For some music is a
sound that produces effects, usually produced by instruments or voices in order
to create that effect. For others it’s an art that hosts a connection with our
individual emotions. At what point do we/or do we become aware of the powerful
source of ‘mainstream’ music? The term mainstream focuses on music that is usually
on the radios Top 40 and is well recognized publically for example; Rhianna,
Beyonce, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake etc. Are the top 10 predictions for 2014
really predictions? According to the article Spotify in Review: 2013, the top
male and female artists across the globe were Rhianna and Macklemore. According
to an article by Top10, the top three most popular songs of the week of March
13th 2014 consisted of Pharrell Williams’ Happy, Katy Perry’s Dark
Horse and Jason Derulo’s Talk Dirty. The trends in mainstream music continue
and very few non-mainstream artists, such as indie or folk artists tend to get
a breakthrough in the industry.
With relevance to the
growth of online radio e.g Spotify and Pandora, we as a consumer/audience, for
the first time, determine what WE want to listen to. Spotify allowed me to
explore the world of introducing acts, basically a monthly playlist that is a
spin-off of British Broadcasting Channel (BBC’s Radio 1 Introducing unfound
talent). Spotify aids all kinds of upcoming artists by ensuring they have a
platform to present their art to an audience other than a flyer to the by
passers of a community club or a college campus. The “Spotify in review: 2013”
article illustrates just how crucial Spotify can be in determining the future
of an artist or band. With 24 million users currently active and the most
popular song in a single day being Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” with 15 million
streams it can be hard for non-mainstream artists to get recognized. Regardless
of the continuation of mainstream music Spotify presents a unique way for us
(audience) to control what we listen to for free. Should we as an audience
recognize the implications of ‘free’ listening?
Over thanksgiving break
I visited Asheville, North Carolina and automatically fell in love with the
music scene within the city. Matt Townsend, a local upcoming folk artist from
explained to me the impact of Spotify with relevance to his career. “Free music
is kind of a complex issue for me, especially at this point in my career. On
the one hand as an artist I feel that nothing is truly owned. Art is made to be
shared, and shared in a direct interaction with other people, look at it as one
buying a cd is actually buying a ticket to whatever journey you as an artist
hope to take them in. On the other hand however, as a musician trying to make
it a career, I have to eat. Now, I am going to offer my music for free. I do
this because of the stage I’m at in my career, it is important for me to
connect with people.” An important aspect of non-mainstream music artists is to
not only be heard within their particular demographic but to branch out and
‘touch’ the ears of wider audiences. It’s difficult and for many, similar to
Matt the decision is how they draw the line of free listening and get paid for
what they do. According to an article in the Guardian based upon upcoming
artist Zoe Keating, statistics showed that for every track played, artists make
0.4 cents. “The income of a
non-mainstream artist like me is a patchwork quilt and streaming is currently
one tiny square in that quilt. Streaming is not yet a replacement for digital
sales, and to conflate the two is a mistake.” Personally, I think the
establishment of online radio has introduced both artists and audiences to a
new wave of listening. According to an NPR article “Spotify is good for the
music industry,” CEO Daniel Ek said “What we are trying to do is to move people
away from piracy into a legal model that contributes revenue back to the music
industry,” Spotify allows artists to express their art online to users and
branch out to their audiences through the use of ‘sharing.’ But do the upcoming
non-mainstream music artists like Matt; really stand a chance in gaining
recognition through Spotify? I don’t believe so.
Overall, I think it’s important to understand that Spotify acts as a
catalyst for non-mainstream artists. It helps grasp the initial interest of the
audience, allows the user to listen to the artist’s work and persuade them to
join the ‘journey’ with the artist and purchase the album on Itunes. Many
believe that online radio aids the upcoming artist in ways other media outlets
don’t, however its ‘free’ perks, can capitalize on the natural of the art. Do
you agree?
Citations
"Spotify Year in Review 2013." Spotify.
Accessed 20th March. 2014. Web.
Sisario,
Ben. “Pandora and Spotify Rake in the Money and Then Send It Off in Royalties.”
Media Decoder (New York Times blog) 24 Aug. 2012. Web.
NPR.
“Spotify is good for the Music Industry.” NPR Music. Accessed 20th
March 2014. Web
Stuart
Dredge “Streaming music payments: How much do artists really receive?” The
Guardian. Accessed 19th March 2014. Web
BBC “David
Firth ridicules 2009 music scene” You Tube 29th May 2009. Accessed
20th March 2014
Top Music
Mafia “Top 10 songs of the week- January 4th 2014” You Tube 30th
December 2013. Accessed 20th March 2014.
