated platforms to:

• make room for "weird," "off-beat" creativity (aesthetic nostalgia);

• open up possibilities through mixed media, in ways that mainstream platforms don't allow (technical nostalgia);

• empower us as creators to experiment without pressure (social nostalgia).

Here, I want to explore the underlying assumptions behind each of these claims. I'll start with aesthetic and social nostalgia, before ending with technical nostalgia.

Let's dive in.

Aesthetic Nostalgia

Take one look at E.gg's website, and you might think the app as a whole is all about that retro vibe. Everywhere you look on the featured canvases are bright colors, flashy GIFs, and tumblr-esque bits of wisdom ("Sometimes the most meaningful things take the longest time to show signs of progress"). Whether pop- or dark wave-inspired, every element has something deliberately passé to it.

The NPE Team is aware of the confusion, and has tried to clear things up right away on its About page:

We acknowledge that a lot of this seems like misplaced nostalgia, and maybe it totally is, but it's important to note that we are _not_ looking to create a 90s-throwback platform. We built E.gg to enable all sorts of content / visual styles (ideally, the rougher the better) — the 90s infomercial/webpage style just happened to be fun so we ran with it for this page.

The Early Web aesthetic, apparently, is here only to demonstrate what's possible with the app: it's a showcase, not a guideline.

Still, it's hard to shake the feeling that the team's intentions with E.gg are indeed about bringing the past back into the foreground. Weirdness here is a substance to be retrieved from the archives, presented as the only viable way out of our contemporary visual boredom. If aesthetic dullness is the disease, a vintage shot of Weird is supposed to be the antidote.

There's something strange about such an ambition - to establish Weirdness as a rule, and to hold it nice and quiet within the confines of a single, dedicated app. Creating a well-defined place to house our most rule-breaking creations feels somewhat contradictory. As Aaron Z. Lewis told me:

Most Weirdness comes from going against the grain of an otherwise normal context. Weirdness is a relative quality rather than a property that's inherent to the medium. In other words, what makes something weird is the contrast between the frame break and the broader context that it's happening inside of.

The very idea that Weird Social could stay weird for long also sounds like wishful thinking. One of the Mainstream's greatest strengths has always been its ability to absorb more edgy subcultures, to tune them down until they're digestible by the average consumer. Jazz. Rock. Punk. Pop. Rap. And that's just music. Subversive aesthetics in every medium suffer mainstream integration until they're nothing but distant (but highly lucrative) memories of cultural rebellion.

The internet has only accelerated this trend. Today, ubiquitous access, smartphone proliferation, global social networks, and our Extremely Online-ness together mean any piece of innovative media content that can go viral, will. As Toby Shorin puts it in The Diminishing Marginal Value of Aesthetics: "Novel aesthetic strategies are brought to market much faster, thanks to zero marginal cost distribution." They've inherited their velocity from their software surroundings.

No matter how inherently niche or weird an aesthetic, the Mainstream picks it up, amplifies it, copies it, integrates it. Until Weird isn't weird - or weird enough - anymore, and Weird-minded users move on to other weird stuff to indulge in.

In his essay, Toby Shorin describes a general "dampening of the effectiveness of aesthetic strategies." Cheap to produce and to distribute, aesthetics no longer make for durable moats. They're easily copied, disrupting the very notion of authorship, as well as the livelihood of the creatives who until recently could leverage their upstream position in the aesthetic stream.

While Toby's focus is on the creators, the same phenomenon affects social platforms too. Aesthetics today travel seamlessly across platforms as users circulate the most creative content within their own networks. Through billions of individual nodes, an ever-more efficient content supply chain has formed that can popularize and commoditize aesthetic innovation in a matter of days.

With so many entry and exit points, no platform is an island, exempt from external influence. Nor can a platform prevent its own native aesthetic from leaking out into the wilderness, either online or offline. If an aesthetic is appealing enough, it's bound to spread no matter what - losing its edginess in the process.

