Pretty prescient for 2008.
My point is that artists who develop 1,000 true fans, they have a real place in the broader community. We need to be careful to make the broader community more welcoming to them.
i.e. You have 60% enough true fans and need the more lukewarm crowd to make ends meet.
The true fans will be there no matter what. The lukewarms can easily disappear just because the black box algo has decided it doesn't like your twitch stream this month and funneled them somewhere else.
Suddenly the creator has an existential career crisis on their hands and might need to drop streaming entirely in favour of full time burger flipping just due to $$$.
So I asked a published author from that community what I should expect. They said their book paid for a nice bicycle. And they were able to do it on the side, from a comfortable career position.
Although I think my book could've quickly grown a few times the number of commercial adopters in the niche, which then conceivably might've been the critical mass needed to start growing actual significant commercial uptake market share, I couldn't afford to focus full-time on it. So my strategy was to work on it on the side, but then additional speedbumps were thrown in the way, so I abandoned it.
This 1,000 True Fans is a handy idea to keep in mind, and difficult even for an established musician like Robert Rich's story in TFA. "Will I have 1,000 True Fans, paying $100/yr.? Or 10K paying $10/yr.? No? Then this is not going to be sustainable on its own."