Aine, I found your topic to be both extremely interesting and relevant to the time period in which we live. I agree with you that Spotify and Pandora have completely changed the way that we listen to music, and also the way that we discover (or don’t get the chance to discover) new artists. In many ways, as you said, Spotify and Pandora allow us to break away from the mainstream music trends that our culture is constantly oversaturated with. As discussed in the Los Angeles Times, the artists behind some of 2013’s biggest hits were Justin Timberlake, Robin Thicke, Rihanna, Pink, Katy Perry and Beyoncé (Lewis). The songs by these hugely successful artists are played over and over again, and in my opinion, many of them do not have much substance to them.
ReplyDeleteWhile the mainstream music business is extremely commercialized and conform to the same trends that are proven to make money, Spotify and Pandora allow newer artists to share their music for free. And users are welcoming the chance to finally choose what they want to listen to instead of what the music industry decides. According to a New York Times blog entitled Media Decoder, “Pandora now has 67 million listeners each month — a third more than it had a year ago” (Sisario). It was extremely interesting that you were able to get the point of view of an up-and-coming artist who utilizes Spotify to spread word about his music. As you said, users being able to pick which songs they listen to makes it difficult for lesser-known artists to be heard. Even though they do not make the money they desire by allowing their music to be streamed for free, the hope is that getting their name out there will create devoted fans.
I think that from an artistic standpoint, the ability to stream songs for free is beneficial for everyone. Artists can share their music with the entire world with one click, and their songs can be spread around the world within minutes. There are music lovers out there in any genre imaginable that search the web in hopes of discovering new artists. This is the power of social media; the days of waiting to hear songs on the radio or the albums to come out in stores are over. The point of making music for many gifted artists is to share it with the world and create an emotional connection amongst listeners, as you stated in your post. That being said, free music streaming means that new artists find it extremely difficult to live off of the earnings from their music.
(continued)
ReplyDeleteThe artists are not the only ones struggling to make a profit off of free streaming. Surprisingly, both Spotify and Pandora are unable to breakeven because they have to pay most of their revenue to the music companies. According to Media Decoder, “For its revenue, Pandora…relies almost entirely on advertising. Yet it has been unable to sell enough advertising to offset its royalty costs” (Sisario). This is part of the problem with centering on the user; the consumers have the power to stop using Spotify or Pandora at any point if they become tired of the ads, but the ads are the only ways that these companies can stay afloat.
To respond to the question you pose, I do believe that free online streaming does aid the creative nature of music and most definitely helps upcoming artists become recognized. However, I think that both these artists and the online streaming brands, like Spotify and Pandora, will struggle in coming years to turn any profit from these services. The companies can try to implement mandatory ads to watch and even charge subscription fees, but if the users are not happy with them, they have the power to listen to other stations and bring down the entire service. I hope that lesser-known artists will not be discouraged by this and will still want to share their music freely on these sites so that it can be enjoyed by everyone.
Works Cited
Lewis, Randy. "Justin Timberlake, Robin Thicke Post 2013's Top-Selling Album, Single." Los Angeles Times 3 Jan. 2014. Web.
Sisario, Ben. “Measuring Growth in Dollars and Page Views.” Media Decoder (New York Times blog) 16 Jan 2013. Web.
Sisario, Ben. “Pandora and Spotify Rake in the Money and Then Send It Off in Royalties.” Media Decoder (New York Times blog) 24 Aug. 2012. Web.
First of all, I thought you picked a very interesting topic for your blog. I also think that this could possibly be the future of music. These services like Spotify, Pandora, and Grooveshark have really opened the doors for not only the music industry but for new artists like the ones you have talked about in your blog. I personally tend to use Pandora more than any of the others, which I prefer because it gives me stations of types of music instead of single songs. This allows me to find new artists that I am usually going to like because it is under the topic of the station I choose to listen to. But at the same time, I feel that my taste of music is definitely not considered mainstream music, which allows me to find new artists. Some of the top stations on a Pandora radio are top hits of all today. These are all the songs you hear on the radio. This makes it very hard for new artists to break through in the industry.
