I met the manager and promoter for a successful new music artist. The successful artist is Keshi and the manager/promoter is JamesDai. James is with Soka Talent Group.
Keshi is a musician with millions of views for each of his songs on Youtube and who plays at large stadiums in China.
This is becoming very rare. What is rare? New music and new music artists.
476 songs have surpassed 1 billion streams on Spotify as of 25th September, 2023. Spotify’s BILLIONS CLUB playlist shows the tracks which have reached the milestone, revealing the wide array of artists who have hit the impressive number, including: Sia, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, and Arctic Monkeys.
The average price per stream is $0.004. $4 for every 1,000 streams. $4000 for each million streams. It is about 4 million for a billion streams. Drake has the most streams on Spotify with over 60 billion.
Old Music is Dominating Because of the Algorithm and Preference Feedback Loop
In 2022, Ted Gioia article in The Atlantic asked is Old Music Killing New Music? Old songs represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market. Even worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking. 200 most popular new tracks are only 5% of total streams and a few years ago it was 10%. Top ten songs (last 18 months) are having less and less impact.
The main music industry can just support old and established musicians and musical groups.
The top 20 musical acts by tour revenue in 2022.
The top musical acts in 2023 are Taylor Swift and Beyonce.
A and R stands for “Artists and Repertoire”. It’s a division of a record label or music publishing company that handles:
Talent scouting
Artist development
Overseeing the recording process
Marketing and promotion
Acting as a liaison between artists and the record label or publishing company.
As of November 2023, the annual salary for a Music A&R ranges from $31,000 to $67,000.
Search algorithms are designed to provide music and content in general that is like what has worked before. This causes stagnation in music and in many kinds of content.
Music industry experts describe how decades ago in the age of CDs there was artist development and millions of album sales for the top artists. Around 2001, the music industry consolidated and the amount of money to artists dropped to 9% (13% total but 3% for the producer and 1% for the mixer). The money for producers continued to drop through 2008.
Rick Beato discusses how to succeed in music today and how the economics of music has changed.
Damian Keyes worked with musicians every day of my life for the past 20 years. He was signed to a major label when he was 18 and was dropped 6 months later. At 23, he co-founded a Music University in Europe called BIMM (valued at $300M). He played bass for Eric Clapton, Alanis Morrisette and Billy Cobham.
Damian says that new music artists have to manage themselves as content creators. They have to make 15-30 second videos for Tik Tok and Instagram and Youtube and develop their own following. He gives more advice to musical artists.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
It’S looking like the last decent place for independent artist download, Bandcamp, is now in a death spiral as well.
And, of course, the RIAA managed to kill off MP3 dot com, which had been allowing creators to monetize their music and retain most of the profits themselves. It’s notable that when they took over, their very first move was to delete every bit of the indy content, even though MP3 had standing contracts requiring it to be kept up perpetually, and the indies weren’t part of the IP violations they’d leveraged to take it over.
I know, because I had perpetual download rights to a lot of indy music there, which I’d paid good money to the artists for, and it all went ‘poof’. (Glad I always made a point of securing physical copies.)
There’s plenty of money in the system to support new artists, but the established players got the market legally tied up, and make sure it can’t reach them.