That the NPE team thinks E.gg can remain a haven for "the weird and the off-beat" is oblivious. If the Weird aesthetic it's trying to bring back makes enough of a cultural splash, the flocks of new users will soon make it into a boring blob, or the Weird itself will grow successful elsewhere beyond recognition. In any case, it's a losing battle.

Social Nostalgia

At the core of Egg's social nostalgia is a belief in the loss of our creative innocence - something like the social media equivalent of the Bible's original sin.

The story goes like this. In the beginning, there was the Early Web, full of enthusiastic pioneers exploring the creative possibilities of new interfaces and media. With everyone excited about this new world, early users felt free to experiment. There was no judgement, no censorship; people could be unapologetically themselves.

But one day, something changed. (Here, the story gets a bit blurry.)

Maybe it was the massive influx of new internet users that suddenly made people self-conscious about the content they were posting. Or context collapse, which made every post online a potential liability. Or the birth of the social profile, which made our online presence into an open book. The addition of a social interaction layer through likes and comments turned our digital life into a global competition. Likeability, not originality, became the driving force behind our creations.

It's a compelling narrative, but a simplistic one. It's possible that we've lost part of our creative innocence as an aesthetic consensus emerged online and started pushing the Weird out of the field of possibilities. But this process isn't linear: it's a fractal.

Each and every social platform unconsciously reenacts the story from start to finish. From its digital birth to its mainstream peak to its demise, it subjects its users to varying levels of social pressure. Even if we postulate that online creativity as a whole has declined for fear of peer judgement, in effect every platform finds itself at a unique stage in this process.

In his piece on Aesthetic Inflation, Ryan Dawidjan touched on how a platform's original aesthetic inevitably shifts over time.

Aesthetic inflation is a steady increase in the baseline expectations of ‘quality’ and style of content shared within a social network. 📈 The photo you may have posted in a heartbeat four years ago isn’t something that you would feel compelled to have others see today. Slowly but surely aesthetic inflation tends to root out the raw, candid, and whacky visuals that may thrive in the early days.

This can occur in two ways:

• Content: "The actual scenery, objects, experiences, or landscapes within a photo.[...]Think bathroom mirror selfies, airplane wing shots, kale salad bowl, girlfriend leading with her arm behind her back, ordinary sunset, etc."

• Style: "The visual style, layout, pattern, and format of a photo. Think heavy filters, screenshots, black borders, collages, etc."

As expectations shift and social pressure makes itself more pervasive, Aesthetic Inflation ends up reconfiguring everything that's produced within a network - not by force, but in a subtle, sweeping way. When everything around you starts looking more refined, you tend to adopt the same aesthetic just to keep your spot in the cultural loop. All these individual micro-adjustments add up, together leading to a collective shift.

Among the reasons for Aesthetic Inflation, Ryan lists three that I think pertain more directly to social nostalgia.

• Subtle or explicit modeling after other user group’s behavior: for example, groups like brands and influencers "have natural incentives to produce more striking and interesting content."

• Increasing rates of context collapse: the convergence of many personal selves forces your profile to be a public catch-all for multiple relationship types

• Natural law of messaging: “All apps with DMs eventually become dating apps:” The need to please (or, rather, date) pushes users to make their content more refined and aspirational as "a profile's surface area becomes a point of evaluation."

All this affects not just some platforms, but indeed all of them. Aesthetic Inflation is inherent to social networks as their audience grows and evolves.

Therefore, just as it's impossible to authoritatively institute Weirdness as a creative rule, so too it's impossible to rid a social platform of any and all traces of self-consciousness.

Hoping to, once and for all, free users creatively by making a platform "social pressure-free" might be a noble intention, but Aesthetic Inflation catches up eventually. There's just no stopping it.

Still, you can tell the NPE Team takes this responsibility seriously. One of its founding principles is "Creativity as its own solitary reward." For example, it chose to leave out like counts and comments - now common fixtures of most social platforms - to encourage more experimental content on E.gg. In a sense, that's starting where Instagram left off.

