Using data to improve Artist revenue

This is just a sample of 1 user (me) and 1 artist (Badly Drawn Boy) but I think provides some insight into how revenue from music has changed and how better communications/use of data can help artists get more fairly compensated for their work, which is even more important now with the lack of Live performances.

Source of revenue has changed over time as this chart (adapted from RIAA data) shows and you can consider today’s artists to be lucky or unlucky depending on whether you compare to the trough of a few years ago before streaming fully kicked in or the late ‘90s heyday of CD sales.

Obviously there’s a difference between revenue within an industry and what an artist actually receives. The #BrokenRecord movement aims to raise awareness of the situation and try to improve it.

Ultimately there are 4 possibilities:

• Same share of a bigger pie: Spotify is ￡9.99 / €9.99 / $9.99 a month so breaking 10+ in these territories is presumably seen as a psychological barrier, the number of people who can afford ￡9.99 but not ￡11.99 will be relatively small but it could tip the balance for enough people who feel that then it doesn’t give value for money. When you’re focused on acquisition more than profitability, the last thing you want is a churn problem. 
• Bigger slice of the pie: Getting tech companies or record labels to be more generous is probably a futile task
• Split revenue on a per user rather than a per stream basis: Overall this doesn’t return any more money to artists but it feels a fairer way of doing things. On a simplified level imagine Person A registers 90 streams of artist 1 and Person B listens to 10 streams of Artist 2 in a period, then on the per user basis Artists 1 and 2 receive the same amount but on the per stream basis Artist 1 receives 9 times as much. This means revenue goes more to the kind of artists heavy Spotify users listen to which is likely to penalise more niche acts
• Use streaming to Increase off-streaming revenue for artists: this for me is the most obvious opportunity. I don’t think the model of streaming itself is going to change any time soon, but using that data and level of interaction to create opportunities for Artists (and not just monetisation for themselves) is something streaming services can do to increase fairness.

Spotify knew enough about my listening habits to email me in August and October 2019 and January 2020 about concerts from Badly Drawn Boy (and others) - the email heading being ‘Upcoming shows near London’ however is not going to get me rushing to open, it wouldn’t kill them to have a dynamic subject line based on content.

I didn’t however get any prompting about the (then) new single ‘Is This a Dream’ in Jan 2020 or the Album ‘Banana Skin Shoes’ in May. The first I heard about it was via the excellent Tape Notes Podcast where Badly Drawn Boy and producer Gethin Pearson discussed the recording/production process. 

My grasp of what’s going on in the world was never the best but in current times the news of a new album completely passed me by but since hearing the podcast I’ve probably listened to the album about 15 times. Looking at how the album has done overall, shows a peak for ‘Is this a Dream’ which came out four months earlier than the rest of the album:

Back to me and Badly Drawn Boy, ‘The Hour of Bewilderbeast’ was the first thing I ever bought on Amazon back in 2000, for some reason even though my short-term memory is shot to pieces I can remember standing in my back garden opening the package back in a time when internet shopping was a novelty. It’s a great album and I’ve bought a number of his albums since.

With such a large proportion of income from recorded music now coming from Streaming it raises questions about what an album is and how it should be structured. Do you put all the ‘immediate’ tracks up front, do certain song titles grab passers-by, should you ensure the intro isn’t too long to avoid the track being skipped in the first 30 seconds and therefore not counting as a stream?

Looking at stream counts for Badly Drawn Boy on Spotify, I noticed one track that was 28 seconds (A Gentle Touch), so doesn’t register plays, it came out in 2009 so would have had to have been pretty prescient to have added an extra couple of seconds to hit the target.

Trying to think of someone who often has short tracks I had a look at Emimem’s new album and a 30-second track there had over 26m plays. This is around a third of the volume of the tracks either side but that 26m plays equates to over $90k in revenue for a 30 second sample of Alfred Hitchcock.

There’s no way both because of GDPR and also that it’d be terrible business sense for the likes of Spotify to supply Artists with the contact details of regular listeners but I do think there’s an option for Streaming services to act as a gateway between Artists and Fans.

Have a service on the app called something like ‘Fan Connect’, which lists the 20 or so Artists a user listens to most and offer an opt-in option for each of these. On the other side of things an Artist (or their label) can create content that can be pushed out to these followers - I know Spotify has a ‘follow’ option but I think you need it a bit more explicit and in a single place for all your Artists. 

This could be subject to contact limits (e.g., 2 contacts per month) but the content itself (within reason) is anything goes. For Badly Drawn Boy for example that could be areas of promotion outside of Spotify (e.g., Bandcamp) but also pushing people that have listened to the Single to the Album, directing people to a personally collated playlist of his tracks or directing people to relevant podcasts such as his Tape Notes appearance.

Spotify are going increasingly big on Podcasts and an obvious avenue to promote would be music related Podcasts, right now listening to Podcasts on Spotify feels like putting custard on chips, the two don't go together but convincing people like me to make Spotify my default podcast player rather than Apple's podcast app would be something that improves retention for relatively little cost.

Ultimately, I think the best chance for Artists to get a fairer share of the benefits from the rise of Spotify and other Streaming services is with indirect access to user data with the Streaming services as an enabler rather than a blocker.