Fortnite creators have been blowing up in TikTok search and I've been watching this space with more professional interest than you might expect from an indie rock musician on album rollout. Because what's happening in the Fortnite creator ecosystem, and in gaming creator economies more broadly, is a preview of what the music industry needs to become and is, for the most part, refusing to become. And I have strong feelings about this that I'm going to put into sentences now.
Let me set the table. Fortnite has a creator program, the Fortnite Creative mode and the related economy, where players who build maps, game modes, and experiences within the platform get a share of the revenue based on engagement. Top Fortnite creators are making real, significant money from their audience in a way that is structured around direct value exchange: you make something people want to engage with, you get paid proportionally to that engagement. The platform is the distribution mechanism, not the gatekeeper that extracts the majority of the value.
Compare this to how a typical major label deal works for a new artist. You sign. You assign a large portion of your rights, often master recordings, sometimes publishing, often some portion of touring and merchandise, to the label in exchange for an advance that is recoupable against your future earnings. The label has approval over creative decisions, marketing, release timing, and often much else. You get paid last, after the advance is recouped and the label's percentages are extracted. The percentage you actually retain of the money your music generates is often shockingly small for how much of the creative work you did.
Fortnite creators built their audience, built their content, built their income, with the platform as infrastructure. Musicians who signed major label deals in the traditional model built their career while giving the infrastructure owners an enormous cut of everything they made, sometimes including rights in perpetuity. I know which model I think is better.
What the Creator Economy Got Right That Labels Didn't
The game creator economy, and I'm talking about Fortnite specifically but also YouTube, Twitch, and the broader ecosystem of platform-native creator monetization, figured out several things that the music industry has been slow to accept.
Direct fan relationships are the asset. In the old label model, the label owned the marketing relationship with the audience. The fan base was a label asset maintained by label marketing infrastructure. The artist, theoretically, was interchangeable; a label could theoretically drop an artist and try to replicate their success with someone else using the same promotional machinery. The fan's relationship was with the brand the label had built around the artist, not with the artist themselves. This gave labels leverage over artists that they used extensively.
Fortnite creators have their own channels. Their subscribers, their viewers, their community, that's theirs. The platform is where the content lives, but the community relationship is the creator's. When a creator moves between platforms, their audience follows because the audience came for THEM, not for the platform. The label model was specifically designed to prevent this dynamic. The creator economy model specifically enables it. For musicians, this translates to: build your audience directly, own your communication with your fans, and don't structure your career so that any single third party controls access to your own community. Which is why I'm here writing blog posts and building this directly.
Diversified revenue makes you resilient. Fortnite creators don't make money from one thing. They make money from creator program revenue, sponsorships, merchandise, Patreon or membership programs, tournament earnings, commissioned map work, and any number of other streams. The music industry's traditional model concentrated revenue in album sales (when those existed) and live touring. Digital changed album revenue dramatically and COVID changed touring dramatically, and labels and artists who were concentrated in those two streams got hurt bad bad.
Independent musicians who had already diversified, who had built Patreon communities, who sold merchandise with real margin, who had licensing relationships for sync and ads, who had direct-to-fan selling channels, were significantly more resilient. They took the same hits but from a smaller base and with more buffers. This is the creator economy lesson: multiple revenue streams that you control beats single revenue streams controlled by intermediaries, every time.
The Direct-to-Fan Thing Is Not Optional Anymore
I want to be direct with fellow musicians about this because I've been on both sides, or rather, I've been the indie artist watching from outside as people went through the process, and the landscape has shifted enough that the math has really changed.
Ten years ago, a major label deal was still potentially the fastest path to significant reach. The infrastructure, radio promotion, physical distribution, major venue booking relationships, press access, was real and it was genuinely hard to replicate independently. The price in rights and revenue share was steep but the access was worth something.
Today? The streaming platforms have flattened the distribution advantage. Social media has made direct audience-building possible at scale without label machinery. The press landscape has changed enough that independent artists can get meaningful coverage without a label PR team. And the touring infrastructure, while still gatekept in some ways, is more accessible to independent artists with audience than it used to be. The things labels sold you (distribution, press, audience) you can increasingly build yourself. The things they take (rights, revenue, creative control) are yours forever in a way that will matter as long as your catalog exists.
