As I have gingerly stepped up to this question, a question that I have yet to define well enough to actually write here (introductory blog post hopefully coming soon); as I have picked around its edges like a decade-untouched attic I’ve resolved to organize; I’ve thought a lot about music.
I have two reasons. First, to write and produce original music, which a musician friend recently told me was like a “boring pushup wet dream,” is one of the most recognizably creative activities – and for those who can make enough money, one of the most recognizably creative occupations.
Second, in landing and casting their shadow upon Earth massive new digital networks, like the spacecraft in Independence Day, companies using the internet have perhaps increased how many people can earn money making music, and what kind of music they produce.
Any song on a web music store can be downloaded by anyone, anywhere (at least in the country, theoretically the world). If you play French trombone fart jazz, in the 90s sitting alone in your room for hours trying to make your true self seen by nobody in particular (who does that?) was probably the extent of your ability to build an audience. But starting twenty years ago, you could build a global global following, tiny relative to everyone on earth, but absolutely enormous; fame was no longer a prerequisite for listenership outside your mom and most indulgent friends.
And you’d further expect streaming platforms to have accelerated the matching of weirdo musicians with weirdo fans across the world, because it costs you nothing to click on a playlist whose thumbnail is of, say, a guy in leather and chains, because it might not normally be your thing, but hey, maybe you’re feeling extra lonely tonight. As Ben Thompson has written, “the internet enables niche in a massively powerful way.”
So: if the adoption of digital tools and networks in society were going to free up time for humans to work with their creativity, as all the optimistic consulting firm reports on the future of work like to propose, an increase in the number of people earning livings making music, in the form of more artists with small, dedicated global followings accessed on web services that have totally transformed music consumption, would be an intuitive place to see an early part of this process.
After a medium amount of Googling, and a large amount of stuttering heaves at assembling original data (which yet may or may not pay off), I found a study that could validate this story. A Stanford professor had been given access to an unnamed app that makes song and artist recommendations based on a user’s listening behavior across all music apps and services. It was a view from a perch of melodic omniscience: perfect detail on the listening habits of 2,000 people over a two year period, at the beginning of which most acquired music mostly through downloads, but by the end of which most had become frequent users of streaming services. A direct view of the immense mass of American music consumption as it traveled through the filter of Spotification.
My good news: as I thought, after the adoption of streaming, smaller artists got more listenership, both absolutely and relative to the most popular performers. Total music consumption among streamers six months after making the switch from download-only increased 49 percent, confirming that streaming puts a ton more track listens up for grabs. With total number of unique artists consumed 32 percent higher after the adoption of streaming, consumption of top-100 artists declining by 7 percent relative to total listenership, and consumption of top-500 artists declining by 2.4 percent, it’s clear that a sizable number of those additional listens were going to non-superstars.
Some of these acts may be established indie bands who already make good cash; others might be hobbyists – I mean that in the most dismissive way possible – who have gone from playing for their friends to getting accidental listens on obscure Spotify playlists, earning them $1.50 per week. But if you assume that the new listens going to previously undiscovered artists are evenly distributed across types of said artists, then some of them are going to be bands and producers who get to stop waiting tables devote every morning and night to the creative process because the streaming platforms delivered them listeners and income (fewer than there should be, because Spoitfy allocates subscription fees to artists in a way that totally screws small creators, but we’ll get to that another time).
Bad news: it’s not that many people. A a reallocation of 2.4 percent listens from the top-500 to the rest hardly bespeaks a massive shift in listening dollars from Drake to your friend who is an insanely talented producer but for whom the process of getting discovered and paid is so daunting that he may as well just code. Maybe the continuing use of discovery algorithms as well as other mythical but I swear to God real trends driving fragmentation and specialization in taste will redistribute more of the top shelf cash to lone creators. Maybe this will turn recording artist from a job you need to be famous to sustain to a job you that can support a mainstream consumer lifestyle for a lot of people. I can dream. But if that’s happening at all, it’s happening very slowly.
Still. Spotify’s revenue in Q4 of 2019 was €1.855 billion, with a gross profit of €474 million. I remember accounting 101 from college; this leaves a COGS of €1.381 billion; I’m pretty sure most of a streaming platform’s COGS is the cost of its rights to music. In Spotify’s case, this is made up mostly of payments to artists, the total pot of which is allocated directly in proportion to total listenership. If, as indicated by the Stanford study, 2.4 percent of listenership we redistributed from top-500 artists to everyone else, that’s an extra $37 million (4/2/2020 exchange rates) going to recording artists that, let’s estimate generously, 10 percent or fewer Americans have ever heard of. On an annualized basis, that’s 1,850 more artists taking $80k per year from Spotify alone, or almost 15,000 taking home $10k.
Music isn’t the new automotive sector, and Spotify’s mission of “giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art” may be a fantasy, but it’s not nothing. And maybe if I look around at other industries and jobs that technology is disrupting, I’ll be able to stich together the beginnings of the platform-enabled creative and empathetic job opportunities that – if coronavirus-inspired automation has its way – we’ll need pretty soon.