Accepting the Spotify “problem”
I am coming to a grand unified point of view about Spotify. The purpose of this post is to present it, so that I never have to talk about Spotify again.
If you want to skip to the good stuff and move on, here’s a short summary:
- There are exactly 2 ways Spotify can be useful to small indie artists: (1) as an unpredictable marketing channel, and (2) as a barometer for your audience growth achieved in other ways. It is not something to “work on” outside of occasional marketing activities.
- Streaming in general is not viable as a primary revenue source for musicians; do not think of it as one.
- It is not worth my time as an independent artist to fight for or expect Spotify’s downfall; expect it and the streaming model generally to stick around for a long time.
- It is respectful to a potential listener to have your music on Spotify or any possible place where music can be heard; not doing so is a missed opportunity to find a potential fan.
Okay now for a rant:
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Spotify much in the last few weeks, but I’m also extremely tired of having to think about Spotify. It seems to constantly pop up in my social feeds. It’s regularly talked about in both tech and music news. The company is everywhere. It’s been the elephant in the music room for years now.
Most recently it became profitable, mostly through multiple layoff rounds, de-monetizing 80+% of the music listened to on its platform, and continued investment in sourcing other content (like audiobooks, podcasts & production library music made by “ghost artists”) to offset the share of listening done by its users of music requiring a royalty payment.
None of these developments are good for smaller independent artists. No doubt. It’s infuriating as a musician who cares a lot about his craft.
But also nobody should be surprised by any of this. Artists living in a late-stage capitalist society (ie. basically all living artists) need to accept that Spotify is not for them. This is a for-profit business whose biggest cost source is royalty payments to artists. The only ones they cannot avoid are major-label artists, due to the outsized influence of the 3 major labels (oh and Tencent Holdings, the massive Chinese conglomerate, which has a stake in both Spotify, Warner Music Group, and (full disclosure) Epic Games which formerly owned Bandcamp). Therefore, it is not a surprise that the labels and Spotify peacefully coexist in a rat-king of entangled investments, including from private equity.
Spotify, like most publicly traded companies, is designed to be in service of its shareholders (including major labels & private equity, which are minority shareholders per the above point) first, and its revenue sources second (in this case, customers & advertisers). It never has been and never will be in the service of independent music. The only musicians it will serve are those represented by Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music Group, who represent the collective majority of music revenue but a tiny percentage of the actual musicians in the world. It is not viable for Spotify as a business to support the rest of the world’s musicians, because they’ve played a massive role in cheapening and commoditizing music, packaging the entire catalog of recorded music into a nice $10 $15 monthly subscription.
You could argue that other streaming services are slightly more in service of independent musicians – particularly YouTube seems to be the most friendly in terms of tooling / network effects, and a few offer better payouts – but most of the other streaming services are a side revenue stream for a much larger tech conglomerate, which means it’s lightly invested into at best, and the artist is usually the last to be invested in. Apple is happy to keep bankrolling Apple Music as long as everyone keeps buying their phones at a massive premium and naturally upgrading to an Apple-owned services bundle which includes Apple Music1.
Also, none of these other services have the market share to yield a decent payout, and even if they did, the payout would not be enough to sustain the cost of living for the vast majority of artists.
Spotify does not have the luxury of being a subsidiary of a larger tech conglomerate, which is why it’s unsurprising that they invest in podcast, audiobook, “ghost artist” music and now user-generated video content. The ironic thing about this is that, as J Herskowitz put so eloquently on Threads, each of these involve “real musicians getting paid to make music.” Think about it: audiobooks & podcasts need intro music. Where do they get it? From a production library service. Where does the library get its music from? Either on-staff composers or by licensing music made by others. Spotify is now licensing that music directly, because it turns out many casual music listeners can’t distinguish between lo-fi chill beats made by a ghostwriter artist and, like, Boards Of Canada.
Things that “real artists” do not like about Spotify are almost certainly legal, and in many cases great for consumers. Assuming, for example, that Spotify is not actually paying itself royalties for stock music libraries it’s licensing and putting on its popular playlists (and even if they are indirectly, there are loopholes to make this possible), this is entirely legal and not unlike Amazon buying cheap products in bulk, white-labeling and selling them as low-cost alternatives under the “Amazon Basics” brand. We’ve all bought from that brand before.
It is also extremely unlikely that independent artists will form a union together to stand up to Spotify, because artists are fickle and we’d never have enough swing because Universal Music Group commands more music playback than all independent artists combined.
And as much as I don’t love this reality, Spotify is the most widely used streaming platform and arguably the easiest way for most people to find and stream my music. As much as I loathe aspects of their business model (the free tier relentlessly destroyed with ads, the heavy weighting of major label and cheap audio content in their interfaces & algorithms), they do have solid AI and editorial playlists and the best music app in many ways for most people. As much as fellow independent artists complain about Spotify, a massively high percentage of my fellow independent artists use Spotify to listen to music. I’ve literally had multiple public conversations on platforms like Threads and Bluesky inviting real fans of my music to listen to a Bandcamp exclusive, only to have them tell me they’ll wait for the streaming release — and then listen to it on Spotify two weeks later. (I don’t say this to complain, but to reinforce the point about the convenience of streaming and point out the hypocrisy of it.)
