Before: 2 listens = dealer price of a CD in UK = about £7.5 (on a good UK indie that's split 50/50 with the artist).
Now: 2 listens = income from 2 streams on Spotify = about £0.0006
I'm thinking of artists like Autechre.
Spotify is starting the shape the sort of music that artists can be successful with, in a bad way.
An artist does not get paid after the first payment from the label from the sale of a CD. If you play the CD on repeat, the artist does not benefit, nor does the label.
/Labels/ get paid for every single listen on Spotify.
There is also Spotify Direct, too, and the artist can directly benefit more than if they went with a label.
What? See how many rap albums are in this list [1].
1: https://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/2000/top-album-sale...
Scheduling Eminem for radio play while he is arguably the biggest artist on the planet is not really going out on a limb.
> Scheduling Eminem for radio play while he is arguably the biggest artist on the planet is not really going out on a limb.
I mean, you can't be the biggest artist on the planet without some level of main-stream support in the first place.
To say that hip-hop became more popular due to streaming is just obviously nonsense.
> According to the report, R&B and hip-hop are now responsible for 25.1% of all music consumption in the U.S., while rock claims 23%.
> Looking at the rest of the numbers listed that dissect how people are consuming these styles of music, it’s clear that streaming is to thank for the swap in ranking. Rock is far and away the winner when it comes to album sales—the genre claims 40% of all album sales in the country—but the total number of records actually purchased dwindles every year, so while that percentage may remain steady or even climb, it’s not representative of how Americans are truly consuming music. [1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2017/07/17/hip-hop...
[2] http://www.insideradio.com/free/in-a-streaming-world-it-s-r-...
Rap popularity was steadily increasing before streaming, you can't credit streaming for it's popularity.
Sale of rap and even “gangsta rap” has been dominated by White people for two decades.
Where Spotify comes into play is granting exposure to artists who are still trying to make it, or whom mainstream radio won't play. But that's cross-genre and diesn't affect the mainstream viability of hip-hop itself.
Hip hop is huge on Spotify, where it struggled for radio play and sales before because commercial radio is so conservative (in the sense of risk-averse). Then there's the whole Billie Eilish thing: huge on Spotify, almost no radio play at all.
On the other hand, there are Billboard 100 artists who are more or less absent from the streaming landscape. Some sell lots of albums but aren't on the streaming charts at all.
It's probably not as simple as saying that streaming is only good for established artists, but bad for the long tail. For some of the previous long tail, it's been very good. And for some of the oldies, it's been phenomenal - Spotify enables them to monetize their back catalogue with near zero promotion or distribution costs, year round.