A Different Type of Streaming Platform
Imagining a music streaming platform that would be good for musicians
If you are a small or independent artist in the current streaming economy, you better be good at selling t-shirts.
I will not recount all of the ways that the Big Platform Royalty Model screws over small artists. Too much has already been written on that. Instead, I’d like to sketch out a possible alternative.
What if instead of perpetuating a 1% winner-take-all mindset of the Music Industry, there were a platform designed specifically to make music-making a viable career choice for the 99% of musicians who will never rack up enough streams to cover their rent?
Note: the likelihood of anything like this actually happening is less than near zero. Alas, consider this a thought experiment.
Here’s how the platform would work:
Artist royalties are capped.
All artists on the platform who meet some threshold (could be evidence of touring, references from peers, recommendations from platform members or music journalists, even an evaluated proposal) are placed in tiers and can move up or down those tiers over time.
Artists are paid quarterly based on where they sit on the tier structure. And this is the key thing: Payments are paid out to artists from the pool of surplus of funds gathered from above the cap.
What this means in practice (simple math version): If Artist X has a billion streams, they get paid a royalty for the first 100 million of those streams. The royalty monies from the remaining 900 million streams is put into a pot and distributed quarterly to all artists on the platform — their take depending on what tier they are on.
Being on the platform would be non-exclusive. So if Artist X wants to make another billion dollars on Spotify, good for them. But by choosing to be on the platform, Artist X is making a public commitment to the global community of musicians. And it’s not just happy talk. The public commitment means that artists at various stages of their careers can enjoy regular royalties to help sustain their career.
The tier system would be community-based. That way, artists can have a reasonable path to rise up through the tiers — and different types of artists can rise up through the tiers in different ways according to the type of work they do. Artists whose primary vehicle is the studio would not feel compelled to tour while road-dogs would not feel like they were under constant pressure to get in the studio to record one-offs to stay relevant on a streaming platform.
And in the end, the success of the platform would depend on the audience choosing to listen to the big artists on it rather than on Spotify and the like. A big part of that comes down to providing a better user experience with things like:
better quality audio
the ability for artists to sign-off on playback levels that effect the work they’ve done in mastering before publishing on the platform (which results in a better listening experience for listeners — especially when they want to put together playlists)
linked data to group all of the work done by an artist who has used different names or has played in a number of groups in one place and make the artists’ entire work more accessible to find
related: a better system of handling search for classical music and related music where there are a wealth of recordings by different artists of works by the same composer
enhanced album art options including better ways to handle liner notes
integrated video
These are just some of the ways that the user experience of the new platform could be an improvement over what’s out there. I’m sure I’m missing about 10,000 other ideas.
So, chances of this type of platform actually happening? Not high. I don’t even know where you’d begin. Maybe by getting some big star to say it’s a good idea. But something has to happen, and I think this is a decent thought experiment. A place to start.