Making music in 2024 is arguably extra accessible than it is ever been. In case you’ve bought any recording machine, an instrument, and a few option to add it to any streaming service (or Bandcamp, and many others.), you then’ve bought the means to place your music on the market. It is also no secret that persons are doing precisely that – there have been roughly 120,000 songs uploaded to streaming services every day in June 2023, with that quantity having grown fairly a bit since then.
So simply how a lot music is that? In a report from Music Radar, Will Web page, former Chief Economist of Spotify and PRS For Music put it into perspective: “Extra music is being launched in the present day [in a single day] than was launched within the calendar 12 months of 1989.” He continued: “And extra of that music is being finished by artists themselves, which means there’s much more demand for music manufacturing software program.”
Much more insane, the report notes that there was a 12-percent enhance in music creators between 2021 and 2022 to a whopping whole of 75.9 million music creators. That quantity is anticipated to succeed in 198.2 million music creators by the tip of the 2020s, prompting the logical query of “what the hell will we do about that?” Contemplating how little visibility artists get now, and the way it appears to solely be getting worse with the above quantity and the way algorithms are likely to push a choose few artists, the report definitely feels grim because the ocean of creators solely will get wider and deeper.
And thus, we should flip to one of many essential offenders for artists making zero cash – Spotify. In November 2023, Spotify introduced that they wouldn’t be paying royalties for any song that didn’t get at least 1,000 streams yearly, successfully getting free labor from some artists. Then in December the corporate laid off 17% of its staff, and final week CEO Daniel Ek made some incredibly terrible comments about “the price of creating content material being near zero.” However don’t be concerned! They made Spotify more expensive and the company is doing very, very well.
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