Pardon me while I nerd out for a minute. Official estimates put the world population at roughly 8 billion this past December, and I couldn’t help but have a brain tangent about what a growing population meant for the music business. Bear with me— I do have a point, but there are several factors that I need to suss out along the way… We musicians are aware that the population has been growing, and in theory this should scale up listenership in the age of streaming, but things don’t appear to be scaling quite so quickly and we are far from duplicating the financial success of the 90’s where distribution was dominated by over-margined cds. I believe the streaming + physical mix is here to stay. Physical being more for the collectors, next level fans, and audiophiles. Streaming will take care of the majority though, with downloads useful only for out of network use…
I’m going to make an assumption now.
The assumption is that at certain population milestones, what was once good niche local music can have a sufficient level of fans that will support the livelihood of the artists. I’m going to quantify this– because why not. I’m going to give said artist a median US income of (55k) plus the cost of releasing an album a year–25k,(Indie style release 25k), so 80k. This means each album would need about 20-24 mil streams depending on the outlet mix if income was just from streaming. If someone likes your song, we’ll say they give it at least 50 listens a year, so roughly 480k fans are needed. 50 listens x 3.5 minutes = 2.9 hours of time a year. As of 2022, average time spent listening was 1.66 hours a day. Currently, there are about 4.3 billion mobile internet users, and estimates of paid music streaming subscribers are likely around 650 million worldwide. Safe to say there are enough listeners to support a musician middle class.
Ok, the problem now, if everything else checks out, how do you get the music you make to the algorithmically identifiable potential 480k fans? Is there a mutual benefit to both music manufacturer and music distributor to identify and distribute to potential fans? Are they already doing this to the best of their ability? According to loud & clear of Spotify, they are estimating that at least 50k artists are earning about 1/2 of the 80k I said is needed annually. I have to believe access is being increased with technology, but my experience shows that streaming dj’s (aka playlisters) seem to have the greatest value of suggestion with Apple and Spotify controlling their primary playlists for better or worse. Based on the Spotify data it does appear that there has been both diffusion of monetary flow from the top 50 artists and away from the US to the international music scene, but most musicians still aren’t feeling the cash flow.
You still listening?
I believe the real opportunity for both distributors and artists lies in the local markets. Hold on – more math… There are roughly 500 metro areas globally with over 1 million people (60 in the US). Last year there were 5.3 trillion streams. That means if things were equally distributed there would be 106 billion streams per these markets; then divided equally amongst artists there would be 5300 artists with 20 million + streams per nearest 1 million person market. At these numbers, there is the potential for over 2 million artists to be earning a “middle class” income of 80k, way more than the 50k artists earning half that per Spotify’s data. I can’t name one artist that meets this 20 million stream criteria for my market of 1.7 million people, which is just behind Nashville in population nationally. There is the issue of quality production that I often harp on, and I believe to be one of the factors that reduces potential listenership of a song, but that aside, here is an opportunity for venues, artists, and distributors.
Spotify, Apple are you listening?
For these large markets good local productions should be weaved into the primary playlist. Do not, I repeat do not create a playlist that says, your local music scene, if it is a great rock song, drop it in the main rock playlist only for its local market. I know Spotify and Apple have the data and know how to make this happen. I refuse to believe that there are not some genre options produced locally that would qualify in all of these markets. I’m not saying to get rid of curation, this would just be another form of curation. This would elevate, and inevitably find some top notch songs that would have never risen to their full potential otherwise. More importantly, this would bolster local scenes and artists’ income as their show value would go up with increased popularity and legitimacy, which simultaneously helps the venues by increasing foot traffic and those things that come with a venue full of fans. Music scenes make music lovers and on a global level I’m sure this would equate to at least a couple percentage points of increased profit for the streaming platforms and much more for the musicians. I also believe that the first platform to do this is going to solidify their position even further.