Spotify Is Eating the Entire Music Business?

[BONES]

I pay $11 a month to Spotify for the convenience.

How is Spotify more convenient than Pandora or Apple Music or Amazon Music or Tidal or any other streaming service? It's a genuine question because I don't understand at all why Spotify took off when it wasn't the first or even the best streaming service but, somehow, it was the one everybody caught onto. e.g. Zune Pass was $8.99 a month and you got to download 10 songs a month to keep. They had more songs than iTunes for a long time, so the catalogue was vast and their recommendations were mostly excellent, plus they offered great extras like band bios, photo galleries, reviews and they had a community feature so you could share playlists, etc. It was a product with wide recognition from one of the world's biggest companies. But it tanked, even before anyone had ever heard of Spotify. I look at Spotify and I don't see anything special about it that would make it the one to change the world. Is it just sheep mentality or FOMO or something?

how do consumers form their musical tastes?/preferences

That's a massive question, one for which I have no answer beyond my own personal experience. I don't think my musical preferences were "formed" as such, it was a simple matter of finding music I connected with. When that happened, in a single night in 1979, when I was 21, my understanding of people's love of music changed forever, as did the entire course of my life. At that point, music that I thought I had "loved" turned out to be stuff I could tolerate and I don't think I ever listened to any of it ever again after that night.

The real truth here is that artists that produce stuff that people don't want to listen to are mad that people don't want to listen to their stuff and think that it's just about exposure.

No. If I am "mad" at anything, it's the complete lack of diversity in mainstream music today. The most popular song in Australia last year was Vance Joy's Riptide, a song from 2013. It was in and out of the charts several times during 2023, despite zero promotion from anyone. Similarly, all it took was to hear Kate Bush on a TV show for that 40 year old song to rocket back into the charts worldwide, so starved are we of good new music. That's not because the good new music doesn't exist, it's because it is so much harder to get it out there for people to hear.

[BONES]

Very true, and most artists are too lazy to create their own exposure, or are uneducated in what is required to accomplish that.

That's bullshit. You can pay people to do that but the problem is, these days you won't get your money back. We have a label that takes care of that for us and we get excellent exposure - online and magazine interviews and reviews, we chart on the important charts to maximise our exposure to our target audience. Even reaching no. 1 on the DAC album chart doesn't translate to any financial success. We put out a new album, the label spends a grand or so promoting it and they're lucky to get hundreds back from their cut of sales. They are OK with that because they have more successful artists to cover their losses on our stuff but for us it is hugely frustrating. In reviews we are favourably compared to the biggest names in the genre but that translates to f**k-all when it comes to sales. We make less than 100 euros a year for what we do.

To be clear, that doesn't bother me, as such, what bothers me is that we've done as much as we can, achieved so much more than I could ever have imagined 30 years ago, yet it's harder than ever to get gigs. Obviously there are a lot of other factors affecting that situation but you'd expect that with the exposure we've had, we'd be in a position that those other factors wouldn't matter. But no, everything is so skewed towards the top 1% that there's no room for anyone below that. There is no tolerance for anything more than a tiny bit outside the mainstream and that's down to the fact that nobody is exposed to anything really different these days. The fact nobody has even heard of Bandcamp should be proof enough of that. I mean, we had Buzzcocks in our day, today the kids get 5SOS. Little wonder they have no tolerance for anything interesting/good. Even most of the people here have no experience of music like ours, yet in the 80s I used to see bands every week do stuff that was way weirder than what we do.

I give CD's to a few store-checkers, and attach mp3's to a few people that medically kept me alive, and also a few forum members out yonder.

That's a bit presumptuous, don't you think? I assume that most of my friends, relatives, co-workers and people I meet on the street will not have the slightest interest in my music. Why would they, It is way outside their experience, they have nothing to tie it to.

[Roman Empire]

I pay $11 a month to Spotify for the convenience.

