Adding Up Music’s 1 Percent
Streaming could have leveled the playing field, but the top acts have an even bigger lead than before
In its early days, streaming offered users a glimmer of a utopian free-for-all: a musical landscape where all artists had access to the same audience, an endless buffet of options that would lead listeners beyond blockbuster albums to an array of underground obscurities.
But in reality, today’s streaming landscape looks a lot like the music industry used to. There’s a small class of artists who see not just the majority of activity, but damn near all of it.
In fact, streaming hasn’t just upheld the gap between music’s haves and have-nots — it’s widened it. An analysis of current music, using figures from Alpha Data for ondemand audio and video streams tracked from January 18th, 2019, to July 17th of this year, revealed that the top one percent of artists managed to account for 90 percent of all streams.
When it comes to album sales, 83 percent went to the top one percent of artists. In physical album sales, things are a little more equitable: The top one percent accounted for just 54 percent of the total sales in the same January-July period. Streaming does, however, mark an improvement from radio, where the top one percent received practically all — 99.996 percent, to be exact — radio spins on the music released during that time.
Nearly all of the streams went to artists in the top 10 percent, with the bottom 90 percent pulling in just 0.6 percent of streams. Almost half of the artists analyzed saw fewer than 100 streams on the music they released. Comparatively, the top 10 percent account for 92 percent of physical album sales, and 100 percent of radio airplay.
Much of the reason for the discrepancy between sales and streaming is simple: There is exponentially more music available to stream than is available to buy. Last year, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek estimated that close to 40,000 tracks were being added to the service every day. It’s so difficult for most artists to rise above that noise that some have been paying third-party companies to push their music to Spotify playlists.
“You’re just gonna get drowned out, no matter what,” Jason Grishkoff, who runs one of these companies, SubmitHub, told Rolling Stone’s Elias Leight. “I don’t envy most of the artists out there.”