As Spotify puts it, “for 2019 we’re focused on growth and velocity: all the ways your career grew, your music exploded, and your fans had you on repeat.” And even if more Spotify streaming helps you get gigs by increasing your fan base, or helping people discover your music through playlists, that still doesn’t explain why you need to share those stats with fans. In a statement, the company says they’re “dedicated to growing careers and sustaining momentum.” The key is how they define “momentum,” which is driving up playback stats and getting music “on repeat.” But unlike a platform like Bandcamp, that doesn’t include ownership of the music or any way to offer merchandise (which generates more revenue) or ownership of listener statistics, which might assist you in planning a tour or connecting with fans directly. It’s about building Spotify’s business, Spotify’s growth, Spotify’s core data – improving engagement for them, on a platform they own and control.īut why should I make that argument, when Spotify makes that argument for me? Even without considering the pittance of income that generates for artists, it isn’t about you. (SoundCloud has offered similar data, too, for years, in greater detail.) The rest is all about feeding Spotify’s goals, which is to say, increasing the amount of streaming engagement on Spotify.
Note that of these, only one element – growth by country – is really useful for gathering data about how you’d want to expand your fan base or, for instance, where to tour.
With apologies to those of you who did share this for some reason already, here’s why I think critics are justified in sounding an alarm. If you live by the numbers your career also dies by the numbers- Scott Harris December 6, 2019īut then once they began appearing, the flood of reports posted to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter has become unnervingly commonplace. Ironically, I heard about the backlash to the wrapped artists before I started seeing reports. (Top tip to those artists: if you get a deal from a Nigerian prince or someone promising to, uh, improve some aspect of your anatomy, I suggest applying some caution before you act. Here’s where things get weird – a whole bunch of artists just read that, and did as instructed. The artist email email concludes with the instruction to “share your highlights with your fans on social.”
(Richard Lawler wrote this up for Engadget.) (Mine for some reason isn’t available, so I’m guessing there’s some lag from demand.) The service coincides with a “Wrapped” report for listeners/fans, which shows which tracks they streamed most. Spotify sent an email last week to all artists registered for the Spotify for Artists program, with a link to “2019 Wrapped for Artists.” You need to be an artist with music on Spotify, but that’s it – the company even says you only needed three (!) listeners prior to the end of October to qualify for the “Wrapped” report. Putting aside the streaming business model itself for a moment, though, let’s consider what artists are doing here. There are reasons to distribute music to streaming services, and ways of leveraging that distribution to financial benefit (albeit largely indirect). First, before I sound immediately anti-Spotify or anti-streaming, this isn’t necessarily about that.
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