Stop Running Campaigns. Start Building Eras
I wasn’t even a little surprised when I learned most musicians don’t get rich off streams.
Spotify pays artists roughly $0.003–$0.005 per stream on average. That means you need around 250,000 streams just to make about $1,000 before anyone else takes their cut. Ditto
So where’s the real money?
Touring. Merch. Brand deals.
For a lot of artists, merch sales at shows can rival or outperform what they see from streaming, and live gigs plus sponsorships are core revenue streams, especially for independents.
Streaming is the awareness engine. The tour is the business.
Look at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. The tour pulled in an estimated $2.2 billion in ticket sales, making it the highest‑grossing tour of all time. The albums and streams set the stage, but the real economic and cultural earthquake came from the experience built around the music: the costumes, friendship bracelets, surprise songs, city takeovers, a whole shared mythology.
Now, swap “musician” for “marketer.”
That cute campaign you just shipped? The one with the clever tagline, slick video, and polished landing page? That’s your stream. It’s nice. It gets views. It nudges awareness.
But the real game is everything you build around it:
A content series that runs for months, not days
A recurring program or event people plan for and invite others to
Rituals, in‑jokes, artifacts your audience wants to collect and show off
Think Red Bull.
They didn’t stop at “drink our energy drink.” They built a whole universe of events, stunts, and media, cliff diving, Flugtag, Formula 1, their own studios—until the experience became the product. People don’t just consume Red Bull; they belong to its world.
That’s the move for marketers: stop thinking in “campaigns,” start thinking in eras.
Instead of:
“We’re launching a Q4 brand campaign.”
Try:
“We’re kicking off a 2‑year program our audience can grow up inside.”
Some ideas for building your own “tour” around a campaign:
Flagship experience: Launch one recurring thing people can point to: an annual summit, a live show, a seasonal challenge. The goal is, “See you again next year,” not “thanks for the click.”
Setlist of content: Don’t ship one hero video. Build a setlist: behind‑the‑scenes clips, founder commentary, customer stories, live Q&As, remixes. The campaign is just Track 1.
Merch = memory: Your “merch” might be templates, toolkits, digital badges, physical swag—anything that lets people signal, “I’m part of this.”
Language and lore: Musicians have eras, deep cuts, tour inside jokes. Your brand can have its own shared vocabulary, recurring bits, and callbacks across launches.
In music and in marketing, the one‑off hit is nice, but the world you build around it is what compounds. Streams are cool. Campaigns are cute.
But if you want something people remember, travel for, and talk about for years?
Build your own Eras Tour.
