The Spotify Effect
Mayer Hawthorne, an artist I love, tweeted this week:
“Hey @spotify, thanks for the .00019 cents per play. Only 26 million more plays til I make $5! I’m gonna be RICH! Hahahaha”
When I read this, I almost immediately cringed. I had been on Spotify for about a week, having enjoyed all kinds of music I had heard about but hadn’t come around to purchasing. The implications of this business model were clear to me- but the translation of what it meant for musicians was not.
When I thought about the increase in the long tail in music over the past two decades, and knowing how much more brilliant music we’ve been exposed to, it hit me: we may very much cause the long tail to go extinct.
If Spotify pays an artist .00019 cents per play, and we assume that iTunes and Rhapsody will land somewhere in that ballpark, it means that without millions of plays per month, an artist will not even make minimum wage.
This infographic says it all: our obsession with convenience is single-handedly killing the independent musician.
The iTunes revolution is nothing compared to what unlimited stream memberships mean for musicians of all sorts. They may as well start applying to second jobs. This model actually promotes the rise of the super-star once more, rather than making available all sorts of lesser known artists. It means the Katy Perry’s of the world will see billions while the Mayer Hawthorne’s stop making records.
And as great as Katy Perry might be, I’d sure miss Mayer.