HEATHEN HYMNS is mine. Completely. Every song on it was written in my closet and produced in my closet and the rights sit with me and will continue to sit with me. That's worth something economically and it's worth something emotionally. When I see fans reacting to those songs, when someone posts about what "Both / Neither" did for them, I don't have to share that moment with an institution that also owns a piece of it. That's mine. That relationship is mine. And that's the Fortnite creator economy lesson applied to music: build the thing, own the relationship, run the revenue directly.
What Musicians Should Steal From Game Creators
Let me be concrete, because this is supposed to be actionable. Here's what I watch game creators doing that I think musicians should adopt harder and faster.
Community-first content. The best Fortnite creators don't just make content about their game. They make content about their community, reactions to fan creations, community events, Q&A, behind-the-scenes process stuff. The community is the product, not just the audience. Musicians who are building real fanbases do the same thing. The people who will sustain your career long-term are not passive consumers; they're people who feel genuinely connected to what you're making and why. That connection requires you to be present and real and interested in them, not just broadcasting at them.
Tiered participation models. Game creators have Patreon tiers, channel memberships, creator codes. These let fans participate at different levels of investment and get different kinds of access. Musicians have been slow to adopt this despite it being obviously applicable. Early access to new music, studio process content, direct communication with the artist, exclusive merch, there's a whole structure of fan investment levels that most indie artists haven't built explicitly. I'm still building mine. I should have started sooner.
Showing the work. Fortnite map creators post process videos. Speedbuilds. Behind-the-scenes of how a map comes together. That transparency creates investment, you watch something being built and you want to see the finished version, you feel connected to the creator's process. Musicians have studio content for this, behind-the-scenes recording stuff. I've done some of this during the HEATHEN HYMNS process and the response has been significant. People want to see the work being made. Give them that. It costs you a phone propped against something and a thirty-second clip.
The game creator world is showing us a model. I'm taking notes. And I hope my fellow musicians are too. I love you, build the direct relationship, don't give away the farm.
The Rights Question Nobody Wants to Answer Out Loud
I want to add one more thing because I think it's the most important thing and it keeps getting glossed over in conversations about the music industry versus the creator economy. When a Fortnite creator builds something on the Fortnite platform, they've made something within a framework they didn't own. But the RELATIONSHIP, the audience, the following, the community, that's theirs. They can take it somewhere else. They can post on YouTube, stream on Twitch, build a Discord. The community travels with them because the community is following a person, not a platform.
When a musician signs a traditional major label deal, one of the things they often give up, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, is the ownership of the master recordings. Meaning the actual recorded music, the specific versions of the songs that exist on the record, belong to someone else. And in an era where catalog value is understood to be enormous, where the rights to recorded music from decades ago are being bought and sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, giving that away at the beginning of your career is giving away something whose value you couldn't possibly have assessed accurately when you were a young artist trying to get anyone to pay attention.
This is the single most important structural lesson I take from watching the creator economy versus the music industry. Creators own their output. They own the content they made. They own the channel. They own the relationship. Musicians who signed away masters often own none of the above, not the recordings, not always the publishing, not the relationship with their fanbase through the official channels. When artists have tried to reclaim that relationship by rebuilding their own platforms and re-recording their catalog, the industry has sometimes tried to stop them, or used their own catalog against them. That dynamic is obscene. And the creator economy has shown us that it's not inevitable.
I made HEATHEN HYMNS independently. Every decision was mine. Every master is mine. Every relationship with every fan who streams the record or comes to a show or messages me on Instagram is a direct relationship that I own and maintain and that no intermediary can threaten or take away. that's what the Fortnite creator model looks like in music. That's what I'm building. And when I watch young musicians considering label offers, I want them to have seen what the alternative looks like so they can make the calculation with full information. You can do this yourself. It's harder in some ways and it's slower in some ways. It's yours in ways that a label deal never will be.