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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."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Friday July 05 2019, @10:41PM (3 children)
I have actually started to listen more and more to radio. It's usually a fair bit of a mix of music and music styles even I tune into a station that cater to a specific niche (80's, country, classic, whatever ...). While streaming appears to go for algorithmic selection and trying to play me the same type of song over and over and over again (oh you liked this song, then our "AI" also calculate that you will like this this and that cause they are about the same -- so I'm not really getting a good mix am I?).
Not to mention that my radio doesn't snoop on me unlike Spotify, itunes, Youtube or wherever you stream your music from.
That said yes there is this distinct possibility that I'm getting feed major record label artists instead of the indies. But since I'm old I don't listen to new music anyway so they are somewhat failing there really. The artists I like just don't put up that many albums anymore, in fact there are so few of them I have started to resort to getting bootleg live recordings and such.
Never even heard any of their music, but then as noted I'm not a teenage girl. The only one I even heard about was Grande, not that as noted I ever heard any of her music, but that is cause she was playing when the blew up the bomb in 2017 in Manchester.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @01:34AM (1 child)
Here here for AM and FM. My N900 can receive both. Indy-ish stations (I'm urban) are amazing and play stuff where the most poppy is Snotty Nosed Rez Kids. College radio, community radio - the longer lived shows have the love and attention of the best of the podcasters, and incredible variety of music from hour to hour.
Hell yeah for streaming, the old-school tower antenna way!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @11:56AM
The nice thing about your N900 is that in can broadcast FM! Screw all that difficult bluetooth and broken audio cables.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 07 2019, @05:57PM
You can listen to radio and stream: https://radio.garden/ [radio.garden]