Words matter. These are the best Jack Conte Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’ve dealt with a record label in the past.
I love the idea of creators owning their audience data instead of platforms.
Taking occasional risks, I’m a strong proponent of that.
There are literally tens of thousands of people who create regular content on the web and have millions of followers.
When I graduated college, I didn’t get a job. I started making YouTube videos. I used to spend my days making art, and I love that. And, if I’m being honest, what’s the hardest thing? I think it’s just becoming a CEO from this path of being a YouTuber.
I’ve always felt like I’m on the outside of the music industry.
The whole idea behind YouTube is accessibility and openness.
On the Internet, it’s not just content that’s king. It’s regular content. But models like Kickstarter don’t work for regular content. And the advertising you earn on YouTube is nice, but it doesn’t seem to assign the appropriate value for the amount of work and passion that goes into certain types of content.
Everybody wants to be able to enjoy beautiful things.
I don’t love using synthesizers, but I do use synthesizers. I’m more inspired by acoustic instruments – as long as there’s something making the sound it’s something I really like.
Building habits is important. One of mine is a weird, small thing, but it’s very helpful: I stop eating just before I’m full. I feel so much better throughout the course of the day if I don’t pack myself. It’s a good way to get more energy.
We do love playing live.
I guess I kind of don’t like how there’s such a pedestal for music culture and especially for band culture. It just feels fake; it feels like smoke and mirrors. And I feel like music doesn’t have to be like that. It can be something that’s very normal and very accessible.
When I was 6 my dad taught me the blues scale, and I started writing songs and improvising.
I loved the ‘Sister Act 2’ soundtrack.
Whether you have a barbershop or you’re a local restaurant owner, there’s lots of tech for you to understand your business.
Being in an indie band is running a never-ending, rewarding, scary, low-margin small business.
Hard work works.
I spent three months working on music videos, working eighteen-hour days, put it out, got half-a-million views… and got a check in the mail for a couple hundred bucks.
People like my videos, some of which can cost me thousands to make. So I just ask, ‘How about giving me $1 to help me make my next one?’
There’s a difference between what people will consume and what they will pay for.
Kid A’ is my favorite record.
I love the idea of shifting power away from institutions and toward individual creative people.
Kickstarter is not appropriate for a blogger who writes weekly articles – he doesn’t need a big chunk of money, and he has no big project to use it for. He needs monthly income, and Patreon brings crowd funding away from singular one-off projects and into the realm of regular content creation.
In a perfect world, art and commerce, I think, could be in vacuums and coexist in full purity.
Medium is like the Instagram of the corporate world. It’s the layer that we want everybody to see, but not actually how it is. It feels like content marketing.
Artists deserve more than a check cut in half eight times by publishers.
I’m half of the band Pomplamoose and cofounder & CEO at Patreon.
The reality is Patreon needs to build new businesses and new services and new revenue lines in order to build a sustainable business.
If you want to attract executives who value diversity, then build a system that leads to diverse interviewing teams without ‘tokenizing’ people.
We want Patreon to be safe, and we have no tolerance for hate speech. That’s something I think other platforms have been behind on. They’ve been allowing their platforms to become toxic places. We don’t want that. I don’t feel apologetic about that at all.
Patreon, is, has been and will continue to be a creator-centric organization.
I usually spend my weekends working on my music and videos.
There’s a tendency for young musicians – I certainly was guilty of this – of wanting to know what they sound like, before making their first record, before releasing things. But I think that’s the wrong order of operations. You only find out what you sound like, when you have five records under your belt.
In truth, a label is nothing more than a corporation, and it funds artists. Why couldn’t another corporation fund an artist? And instead of having Capitol Records at the bottom of your CD, it says Hyundai. Why not?
I learned all about big band arrangement and symphony arrangement and writing for strings.
Basically all the art we know in history books, the business model for that art was not unit sales. It was patronage. It was a person who made great stuff. And then an institution, a religious institution, a government, a wealthy individual, would pay that person to go make more of that.
No one talks about the epic failures that we all have.
I love the idea of creators having leverage and control.
The only reason why a company like Patreon works is because of transparency, being open with people and telling them what’s going on, and having them support you.
Patreon is here to give control back to artists so it doesn’t need to be a hard conversation when a kid tells their parents they want to be a musician or a photographer or a comedian. It should be the same as wanting to be a doctor or a lawyer.
We get to make the music that we love.
Unless you’ve given up your business to a record label, there’s no such thing as just being a musician anymore.
Art is the meaning of my life.
At the end of almost every video in my YouTube catalog since Patreon’s launch, I talk about my work at the company.
Know your goals – it will help guide your decisions.
What I will say about crypto and NFTs in general is I really love the idea of creators owning their media and owning their content.
If you’re a really good community manager, that’s highly predictive of your success on Patreon.
Patreon is a website that helps artists make money. It’s crowdfunding on an ongoing basis for a creator.
The epic failures make up the journey along the way to getting the wins.
It’s so embarrassing to just not feel valued as a creative person.
When I created my Patreon page, I knew the fans of my music would support me. I’ve met them on tour and I’ve seen their comments on Twitter and Facebook. I’m out there making relationships, so I should benefit the most, right?
I want creators quitting their part-time jobs and being creative for a living.
I love well-produced stuff. The craft and the art of production is something I really, really love.
We built Patreon to be an open, flexible platform. It’s a tool. Why shouldn’t we open it up to people who find utility in it?