This reality does not stop me from promoting the formats and platforms I prefer – which is why I occasionally do advance & exclusive releases on Bandcamp. However, what happens when a fan I’ve earned decides they want to listen to Kid Lightbulbs, and can’t because they lost the link I shared and my music is hidden from their easiest way to listen to music? It is a disservice to my potential audience to not have my music on a service like Spotify.
So that leaves the question of whether Spotify can work for me in light of the frustrating points. Does it help me grow my audience? I’m not sure that it does. It’s helping me maintain an audience I seem to be building on my own in other places like Threads & Bandcamp & (maybe a bit) YouTube, and giving me opportunities to maybe snag a few listeners here and there, but none of them seem to translate into fans without me actively promoting myself via my channels.
The ways I see independent artists trying to “grow” on Spotify don’t seem viable at all. You can play their ads game, which is not affordable for most artists; you can buy into a “growth service” which is almost certainly using farms of smartphones run by robots to generate fake plays and listeners. To organically “market yourself” on Spotify is to be constantly pitching to playlist curators, which range from Spotify itself to your friend’s dad, many of which are gatekept through “vetting” services like Submithub, Musosoup and Groover. You can do this, but it rarely pans out. I have spent probably $300 on promotions this year via these platforms and have effectively nothing to show for it beyond a few flattering reviews, some (not all!) actually going into some depth, which have yielded almost no new listeners. In fact the most successful press I’ve gotten is from one review I landed via a mutual Threads connection, and word-of-mouth.
If music is so deeply oversaturated, and the average playlister is a random online content creator focused on vibes instead of taste and critical analysis, of course the average small artist is going to be rejected from almost any playlist and for no constructive reason.
Occasionally you do get lucky – and suddenly notice 15 concurrent listeners listening to your stuff on a Saturday evening, which in theory sounds exciting! – but more likely than not these are scams simply looking to either take your money or terrorize you as an artist. Enter Chartmob, Wavr.ai and the countless other bot playlist scam companies. Many artists I know have run into these, but if you’re unfamiliar: these are services that offer “growth on Spotify” by “guaranteeing” a massive increase in plays and listenership. They do this by adding your music to one of their playlists and using a massive farm of smartphones to shuffle that playlist on infinite repeat for some specified period of time (3-7 days, usually), despite insisting that “these are real fans!” with no way to contact them to ask for more information on those supposed fans or how it works.
I’ve gotten “placed” on one of these playlists, outside my control, 3 times in the past year. (They also randomly scrape songs from indie artists for their playlists, as a bizarre form of sales lead generation I guess.) While one of those times triggered a bit of a Spotify algorithm boost for an obscure piano piece of mine (“into the bay”), though didn’t actually yield me any new followers or consistent listeners. The other two did nothing but throw off my Spotify metrics for a month. It’s now the end of 2024 and I’m basically where I’ve been most of this year, as far as listeners and weekly streams go.
This is my listeners chart for the last 4 weeks. A song of mine (“things I might say to you”, a collaboration with Badyears) got scraped for a Chartmob playlist, and suddenly got almost exactly 1,000 players over 72 hours. I got nothing out of this as an artist other than a to-do to report Chartmob to Spotify, and my “monthly listener” count now looks artificially high until roughly January 4, after which it will likely return to measly low-triple-digits.
I’ve also seen small artists band together to make their own playlists to “help each other grow.” Enter what I’ve been calling the “community playlist extortion” strategy. The idea - I think - is a classic word-of-mouth playbook which also, if executed well, triggers the Spotify algorithm to take note of the increased attention to the playlist, and boost the artists on it:
- Someone makes a playlist that vaguely follows a theme and invites a bunch of current and potential musician friends to feature a song on it
- That person asks every participant to regularly play the playlist, and/or promote the playlist to encourage a few new listeners outside the circle of musician friends
- Time passes; some percentage of the participants and their followers listen to the playlist for some amount of time
I’ve done a couple of these. They never achieve the goal. Participants forget or bail. Listeners forget. The vibe/theme of the playlist is contrived and therefore the playlist isn’t tightly focused. Most of the listeners of the playlist are friends of the artists and therefore don’t actually help anyone’s audience grow at all. And so nothing happens and we move on.
I’m not convinced at this point that there is a viable playbook for building an audience on a streaming service, without either paying lots of money to manufacture one (and this is likely not a sustainable or even real audience), or by coming to streaming with an audience you built elsewhere.
- Streaming has given everyone access to the entire catalog of recorded music. Listeners have always been fickle with regard to their music preferences, and are arguably more so now given the overabundance of listening options they have. An extremely small percentage of them notice the artist making the music they like.
- The incentives of streaming services are aligned with consumers, not suppliers (artists/creators of music). The enshittification theory explains how, and I think the why is simple: because in Spotify’s case, retention of paid subscribers (listeners) is how they make money.
- Therefore, artists are forced to be in service of the streaming service, not themselves, and unless they have enough influence on their own to drive a successful business relationship with a company like Spotify, there’s no happy path to achieving one.
