Camille Hearst was the head of product, creator and general manager, merch at crowdfunding platform Patreon, until now. As of today, she’s joining Spotify as its first head of Spotify for Artists. Hearst announced the news in a series of tweets this afternoon.
“In this new role, I’ll lead a cross-functional team including product, tech, design, user research, and more. Not to mention getting to work closely with the SoundBetter team…what a cool platform,” she wrote.
“I’ve spent almost the entirety of my career working on helping artists and creators make a living from their craft. And now I get to continue that work at one of the companies best-positioned to make a serious dent in this space.”
Exciting news! I’m joining Spotify as the Head of Spotify for Artists. In this new role, I’ll lead a big cross-functional team of product, tech, design, user research, and more.
— Camille Hearst (@camillionz) October 6, 2020
Before Patreon, Hearst was the co-founder and CEO of Kit, a company originally founded to help influencers recommend products to their fans. Her career has also included five years as product manager at Apple’s iTunes, and a stint as a YouTube product marketing manager for music, films, TV shows and e-commerce.
Music Ally contacted Spotify after seeing Hearst’s announcement, and the company told us that she’ll be based in New York, reporting to the company’s VP and head of marketplace Charlie Hellman.
Although Hearst is joining from Patreon, we’re not going to jump to conclusions about what that might mean for Spotify’s artist-tools strategy. In other words, it’s no guarantee that the company is planning to introduce Patreon-style ongoing crowdfunding features (or memberships, as that company describes them) for artists.
That said, Spotify has dipped its toe in those waters with its artist fundraising pick feature, and while that generated some criticism (of the ‘it’s just a sticking plaster for low streaming royalties’ variety), there’s clear potential for Spotify to expand on this idea – and if it does, Hearst seems like a strong hire to oversee it.
In April, Music Ally asked Spotify CEO Daniel Ek whether there was any reason why fan-funding couldn’t be a bigger part of Spotify’s offering for artists.
“I definitely don’t think so,” he said. “When you imagine streaming, it’s been pretty much a one-size-fits-all [thing] around consumption. But Spotify’s goal – a big part of our marketplace strategy – is to make more meaningful connections between fans and creators. You can imagine that things like this [referring to the Artist Fundraising Pick feature] could be a big part of that.”
Talking of tools for musicians… there’s some more news from another part of Spotify this afternoon: the Soundtrap online studio that it acquired in 2017.
It has just launched an iPhone app called Soundtrap Capture, pitched as “a collaborative mobile app for on-the-go music capture and creation” focusing on the initial stages of recording: “the first strains of melody, the initial ad-libbed verse, the spontaneous guitar riff…”
The app supports multi-track layering, collaboration between multiple musicians, and stores projects on Soundtrap’s cloud. Later this year, an update to the desktop Soundtrap Studio software will make it easier to switch between that and the mobile app.
The obvious comparison is Music Memos, an app launched by Apple in 2016 as a similar way for musicians to capture their ideas quickly, then transfer them to their regular music-making software.
Soundtrap Capture and Soundtrap Studio versus Music Memos and GarageBand may not be the highest-profile direct battle between Spotify and Apple, but it’s still a very interesting one.
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