The Essential Music Industry News You Probably Missed These Days - October 2020
2 billion euros is not enough for Spotify to cut a fair fee for the artists, so maybe it's time to create a more direct artist-to-fans connection
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Spotify Made 2 Billion Euros In The First Quarter So They’re Ready To Increase The Subscription Costs
So, how are your music related revenues feeling this year? Pretty down, right? Well, at least you don’t have to worry about Spotify: they’re fine, thank you for asking. Fine as in almost 2 billion euros revenues in the 1st quarter, mostly coming from the 144 million paid accounts all over the world). But even backed by these huge piles of cash, Spotify is still loosing money. Not a good excuse for paying those shitty pennies per stream, so this is why a growing number of artists are signing pledges for Spotify to increase these rates. Not sure if these voices were the cause, but apparently Spotify is taking into account a price rise for its subscribers, a move that would make a better revenue share for the artist. For the moment, it’s being discussed internally and you can have a glimpse of all these talks in Spotify’s latest investor report.
Direct Support From Fans Seems To Be The Key-To-Survival For Independent Artists
100,000 streams on Spotify will bring you 400 USD. On the other hand, 500 downloads on bandcamp.com at a low price of 1 USD / single can get you roughly the same amount. While being present on all major DSPs’ didn’t hurt anyone, artists should start considering methods of receiving support from their fans, as Mr. COVID will be with us for a while. Merch, exclusive downloads, paid livestreams: there are just a few opportunities, especially if you have a community of die-hard fans willing to support your creative effort. Needless to say, there are several online platforms offering tools for direct fans-to-artists support. Take *LÜM*, for example, a music streaming platform that grew up to 80K artists and around 200K tracks uploaded to their platform. While users can use the app free of charge, they can directly support the artists they love with gifts in form of a virtual currency that can be exchenged to real money. This is, probably, the future of music streaming for independent artists!
Get Your Playlist Pitching Strategy To The Next Level With This Free Service
Thousands of services claiming you’d get gazillions of plays if your song gets a placement into their Spotify playlists. The problem is that, regardless the number of followers, which can be pumped up easily, the true number that counts is the active listeners for each playlist, a number only Spotify knows 🙄 Lucky for you, a nice guy from Belgium thought of creating a free online analyzer for Spotify playlists: isitagoodplaylist.com is digging on every profile of the artists placed in that playlist, checking whether the playlist is listed on Discovered On (this is a short list displayed in the About section). Based on this, you can make a pretty decent idea if the playlist has active listeners or not. Kinda cool, right?
Next Level Shazam: Google Has Just Launched The Hum-To-Search Option
Probably just an intermediary step for the search engine to reading your thoughts and displaying results: Google announced that you can now hum, whistle or just sing a song for at least 15 seconds and you’ll get a complete track ID as a result. Head over to Google’s official blog for more details about this. Our life is now complete 🤔