Musicians Are Stuck In The Conga Line Of Chasing Streams… And It’s Time To Move On.
Streaming is fu#ked.
Yep. You heard me right.
For the vast majority of independent musicians, the Digital Streaming Platforms (DSPs) are a never ending death churn of failed promises and diminishing returns.
Ever since Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace removed their albums from Spotify, a raging debate has swirled around the value of streaming music services for the industry.
For the majority of artists, middlemen and Tesla driving industry suits siphon off most of their profits, leaving them desperate to climb charts (and odds) that are stacked against them.
What options do they have but to pay for services to boost playlist placements (most of these don’t work or worse, put you at risk of being blacklisted) or seeing how many times they can listen to their own track on repeat. If you’re curious, that too will get you banned and here’s a useful Quora thread discussing how much you can stream your own track on Spotify.
It Wasn’t Always This Way
Once upon a time, Spotify was a golden new promise. A better way for musicians to monetise their music, reduce piracy (bye bye Napster) and get their songs into the ears of a global audience, hungry for new music.
Not only that, it rewarded taste by giving playlist curators the ability to earn money for reviewing and assembling playlists, and provided other tools for monetisation such as donations and licensing to podcasts.
Win. Win. Win. Right?
Well, kind of.
Many artists have found success on Spotify, and getting put on a popular playlist can vault a relatively unknown artist into the rarified air of the music label darlings, but the odds of getting that to happen are still similar to walking down the street to your local grocery store and buying a winning lottery ticket.
According to this recent article by Rolling Stone:
In 2023, songwriting is more like a lottery than a profession. Like many creative fields, it’s been hollowed out, turned precarious, with most practitioners fighting over scraps while a tiny fraction of ultra-successful winners thrive.
Gaming The System
As Spotify made a meteoric climb in popularity (From 7% of the US music industry market in 2010 to 83% in 2020) labels and industry heavyweights began to game the system. Seeding playlists. Paying for reviews. Using their social and traditional media reach to boost the popularity of their most prominent artists. Translate: The rich get richer and it becomes harder and harder for independent musicians to get their music discovered by fans.
Hell, even Spotify has been accused of gaming their own system, by paying producers to make songs that are placed on some of their most popular playlists. This up front payment saves the company from writing fat streaming checks to actual songwriters and artists on the playlists. If you think about it, this is the equivalent of a hamburger chain adding fillers to their hamburger meat to reduce costs.
Spotify has denied the allegations… but some smart people at Music Business Worldwide have compiled a list of all the ‘fake’ musicians on popular playlists, some of which have north of 10M streams!
Why Streaming Is A Tough Sell
It can be controversial to summarily dismiss one of the prime ways for fans to discover new music in the current platform-dominated media scape, but here are the facts:
- Musicians need millions of streams to make even a few thousand dollars from their music (the average payment per stream is $0.003)
- Industry heavyweights dominate playlists and curation metrics on streaming platforms.
- Though streaming platforms like Spotify claim to pay up to 70% of their revenue back to musicians on the platform, it’s usually those at the top of the streaming charts who earn the most from streams.
- Playlist listeners on streaming platforms aren’t true fans. Many of them don’t even know the names of the artists their listening to.
Music journalist and Innerviews founder Anil Prasad said many artists see next to nothing in Spotify streaming revenues but still feel bound to the platform. “Artists have a conceptual gun pointed at their heads,” he said in a recent interview, “They’re told if they don’t deal with entities like Spotify, they won’t have a chance of success in their music career. It’s PR-driven psychological terrorism.”
So, if streaming is so bad… but it’s really the only option of mass distribution, what do artists do?
According to Neil Young, “It’s up to this generation to not be over-reliant on [streaming platforms],” adding “I’ve seen industry folk wave contracts at 18-year-olds who think ‘wow’ before signing their entire publishing rights away for life. It still happens a lot. We’re fodder for that system. But it would take a mass movement to shift things, and then I’d start boycotting. Just like we saw with the anti-apartheid movement. That did make a difference.”
But will artists boycotting streaming platforms make a difference? And how many will it take?
Perhaps the bigger question is, what do artists do to reach a wide audience without streaming platforms? If not Spotify and iTunes, where will they find a community of supportive music lovers and fans, hungry for new music?
The Next Big Shake Up
When Napster almost singlehandedly obliterated the music industry early in the 21st century (total recording sales decreased by 33% in 2000 alone) by erasing the need for CDs, many foretold the end of the music industry. A whole generation of music fans were no longer conditioned to pay for music, but expected to get it for free, and it seemed as though the music industry giants were backed into a corner.
Then iTunes, and a few other streaming platforms stepped in with a solution. Provide it to listeners for free (until they were dependent on the ecosystem) and then charge them for premium access, passing those profits on to the labels, and then to trickle down, eventually, and ever so slowly, like honey in the cold ass heart of winter, to the artists themselves.
If you’re interested in a quick and dirty overview of how money flows through the music industry, we’ve put one together for you here…
Streamers pretty much saved the industry, but over the past 4–5 years have become saturated by the same power structures and inequality that plagued the pre-internet music industry… without the romance of a smoke screen. They are robbing musicians in plain sight.
Drumroll… Enter Web3.
More specifically, MusicNFTs.
If you’re an independent musician and you haven’t been researching how (and why) MusicNFTs are on the countdown to lift off, then you’ve been under a rock.
Over the past year, we’ve seen:
- NAS partner with 3LAU to launch Royal.io where artists can sell fractional ownership in the streaming royalties from their tracks.
- Snoop Dog buy Death Row Records and announce he’s turning it into a Music NFT label.
- Sound.xyz show that active, independent artists who are community focused can make a good living by releasing editions of Music NFTs.
- A whole ecosystem of tools begin to emerge for independent artists, to help them connect directly with their fans, rather than let those relationships be managed by platforms (like iTunes & Spotify) who manage the relationship
- Artists like Rhianna (yes, Rhi Rhi) releasing their songs as Music NFTs to give fans a percentage of streaming royalties.
Yes, the music industry is in the middle of a shake up, and it’s time for musicians to get out of the conga line of streaming, and focus on building more direct connections with their fans.
This involves prioritising live gigs and real life events, of course, which have been and still remain the best way to find and develop deeper connections with music lovers.
And yes, to take the plunge into the world of MusicNFTs. If you’re on the fence about jumping in, try it out. Become a collector. Engage with artists who are in the space. Learn and get a better understanding of where the movement is headed.
Because it looks as if MusicNFTs are poised to become the next artist friendly version of the music industry… and you don’t want to be left behind.
Soundnation is an artist-first platform helping musicians make a sustainable living from their music. We help artists release Music NFTs as tickets to concerts, find sync opportunities, and build community.
Join 2000+ musicians and music lovers helping one another succeed in Web3.
