There has been a marked shift in the last 10 to 15 years in how people discover music, according to Robert Prey, a professor at Groningen University in the Netherlands who researches music streaming services.
“In the early days, they use[d] the analogy of listeners driving their cars through all the undiscovered lands of music,” he said, referring to Spotify.
“But as more people started to use Spotify, and more music started getting uploaded, we’re joined with more mainstream music listeners. Spotify uses the analogy of, now they started introducing self-driving cars to help guide you.”
In the early days of streaming platforms, people were searching for the songs that they wanted to play, Prey said. But around 2013, Spotify began shifting its branding from being an enormous library or archive of music to being a curator. It began making investments in creating its own playlists and generating music recommendations, customized for each listener.
“The amount of content that people listen to that comes from recommendations has been growing by leaps and bounds every year,” said Prey.
Robert Prey is a media scholar who studies at the intersection of technology, capitalism, and culture. Photo courtesy of Robert Prey.
At the same time, the way artists can distribute their own work has evolved, in many ways, lowering the hurdle musicians used to have to vault. Once their track is mixed and mastered, for artists to upload their song to a streaming service like Spotify, they have to use a Digital Distribution Service. To register, all relevant information and files have to be uploaded, including the audio file, album artwork and release date. Once the form is submitted, the distribution service will prepare to release the song on the requested release date. On that date, the music will be included and accessible in digital stores and streaming services, including Spotify, Google, Apple and Amazon.
Hannah Judge is the Ottawa-based artist whose profile as fanclubwallet has been rising, in part due to music streaming. Photo by Ian Filipovic.
Hannah Judge started quietly making music without announcing to anybody that she was. At the time, the 21-year-old was living in Montreal working at a job she didn’t like, and after saving some money she quit and moved back to Ottawa. She then joined a girl rock group and released an EP, working odd jobs on the side. Then the band broke up.
“I was like, ‘Okay, I still like music. Let’s keep making it,’” she said. “After that, I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna make solo music. I’m gonna let people hear the stuff that I secretly make.”
From there, Judge began recording her work under her moniker fanclubwallet in early 2020. It wasn’t long before Canada went into its first lockdown to slow the spread of COVID-19. Judge said she had to learn pretty quickly how to navigate streaming services to get her music out into the world.
“I didn’t expect that a pandemic would hit and that it would kind of have to all be online,” she said. “So, I’m definitely really lucky because my best friend, who’s also my producer, has been doing the Spotify thing for a long time with their band, uploading stuff to Spotify, and knows kind of like how it all works. I think if you don’t know how it works, it can be confusing, and it’s definitely harder to work around.”
Judge’s fanclubwallet track “Car Crash in G Major” took off on Spotify and other streaming platforms this past winter, securing a spot on the much coveted “New Music Friday” playlist.
Her meteoric rise on the platform caught the attention of legendary US agent Tom Windish, who has worked with the likes of Billie Eilish, Lorde and Diplo. Windish reached out to Judge personally to offer to become her manager. “We just kind of talked for a while and then we were like, ‘Let’s do this. Let’s try this out. Let’s see how this works,’” said Hannah. “He’s great. Nothing but nice things to say about him.”
From about 1.5 million streams of that single, Judge has earned about $6,000 U.S., or approximately $7,250 Canadian. With that number of streams, she was offered a record label deal. In that deal, Judge gets the lion’s share of royalties from her streams at about 75 per cent.
Hahaha wtf 1 million!!! I literally can’t believe it! thank y’all!!🤯💕 pic.twitter.com/y0iiFoyevl— Hannah (@fanclubwallet) January 8, 2021
Playlisting is a big deal on music streaming services. For an artist to find their song on a high-visibility playlist is comparable to how consequential radio play has traditionally been. How a song is determined to be deserving of a prized spot on a prominent playlist relies on a combination of data-driven processes and the work of human curators, located worldwide.
A curator shared their evaluation process with Spotify. The curator, whose name was not divulged in the Spotify article, explained, “The strategy is based on the playlist itself. Each has its own hypothesis, theme, or audience that we’re thinking about. If it’s one of the genre-specific playlists, like Are & Be, that’s the home for the current, biggest songs in that space. The Newness is new releases or developing artists… It really all depends on what the goal of the specific playlist is.”
In 2018, Spotify introduced the pitch form as a way for musicians to apply for playlist curator consideration. Prior to the pitch system, curators would determine songs on a playlist without an avenue for artists to apply. As of February 2020, Spotify has playlisted 72,000 artists and has a pitch acceptance rate of 20 per cent.
Ottawa local Michael Watson releases solo music under the Plastic Farm moniker, produces, and plays in a number of other bands in the area. Photo by Hannah Judge.
Michael Watson is the friend of Judge who helped get her music on Spotify, and is also the producer of her work.
When they were 16 years old, the first single from Watson’s solo music project, Plastic Farm, earned them a spot on the “Fresh Finds” playlist, which features best new music from independent artists and labels.
