O what happened to the idea of the “long tail”, eh?
I guess the truth was that it didn’t scale.
IMO, that's not a great point. The music is already made - that's the hard part. It just needs to be licensed.
Maybe there are other channels that are more profitable than streaming, but I'm guessing that a lot of older/niche music is just locked away for no good reason.
At a certain point, I have to imagine that most artists would prefer their music be listened to if they aren't going to make money either way.
In no particular order:
* Will Wilde
* Sugarray Rayford
* Smokehouse
* Etta James
* Gordon Webster
* The Blue Vipers of Brooklyn
* Tin Pan
* Asylum Street Spankers
* Hugh Laurie
* Legendary Rhythm and Blues Revue
* Preservation Hall Jazz Band
* The Marsalis Family
* Katie Webster
* John Lee Hooker
* Keb Mo
* Son House
* Joe Bonamassa
* ZZ Ward
* Kevin Selfe
* Allen Toussaint
* Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown
* Bill Withers
* Nina Simone
* Buddy Guy
* Lightning Hopkins
* Howlin' Wolf
* Brother Yusef
There's probably a whole lot more - these are just the ones that I can think of off the top of my head. You probably know a lot of them, but I didn't want to guess which ones you know, so I just wrote out a bunch of people I like.
It'll be interesting to see what happens.
As a fan of blues, I've noticed that there are a lot of grey songs in my Spotify playlists. There's just no practical way to be able to listen to the music I want to hear besides owning it (Youtube is hit-or-miss as well).
For people who want to listen to pop, they're probably fine. But anything that's even a little niche is trouble. Or that's my experience, anyhow.