-Superfans will be an increasingly important source of income.
-Latin America is one of the emerging markets that will be important drivers of growth.
-The opportunity is to convert millions of free listeners into paying subscribers.
-The strategy consists of pre-sales of tickets, memberships and private communities, exclusive content and VIP experiences.
These are some of the conclusions that the study showed
Music in the Air: 10 years onGoldman Sachsreleased last October and which analyzes the economic prospects of the global music industry: streaming, record labels, publishing, concerts, AI and monetization. According to this data, the opportunity is the Direct to Consumer (D2C) model.
Arturo Fontaine Ducci (44) shares this information with enthusiasm because the study confirms the trend he has been betting on since 2023 with MINT, a Chilean platform that offers direct sales from musicians to superfans. “It fills me with pride,” he says.
The twists and turns of the music industry
But before delving fully into MINT, Fontaine goes back to his own history, which runs parallel to the transformation of the music industry.
He says that he started to study civil engineering at PUC but in his second year he dropped out to pursue a degree in Music Production and Music Business at Berklee College of Music in Boston. His brother Héctor also studied and lived there (both are sons of the writer Arturo Fontaine Talavera and the journalist Mercedes Ducci).
Arturo arrived in the United States in 2005, a year after Facebook was founded, which was initially a social network restricted only to Ivy League universities. At that time MySpace occupied the space shared today by TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, etc., he explains. He comments that a few years earlier, in 1999, Napster had transformed the music industry, introducing free music and digital piracy. Music labels collapsed.
The crisis in the industry meant that labels did not have the resources to take risks and investment in new talent decreased. “Spotify appeared as the first solution to piracy and gained strength in 2016. Imagine that before a single CD could cost you 20 lucas and now on Spotify for less than 5 lucas a month you can listen to everything. It was an aggressive devaluation of recorded music. You can have everything from Bach onwards on your cell phone. Basically people lost the willingness to pay for music. Labels are dinosaurs that react slowly, they got stuck trying to return to the old model. Nowadays almost everything “The world listens to music and almost no one is willing to pay for it.”
This sociocultural change has forced the industry to reinvent itself. “The dream of taking music sales to digital is still pending. Steve Jobs tried it with iTunes and failed miserably,” he says. After Spotify, platforms such as Patreon and Bandcamp appeared that offer monthly memberships through a patronage system.
They achieved partial success: in the case of Patreon, music is not the content that raises the most and Bandcamp is niche, Fontaine notes. “We believe that monthly membership is not the way because it requires a lot of effort on the part of the content creator and the income is smaller and irregular,” he says.
Paid streaming is the main income for record labels, but the future could be different.
Fontaine once again cites the Goldman Sachs report to explain the opportunity that the direct to fans model represents. Streaming requires a high volume of reproductions. If a superfan spends $30k a year on an artist, that’s equivalent to 150 million streams on Spotify, he mentions to illustrate the income gap.
“Unlike the volume logic of streaming where you need mountains of views, a small band that has a thousand monthly listeners, of which 100 are superfans willing to pay $30,000 a year, can now monetize. It’s a good opportunity for them,” says Fontaine.
Engagement is essential, he adds. “A light consumer listens to you at the gym or at a meeting with friends, but would not necessarily have bought your album or gone to your concert. A superfan, on the other hand, pays to have access to the pre-release of a single or a video clip, to have the right to pre-sale tickets for a concert, merchandising, etc. People pay for exclusivity,” he says.
And that’s what MINT offers.
“The superfan wants to be recognized as such”
– If this interview were a pitch, what would you say?
– We are in a unique moment to solve how to monetize the superfans of the digital music world. Historically, it has been possible to monetize in person, in the real world, with “live”. But in digital that has not happened. Goldman Sachs is very clear that there is an opportunity. He said it in 2024 and he says it again now, stronger than ever. Weverse in Asia and Even in the United States are two platforms in which Universal invests. In one line: MINT wants to be the Weverse of Latin America.
“Sign up to support your favorite musicians and meet other fans,” invites the description of
@mint_app on Instagram. The MINT model is based on drops, “Strategy of limited launches or reduced stock of a product,” says the definition of the term in Spanish. The app is free to download.
“You pay $2,000, for example, and you can have access to a pre-sale of tickets, the pre-release of a song, a live streaming or unpublished photos of the band. This way you build a community with functions such as video note channels that allow superfans to interact with each other and see each other’s faces. There is a lot of anonymity in the fan community and the superfan wants to be recognized as such,” Fontaine describes.
MINT also contemplates a referral system: superfans earn to the extent that they convert sales on their social networks. “They have a traceable link that allows them to earn a percentage of each sale they achieve. In the past, music was very word of mouth and this is like a human algorithm. ‘I’m listening to this song on MINT, I recommend it’. And if someone buys, they keep a part. Fans can earn infinitely with digital products: how many songs you sell, how many videos, how many tickets, high-quality streaming…”, he lists.
