From Fast Company:
Like a lot of musicians now, Scott Hansen was pretty skeptical of Spotify. To Hansen, the mastermind of chilled-out electronic music outfit Tycho, the streaming service and the new era it seemed to herald posed troubling questions: Am I getting paid enough to support myself? Is my craft doomed? Is this whole streaming model even sustainable to begin with?
Anxious questions like these remain unresolved for many artists as the music industry reshapes itself and streaming becomes its biggest source of income. Thanks to streaming, record labels are finally seeing their revenue grow after years of decline, but the gains don’t always trickle down to musicians and songwriters. Spotify recently settled a $43 million class action lawsuit over royalty payments that went unpaid to certain artists, likely due to a metadata error. In other cases, the royalties flow, but not always in large sums. One of Spotify’s own executives recently conceded publicly that streaming doesn’t pay artists “enough.”
But for an increasing number of artists, including Tycho’s Hansen, the advantages of the streaming era are beginning to come into sharper focus.
“I definitely think we’re in a better place than we were three years ago, that’s for sure,” says Hansen, by phone from somewhere outside Cologne, a stop on the group’s recent European tour. The tour’s been a big success, he says, something he attributes, in part, to an experimental marketing project at Spotify. (The group’s recent Grammy nomination likely didn’t hurt either.) By aiming email and web ads at listeners who seemed likely to care the most about their music, the program helped the group sell about 1,600 tickets in Europe, Hansen says, and a total of more than 4,000 tickets this year. “I see it getting better as more people adopt that way of consuming music,” says Hansen.
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As Spotify seeks to build better relationships with record companies and music publishers—and as artists seek new sources of cash—the company’s executives and artists say the efforts are already helping, providing precise data to help artists make smarter career decisions, and leading to bigger ticket and merchandise sales. Collectively, the company says, the relatively young effort has generated millions in additional revenue for musicians–results that, after years of industry upheaval, are hard to ignore.
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Of course, not every artist can realistically expect this kind of free marketing push from Spotify. In an attempt to build stronger personal ties to the recording industry, promote and develop artists on Spotify, and bolster the company’s artist-facing tools, Spotify hired investor and former Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter last year as its global head of creator services. Carter’s job, interfacing with artists, managers, and labels, is about being “better partners,” he says “whether it’s helping you co-market a product on our platform, helping you understand how the international market works, or how our playlisting works.”
Link to the rest at Fast Company