In the early 1990s I worked for Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond's record label, back when they were dominating the UK and European pop charts as The KLF (https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/07/20/537708922/...).
They never made a pound touring. Their success and much of their impact was tied to European club playlists, the sales of singles, album sales, and the media.
You can talk to many other artists from that era who did depend on touring and merch, but also used distribution and sales of singles and albums (and advances on record deals) to establish themselves.
While plastic media was doomed long before Spotify, this "audio-based customer acquisition channel" is, by design, set up to benefit Spotify, record labels, and top artists, in that order.
Everyone else in the 98.6% tier gets the scraps.
yeah because they're getting 1.4% of the listens.
It's not because Spotify is a meritocracy for music.
I have created something similar with SoundRat (https://soundrat.com) that connects more with the patreon-like features and makes listening of music free but gives fans an option to donate to artists and get some perks for doing so.
Yup, so why start now, right? That would go against tradition.
> That would go against tradition.
a tradition of it being unprofitable, perhaps. It just goes against the numbers. Small artists just don't get enough listens.
Everybody complains, but you aren't entitled to success. Once you're popular, there's plenty of ways to monetize.
The only solution is basic income, because you probably aren't gonna live off your music otherwise.
Each location could have their share of top talent to perform for the region.
I see spotify more like as an audio-based customer acquisition channel, like the radio.
Maybe it could build in some kind of "donate" patreon-like feature into the app. I wish Soundcloud had this.