We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Will Cuming a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Will thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been one of the most interesting investments you’ve made – and did you win or lose? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)

Your investment of both time and money in building a creative career is significant. In an industry of what are essentially small business owners, there are many challenges around how best to run that, stay inspired and creative, and find mentors with the right strategic experience and advice to help you thrive.

For me, I think I have had to really learn from making lots of mistakes. Certain ideas or instincts I had when I was first starting were to build more direct pathways to my audience, but I was often advised against prioritising my mailing list to instead focus on getting radio support in Australia (I’m from Aus). Now we’re in an era where you are once again strongly encouraged to focus on your superfans (which is somewhat of a buzz word).

To come back to the crux of the question, the best thing to invest is your time, especially when you’re young. But not to invest blindly. To be discerning with it. If you are patient, very very good (this comes with lots of practise), and lucky, you have a shot at it. The thing to be striving for here is not to have your music come across the label CEO’s desk, but to have a strong emotional connect build with an audience of small scale. And then to scale that. Nothing gets the attention of the labels quite like an artist who has their own audience anyway.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a artist, songwriter and producer working under the moniker of LANKS.

I have +100 million streams on my own music, have achieved platinum and gold status in Australia, and am a self-managed and curious creator and entrepreneur.

Since covid, I have almost completed a Masters of Business Analytics, and am now also a full stack developer and data analyst creating tools for the music industry.

I am curious and self-driven, and I am passionate about making meaningful, personal and emotionally rich art that helps people. Helping people process pain or trauma, or giving fans something that makes them feel good is the reason I do this. For connection.

I am very proud of the way I have run a sustainable business and my ability to adapt in an industry and era full of dramatic change.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I have a lot of thoughts about this industry and the way I believe it can be improved.

Since covid I have added more business, data analytics and coding skills to help enhance my ability to strategise solutions in music.

My main observations are that the music industry has been dictated the terms of it’s engagement with fans because they didn’t own the technology that was created to exploit that fan-artist relationship.

I have nothing against Spotify in particular, but I think the gate-keeping of our audiences and silo-ing of data has severely hampered artists ability to build a sustain career.

I have no path to reach the millions of people who have listened to my music on Spotify and turn that into further revenue streams.
I also have no way of attributing growth in my streaming audience to any particular channel or marketing activity, so I learn nothing new about where is best to communicate with my audience or what channels of marketing are the right ones to spend my budget.

The emergence of niche superfan apps is great, but from a fan UX point of view, learning a whole bunch of new platforms probably doesn’t sit that well with every fan either, so there is some sort of middle ground here.

It is an oversaturated/over-supplied industry so will always have challenges around artists making sustainable incomes, but if we consistently make great art that connects to people, and build more direct connections to our audiences, then we have a shot.

Have you ever had to pivot?

My whole life as a creator has been about pivoting, so when covid came around, and many other industries were talking about it as a new thing, I don’t think I was as overwhelmed.

I had just moved to NYC with my wife, was already expecting it to be hard as I needed to build up more audience and a new community of industry connections and friends in the US, and covid struck.

At first I made a double album. Then I started painting and drawing every day. And then my sister, then studying a Masters in Business Analytics, asked if I had ever coded before. So I tried that.

Starting coding, and then my own Masters of Business Analytics, was a very large pivot from music, but weirdly, it felt just like learning a new instrument to me. All this new knowledge and context around my own industry now started to make more sense. Frameworks for dissecting how the industry worked, or the coding and computer science knowledge to understand how the apps we use to promote are designed and operate, my view into the industry expanded greatly.

I have now recently launched an analytics app in beta that joins advertising and ticket and other data sources to help artists and music companies better understand what is and isn’t working in their tour, release and merch campaigns.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lanksmusic.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lanksmusic/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lanksmusic/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-cuming-lanks-a1394b22/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lanksmusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtpRHcO5C14gsKL3mr4XzLw

Image Credits
Brook James