music streaming

When all artists are confined to the same handful of platforms to promote their work, only the top 1% get a fair slice of them. And when all listeners are dispersed over an infinite array of small-scale, pop-up, artist-first solutions, no one gets a pleasant digital music experience. The only solution is stratification at scale.

Streaming offers the tantalizing illusion that these laborious steps have been eliminated by technology. But really they haven't. Music is an attention economy. The dominance of the biggest attention companies used to be reinforced by constraints of physical distribution, but it mostly survives the format shift. Most of the songs on the biggest pla... See more

The reason that per-artist subscriptions don’t make sense for fans is basic maths: multiply the number of artists you really care about by the subscription fees and the costs soon seem unrealistic, resulting in fans investing in one artist at the expense of another. And once listeners are locked in, there is a level of guilt associated with cancell... See more

Streaming sites have thus transformed into enterprises whose business is not limited to the sale of music-related services, but relies increasingly upon the collection, aggregation, and exchange of user data. A key issue this article pursues concerns the changing status of music within the commercial strategies of online streaming. While previous r... See more

Spotify has already learned that there’s no money to be made with exclusive rights to superstar offerings. “After pouring billions into podcasts and audiobooks to little effect,” explains tech journalist David Pierce, “it seems to have largely given up on the idea that exclusive content is the path to riches.”

The more profitable move is to manipula... See more

If Apple wanted to offer exclusive music, they would cut a deal with Taylor Swift. They have the cash to do it. They wouldn’t waste time on locking up Kalevi Aho. That’s so obvious I shouldn’t even have to say it, but (given all the smoke and mirrors here), I really do.

So we’re clearly dealing with the bad Apple here. And the fact that the company... See more

The most frequent complaint I hear about streaming services is that they don’t pay artists fairly. Michael Pelczynski, the former Vice President of Strategy at SoundCloud, took that complaint personally. Over his five years with the streaming service, he helped conceive and implement a novel payment scheme that received much praise.

In an hour-long... See more

“We have to overcome some legal hurdles, but we could unionize musicians tomorrow,” DeFrancesco said. “SAG is like an alternate history for musicians. We’ve done all this before and won, just not within recent memory.”

Some musicians are in fact unionized. The American Federation of Musicians, with 80,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, collectively... See more

The music industry is deceiving you. They aren’t doing it on purpose, though. Statistics are just deceptive. And I’m not talking about any fancy statistical techniques. I’m talking about simple things, like means and medians. I’ll illustrate how with Spotify’s album charts.

The simplest way a music streaming service calculates the top album on their... See more