Spotify and the Long Tail
Spotify has come to dominate the music streaming service ever since its launch 12 years ago. Since then, it has garnered 180 million subscribers and is now worth around 34 billion dollars on the NY Stock Exchange. Spotify has been able to benefit by providing music from artists that were previously exclusive, like Beyoncé, Kanye West, Drake, and Chance the Rapper. These artists now comprise a group of musicians with consistently high streaming rates. A quick spotify search puts Drake at around 45 million monthly listeners. Ariana Grande, another of their highly-streamed artists has 37 million monthly listeners, as her recent single “thank u, next” is this week’s most streamed song in the US. But lately, Spotify has been facing stiff competition from big companies like Google and Amazon, who are putting out new streaming services with Youtube and Amazon Music. As competition grows, it seems Spotify has been tapping into its “long tail” markets.
There are a significant amount of “smaller artists” on spotify, that generally generate far fewer streams than their famous counterparts, similar to the long tail scenarios discussed in class. These niche markets have often existed in music as people personalize their music tastes outside of the mainstream. Spotify tracks the music and artists you listen to and save onto playlists and then uses various algorithms to generate more songs you might enjoy but might not have listened to yet. Spotify hopes that through their generated playlists, they’ll give listeners to their small, undiscovered, niche artists. When I look into my own “Discover Weekly” playlist that it generates for me, I recognize none of the artists. Many of these artists have only a few hundred thousand monthly listeners according to their spotify pages. With “Discover Weekly,” spotify claims to have connected “40 million listeners” with nearly 50 billion new songs in less than a year.” The company also produces its own “Fresh Finds” playlist for all spotify listeners, again full of artists with far fewer monthly listeners. These Fresh Find artists start off with 100 monthly listeners, but often end up with tens of thousands of listeners after the playlist feature. The streaming service is also attempting to attract more small artists along with their listeners. A couple months ago, they announced a new beta feature for the Spotify for Artists, which allows independent musicians to directly upload their music to the platform and help them “rack metrics surrounding their streams and their fan base demographics.” These music uploads are free of charge and the artists can still generate revenue from royalty payments based on streams. It should be noted that Spotify has faced backlash from small artists, who often receive a very small amount of revenue even if they get near a million streams per month. Overall, the company’s actions indicate that, in services with near unlimited consumer choice, the “long tail” has undeniable influence.
https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7385830/wheres-the-long-tail-spotify-artist-discovery
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/20/spotify-will-now-let-indie-artists-upload-their-own-music/