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Streaming is secretly fixing your mainstream taste in garbage music

The world's most-streamed artists are a parade of major-label household names: Ariana Grande, Post Malone, Billie Eilish. But hidden below the top rankings, independent artists and labels are taking over a greater share of the music channeling into your headphones.

Why? Music-streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora -- and the quirks of how they funnel music you may never have heard otherwise -- are helping fuel an indie golden age just below the surface.

"If there's one thing that streaming has done for sure, it's created a new independent music industry," said Jorge Brea, founder and CEO of Symphonic Distribution, an independent music company in Tampa, Florida, that's distributed music by Waka Flocka Flame and Deadmau5 in his early days.

The meteoric popularity of streaming has lifted fortunes across the recording industry. But streaming also has been quietly shoring up the indie sector that exists outside the big three major labels. By nudging people to listen to a wider variety of artists, the services are helping more listeners stumble on music outside the mainstream. And by reconceptualizing how we pay for music, the services are helping indie artists and labels bask in streaming's glow.

[...] Since the advent of recordings, fans have paid upfront for tunes by picking and choosing specific titles, whether it was a record, CD or digital download on iTunes. In the streaming age, when you rent an all-access pass to an unfathomably deep catalog of virtually all the world's music, money is meted out to artists and music companies in a different way.

Services like Spotify and Apple Music pool together all the money they bring in every month, and artists are paid out in proportion to how much their music is streamed. That means indie artists don't need to overcome the hurdle of getting your attention before they can convince you to open your wallet. You're helping secure their income just by sampling their work.

"Streaming, slowly but surely, is creating a commercial ecosystem in which more artists are able to make a living — and forcing the biggest-earning megastars on the planet to share a chunk of their annual wealth," the Rolling Stone study said.

But that's not to suggest indie artists' livelihoods are a cake walk. In the streaming age, Saban said, middle-class artists have to work harder juggling their income from publishing, streaming, physical sales and touring -- in an environment where fans expect new material on a regular basis.

"Once upon a time, if you had good physical [CD and record] sales, you could also tour and be a happy, middle-class career artist," she said. But in the lives of midtier indie artists today, "They're all just hanging on with their fingernails to the best of their ability and cobbling together a living."

Even if it's a struggle, indie musicians have more of a shot than ever to break out.

"It was very, very difficult to be an independent label," Brea said. "But now independents are primarily going to be the industry as it continues to grow."

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