The Streaming Era: The Free Market of Music
We live in the era of streaming. No matter how much music purists and vinyl enthusiasts resist, the most popular method of music consumption for the last decade has been through streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music. The rise of streaming has brought about many benefits for the consumer. Now, you can listen to music whenever and wherever, easily discover new music from around the world, create your own playlists, and share music with friends and family at the tap of a button. Listening to music has just become easier. But does that make the experience of listening to music better?
The answer to that question depends on the listener. Are you someone who listens to an album all the way through, or someone who curates the best playlist to fit the ~vibes~ of any given moment? The latter is much more common. According to a study by Alpha Delta, a music business intelligence platform, album sales have been declining by the double digits nearly every year since 2016. Additionally, a recent poll of UChicago students conducted by Firebird showed that 50% more students listen to curated playlists than to albums as a whole. How did this come to be?
With the rise of cassettes, and CDs in the 1960s and 1980s respectively, album-length became more flexible, and music more portable. However, skipping around between albums, or even songs in the case of vinyl records, was still not easy; so if you paid good money for an album, you were going to listen to the whole thing. The physical album also often included notes from the artist, additional artwork, lyric books, and credits to all involved musicians and producers. These helped make the album an experience; a musical journey through an artist’s struggles, triumphs, or conceptual artistry.
In the era of streaming, much of this is lost. With such ease of access to singles and individual songs, listeners no longer need to purchase an entire album in order to listen to the one or two tracks they really like. Yes, this is a wonderful benefit to listeners and it explains why more students listen to songs in playlists rather than within their respective albums. But it also serves to undermine the concept and artform of the album. Artists no longer need to create a cohesive body of work where all the songs meld nicely together. It doesn’t matter if an album is 90% filler, and only bolstered by one single. In fact, some artists aren’t even bothering to release albums at all. A prime example of this phenomenon is pop-star turned TikToker Jason Derulo. Since his album Everything Is 4, released in 2015, Derulo has put out 16 singles but no albums. He seems more focused on creating catchy singles that will generate TikTok dances like his smash hit “Savage Love”, which dominated airwaves this past summer. Artists that do choose to release albums are tending to rely on one hit to carry the entire album (see “Old Town Road” on Lil Nas X’s EP7), or trying to cram their album full of so many singles and bangers that people are compelled to listen to the whole album (see Migos’ Culture II).
This also helps to explain why song lengths have gotten increasingly shorter, with the average length for a song in the Billboard Hot 100 for 2019 being just 3:07, marking a 30-second decrease from the previous year. The two longest-running number-ones of that year were “7 rings” by Ariana Grande clocking in at a brisk 2:58, and the aforementioned “Old Town Road” coming in at an even shorter 1:53. This trend only seems to be continuing with hit songs from this year like “Telepatía” by Kali Uchis at 2:40, and “Up” by Cardi B at 2:37. The shorter the songs, the more you can fit onto an album or get people to add to their playlists, raking in the streams, and boosting your numbers on the charts.
Even beyond changing what kind of music is released, or how long it is, streaming services have changed the way in which artists cultivate an audience and gain popularity. Streaming services have been a haven for up-and-coming artists, giving them the ability to freely release their music without the burden of a record label, easily promote through direct links to their music, and offer their music up to a wider international audience. This is fantastic news until you realize that 60,000 new tracks are added to Spotify a day. That’s almost one track per second, and about 22 million new tracks a year, according to Spotify’s co-head of music Jeremy Erlich. This has created an incredibly oversaturated market with artists struggling to compete for listeners’ attention.
In reality, a large majority of listeners’ attention is dictated by the streaming services themselves. Companies like Spotify have enormous power over what becomes successful and what doesn’t. Increasingly popular pre-curated playlists like “Today’s Top Hits” and “Best New Artists” help guide listeners to specific content and influence their listening habits, with the service’s most popular playlists being dominated by major labels like Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group. This is unsurprising, as both Sony and Universal each own about 5% of Spotify, and have intricate licensing contracts with the platform. The seemingly “level playing field” for all artists to release music is thus overshadowed by the artists who already have connections in the music industry or backing by a record label. The wild success of Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license” was no mistake. While marketed as an average suburban teenager, in reality she was backed by Disney from her work on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, and her record label Interscope. Her already strong foothold in the industry was then given a boost by a shoutout from Taylor Swift. The song sat in the number one spot of “New Music Friday”, “Pop Rising”, “Teen Beats”, and then “Today’s Top Hits” once Spotify caught wind of the song’s success. The song still sits on the playlist today.
So aside from listener attention, what does a coveted spot on a Spotify playlist get you? Being added to “Today’s Top Hits” raises streams for a song by almost 20 million, bringing in additional revenue between $116,000 and $163,000. Got added to “New Music Fridays”? Expect an additional 14 million streams and between $84,000 and $117,000. But these rewards aren’t shared by all. According to the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), the average artist earns just $.00038 a stream. That’s 263 streams for the average artist to earn $1. This is because Spotify only pays for access to a record label’s catalog, and it is then up to the record label to distribute the revenue as it sees fit; with independent artists often receiving far less than a major act.
The pay disparity between up and coming vs. popular artists illustrates the primary conflict of the streaming era: even though it is often claimed that streaming has democratized music, in many ways it has only deepened the divide. While streaming makes it easier for listeners to explore new artists, how much of this exposure is offset by streaming services' clear preferences for popular artists or by labels’ own reluctance to pay more minor acts the same rate for each stream? Is the “free-market” of music worth the cost of artistic integrity, as artists compete to make the next big song to spawn a TikTok dance in lieu of a body of work? These are questions that both the music listening and music producing communities must grapple with as streaming continues to change the way music is listened to and produced.
Edited by Jennifer Morse, editor of Bird’s Eye View
Cover art by Shira Silver