Spotify Is Eating the Entire Music Business

Now streaming is still the most important digital channel by far, but you're starting to see these new things emerge. So for an artist, there is a lot more complexity to distributing your product now.  

As T Bone Burnett once said, “Major labels figured out that catering to people who don’t need music in their lives makes them more money.” Passive streaming is a prime example—when music plays in the background at shops, hairdressers, or when Spotify keeps going after you’ve fallen asleep. Major labels don’t pay for these streams but heavily invest... See more

Sound, which lets musicians sell their songs as NFTs to their biggest fans, has been on fire in its first month. Its 5pm daily drops have become appointment internet, and it sold out its first 21 consecutive drops in under a minute each and paid out over $200k to artists (plus a 10% cut of secondary transactions, which have been very active). It wo... See more

While musicians faced an existential crisis during a pandemic, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s ownership stake in Spotify climbed to be worth over $4 billion. In order to earn $4 billion, a musician earning the median wage of $25,000 would have to work for 160,000 years – in other words, they’d have to have started working before human history began.