Content, media and distribution

What COVID actually changed about distribution

Six months into the pandemic and some things are becoming clearer. We spent the first two months in shock, the next two trying to adapt, and now, in September, we are beginning to see which adaptations are permanent and which were just emergency measures.

One of the most significant shifts has been in distribution. Physical distribution, the channels through which creative work reached audiences in 2019, collapsed almost overnight. Live music, live events, physical retail, cinema, gallery openings, sports, conferences: all of it went away, and the digital channels that remained were suddenly asked to carry everything.

This was not uniformly bad. For a long time, digital distribution had been treated as secondary, as a complement to the real thing. The real thing was the show, the store, the experience. Digital was where you pointed people after the fact, a reminder that the thing had happened. What COVID did, almost by force, was make digital the primary surface. And that changes the economics, the relationships, and the creative decisions that follow.

The question for September 2020 is not whether digital distribution matters. That is settled. The question is what kind of digital distribution actually works, and who it works for.

The economics of digital content have shifted underneath us

When distribution was physical, there were gatekeepers at every stage: labels, publishers, distributors, retailers, venues. Each gatekeeper extracted value in exchange for access. The creative person needed those gatekeepers because there was no other way to get the work in front of people.

Digital changed this progressively across the 2010s. But what COVID accelerated was the removal of the physical requirement entirely. The gatekeeper is no longer holding a key to a physical space. They are holding attention.

Attention is still scarce. But attention is not controlled by a single point. It flows through platforms, through recommendations, through social proof, through community. And the economics of this are genuinely different from the old physical model.

In the old model, a creator got a percentage of revenue after the gatekeeper had taken their share. In the new direct model, a creator can potentially receive the full economics of their audience, minus a platform fee. The fee is often smaller. The relationship with the audience is often more direct. The dependency is on the platform rather than the distributor.

This is better in some ways. It is worse in others. The better parts are obvious: more margin, more autonomy, more relationship with your audience. The worse parts are less often discussed.

When you distribute through a gatekeeper, the gatekeeper has an incentive to get your work discovered. The label wants to sell your record. The publisher wants to sell your book. The gallery wants to sell your painting. Discovery is in their interest.

On a platform, discovery is an algorithm's problem, and the algorithm's incentives are not necessarily aligned with yours. The platform wants engagement. Engagement is not the same as quality. A creator who optimises for the algorithm can find themselves making worse work with more views. The relationship between quality and discoverability has been severed.

Direct-to-audience is an opportunity and a discipline

The phrase "direct-to-consumer" was everywhere in 2019 as a business model. COVID has accelerated the creative equivalent: direct-to-audience distribution.

For creators, this means building and owning the channel rather than relying on a platform to surface you. A mailing list. A Substack. A Patreon. A Discord server. A community built around a shared interest or aesthetic.

These approaches work because they restore the relationship between creator and audience that platforms interrupt. When someone subscribes to a newsletter, they are making a deliberate act of attention. They are not being served content by an algorithm; they are actively choosing to receive it. The signal is higher quality than a follow or a like. The conversion rates tend to be higher. The churn tends to be lower.

But direct-to-audience is a discipline, not just a tool. It requires consistency, it requires knowing what you are actually about, and it requires the willingness to build slowly. Platforms offer the seduction of scale immediately. Direct channels offer the promise of compounding over time.

For creative teams building in September 2020, the practical question is: which of these is actually appropriate for what we are making? Not every creative project needs a direct channel. Not every project should be platform-first. The answer depends on what the work is, who it is for, and what kind of relationship the creator wants with the audience.

The platform trade-offs: reach versus control

Platforms are not uniformly bad. They are trade-offs, and understanding the trade-offs is the starting point for using them intelligently.

Reach is the obvious upside. A platform that has tens of millions of active users offers a distribution surface that no individual creator can replicate. If you make something that the algorithm rewards, you can reach an audience at a scale that would have been impossible without a major label or publisher ten years ago. This is real. It is not trivial.

The trade-offs are several.

Control. When you distribute through a platform, you are subject to that platform's rules, policies, and decisions. Your account can be suspended. Your content can be removed. The algorithm can change, and the audience you built can disappear overnight. The cases of this happening are well documented. It is not an edge case; it is a structural feature of platform distribution.

Economics. Most platforms are extractive at scale. The terms that make sense when you are small often become disadvantageous as you grow. The platform has leverage because the audience relationship runs through it rather than to you directly. The creator who built their following on a platform does not own that following; they have access to it, on the platform's terms.