Sure, it's a simple way to prevent social incentives from ever swaying users' creativity. But it also reads a bit naive. Social incentives will exist; they just won't be allowed on the platform. Does it work all the same?

Again, what initially seems like a good idea might prove misguided pretty quickly. As Eugene Wei writes in Status as a Service (StaaS), we're all just "status-seeking monkeys," seeking out "the most efficient path to maximizing social capital." Depriving its users from building that capital with their creations means E.gg is essentially sentencing them to a social vacuum, with no feedback loop for them to iterate on their work, or to incentivize them to create at all.

Judgement-free also means reward-free. And in a world where every product is now inherently social, being antisocial is a weakness, not a strength.

Technical Nostalgia

Is Weird Social a matter of features?

The NPE Team seems to think so. E.gg's manifesto mourns the Early Web for its legendary "clumsiness," a mixed-media mess of GIFs, guestbooks, links, and pictures - all juxtaposed, fighting for the visitor's attention. Central to E.gg's trademark canvases is the idea that the partitioned media experiences we have today (music with music; pictures with pictures; videos with videos) fail to give us the creative room we crave. And that freeform, being more open, is the only option for "the weird and off-beat."

This makes sense. If the interfaces we use shape our thinking, it stands to reason that they would also influence how free, or how constrained, we feel creatively.

Each media format fosters a specific kind of personal expression. Snaps being ephemeral meant people could use Snapchat to share content they wouldn't on other platforms. The introduction of Stories later enabled users to weave their once disconnected impressions into more cohesive personal narratives. Similarly, Instagram's grid is a very different framework from Facebook's all-encompassing profile. A platform's features are its creative idiosyncrasies.

Yet creative innovation often works in spite of a platform's features, not because of them. The history of social media - short as it is - offers numerous examples of how users work around these limitations, or even leverage them to innovate on a platform's accumulated creative norm.

Consider "Open for a surprise" photos, which made the most of Twitter's limited image preview to hide a surprise out of frame. The big reveal - a hidden subject, object, or punchline - was then made visible only on the enlarged image.

Then, in January 2018, Twitter started using machine learning to crop photos to their "most interesting part" - the one that users were most likely to want to see. The tweak suddenly made the surprise element much harder to pull, largely stopping the trend in its track.

Something similar happened when users tried to exploit Twitter's... color palette. Picture previews on the platform use white backgrounds, while enlarged images have black backgrounds. Knowing this, creators started using transparent elements that would appear only when users clicked on a pic.

The hack, however, was compromised when Twitter introduced its "Dark Mode" - and an even darker "Lights Out" mode shortly after. The once transparent elements now appeared upfront on image previews, retroactively messing with the tweets that had used the effect to great success only a few months before.

And the list goes on. Take this Beyoncé-inspired, choose-your-own-adventure Twitter thread. Or how meme-and-theme accounts transformed Instagram into a sort of public diary. Take Weird Twitter. Or Weird Facebook.

The most exciting acts of online creativity happen on the margins of a platform's use cases and features. They manifest spontaneously through bottom-up innovation, not authoritatively through platform direction.

There is no need for Weird social platforms, because the Weird is not a matter of features. It pops up organically as users themselves look for the most appropriate ways to share their stories and obsessions, or just to have fun. It lives on mainstream platforms, half-hidden from us normies, but thriving. Not even hiding per se - just unnoticed, because we're not paying attention.

But once in a while, a splash of Weird reveals itself and spreads like wildfire, catching everyone's attention, if only for a brief moment.

Back in January 2019, the Instagram egg (aka @world_record_egg) came to life: a simple image of a brown egg, with the caption, "Let's set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram. Beating the current world record held by Kylie Jenner (18 million)! We got this." The post reached 18.4 million likes in just under 10 days, becoming the most-liked Instagram post of all time. It now has over 54 million likes.

