By Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow, Wired | This story is adapted from Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.
Paul Johnson’s life was like any other struggling musician’s—working multiple jobs, picking up gigs, hustling. Then his warm acoustic folk-pop tune “Firework” made it on to one of Spotify’s Fresh Finds playlists, designed to surface brand-new artists. Spotify and other streaming platforms invest heavily in playlists, ranging from the algorithmically generated Discover Weekly (which predicts new music subscribers might like) to the editorial RapCaviar (the most desired real estate in hip-hop). Playlist placements are highly coveted, both for how they rack up the streams—more than 7 billion in five years, in the case of RapCaviar—and the way they expose music to new listeners. The latter paid off for Johnson.
His first playlisting shot him from a few thousand streams a day to 20,000, and later, as his music landed more and more spots, to hundreds of thousands. Thanks to this exposure he’s now making around $200,000 a year, mostly in royalties from streaming. That’s brilliant for Paul. But, like almost all successes in music, it’s a Horatio Alger story. Spotify wants you to believe the rags to riches transformation is due to hard work and talent when it actually requires a huge amount of luck. Ignoring that luck element illustrates how difficult it is for musicians to support themselves via streaming revenues—and how many hard working, talented people will be unable ever to do so.
Immediately before the streaming era began, we experienced one of the rare moments in the history of recorded music when power flowed in the direction of artists. Although it was an economically disastrous time for many of them, the democratization brought by digital technologies and the internet also finally forced record labels to reform abuses they’d carried off for decades.
Now, however, the recorded music market is again taking on its former hourglass shape, this time with the streaming platforms at the center. Just as the music industry is organized to let labels and publishers scoop up much of the value of music, the streaming platforms, as they become more powerful, are positioning themselves to do the same.
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Read the full story here:
https://www.wired.com/story/spotify-streaming-playlists-music/
Streamers Use Playlists to Control the Music Industry