It has me wondering what the goal of “building an audience” online really is for a musician, and how we define success here. What kind of audience? How big? Is it to be discovered? If we talk about “being discovered”, by whom? The industry?
It feels often like the ones who talk about this are the ones who are either (1) industry people or (2) artists who were discovered, either by a large fan base or record label, often before the current phase of music & technology in which Spotify, TikTok and Instagram dominate how music is heard. I haven’t done this research, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the growth of follower & listener counts among smaller independent artists has flattened over the last 5-10 years. (The data is publicly available to determine this). There are obviously exceptions, but I suspect many of those exceptions are either now signed to a major or meaningful indie record label (based on a following they were cultivating elsewhere), or artists who paid for some artificial growth of these numbers in order to “legitimize” themselves.
And when I talk to these artists, they often hustled for years and shelled out massive amounts of money, and caught a wave before this period began. Some of my best friends are now in the echelon of artists where they can make some money each month on streaming – and they largely attribute their success to working extremely hard (in a nearly full-time capacity) and being excellent at their craft, putting tons of money and time into investing in and promoting themselves, and catching a wave of significant Facebook and YouTube growth before TikTok blew up.
I would argue I’ve honed my craft over nearly 20 years of consistently composing & producing music, but I don’t have the time or money to either buy a lot of PR or get good at video so I can ride a TikTok wave, which I’ve likely already missed, and short of a viral sensation I don’t see a way through this unless I put far more money into this operation or try something wholly different. (Maybe I’ll catch a long-form writing wave, who knows?)
Here is my grand unified point of view about Spotify as a small independent artist in our current era of music. This may not work or make sense for everyone, but it comes from some deep reflection on the points above.
These are the 4 components:
- There are exactly 2 ways Spotify can be useful to small indie artists: (1) as an unpredictable marketing channel, and (2) as a barometer for your audience growth achieved in other ways. It is not something to “work on” outside of occasional marketing activities.
- Streaming in general is not viable as a primary source of income for most musicians building an audience post-2018; do not think of it as one.
- It is not worth my time as an independent artist to fight for or expect Spotify’s downfall; expect it and the streaming model generally to stick around.
- It is respectful to a potential listener to have your music on Spotify or any possible place where music can be heard; not doing so is a missed opportunity to find a potential fan.
At the highest level, we need to stop talking about Spotify as if it is something to proactively work on as a small artist. Yes, the industry seems to care a lot about the vanity metrics it puts out (monthly listeners, plays, etc.), but I suspect this is to reinforce the influence of the major labels. These are not metrics that we independent artists should strive to grow on their own. Instead, these should be a reflection – the result — of promotion activities we do elsewhere: PR pushes, new music releases, building a social presence, cultivating a brand/image, creating & promoting other media, playing shows, surprising fans and potential fans.
You can get lucky with Spotify, if a song of yours gets on a special playlist that causes your listenership to (temporarily) skyrocket, which may trigger some perks from the algorithm. But I am not convinced this is a repeatable activity you can drive as a smaller artist. The bigger and longer-tenured artists (thanks to label support, heavy PR and money) dominate any meaningful editorial playlists, and most other playlists don’t generate enough meaningful listenership to drive any sort of audience growth because most Spotify users simply use the options the algorithm sends them. Neither listener habits nor black-box algorithms are in our control, so we need to stop acting like they are.
You can also choose to take your music of Spotify in protest, but I wouldn’t. I think it’s disrespectful and a form of gatekeeping, but more pragmatically it’s a missed opportunity to gain a repeat listener by forcing that listener to find your music somewhere else if it’s less convenient for them.
So the streaming service serves as your back catalog, a reflection of your work as an artist and therefore the audience who wants to listen to that work. You can leverage features like Release Radar to notify your existing listeners about new releases, try to get on some good playlists, and hope that a few prospective listeners will catch them across those placements. But at the end of the day this serves as unpredictable, low-touch marketing of you, the artist, where your song is the marketing asset.
To end this very long rant: I just think we need to worry about Spotify a lot less and let it do its capitalist thing. We can both make more impact as artists, and inspire real change in listener habits and the art form of music generally, by focusing on other things. Like Bandcamp. And organic connection with potential fans on social platforms & elsewhere. And playing shows. And touring. And merch. And generally making more art and putting it out into the world. And other innovative offerings that we haven’t come up with yet, but we will because we’re creative people who do the music thing because we need to do the music thing.
Full disclosure: my family pays for the Apple One bundle, the top tier specifically. For $38/month, I get 2TB iCloud storage ($10 value), Apple Music for my whole family ($17 value), access to the only genuinely good TV streaming service ($10 value), and access to games ($7 value) and workouts ($10 value) and news articles ($13 value) from a few outlets I care about. It’s interesting to me that, all things considered, I effectively pay less per month for a music streaming service than Spotify charges, and a (barely) higher % of my subscription goes to indie artists, and I support a few indie game devs & news outlets I enjoy (mainly The Atlantic and The Verge) through this bundle.↩︎