It's perhaps not pure chance that the NPE Team chose to name its new app E.gg. In fact, I like to think it was a nod to the Egg's accomplishment, its Weird tour de force. But I also think the decision was ill-advised.

What was it, really, that made the Egg so successful? It wasn't a feature, or a format. In fact, the @world_record_egg was an image like billions others, displayed in the same rigid grid as every other post. It wasn't interactive, or even visually striking (the picture came from Shutterstock).

What was exciting was that its deliberate randomness enabled it to stand out from Instagram's otherwise manicured content. That it aimed to compete with Kylie Jenner, one of the platform's most representative figures, only made the contrast more obvious. It was a well-executed fringe use case, not a technical prowess.

In its belief that it could put creative control "back" in the hands of users, E.gg misses the whole point. Freeform canvases won't save creativity, because creativity doesn't need saving.

The cost of safe bets

Whether aesthetic, social, or technical, E.gg's nostalgic manifesto ultimately fails to impress. No matter how you slice it, its retro rhetoric feels oblivious to the dynamics at play on and across today's social platforms.

In all this, the NPE Team also fails to address the blue elephant in the room: that Facebook itself is largely responsible for the aesthetic neutralization and standardization of the web. (In her article for The Atlantic, ironically titled "Even Facebook Is Pining for the Internet It Destroyed," Kaitling Tiffany made sure to point out the paradox.)

That the call for weirder social networks would emerge from inside the most mainstream of them all is quite striking. At the end of the day, E.gg’s attempt at weirdness was made possible by the very powers it says it’s fighting against: an experimental team, insulated from Facebook’s pressures yet enabled by its riches, ventured into new consumer territories without having to suffer the consequences.

But safe bets don’t make for lasting impact. Without proper incentive structures in place (Who stands to benefit? What does success, or failure, look like? Does the NPE Team see any upside?), Facebook’s growing list of experiments is sure to remain inconsequential.

Aesthetic tools

Does it mean there is no room for new networks to develop and claim their own aesthetics? Are we forever bound to use generic platforms for everything, with no hope of escape?

Fortunately, no. The larger the platform, the more obvious its deficiencies become to its users. As the Reddits and Facebooks of this world continue to aim for the lowest common denominator with universal features, the most demanding communities can feel the urge to build their own creative refuges. As Greg Isenberg writes: "There is too much surface area for Reddit to possibly cover within constraints of subreddits."

In Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool, Toby Shorin argues that: "Just as built-in social networks are a moat for information products, customized tooling is a moat for social networks." He goes on to list a number of opportunities, from "chat groups for gaming and fantasy sports" to "food influencer communities." A "community chat for Dungeons & Dragons players," for example, could include "character creation interfaces" and "dice tools."

The key here is that aesthetics serve a purpose: unlike E.gg, Toby's suggestions go beyond sheer creativity. Their interface manifests their mission; they make obvious who they're built for. They have value because they fill a community's need, not because they claim to heroically bring creativity back from the dead.

We'll know soon enough if E.gg's premise has struck a chord. Hobbi, the NPE Team's app for short-form content creation around personal projects, folded in July after just a few months, having reached less than 10,000 downloads. The consumer social space is make-or-brake - let's see how long E.gg's Weird experiment lasts.

The Medley

The best hyperlinks you’ll click on today.

🃏 The Stockbrokers Of Magic: The Gathering Play for Keeps | Cecilia D'Anastasio

I’m only starting to discover the insane amount of passion and money that goes into hardcore collections. This piece is a good intro to how Magic card trading has gone from a nerdy hobby to speculative investing. Jerry Lu also has an excellent thread on designing Magic cards.

💬 Slack TV! – *Unscripted Production Studios, coming to Hollywood en masse! | $5.vc

$5.vc is “your source of differentiated startup intel!” Every week, they come up with dope new startup ideas inspired by the behavioral consumer trends they’re seeing in the market. Inspired by MSCHF’s The Office Slack, the team made the case for turning well-known IP into live, conversational experiences. They’re so excited about the opportunity, they’ve already built it: Slack TV is now looking for a founder.