How is Spotify more convenient than Pandora or Apple Music or Amazon Music or Tidal or any other streaming service? It's a genuine question because I don't understand at all why Spotify took off when it wasn't the first or even the best streaming service but, somehow, it was the one everybody caught onto. e.g. Zune Pass was $8.99 a month and you got to download 10 songs a month to keep. They had more songs than iTunes for a long time, so the catalogue was vast and their recommendations were mostly excellent, plus they offered great extras like band bios, photo galleries, reviews and they had a community feature so you could share playlists, etc. It was a product with wide recognition from one of the world's biggest companies. But it tanked, even before anyone had ever heard of Spotify. I look at Spotify and I don't see anything special about it that would make it the one to change the world. Is it just sheep mentality or FOMO or something?

There´s one feature in Spotify that AFAIK beats any other platform. It´s the possibility of using any device with Spotify installed to impact the listening session you´re currently in. Example:

My computer, of which the audio signal is sent to my amplifier in the living room, is playing something from Spotify, that I´m listening to. Then it´s dinner time, and I´m too far from the computer to interact with it. Luckily I have my mobile nearby, so when my 3-year old daughter asks me if we can hear Vivaldi while we´re eating, then it´s a piece of cake to change the music from Spotify on the mobile.
That´s the only really outstanding feature that I´ve found in Spotify, but it becomes essential when you´re used to it. I found out, when I tested a couple of other platforms and figured that I couldn´t live without this.
But then again; I doubt that this is the reason for Spotifys popularity, as a lot of people don´t even have a stereo anymore. Spotify is most likely so popular because it´s the one platform that´s been hyped the most.

[BONES]

Your daughter sounds like a precocious brat! When a 3 year-old asks if she can listen to something else over dinner, the correct response from any responsible parent should be "f**k off, I'm in the middle of this Dead Kennedys album and I'm not changing it", even if it was one of their poorer efforts.

[neverbefore]

To be clear, that doesn't bother me, as such, what bothers me is that we've done as much as we can, achieved so much more than I could ever have imagined 30 years ago, yet it's harder than ever to get gigs. Obviously there are a lot of other factors affecting that situation but you'd expect that with the exposure we've had, we'd be in a position that those other factors wouldn't matter. But no, everything is so skewed towards the top 1% that there's no room for anyone below that.

This point was made years ago for opera. In the early days, in countries in much of Europe every town of any size had their own opera company. Over time transport improved and instead of dozens of little companies every state or locality had their own bigger, more impressive, opera company and they would do regional tours or people would travel in to the city to see opera. Later countries just needed a national opera company and maybe one or two others all heavily subsidised and all needing to tour to justify their subsidies as national organisations.
Then came The Three Tenors - the commercialisation of a few opera stars who toured the world. It did not matter how good an unknkown tenor was, the industry already had the 3 tenors required and hda invested heavily in marketing them. Only when a slot appeared in the tenor promotion machine did it become necessary to seek a new tenor to slot in. And they had to have some hook to make them marketable.

Your band might be as good or even better than bands that are making big sales - but for the industry, so what, they already have that slot in the market filled and spent plenty to fill it. They have no need to dilute their investment, as adding another band into the existing market is all it means to a business

Meanwhile the music industry became dominated by three major players who own around 85% of everything - including part ownership of spotify and deals with everyone else in the streaming business.

And just as cheap travel ushered in the end of locality, the end of financially viable local bands and classical ensembles, the internet relegated locality to a site of 'charming' and/or 'authentic' production, a site for genres of various sub cults and 'worlds', styles to be picked over, incorporated and monetised by the mainstream artists of the conglomerates.

Anyone who thinks this is some sort of level playing field for artists is naive at best.

[ghettosynth]

I pay $11 a month to Spotify for the convenience.