ReplyDeleteDiscovering new music is one of the best, and most interesting, parts about fully-connected music streaming services. Both Spotify and Grooveshark show users the most popular songs on the site. And Spotify makes suggestions for music you might like, but these are often way off the mark and seem to have nothing to do with what you actually listen to on a regular basis. Grooveshark’s community and sharing features make discovering new music fairly easy, especially if you have some super “up to date” friends. The same goes for Spotify and its Facebook integration. Grooveshark also has a “related artists” feature. In my eyes, the hands-down winner in the music discovery category is Pandora. Pandora is an extremely popular in todays society. In Ben Sisario’s blog, “Measuring Growth in Dollars and Page Views” he mentions that “Pandora now has 67 million listeners each month — a third more than it had a year ago” (Sisario). I believe these numbers have grown and will continue to grow because of the unique ability that Pandora provides. Like I mentioned before, Pandora doesn’t offer the ability to listen to exactly the song you want, when you want it. Instead, it allows you to create “stations” based on a particular song or artist. From there, songs are played automatically (like a regular radio station) that are tailored to your specific taste. What I didn’t know was that this is all made possible with something called the Music Genome Project. The project analyzes over 400 different attributes to every song in the Pandora catalog to help deliver music that you will like, without you having to know about it already. (Westergren) Spotify offers a continually improving radio mode, but it still lacks in comparison to Pandora’s advanced structure.
Works Cited
Sisario, Ben. “Measuring Growth in Dollars and Page Views.” Media Decoder (New York Times blog) 16 Jan 2013. Web.
Westergren, Tim. "The Music Genome Project." AlwaysOn. June 2, 2005.
Hey Aine, I liked your article. It wasn't too long ago, relatively, that the biggest barrier to entering the mainstream consciousness for a recording artist was to make it on the radio, the analog radio that is. Then the internet came along and everything changed. I definitely agree that the internet, specifically personalized streaming services like Pandora and Spotify have drastically altered not only the way we access the music we want listen to, but also what we listen to.
ReplyDeleteI think Spotify identifies itself as the legal alternative to illegal downloading. It’s true that artist don’t make much money off of its streaming services, but they would make even less if the people who wanted to listen to the songs did so by downloading it illegally, as is still the case with most people. It’s not so much that people like stealing copyrighted material, it’s more that people like to listen to exactly what they want to listen to, and before services like Spotify the only way to do that was by sending a fortune to download every song you want off iTunes, or by downloading the songs in bulk off a peer to peer file sharing network, like Bit Torrent. It didn’t help that downloading illegally was extremely easy to do, and that the chance of getting caught doing so was so minimal that it was laughable. So essentially, people would do it because they could. But then Spotify comes along and lets you listen to whatever you want, for free, and with only an ad every 10 or so songs. The numbers are staggering, Spotify has over 33 million subscribers as of 2012 and Pandora has over 150 million registered users (Sisario). I’m sure terrestrial radio listener numbers are just as impressive, but those aren’t active listeners. You have to go out of your way and seek out these services. I believe that the people who utilize this would likely never have paid for the songs at all, and some profit off the streaming is better than none. And hopefully the situation will change, as the profit for these services go up, there was a 77% increase in revenue in 2013, maybe it can benefit the artists more than it currently is (Jones).
But I think your best point is how this new environment changes who we listen to. The artists who really benefit off these streaming services are the ones that are already huge, people like Rhianna who already have an international audience of millions. Smaller, upcoming artists face a weird and interesting barrier though, it’s no longer that they need to impress one radio DJ so they get their song played. Instead, they need to reach thousands of people in order to be able to do what they do. The barrier to the mainstream used to be to make it on the radio, now they are on there, the digital radio that anyone can access, but they are drowned in the millions of other similar bands and under the shadow of massive artists.
DeleteThe internet has created an even playing field, sort of, in that people have equal access to their music as well as to the big name artists. That’s how I know about an indie band from Austin, Texas called Okkervil River, and how I know another band half way across the world in Scotland called Frightened Rabbit. I discovered these bands through online recommendations, and even those two examples are relatively big compared to the hundreds of small town artists that exist like the one you mentioned from North Carolina. However, because our means of access to these bands are free, and the environment we live in now encourages us to expect every bit of media consumption to be free or really cheap, it is now a lot less realistic to expect to be a new and upcoming artist and live off that. It does work for some artists; the Arctic Monkeys became big over the internet for example. But for the majority of them it’s still all about releasing their music for free and hoping that gives them enough exposure to a large audience. Only this time, their big break won’t be being discovered by one guy who’ll expose you to thousands of people over the radio. The big break will be going viral, having hundreds of people like the music so much that they share it with their friends and they share it with their friends. The only challenge then will be somehow making money off that.
Works Cited
Jones, Rhian. "Music App Revenues up 77% in 2013, Pandora Highest Earner - Report."Music Week. Music Week, 31 Jan. 2014. Web. 26 Mar. 2014. .
Sisario, Ben. "Pandora and Spotify Rake In the Money and Then Send It Off in Royalties."Media Decoder Pandora and Spotify Rake In the Money and Then Send It Off in Royalties Comments. New York Times, 24 Aug. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2014. .