Sublime

Streaming sites have thus transformed into enterprises whose business is not limited to the sale of music-related services, but relies increasingly upon the collection, aggregation, and exchange of user data. A key issue this article pursues concerns the changing status of music within the commercial strategies of online streaming. While previous r... See more

Ek: “It used to be before that if you were a musician, you just put out music. But almost every successful creator now is omni- talented and omni-channel. That means that they are on YouTube putting up videos. They are on Instagram. They are perhaps putting together brands and putting it on Shopify, but they're also putting out music and merchandis... See more

This emphasis on creator independence, or giving individuals tools to self publish and promote, has brought with it many benefits, however, as we discussed previously, I believe there to be a real ceiling on the heavily individuated approaches of places like Patreon or substack.

"When we look at what happened with streaming, the artists who adopted early and understood how to leverage the streaming platforms in terms of cadence of release, number of releases a year, and how to market those releases through social, sped past artists who were coming from the iTunes download world.We saw a totally streaming native star come o... See more

In other words, streaming is a lot more profitable for all the actual value creators after we bypass these technopolies.