How is Spotify more convenient than Pandora or Apple Music or Amazon Music or Tidal or any other streaming service? It's a genuine question because I don't understand at all why Spotify took off when it wasn't the first or even the best streaming service but, somehow, it was the one everybody caught onto. e.g. Zune Pass was $8.99 a month and you got to download 10 songs a month to keep. They had more songs than iTunes for a long time, so the catalogue was vast and their recommendations were mostly excellent, plus they offered great extras like band bios, photo galleries, reviews and they had a community feature so you could share playlists, etc. It was a product with wide recognition from one of the world's biggest companies. But it tanked, even before anyone had ever heard of Spotify. I look at Spotify and I don't see anything special about it that would make it the one to change the world. Is it just sheep mentality or FOMO or something?

There´s one feature in Spotify that AFAIK beats any other platform. It´s the possibility of using any device with Spotify installed to impact the listening session you´re currently in. Example:

My computer, of which the audio signal is sent to my amplifier in the living room, is playing something from Spotify, that I´m listening to. Then it´s dinner time, and I´m too far from the computer to interact with it. Luckily I have my mobile nearby, so when my 3-year old daughter asks me if we can hear Vivaldi while we´re eating, then it´s a piece of cake to change the music from Spotify on the mobile.
That´s the only really outstanding feature that I´ve found in Spotify, but it becomes essential when you´re used to it. I found out, when I tested a couple of other platforms and figured that I couldn´t live without this.

Yep, any replacement must have this feature. My music plays on my xbox that's across the room. The XBox interface sucks but it's connected to my good sound system in this room. I sit at my work desk and don't even have to get up to change what I'm playing, change the volume, tag a currently playing song as liked, switch where I'm hearing it, skip a song, etc. If I want to hear it on the nearfields on my desk, then it's a click away. Back on the xbox, just a click. I'm not about to make playlists on my xbox, I don't even know if you can, but it's great on the desktop app and they show up on my xbox, which is mandatory for me as that's where I listen to music most of the day.

BTW, any replacement also has to have similar features that I like in the xbox app. Mainly, it allows me to set the balance of volume between games/tv shows, and xbox and keeps the player running in the background behind whatever other app I'm currently running. I believe that Pandora supports this, but I don't know about other apps. My cat loves when I listen to chill house and play a cat video with birds and squirrels where the volume of the video is up loud enough that it gets her attention, but not so loud that it bothers my music. It's like listening to music outdoors. I often play games without in-game sound and just music that I want in the background.

In short, their attention to quality in the playback experience is what I like in addition to the fact that they just have more music than the competitors. I'm not interested in an Apple account unless it's necessary. I have a normal apple dev account but I'm not paying them anything at the moment. Most likely I'd use Amazon music if I replaced Spotify, but that's not happening anytime soon.

I also get Hulu with my subscription. So that must be factored into the value proposition for me. They don't do this anymore, but, it is absolutely a reason for me to keep Spotfiy even if they raise the price a dollar or two.

Are there features that I wish that it had? Yes, I wish I could mark songs as disliked so that they don't play again and I wish that I could completely block specific artists such that I never hear or see anything from them, even if they're in other people's playlists.

But then again; I doubt that this is the reason for Spotifys popularity, as a lot of people don´t even have a stereo anymore. Spotify is most likely so popular because it´s the one platform that´s been hyped the most.

A lot of people have gaming consoles attached to either a TV, maybe with a soundbar, maybe with a surround sound system. In fact, I would wager that for most people, whatever their TV is connected to is their loudest sound system.

[BONES]

Your band might be as good or even better than bands that are making big sales - but for the industry, so what, they already have that slot in the market filled and spent plenty to fill it. They have no need to dilute their investment, as adding another band into the existing market is all it means to a business

Except at our level industry involvement is minimal (which, when you think about it, is weird for Industrial music). Almost no-one in our genre is on a major label and those who had made that step up in the 1990s all failed and returned to indie labels after an album or two. Our whole genre exists on the fringes in most of the world.

