One profile for music, video, podcasts and live

Most independent creators maintain a profile on five or six services. The cost of that is usually described as time. The real cost is different.

The audience does not transfer

Your listeners on one service and your followers on another are, for practical purposes, different groups. There is overlap, but you cannot move one to the other, and every platform is designed to make sure of that.

So you are not building one audience across five places. You are building five smaller audiences, each below the threshold where anything compounds.

Nothing accumulates

An audience is worth more than the sum of its parts once it is in one place, because that is when the second thing you make reaches the people who liked the first.

Split across services, each release starts closer to zero. The video people never hear the music. The podcast listeners do not know there is a live show.

The version people should get

One place where everything you make lives, that you control, that you can point at.

This does not mean abandoning the other services. Post the clip where clips do well. Put the record where records get streamed. Those are distribution channels and they work.

But they should point somewhere, and that somewhere should be yours.

What that changes

When someone finds you through a clip and wants more, there is a place to send them where more actually exists. When you have something to sell, there is somewhere to sell it that does not take a cut for the privilege of hosting your own audience.

When a platform changes its terms — and they all do — you have not lost the relationship, because the relationship was never held there.