We went viral on LinkedIn! 🤯
We went viral on LinkedIn! 🤯 Here's the good, the bad, and the ugly... 🫠 Now did we really want to make a 20 slide text image post about this? No. Did we feel like we needed to showcase our support for indie artists + our deep understanding and constant curiosity of the system so we can do our best to help make it work for said indie artists? Yes. 👩🏫💼🎵
While we hope the system WILL change more to the favor of independent artists, we do know that this world doesn't change easily nor quickly, especially when dealing with multiBillonaires. So in the meantime, we choose to understand it and do our part to help artists make it work for them, as best as we can. 🌞
We generated some serious debate, as you'll see here, and even learned about some cool new platforms and ideas. Plus Kelsy's favorite music industry economist even found the post. Enjoy. 🥂
EEEEK this is just not right. 😵💫
An artist must have at least 15 million streams per year to make the US median annual wage ($60K). That's assuming they own 100% of their publishing and masters, and that's not accounting for any expenses that can be deducted as a business entity. Most artists' grossing around this annual amount probably need to spend around a 1/3 of that on operating expenses (this is my anecdote), maybe more or less depending on their unique situation.
So if your monthly listeners are relatively stable and your average streams per listener is 2 (this could be low - it depends on the artist, their level of fan engagement/affinity, and their catalog), you need 625K monthly listeners to achieve 15 million streams per year. Again, this is assuming you are collecting 100% of the royalties and own 100% of publishing and masters. Some examples of artists I have saved in my library that are in this realm of monthly listener amounts:
- Magic City Hippies (a band, so this would be divided)
- Jamila Woods
- Julien Baker (not sure if this is looking at just solo work - it may include streams from boygenius songs that she is a featured artist on)
- Eloise
According to Chartmetric, there are currently 1,261 artists that currently have a monthly listener count between 600,000 and 650,000. Out of 11.3 million total artists tracked on the platform. 👀
Share this if you find these statistics valuable!
EDIT: A lot of folks in the comments are taking issue with the idea that Ek's net worth is unnecessary, and that for his innovative work, this amount of wealth is warranted/deserved. So here's some more opinion backed by numbers for you:
"There is no justified reason for anyone to have a net worth above $100 million - that is still so much money and a very healthy reward for doing innovative work for an industry that was crashing. To put it in perspective, that is 1/70th of Ek's current net worth, and still 38x more than a wealthy upper class family (assuming avg of top 10% of earners having a net worth of $2.65m)."
I urge everyone to do this simple math to truly understand how much money we are talking about here.