Aesthetic pressure. This is the one that gets discussed least. Every platform has an implicit aesthetic. The format, the length, the pacing, the emotional register that performs well on each platform is specific to that platform. Creators who spend long periods distributing primarily through one platform often find that their work has been shaped by what the platform rewards, sometimes without noticing. The platform shapes the work, not just the distribution.

None of this means abandoning platforms. But it means using them with eyes open, with a strategy for what you are optimising for, and with a parallel investment in channels you actually own.

Distribution thinking for creative teams in 2020

Distribution thinking is what happens when a creative team treats distribution as a design decision rather than an afterthought.

Most creative teams think about distribution at the end. The work is made, and then the question is asked: how do we get this out there? This sequence is understandable but it is backwards. Distribution is a set of constraints and opportunities that should shape how work is made from the start.

A team that knows it is building for a Substack audience makes different creative decisions than one building for the TikTok algorithm. A team that knows its primary channel is a community Discord makes different decisions than one building for social sharing. The distribution context is part of the creative brief.

This does not mean making compromises. It means making choices. Distribution thinking asks: who is this for, where are they, and what is the best way to reach them in a form that serves both the work and the audience?

In September 2020, distribution thinking also means paying attention to the collapse of old channels and the opening of new ones. The pandemic has disrupted enough established patterns that creators who assumed one distribution path can now reconsider. The physical channel that was assumed is gone. The direct digital channel that seemed too slow or too small is now looking more viable. The platform that seemed essential is now one option among several.

This is a good moment to audit assumptions, to ask which distribution choices were default choices inherited from the pre-COVID world, and which are actually the right choices for the work being made now.

How All Purpose thinks about these questions

All Purpose is a consumer creative ecosystem. It spans music, media, connection and performance, with sub-products that include All Purpose Music, Relay, Horizon and Made It Out. It is not a single app or a single product; it is a set of overlapping creative surfaces built around a shared idea about what consumer creative products can be.

The distribution question runs through everything All Purpose builds, because All Purpose is, in part, a distribution infrastructure for creative work.

The premise is that the platform trade-off, reach versus control, is not a binary. There are models in which a creator can have meaningful reach without surrendering the relationship with their audience to a third party. The direct channel and the platform channel do not have to be in opposition; they can be designed to work together, with each serving a different function.

All Purpose Music, for instance, is not trying to out-Spotify Spotify. It is not competing on library size or algorithmic recommendation. It is operating in a different space, one defined by curation, community and direct relationship between the creator and the listener. The question it is asking is: what does a music experience look like when the creator's relationship with the audience is the primary design principle, not an afterthought?

Relay and Horizon operate in a similar spirit. They are built around the idea that connection and sharing between people can be a distribution mechanism in itself, one that is more human and more durable than algorithmic surfacing.

Made It Out is a story of outcome. It is built on the understanding that creative work that reaches people at the right moment, in the right form, has a specific effect on how they see what is possible. That is a distribution problem as much as a content problem.

The common thread across All Purpose is a commitment to building distribution into the product rather than treating it as someone else's problem. The network effect, the sharing behaviour, the discovery mechanism: all of these are design decisions, not features to be bolted on later.

A September 2020 note

We are writing this in the middle of something, without the clarity that retrospect will bring. The immediate picture is one of disruption: physical channels down, digital channels strained, creators scrambling to find footing on new surfaces, platforms more powerful than ever at the exact moment when their trade-offs are also more visible than ever.

There is an opportunity here that is easy to miss because the noise is so loud. The disruption of existing distribution channels means that the relationships and habits that locked audiences into particular discovery patterns have also been disrupted. People are more open than usual to finding new creative work through new channels. The incumbent advantage that large platforms had partly rested on inertia; COVID has removed some of that inertia.

Teams that use this moment to build the right kind of direct relationship with the right audience, with consistency and clarity about what they are actually making, will find that the ground they gain now is more durable than the attention they might have chased on a platform that rewards novelty over substance.

Distribution is not the opposite of creative work. When it is thought through properly, distribution is part of what the creative work is. The channel shapes the work. The relationship with the audience shapes the work. Understanding this, and designing for it, is what separates teams that build something lasting from teams that make good things that nobody finds.

All Purpose is built on the belief that getting this right is possible. September 2020 is making that belief feel both more urgent and more relevant than it did a year ago.