Getting discovered in a saturated music ecosystem: The Artist Entrepreneur Series (Part 4)
This series aims at defining the role and impact of DIY independent artists in the music industry, as well as demonstrating how they can manage their careers in the era of artist entrepreneurship.
This article was extracted and adapted from my Master’s thesis “Music Entrepreneurship: How Independent Artists Get Down To Business”, written in December 2020 for Berklee College of Music Valencia Campus’s music business program.
Content Abundance = Discovery in Crisis
Every day, on average, around 60,000 songs are being released on Spotify. Provided the average song is 3 minutes 30 seconds long, it takes approximately 146 days to listen to 60,000 songs. Because of the simplification of the process, content is at an all-time high and it is simply not possible to see and listen to all of it. In spite of Spotify’s discovery algorithms, millions of songs never get heard, and platforms such as Forgotify emerge. Forgotify is a website that randomly plays songs with very low streams, with the aim of supporting the creators and raising awareness about the black hole of content that DSPs have become.
The content abundance is not entirely due to the expansion of artists, as consumer behaviour plays an impactful role in this crisis. According to Nielsen, on-demand audio streaming has seen an increase of 16.2% in the U.S. from 2019 to 2020 and globally, users typically spend 18.4 hours per week listening to music. But the life span of a single song is diminishing, as each track gets quickly replaced after being streamed once. Editorial playlists are curated to provide a catalogue of songs that smoothly transitions from one track to another, so much that listeners rarely stop to look at the artists that they are listening to. Streaming platforms want users to spend as much time as possible listening to music, so they constantly serve new songs to keep listeners interested. Labels and artists consequently fill the funnel with yet more new music, accelerating the trend further.
Still, a growing number of artists are making a living out of music because of the speed of music consumption. If an artist lands on the right playlist, their song can become very popular, even if the performer remains unknown. During the 2020 edition of MIDEM digital, Denis Ladegaillerie, CEO of Believe Digital, explained: “we have artists you’d have never heard about, hundreds and hundreds of bands that are making $100,000 or more per annum in royalties”.
Artist-Entrepreneurs need to learn promotion
Nancy Baym, author of the book Playing To The Crowd and a researcher at Microsoft, declared in an interview for Forbes: “it’s amazing to me to see how so many careers, in music and beyond, have shifted such that it’s no longer enough to do the work. Now you have to do the work of making sure everyone is seeing that you’ve done the work.”
In other words, even if independent artists are backed by the industry to control their narrative and manage their careers, they still have to learn how to promote themselves and make their music heard. According to MIDiA Research, half of all independent artists take charge of their own marketing, however only one artist in five receives financial support from their distributor or label whilst the rest proceeds towards the development and roll-out of their campaigns without a budget at all. Artists understand the importance of marketing and online promotion, but they are inexperienced and are not making use of the tools available. In the digital era, data has become the best instrument to market music, and platforms such as Facebook Business Manager open up powerful promotion opportunities. However, while almost two-thirds of artists are using Spotify For Artists, few of them are using any other marketing-related tools.
In particular, Chartmetric is a website that tracks data points across multiple streaming and social media platforms and allows everyone to have access to their audience’s behaviour data and benchmark it to any other artist’s. This tool could potentially teach musicians how to improve their performance and develop their fanbase, and, as stated by Chaz Jenkins, CCO of Chartmetric, they “maintain [their] free tier so that artists can get the basic critical insight they need, especially in the early stage of their career”. However, Jenkins believes that artists are not using data effectively. Indeed, it can be understood that musicians, who usually have a creative mind rather than an analytical one, can feel overwhelmed by the technicality of data. In addition, independent artists have to deal with the numerous social/music platforms, each requiring different content and following different rules.
The democratisation of music promotion
On the other hand, the development of artist services has democratised music publicity and increased cases of “pay-to-play” services. Although it is considered against Spotify’s policy, many start-ups such as Prominoo promise to place songs within 24 hours to playlists with up to 150,000 followers, hiding under the label of “curation and playlist pitching services”.
Likewise, platforms such as MusoSoup offer exposure to blogs, only for artists to be asked to pay the few blogs that accept their submission to write a song review. It is increasingly easy to become an influencer, a playlist curator or a blog writer and to make a living by sharing music on your platform. However, it is an issue for independent artists, who do not possess unlimited budget to begin with, and who quickly exhaust their resources by paying for pitching credits on marketplaces like SubmitHub, without a return on investment guaranteed.
Furthermore, it raises a quality issue concerning the audience of curators and influencers. Artists may be attracted by the number of followers on a playlist but forget that it does not promise a high engagement rate. Additionally, independent musicians can easily fall into the trap of fake advertising, and accidentally buy streams or fake followers. This can damage their algorithm more than it can boost it, because it invalidates their performance data. If artists should rely on their analytics to market their music, they cannot possibly do so if a large percentage of their data points come from click farms. In 2019, the independent artist Tom DuPree III spent $1,000 on Spotify playlist promotion and came to one conclusion: “none of this works if you’re not out to build actual, tangible relationships with real people who love your music for an extended period of time.”
Conclusion
The music promotion industry is currently challenged by the extreme flow of new music and has to find a way to efficiently promote artists without taking advantage of them. This statement is particularly relevant in the light of Spotify’s new feature release, an “experiment” that favours certain artists algorithmically in exchange for a cut in future royalties. It is indeed not only third-party curators that need to revise their promotion strategy, but the whole promotional sector, including major platforms such as Spotify.
Next week: “The importance of a good story: The Artist Entrepreneur Series (Part 5)”. See you on Monday, March 14!
If you’re looking for the source of one of the quotes in this article, shoot me an email! contact@thisisarae.com