⚽ How An App Is Helping To Unearth The Next Generation Of Soccer Stars | Robert Kidd

A profile of Tonsser, a social app built for soccer players, coaches, and scouts. Founded 5 years ago, the app is now used by almost 1.5 million players aged between 13 and 19, who use it for a chance to be named in the ‘team of the week’ in their league or be voted man of the match by teammates. Tonsser uses data to help aspiring professional players showcase their skills and find the best opportunities.

Many thanks to Penelope, Neer, Tina, Freia, and Aaron for their help and ideas for this essay!

If you liked what you read, there’s a number of ways to let me know! Hit the heart button, leave a comment, or share this post with others.

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I’d love to hear your thoughts about E.gg and Weird Social! You can find me on Twitter - or just reply to this email.

Thanks for reading!

Maxime

Today, we're diving deep into the coolest music technology company you've never heard of.

Enter Spitfire Audio

Spitfire Audio is a British music technology company producing high quality virtual instruments and sample libraries for the world's most demanding composers.

Like any exciting company, it has an interesting origin story. In the company's own words:

Spitfire Audio was founded by two award-winning composers: Christian Henson and Paul Thomson. Born out of their shared dissatisfaction for string sample libraries, they pooled their resources and decided to record their own string samples at the legendary Air Studios in London. Initially, they invited a limited number of friends and associates to own copies of their samples, but whispers of this private sample club soon started to echo across the Atlantic Ocean throughout the composer community. Within a year, some of the most renowned composers in film and television signed up, so Paul and Christian decided to take their samples public.

This was back in 2007. Fast forward 13 years, and this "private sample club" is now a company of 70+, recognized as one of the best sound providers in the world. It has collaborated on exclusive products with musicians and composers like Hans Zimmer and Ólafur Arnalds. Its tools and instruments are used for scoring movies, TV shows, and video games across all genres.

Spitfire's perhaps most impressive accomplishment, however, is how it's made the whole world of scoring more accessible and lowered the barriers to entry and creation for aspiring composers. All these years, Spitfire has stayed true to its original mission: "to inspire a generation of composers."

Let’s see how it does it.

Content as Worldbuilding

Spitfire has mastered content creation across multiple platforms and media, delivering the same production values in its ancillary content as it does in its main, paid products. Its approach from the start has been to engage its consumers - and music fans at large - with quality, evergreen content whose value has only accrued with time.

Supporting that stellar strategy are two main properties: its YouTube channel, and Composer, its online magazine.

YouTube: Content extravaganza

Launched in March 2010, Spitfire's YouTube channel has since grown into a key asset for the company, allowing it to consistently educate, excite, and inspire viewers. It features a variety of playlists that not only provide practical guidance on the company's products, but dive deep into the lives and minds of the artists that create and use it. To name but a few:

• Creative Cribs, an insider look into the studios and mindsets of some of the world's best composers.

• Inside the Score, "a never-before-seen vlog style online series, documenting the entire process of composing original music for a feature- length horror film."

• In Action, a series of demos of the company's sound packs.

Of course, Spitfire isn't a video production company - not primarily, that is. Its business is in digital products, not in content, and all those videos ultimately should contribute to sales.

But the company has built the ultimate content flywheel. It goes something like this:

1. Product releases feed new content - teasers, launch party replays, walkthroughs, in-depth tutorials, and user-generated demos;

2. New content (both proprietary and user-generated) generates new sales from existing and new customers;

3. Revenue funds new product releases.

Whether you're considering the playlist level or the channel level, Spitfire's content strategy on YouTube answers some important questions about the company's products and mission.

• What: the actual product, i.e. a virtual instrument or music library;

• Why: the inspiration behind each release;

• Who: the people who record, engineer, and use that content;

• How: the way the audio is recorded and engineered;

• Where: the recording halls and producers' studios where the magic happens.

