Artists have quicker, easier and broader access to people than ever before. A large amount of artists wouldn't be artists if it wasn't for Spotify. Or at least they wouldn't be able to get much for their work. They would, back in the days, have had to go to a label and pay a huge amount for printing CD's and transport etc. A lot of money up front. Maybe the amount of CD's you ordered is sold, maybe they won't all sell and you're at a loss. Maybe you could've sold twice as many and you are in risk of being sold out and missing the hype?
Today you can sit and produce a track and upload it to Spotify and if it's good and gets discovered you get paid without further effort. -Easy!
Don't feel sorry for artists. If they are good they will make money. If they are not they won't.
Today good poor artists have a much greater chance of getting success than ever before.
Thanks for the responses. I can see that if I'm aiming to 'prove' anything I would need to do what staticV3 describes. However all I really need to know is which service I should pay for, so I guess I can at least say that subjectively to me Amazon sounded better in a blind test. I just...
audiosciencereview.com
Yeah, like photographers who have better access to admirers because of Flickr or Instagram.
The hard part was never creating the music. (Well, it's hard to create good music, but that's a whole other discussion.) The hard part is getting your music in front of listeners. Spotify doesn't make that happen any better than a CD in the rack with all the other thousands of CDs at the local CD store (RIP). So, musicians now have to promote their music on a zillion channels--Facebook, Instagram, a bunch of Youtube influencers, etc.--without help from an agent or record label to make that market. The only exceptions seem to be those few who were discovered by well-known producers who already have the connections to make the market, so you have as much star-making as ever.
Where Spotify was perhaps useful was in supporting a small income stream in support of word-of-mouth promotion, which is not much different than selling CDs at gigs. Most musicians get through life putting a bunch of little things together, sometimes (often!) including a day job. But there still has to be promotion, and nobody promotes anything for free, so the artist has to do it. But if the service is peeling back the ability for small musicians to make a small income stream (as Youtube does with content providers), then even that won't have much value. You tell me how much a musician makes from a single download, and the algorithm Spotify uses to put their content in front of people.
Making the market has always been where the money is, and it's no different now. Producing stuff is easier than ever, but that's not what makes the market.
Back in the day, there were several ways musicians could break out: 1.) radio, 2.) live concerts attended by influential people. But Spotify is not radio--there is no programming decision-maker. So it depends on paying Youtube/FB/TT influencers to talk about your stuff to generate interest. Influencers get subscribers when they interview stars, not the local club band that has 45 (or even 450) subscribers on their own Youtube channel.
It seems to me that lowering the barrier of entry makes the job of breaking out that much more difficult--there's just a bigger sea of crap to have to swim through.
Having a CD marketed by a good label was a Godsend to musicians worthy enough to impress somebody who could make that happen. It meant concerts would support record sales, and a grueling tour, even if it just broke even, would result in a stream of royalties. Now, free downloads support concerts, and even if the download isn't free, it might as well be if it doesn't pay the musician anything. And once the tour is over, so is the revenue stream.
I am NOT arguing for going back to a system where unmusical record company executives made dumb decisions about who to give record deals to. That system was also corrupt and inefficient. But, refer back to my statement above: Making the market has always been where the money is, and it's no different now. The most successful musicians, or the musicians with the greatest team behind them to make them seem successful, will find a way in any system. But I don't think what we have now is any better at feeding new acts or those with a limited audience than was the old one.
Rick "download/streaming services are entirely driven by user convenience, not musician well-being" Denney
www.nbcnews.com