Anyone who thinks this is some sort of level playing field for artists is naive at best.

It has NEVER been a level playing field but the thing is that there used to be plenty of room for diversity but that has all gone away because there's not enough money to go around any more, so the major players hoover up almost all of it. Everyone used to laugh and think that Napster would f**k the big record companies but it's worked out the other way - they are now the only ones left standing and it's the rest of us who are f**ked.

[ghettosynth]

The real truth here is that artists that produce stuff that people don't want to listen to are mad that people don't want to listen to their stuff and think that it's just about exposure.

Very true, and most artists are too lazy to create their own exposure, or are
uneducated in what is required to accomplish that. If you meet someone you like out in the wilds, jot them a note with your BandCamp info, and describe your music.

I do that often, and have yet to meet anyone who has even heard of BandCamp. These are are working people mostly between 20 and 40 years of age, so I mention
the songs are also on youtube, spotify, and Apple etc, and that clicks with them.
Gotta start both somewhere, and everywhere! I give CD's to a few store-checkers, and attach mp3's to a few people that medically kept me alive, and also a few forum members out yonder.
Cheers

Yep, it's work, either do the work like, e.g., Ryan Harris, who is earning a living from Spotify, or accept that you aren't cut out to make a living from music in today's world.

BTW: For those of you suggesting other platforms, Ryan addressed this in his blogposts saying that, although other platforms play more per play, he makes the most money from Spotify because of their market share.

[glokraw]

Very true, and most artists are too lazy to create their own exposure, or are uneducated in what is required to accomplish that.

That's bullshit.

You've made my point well, you work hard at the music, and you're educated as to what needs to get done, and live with the results. The whiner class can lay claim to none of that, and barring blind luck, will ever remain in their dire straights.

When Taylor Swift was a kid, she entered contests, won or placed in a few, and got noticed. Practiced the instruments, vocals and dance. Parents were very successful people, saw her potential, and they moved the family to a music center city, (another thing the whiner class are often loathe to do). Word spread in Nashville, and by constantly putting herself 'out there', and outworking her peers, she was often in the right place at the right time, chose top collaborators, soaked up the local knowledge, and got her foot in the right doors. Now she's buying back her catalog, improving some early releases, and has an amazing future if she stays off the dope.

When I give someone some music, I make sure they know what it is, and what it isn't, and no strings attached. People are very gracious in that scenario.
Cheers

[ghettosynth]

Spotify: /Perhaps not surprising, Drake is the current king of Spotify with a take of $52.5 million in earnings generated from his 21.5 billion streams. His haul is unmatched, even by J Balvin (huh?), who took the #2 spot on the outlet's "Spotify Rich List" by netting $37.9M.
The first sighting of dance music producers comes at #16 with The Chainsmokers, who've generated an impressive 7.2 billion streams and $17.7 million. Calvin Harris has taken home a cool $14 million so far, landing him at #25.
These numbers are impressive, but due to Spotify's royalties structure, earnings of this magnitude are few and far between. ////According to Rolling Stone, the average artist in the bottom 98.6% of earners took home just $12 per month. ///

This has a huge tail so the average is going to be low. Those numbers are always misleading. These numbers are a few years old, but this is interesting nonetheless.

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/0 ... s-figures/

Just 13,400 Spotify Artists (Out of 7 Million) Make More Than $50,000 a Year

So some will look at this and claim that it's terrible. I don't think so. I think that's pretty encouraging. You can earn a meager living from art as long as you can get about ten million listens. That's not very many and people really can't grok the difference between a million and a billion.

A million seconds is 12 days.
A billion seconds is 31 years.

