Months, I’ve thought about the Spotificication of the music industry. How when the market for songs becomes a galaxy-space of endless, whimsical discovery, there must be more producers earning livings than when every new track had to be searched for specifically and paid for with money. And I’ve found three studies showing that on-demand streaming’s distinguishing feature, free cost of discovery, increases the consumption of less-popular artists relative to superstars by the 10s of percent.
But as though producers of off-putting sounds from small Vermont towns find their fans in big-city Texas, how many earn good livings? Enough for being a musician to seem doable to the average teenager wondering about life after school, and perfectly normal to a five year old thinking about what “work” looks like?
Here I try to come up with a reasonable range of how many artists could earn middle-class wages from recording revenue in hypothetical future where all music listening runs through Spotify, Apple, or Amazon. Using hard info on the total amount of music listened to by the average American, a finding from a Stanford study on how listening grows and changes as listeners adopt on-demand streaming services, and a little handful of educated assumptions, I derived a conservative and generous case for the state of the music industry before and after streaming adoption. It’s an approach I’m told is used by many a consultant or financial advisor trying to provide reassuring guidance to clients where none exists, a Scientific Wild-Ass Guess (SWAG).
In both cases, allocating listens under a curve in which y = x^-1.01 yielded a visual distribution that looks reasonable enough that I’m not insane:
Here’s another way of looking at it, because the interesting part of that graph is tiny:
Under the conservative case: the maximum number of non-radio artists earning an additional $64,000-$80,000 under Spotify’s payment model (equal to 10 million listens) is 31,165. And the distribution of new listens is likely to be far more concentrated than that. If all new listens were apportioned equally to every non-radio artist, they would each get 505,901 more track plays. Enough for you to call yourself a musician, and to take a dope vacation from your day job, but not enough to quit. Assuming streaming opens the dam for a massive surge of artists who just learned Ableton but whose songs get no play, and where most growth in listens goes to artists who are already rich, very few new middle class incomes could result.
The generous case, is well, generous. Here we have a much smaller number of artists, sharing a much larger number of new listens. Under these assumptions, a maximum number of 208,470 artists could receive additional 10 million additional track plays -- out of a total of 261,000 musicians getting any play at all, including Rihanna and Taylor Swift. In other words, almost every single artist with any listens at all would be earning around $70,000 – making this scenario completely unrealistic.
Based on the vibes each case throws off, the most truthy conclusion I can draw is that on-demand streaming brings in a few tens of thousands of middle-class incomes’ worth of additional listens to non-famous musical artists.
For reference, at peak nostalgia, in 1978, the automotive manufacturing industry employed about 1 million people. Since then there have been swift dips and slow climbs on that line graph, but has remained fairly consistently in the high hundreds of thousands ever since. How about food service, a kind of job so visible, so common, so (thought to be) easily obtained that it’s like the Ratata of career opportunities? In 2019, there were 2.6 million waiters working in the United States. These are the kinds of numbers you need for a job to be part of what the country really looks like, what people of any background can realistically see themselves as.
Even if you stretched my implausible generous case to its implausibly generous limit, assuming that all additional non-radio listens were distributed in equal 10 million listen slices; even if you tripled the number of middle-class incomes that would result, to account for the fact that the bulk of artist revenue comes from tours and licensing; even if you assumed that all artists were solo acts, and had to share none of the take with bandmembers or business reps, which is the most preposterous assumption to be found here; the number of artists employed at middle class wages wouldn’t reach the trough of employment levels of the occupation that essentially defined what it means to be middle class in America.
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A thing I don’t know, but am pretty sure I know, about creating music, or anything else: to make something unique, you have to have on some, possibly pre-cognitive level, observed, appreciated, and accepted what makes you unique. Fundamentally an act of self-knowledge and self-esteem. It’s a difficult, highs and lows journey from an open, threateningly endless sea of possibility in the beginning to a sense of relief and arrival when it’s done, the kind of journey that our brains seem conditioned to need in some form to stay sane.
These are different sensations than what someone can expect from what usually passes as work, whatever the field. Not that no nine to five involves creativity; but in clean, steady jobs, there’s so much repeating, seeking, retreating, submitting. Done in exchange for a roof and food for the family, and maybe, depending on how it goes, a sense of dominance, in the bad way, and belonging, in the good. And perhaps a sense that by being bored in exchange for money, we are doing the right thing, when doing something wrong feels unimaginably terrifying.
They are certainly different sensations than what we tell most children they can expect. This is Shea Serrano, the undisputed God of the stream of consciousness, telling the Dallas Morning News about how he began writing:
““I didn’t have any interest in being a writer. I didn’t even know really that that was a job.” On the south side of San Antonio, ““that’s not a thing that they tell kids they can do. They’re just like, ‘Oh you’re going to work at the tire shop off of Highway 90’ or ... ‘You’re going to put in irrigation or paint houses or lay tile.’”
Streaming services help populate your feed with many a niche artist that wouldn’t have been there before; they help many an listener and performer get their most idiosyncratic strings of appreciation well plucked. But full market saturation of abundant music markets with frictionless discovery, at least based on what we know, will not really change how Americans think about making money; will not tell kids in South San Antonio anything new.
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Making these curves was like, a four-year-old’s first flailing leap of the diving board, limbs everywhere, when it comes to trying to put numbers to the questions I’ve been mumbling about for years. I might have seen the story early if I had thought more about my reference metrics before making the curves. With about 200,000 working musicians in 2009, 1 million auto workers, and 2.6 million waiters, 49% growth in listens was never going to boost musician jobs into the auto worker tier. Next time, in the next market, I’ll be establishing the basic numbers and reasoning about them a little more before opening up Excel.
Did I miss anything else? Are there other ways of thinking about networked markets and creative jobs? Am I describing things poorly? Math criticism is welcome, too! Help me, friends.