And you can also pay for an annual membership that grants points to mitigate costs. It is a loyalty practice that can be convenient for fans: “It is a parallel tool, but not a requirement. So all these combinations, we believe, will be necessary to calibrate.”
Ahead, they propose a development of 12 to 24 months to polish MINT, so that it works perfectly technologically and has a business model that makes sense for all parties, says Fontaine. “We have validated and discarded some hypotheses. We have a lot of work put in there,” he says about the platform that they have been developing since May 2023. He mentions his two partners: Rodrigo Guerra, a cybersecurity expert who worked at YouTube, and Duncan Scott, a schoolmate of his, who has formed different startups.
To date they have raised $400 million and are in a new round of investment to put together the next tranche. They are having conversations with different industry players, potential partners and investors.
The investor profile is more family office than venture capital. “VCs are more short-term, they want double-digit growth per year and MINT requires calibration that involves a lot of iteration,” he comments. Once the platform is more consolidated, the plan would be to present it to Universal Music Group or another major label to invest in it, he says.
Cybersecurity and fans’ willingness to pay are two aspects that are quite resolved, Fontaine asserts. The challenge now is to reach artists through labels. “Now what is holding us back is bureaucracy. There are a lot of contractual restrictions such as exclusivity between distributors and certain platforms, which makes it very difficult to reach mass artists. That is why we have an intermediate target and we have cherrypicked around 20 artists, most of them are urban musicians,” he says.
They currently have about 2 thousand users and 5 thousand unit sales. The platform keeps 20% of sales, in addition to advertising revenue.
During 2025 they held the MINT Sessions: there were six shows with a limited audience and live HD streaming. “There was a lot of skepticism and it worked. We confirmed that people are willing to pay. They were good experiences and we very clearly segmented the superfans who were happy to be there,” says Fontaine.
The bands that participated in the sessions were NVSCVR, Bouncy Boys Band, Loyaltty, Benja Valencia, Ober + KYA + Killua and KUINA. Other artists present on the platform and who have made pre-release songs and videos are Bryartz, Kuroh, Harry Nach, Bronko Yotte, Jamez Manuel and Fran Ri.
Fontaine shares a presentation where different scenarios are projected. In a conservative calculation and imagining a potential alliance with Universal Music Group, it shows that the 25 most successful Latin artists of the label, considering only Spotify, add up to about 400 million monthly listeners, of which 2% are superfans, that is, there would be 8 million superfans. “And we estimate that in the long run a superfan will spend $USD 100 on the platform per year. This is the moment and the opportunity to change the music industry,” Fontaine closes.
The Latin American opportunity
“We are in the era of creators in which everyone is monetizing their communities,” says the CEO. On the other hand, cybersecurity has advanced and technology is increasingly efficient when blocking pirated content. While Warner and Sony are developing their own internal tools, Universal Music Group (UMG) has opted to invest in D2C platforms.
In March 2024, UMG signed an agreement with Weverse, which belongs to the South Korean entertainment company HYBE, and which has 12 million monthly active users and bands like BTS. In February of this year, it did the same with Even, an American direct-to-fan platform focused on advance sales and monetization of superfans.
The opportunity, he says, is Latin America. “It is an industry that is entering a maturation phase. Chile is the country with the most superfans in the world proportional to the number of inhabitants. And Argentina, Mexico and Colombia are in the first seven places according to Spotify. Latin America is a continent with a significant level of fanaticism,” emphasizes the creator of MINT.
For the same reason, Weverse, he says, would be very interested in opening a space in the region. “But to sell tickets live you have to integrate with local ticket companies, it is not so easy to get in here. And there is the opportunity. We believe that Chile, the country with the most superfans, is the place from which to do it,” he emphasizes.
He adds: “Just as BTS superfans in Chile used Weverse to buy pre-sale tickets, people from different parts of the world could download MINT to purchase content from a Latin artist.”
Era 1945
In 2006, when the Fontaine Ducci brothers lived in Boston, they launched their pop-rock band 1945. The name corresponded to the address of the room where they rehearsed and since it was also the year of the nuclear bomb, they thought it sounded rock, Arturo says, laughing.
One of the great milestones of the band – which lowered its activity in 2011 – was a gig they did at the legendary New York club CBGB the night it closed. The band originally playing canceled at the last minute and called them through their agent to ask if they would be available. They left immediately by bus from Boston. “It was epic,” says the musician.
While there they had the opportunity to sign a contract with Feria Music in Chile, the record fair label. They released two albums, The Only Way Out (2008) and Juntar el tiempo (2010) through Warner Chappell and Feria Music. They set television programs to music and their videos circulated on channels such as VíaX, Zona Latina and Match Music in Argentina.
“A lot of entertaining things happened with the band, but economically it was not sustainable,” he points out. It is from that experience that he strives to find a new solution that is more sustainable for emerging musicians. Between 2016 and 2017 Arturo also studied an MBA at Oxford.
