This post is written by Mag Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of EVEN, a direct-to-consumer music infrastructure platform. EVEN has onboarded over 500,000 artists through distribution partnerships with UnitedMasters, Too Lost, Stem, Symphonic, Secretly Distribution, Virgin Music Group, and others across 3,000+ labels and distributors in over 110 countries. EVEN recently announced a multi-year licensing agreement with Universal Music Group.

There is a new vertical emerging in the music release cycle. It isn’t a platform or a feature. It’s a structural layer that sits between creation and streaming, and it is quietly rewriting the economics of the music industry.

I’m talking about D2C before DSPs: the practice of selling music directly to fans before releasing it to streaming platforms.

For decades, artists have sold music to fans directly. Streaming changed that dramatically. Now we’re seeing something new that’s becoming systematized with actual infrastructure. And the data now exists to prove that it works, not as a promotional stunt, but as a durable, repeatable revenue vertical that compounds over time.I want to share what we’ve learned, not to pitch a product, but rather because the findings have implications for how the entire industry thinks about release strategy and fan monetization.

The data

For the past 14 months, we’ve tracked the D2C strategy of Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins across three consecutive projects on EVEN. Prior to releasing on EVEN, Mick’s annual streaming revenue average came in at $143,000 per year. Respectable for an independent artist with 937,000 monthly Spotify listeners and a catalog spanning 10 years. But the revenue was flat year over year. That was his ceiling. 

Then Mick added D2C. With two releases on EVEN in 2025, he generated $146,000 in direct-to-consumer revenue. His total music income grew 88%. D2C nearly doubled his annual revenue, and streaming didn’t shrink by a dollar.

His third release launched in February 2026 and generated $15,000 in its first seven days, before a single stream existed on any DSP. No paid ads. No label or marketing budget.

D2C AND DSPs; it’s both – not one or the other

Nobody cancels their Netflix subscription because they went to the movie theater on Friday night. It’s a different experience, context, and willingness to pay. The two coexist because they serve different needs.

D2C music works the same way. The fan who pays $20 for early access to an artist’s music is not canceling their Spotify subscription. They’re paying for something the streaming experience doesn’t offer: proximity to the artist, access before everyone else, and community with other fans who care enough to show up early. When the album hits DSPs weeks later, those same fans stream it again. The artist gets paid twice. The DSP still gets its content.

The data confirms it. After Mick ran a D2C window before releasing “A Murder of Crows” to streaming, he received 25 major editorial playlist placements across Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube, and Tidal. The full editorial apparatus showed up. 

This is not a workaround. It’s a parallel economy, one that runs alongside streaming, serves a different need, and captures value that the subscription model was never designed to reach. 

Twenty-five percent of Mick’s buyers voluntarily paid above the minimum price. Two fans paid $500 for a single release. That kind of price elasticity only emerges when the experience justifies it.

“This is not a workaround. It’s a parallel economy, one that runs alongside streaming” Mag Rodriguez

What compounding looks like

When Mick launched his first EVEN campaign, he had zero fan contacts. Despite nearly a million monthly Spotify listeners, he couldn’t reach any of them directly. After two campaigns: 7,055 opted-in contacts, a database that drove $32,505 in merchandise revenue across 600 orders at zero marginal cost all through Fan Connect (EVEN’s CRM tool) messaging to fans acquired through D2C. The database is the asset. The releases are the acquisition events. A promotion spikes. A vertical compounds. 

LaRussell shows what this looks like at full maturity. With just 18,000 fans, he generated $450,000 in the first 60 days of 2026, across his 16th release on EVEN. That’s $25 per fan in two months. LaRussell didn’t need a bigger audience. He needed a deeper one.

The real addressable market

In Q4 2025, indie artists who never earned a dollar from streaming made an average of $105 on EVEN. Not their first dollar from streaming. Their first dollar from music, full stop. In that same quarter, established artists across releases averaged $53,296. The same infrastructure that helped J. Cole debut at number one is where an artist with zero streaming income makes their first hundred dollars from fans eager to support them. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what a D2C infrastructure can do.

Luminate’s 2025 Year-End Report showed D2C now accounts for 13.6% of physical album sales and drove 78% of first-week physical sales. The average Spotify listener generates under $1.83 per year for Mick ($143K ÷ 937,000 monthly Spotify listeners). The average EVEN customer spent $21.97 across Mick’s campaigns. That’s a 12x multiplier per fan. The real funnel isn’t streaming-to-fan. It’s social-to-D2C-to-DSP.

On March 5, 2026, UMG Chairman and CEO Sir Lucian Grainge named D2C as one of four strategic pillars for the world’s largest music company in his prepared remarks to Wall Street analysts.

Of J. Cole’s campaigns, Grainge said: “Both projects leveraged EVEN’s white-label solution to reach hundreds of thousands of fans and sell millions of dollars of physical product. The EVEN campaign was a significant factor in The Fall-Off debuting at number one in the US.” The infrastructure layer between creation and streaming is no longer a startup thesis. It’s a boardroom priority.

“Both projects leveraged EVEN’s white-label solution to reach hundreds of thousands of fans and sell millions of dollars of physical product.” Sir Lucian Grainge

What this requires

This only works with artist buy-in. The moments that drive D2C – community chats, lyrical breakdowns, listening sessions – carry weight because they come directly from the artist. That authenticity is what fans are paying for. The artist has to show up. Streaming is passive consumption, and for most artists, it’s also passive engagement. D2C requires active participation. That’s what makes it valuable, and hard.

Mick Jenkins converted roughly 0.5% of his Spotify audience into D2C customers. That’s a small fraction, but even at that conversion rate, D2C doubled his income. The economics are that favorable for the artists and teams willing to lean in.

As Mick put it: “I easily CLEAR the money I made streaming by going direct to fan. It doesn’t even compare AT ALL. And that’s with a FRACTION of my fanbase purchasing.”

EVEN unlocks value from music that can only be accessed when fans pay artists directly. Not a fraction of a cent from an algorithm, but a dollar that says: this is worth something. Every transaction on EVEN returns the data to the artist: who their fans are, where they are, and how to reach them again.

The infrastructure is here. The data supports it.

Please visit insights.even.biz/mick-jenkinsto read the full case study.