Answering those questions in depth supports the company's ultimate business goals, helping it engage both existing and potential consumers at every step of the purchase decision. Enhanced by dedicated quality content, what Spitfire is selling is no longer just a product: it's a toolkit, a mindset, and a shot of inspiration.

To guide consumers on their journey, Spitfire calls on a diverse palette of content lengths and formats. Videos on its channel today range from 2 minute-long product teasers to an astonishing two-and-a-half-hour "Fly On The Wall Film Of A Large Orchestral Session."

With a passionate user base, the company has the latitude to expand on a library's raison d'être or a composer's vision, without fearing that this type of content might bore viewers. Every one of its sound packs is a world in its own right and can be derived into dozens of videos; in turn, every additional piece of content adds an extra layer to Spitfire's worldbuilding.

Composer: Deluxe inspiration

Composer, Spitfire's online magazine, offers a mix of written interviews and profiles of some of the artists the company collaborates with - as well as the occasional miscellanea. Like Spitfire's YouTube channel, it evidences the company's ambitions in creating quality content.

Most of it touches on rather specific aspects of an artist's work, focusing on their creative process, influences, or favorite tools. From building your own recording studio to writing music for LEGO’s mobile game, every issue is packed with both practical knowledge and inspirational insights.

In both its content matter and its format, Composer seems tailored to the personality types you’d expect of the “professional composer” crowd. Deep content (as discussed above) and great design (more on this later) is exactly what you’d think Spitfire’s user base craves for.

Right now, however - and despite the care that goes into it - the magazine seems noticeably underexploited in Spitfire's broader content strategy. That's because Spitfire is careful not to be too pushy in marketing its own products: Composer is about the craft of scoring professionals more than it is about the company. While some of these composers do use its products, there is no obvious plug, no in-your-face call-to-action. Even those articles that are, in fact, centered on paid products, make it seem only secondary. It's like you need to beg Spitfire to take your money.

From a marketing perspective, there's a lot of untapped potential here. Composer could very well be used more aggressively to channel potential customers toward Spitfire's offering - turning readers into buyers. Even the magazine's visibility could be improved: besides social media, the only access point to it is via a discrete menu at the top of the company's website.

But Composer, like the company's YouTube channel, doesn't exist only as a marketing tool: it's a pillar of Spitfire's inspiration engine.

Inspiration as a product

From inspiration to aspiration

Spitfire's playlists on YouTube or articles on Composer have a lot to offer. The tutorials and walkthroughs are instructions; Spitfire's cofounder Christian Henson's vlogs are both education and entertainment. But the most important content of all is here for the viewer's inspiration and aspiration. Spitfire's content and products have one single goal: to empower users, give them models to look up to, and unleash their creativity.

This can be felt everywhere in the company's messaging, from its mission statement ("to inspire a generation of musicians") to the copy on its website.

Besides the inevitable technical specs, each product page conjures up a sense of beauty or mystery. The eDNA library opens up "an uncharted territory of new sonic experimentations," while the London Contemporary Orchestra Textures offer "multifaceted, otherworldly textures" and "indefinable, fascinating sounds." The Angular Strings Evolutions library lets you "create spellbinding, award-winning material from the moment your fingers hit the keyboard." Spitfire takes you - a potential customer, but an artist first and foremost - on a creative journey: “spell-binding” conjures up the emotional aspiration; “award-winning,” the status aspiration; finally, the “fingers hitting the keyboard,” bring you back to the practical action, the necessary first step. It's inspiration turned into words.

Knowing how important role models are to aspiring artists, Spitfire also draws the figures of professional composers and musicians as inspirational nudges. No matter your level of mastery as a composer, seeing other, more established professionals talk about their craft, tools, studios, and creative vision is sure to uplift you - to drive you to create more, to do better. In that spirit, the Creative Cribs and Interviews & Features playlists present viewers with models to not just admire, but emulate.

