The paradox of scale and success: What music can learn from gin distilleries

The digital world is becoming less reliable.  

Platforms are flooded with AI content ranging from banal, to amusing, to concerningly incorrect. Advertising crowds the feed alongside creators desperately trying to sell something: themselves, a lifestyle, products, businesses. Metrics are increasingly fallible, the biggest success stories in entertainment predate streaming, and TikTok stars fail to fill stadiums. 

As a result, attention is starting to shift offline. Digital engagement is unlikely to go anywhere, but the roots of connection, be it consumer and brand or simply friends, are increasingly reliant on offline experiences. Views do not put food on the table. Artists once again rely on selling tickets, records, and t-shirts. Audiences are spending big on the artists that meant something before we even had streaming, and flocking to house parties and DIY nights to cut through the demanding clutter. 

Marketing and culture teams are waking up to this, but have a difficult time justifying decisions to budget holders because of the inherent dearth of data present in IRL activations. The other challenge is that these things do not scale as quickly. True value takes time to grow and become rooted in culture enough to be long lived and highly profitable. 

Scale and success do not work like they used to 

The truth is, scale got inflated by digital globalisation – and it just does not work as well anymore, with online fragmentation a now well-established phenomenon. Personalisation means that mainstream moments are harder than ever to generate. Cultural niches are becoming more specific, and their online origins are no longer stable enough to build much on, as trust and authenticity deteriorate with the influx of generative AI. The biggest companies with the biggest hits have become the aim to emulate, but that model is simply no longer possible to build in the current environment. 

Small companies looking to build longer-term and / or offline are caught between a rock and a hard place. Building for true longevity – be it an artist career or a new movie universe – takes time that financial backers are often unwilling to wait for. Aiming for short-term wins through licensing viral hits or hoping for a lucky product placement yields immediate rewards that fade just as quickly, resulting in a business model that requires constant grind and no relief in sight. This latter is resulting in entertainment beginning to look like finance, with AI and algorithmic tools scraping for the next upcoming hit, buying the rights, making a quick profit, and starting again. Quality and differentiation deteriorate over time through this model, and the rise and fall of platforms – and their constantly shifting goalposts for virality – bring challenges that will only grow over time. 

A little column A, a little column B

Perhaps the better bet is to take a page out of the alcohol industry’s book, and do a bit of both. 

In 2008, the UK saw a boom in independent gin distilleries as a result of a legal change. However, many of them had a bigger play in mind: whiskey. Whiskey takes time to make, as all good things do – 10 years minimum, before the distillation process is complete (and even then, it is impossible to know how it will turn out until it is ready). However, the process to make whiskey can also be used to create gin, which can be ready practically overnight. Hence, distillers could set up the process for the higher-margin whiskey, and while they waited for the casks to mature, they sold gin. 

Independent labels and studios should be aiming for longevity, but careers and culture take time and do not build according to the same rules as flash hits do, even if they require the same tools. Ergo, short term: turn out the viral hits, the brand deals, the reality TV – but reinvest those profits into a longer-term business, while the good stuff matures downstairs.