Spotify has over 200 million subscribers. Let's round numbers a bit to make things easier. Let's call 10 million 12 million. That way it's just one million per month. That's what you need to make more than $50k annually as of 2021. I've already streamed Ryan Harris' songs at least 10 times, probably more than that, since I posted about him in this list. My XYL likes the brand of indie rock that he produces and so the Ryan Harris radio playlist has made it into my weekend morning slot. So, let's relax that, and say that your fans will probably stream you about 10 times per month. Now we're down to 100k listens per month. That's about 0.05 percent (not 5 percent, 5/100ths of a percent) of the Spotify audience. That's what it takes and some 13k artists were able to achieve this in 2021.

You may think that there are 7M "artists" on Spotify, or whatever the number is now, but there are many many amateurs paying for their own convenience to be on the site. A friend of mine pays twenty to thirty bucks a year just so he can listen to his own music in playlists with other people's music or share playlists of his stuff with friends.

If you don't have many tracks racking up hundreds of thousands of views, you're just not competitive and I really don't understand why you think that you should be paid enough to earn a living from streaming. How much more should you be paid? What if Spotify doubled it, or multiplied it by 10! There would still be almost seven million "artists" not making a living on Spotify. There were 184,000 who made at least $1000. This means there were over 6.8 million who did not. So, even if Spotify gave out 10 times the earnings, some 6.8 million "artists" could still not come even close to earning a living from streaming. The numbers simply wouldn't shift much at all.

[osiris]

Spotify will become the next Sirius XM. Remember that?

[ghettosynth]

Spotify will become the next Sirius XM. Remember that?

They're on Louis Rossman's radar these days. It seems that it's quite difficult to cancel. However, I'm not sure that I get the connection. For me, Sirius had the same problem that all radio stations have, it's not a list or set of lists of music that I curate myself. I specifically remember that 100% of the "dance" channels sucked. I've personally never had a subscription, but I have a friend who was always playing it in the car.

I can tell you with absolute certainty, that if I ever hear a single ad on my music streams it will be a same day cancel. I've heard that people are hearing 10 minutes of ads to start Joe Rogan's podcast. I'm not paying for a service and also listening to ads.

[Roman Empire]

Your daughter sounds like a precocious brat! When a 3 year-old asks if she can listen to something else over dinner, the correct response from any responsible parent should be "f**k off, I'm in the middle of this Dead Kennedys album and I'm not changing it", even if it was one of their poorer efforts.

I think this applies only, if the responsible parents are listening to Dead Kennedys in that situation, but I will keep it in my pocket, should I ever have Dead Kennedys playing on the speakers shortly before dinner time.
Btw., what happened that night in 79?

[vurt]

Your daughter sounds like a precocious brat! When a 3 year-old asks if she can listen to something else over dinner, the correct response from any responsible parent should be "f**k off, I'm in the middle of this Dead Kennedys album and I'm not changing it", even if it was one of their poorer efforts.

I think this applies only, if the responsible parents are listening to Dead Kennedys in that situation, but I will keep it in my pocket, should I ever have Dead Kennedys playing on the speakers shortly before dinner time.
Btw., what happened that night in 79?

all responsible parents listen to dk before dinner.
particularly holiday in cambodia and too drunk to f**k.
first to teach the kid how lucky they are, and second to teach the dangers of alcohol

maybe not at 3, 5 or 6 pehaps.

[BONES]

When Taylor Swift was a kid, she entered contests, won or placed in a few, and got noticed. Practiced the instruments, vocals and dance. Parents were very successful people, saw her potential, and they moved the family to a music center city, (another thing the whiner class are often loathe to do).

That's a whole different thing. That's an obsession with being successful/popular. I have none of that, my focus is completely on the music. If I had a choice between a billion dollars (which is what Tay-Tay is worth) and seeing music I like dominating the charts for the next decade, I would choose the latter every time. Which is to say that if I had Tay-Tay's money, I'd spend it all on making artists I like successful. I would not be charging $400 for the cheapest seats at my concerts or flying around in a private jet. I'd be putting up the money to make the tour happen, insisting on reasonable ticket prices and not caring if I covered costs or not.