But this goes even further. Spitfire releases not just artist-focused content but artist-driven products, too, working with the best composers to release libraries of their sounds - it has six of Hans Zimmer alone. The producers who get these packs aren't buying a bunch of sounds, really: they're buying into an artist's vision. They're using these sounds as a way to instil a little bit of that artist's talent and unique touch into their own work. With these packs, inspiration becomes aspiration.

This seems to be a growing trend in the music monetization space, with examples like Splice Originals as well as individual creators releasing their own branded sound packs and plugins.

The LABS strategy

Within Spitfire's entire library, there's one product in particular that embodies that growth mindset: LABS, its renowned library of free virtual instruments. Here's how Spitfire describes it:

The Spitfire Audio LABS programme is an infinite series of software instruments, free to install and easy to use. Made by musicians in London for anyone anywhere.

Launched in 2018, the programme today includes 27 instruments - with new libraries released every month. The instruments in the series had been downloaded over 3 million times as of April 28, 2020.

While not as comprehensive as the company's paid libraries, LABS instruments can stand on their own. And because they're free, they’ve spread widely among scoring aficionados, propelled by trade blogs and user-generated demos on YouTube.

For consumers, LABS is a perfect entry point into the world of scoring. Highly versatile, it's accessible to beginners who don't want to shell out, yet good enough that veteran composers will use it too. Two years after inception, it has remained true to Spitfire's ambitions to lower the barriers to creation - LABS aptly stands for "Let's All Become Something."

From a business perspective, LABS is a loss leader. That it remains available for free, even though it could bring in considerable revenue every year, is astonishing, and proof that Spitfire stills treats it as a labor of love. It’s Spitfire’s own “0 price product,” whose very existence is being subsidized by other product lines, and made possible only because of high conversion rates from free to paid.

This has proved a working strategy. As you grow more confident in your craft, you'll want to add to your stack, experiment with new sounds and more complete libraries. If you've been happy with the instruments in the LABS programme, you're likely to trust Spitfire again when you're ready to open your wallet. The company's premium products will be waiting for you with open arms.

Design as a manifesto

Visualizing sound

What should sound look like?

Mostly, what you expect from virtual instruments is that they sound good - that they sound true-to-life. A virtual violin should sound like an actual one, with its timbre, dynamics, and pitch. Music is a matter of sound - the fact that you're using a computer to create it doesn't change that fact.

Yet computer-powered music is also visual. Design has long been a key element of digital audio workstations and plays a huge role in which software composers settle on. It's all the more important that these are interfaces users are going to spend a lot of time with. Where bad interfaces can make composers dread their time in front of the computer, good ones make these sessions both more enjoyable and more productive.

Knowing this, Spitfire has put product design front and center. For Spitfire, it isn't just about visuals, it's also about accessibility. The company sees and treats design the way it does pricing: as a means for lowering the barriers to creation.

Simplicity has its drawbacks, too. Some interfaces are so clinically clean that you might have a hard time understanding what it is that the few knobs and sliders actually do. Spitfire's sleekness leans on the abstract end of the spectrum, and mastering the company's tools is likely to require some experimentation. Still, its intentions are clear: design should empower, not deter, creators - no matter their skill level.

Making sound cool

More generally, it's also about making things look good. If intuitive interfaces speak to a customer's practical sense, beautiful ones speak to their aesthetic sense. Good design helps tell a story: it's another instance of Spitfire's obsession with worldbuilding.

This makes sense. For all their artistic potential, sound libraries only come as a bunch of files. You download them - all hundreds of gigabytes of them -, install them, load them up in your preferred audio workstation, and only then does the magic happen. With thousands of professional plug-ins and libraries available, composers sometimes need a little push before they decide to take all these steps for one additional piece of software.

For Spitfire, design is that push. The company works hard on giving each pack a distinct visual identity that echoes the idea, work, or creator that inspired it. Not only does this help convey the story behind one particular library, it's also indicative of the sounds you'll be able to create with it: from that perspective, the visual layer becomes as important as the sounds themselves.