“The New Music Friday lists provide heavier coverage of independent and domestic music.” For example, “the major global lists tend to promote major label and US-origin music,” the study finds. New Music Friday list raises a song’s streams by about 14 million.”Ĭertain official playlists tend to support different artists and labels. The study states that being added to the Today’s Top Hits playlist, “raises a song’s eventual streams by almost 20 million, which is almost a quarter of the average value of streams for songs that make that playlist.” In addition, “being ranked #1 on the U.S. That dramatic change can happen in less than 24 hours, based on the decision of one playlist manager. The more artists that are in that position, the more Spotify is also in a position of strength the next time licensing negotiations with the labels come around.Either way, the takeaway is simple: getting on a highly-followed Spotify playlists can completely change an artist’s career. If enough have done this and made a good amount of money along the way, it will be hard for them to give up at least half the proceeds to a label down the road. Yet, Spotify won't save all that much money signing even relatively big indie artists to direct deals, so why even broach something that might upset their label partners? If you think about it, Spotify appears to be looking long-term with this strategy, which is to ink direct deals with the potential superstars of the future. A label has much less incentive to sign an artist if it knows that Spotify might not be an available income stream to them. A major label still has the marketing and promotion infrastructure to boost an artist to superstardom that can't be easily or inexpensively duplicated, so if the artist even thinks he or she will need this type of heavy lifting in the future, a direct deal might jeopardize that. Spotify's deal is also said to be non-exclusive, allowing the artist to go make similar deals with other streaming services as well, if available.īut there are risks involved for the artist too.

A direct deal means that the artist now collects the entire $1, which, of course, is very attractive. That means that for every $1 brought in by the label from Spotify, the artist sees anywhere from 20 to 50 cents. One of the problems with streaming for an artist is that regardless of what Spotify and other streaming services are paying out, the artist is only seeing 20-50% of that revenue due to the terms of their agreement with their record label. Before I throw out a theory, let's look at what's in it for the artist.

Spotify artist rankings 2018