They also secured a place on many of the Discover Weekly playlists that Spotify would customize for individual users. Discover Weekly is a personalized playlist that showcases music uniquely tailored to each individual user’s taste and listening habits.
Watson was willing to shed light on how streams translate into cash for artists. Plastic Farm’s song “For A Moment,” had a total of approximately 165,000 streams over a five-year period, so Watson has earned $779 U.S., or a little over $930 Canadian.
“For me in the beginning, obviously, I had zero expectations,” said Watson. “And then I got all those streams. And then it started paying out and, you know, when you’re 16 or 17, you only really need like, 100 bucks a month, which is what I was getting for a good long while.”
“As a teenager, you’re kind of naive. I remember being like, I’m gonna put up my second EP before I graduate high school, and I’ll be set. That’s like my goal. I’m just gonna be set off Spotify money. Which obviously, did not happen. But it led me to learn. And now I’m actually kind of there. I’m living directly off independent money.”
Watson said that they generate this income from their solo project, their band Chemical Club, and from producing other artists and independent Ottawa bands that have been enjoying some visibility and success, including Judge.
“I’m really thankful for the money that Car Crash made me,” said Judge. “It goes straight into my savings. But I think, they do need to be paying more for people to actually live off of it.”
“So I think streaming is really complicated. And I honestly still haven’t figured out if it’s a good thing or a bad thing,” said Judge.
“I know that it’s positively affecting me, which I’m super thankful for. But I know it really negatively affects a lot of people. But I do think that having that option to make playlists on Spotify, at least you’re getting paid something versus if streaming services hadn’t ever come into play.”
Judge added, “It is better than nothing, but it’s giving us below the bare minimum.”
“I know some people will try to argue for one cent per play. I don’t know about that, though. Because then you’d be making crazy amounts of money. Like Taylor Swift would be too rich.”
“There needs to be more, I don’t know, almost like rights for artists,” said Judge.
As a result of streaming services stepping into that curatorial role, there’s a difference between what the platforms promise and what they actually deliver, according to Liz Pelly, contributing editor at The Baffler, an American magazine known for its cultural, political, and business analysis.
Pelly, who has written extensively on Spotify and music streaming platforms, said the way music can be discovered in recent years is markedly different than distribution channels in the past. “Now where people are discovering music through streaming playlists, and personalized recommendations, there’s sort of this myth that streaming services have access to like 30 million songs, or like every song in the world,” said Pelly.
“But more often than not what people are presented with the discovery mechanisms of these platforms–through the playlist they see on the homepage, or the playlist that they see in their ‘made for you’ tab–are extremely homogenized.”
“Streaming services are focused on engagement like all other companies across the platform economy. They don’t want to lose you as a listener, they want to keep you engaged and listening and streaming” – Liz Pelly
It is also impossible to separate the moneyed interests of a company like Spotify with how it decides to curate music for its users. Their recommendations are directly linked with their desire to capture users for as long as possible, said Pelly.
“Streaming services are focused on engagement like all other companies across the platform economy. They don’t want to lose you as a listener, they want to keep you engaged and listening and streaming,” she said. “You’re not going to discover anything adventurous or strange or challenging to be served recommendations of things.”
“Music platforms gravitate toward recommending music that can be considered background music: music that is not obtrusive or distracting and can be played at a low volume while the user does something else,” she said.
Music recommendations are also highly influenced by labels, large and small, Pelly added.
“The music that you see on the front page, there is this illusion that you have a lot of music to choose from, but oftentimes what you are being shown is actually highly curated and influenced by lots of different people making decisions to make the people who they have financial responsibilities to happy.”
Music scholar Brian Fauteux said what might be unique about this moment is the degree to which a winner-takes-all scenario has emerged for artists.
“There’s always been that gap between artists who make it and those that don’t in the music industry,” he said. “Some end up being welcomed and become quite profitable by kind of playing the industry game, and others do not. I think that has intensified and the gap between the immensely successful artists and those who aren’t has widened.”
In a collaborative study, Fauteux and his colleagues looked at the number and variety of Canadian songs that found a place on the Billboard charts in the 1990s and 2000s and compared that to recent years.
“Drake, Justin Bieber and The Weeknd are like a huge percentage of the hit songs that are charting now and you have this kind of concentrated success within these three artists,” said Fauteux.
Spotify points to the success of those three artists as proof of its contribution to promoting Canadian music, according to testimony before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.
“… Thanks to our local Canadian music experts, Canadian culture is thriving not only in Canada, but all around the world. It is of no surprise that three of the top 10 artists globally on Spotify are Canadians.”
Even though an imbalance of success existed in prior decades, Fauteux said, “There seemed to be a wider variety of artists who were charting and who had successful singles or albums out.”
Brian Fauteux has researched music industries and music radio broadcasting for about 10 years. He is a professor at the University of Alberta. Photo by Dallas Curow.