Nobel Prize-Winning Influencers
Here at the office we were excited to find out that Janelle Gray, one of the folks over at Scratchmade (i.e., the people who help make Capital Camp and Main Street Summit such successes), recently released her first EP on Spotify. Described by Janelle as being in the singer/songwriter aesthetic, it was a “random” project several years in the making. So congratulations Janelle and give it a listen.
It was in the course of hearing Janelle describe how the project came to be that I learned that Spotify pays artists $0.004 per stream. This seemed like a low number to me, so I ran the math.
Janelle’s most streamed song is “Almost a Broken Heart,” which is three minutes and 56 seconds long, which I’ll round to four minutes. The median salary for a full-time US worker is about $60K (again, round numbers). So for Janelle to earn a median annual salary from her hit single streaming on Spotify, it would need to be streamed 15 million times. At 4 minutes long, that’s 60M minutes of listening, which is the equivalent of about 114 years.
And I thought that was kind of an interesting juxtaposition; that people would need to spend more than 114 years listening to Janelle’s music in order for Janelle to earn one year’s average salary from it. Further, that seems like a lot. I think Janelle would be over the moon if “Almost a Broken Heart” was streamed 15M times.
But before I bemoan the economics of Spotify for artists, I have to admit that there are others who seem to be doing quite well on the platform. The most streamed artist looks to be Taylor Swift, with nearly 100B listens. If she’s earning the same $0.004 per stream (and I suspect her team is savvy enough to have negotiated more), then she has pocketed a cool $400M from the platform, which is many, many times the median salary for a full-time US worker and probably several more orders of magnitude greater than what “Almost a Broken Heart” will generate.
Money Stuff Matt Levine also pointed out that you can make money arbitraging the cost of Spotify relative to your royalties if you listen to yourself nonstop (but I think they put a stop to that so Janelle, if you’re reading, don’t do that).
What’s relevant is that I think this dispersion in outcomes is significantly wider than the dispersion in effort to create or quality of the products achieving them. In other words, while the relative quality of something like songs being put out into the world is linear, the relative commercial successes of those songs follow a power law, with the factors that contribute to the relative commercial successes of those songs in many cases being unpredictable.
I don’t know that this is a problem, but it is a reality, and one that seems to be being exacerbated by the ability of the internet to create momentum for an idea, person, or thing without regard to merit (though perhaps an influencer will one day win a Nobel Prize). At the risk of waxing poetic about the old days, I think there was once optimism that the internet would enable longer tails and more exposure for good ideas that perhaps didn’t previously have access to a platform. But now as the internet has been “optimized” and the platform noisier and more expensive, the “middle” in areas like arts, politics, sports, and business seems to be getting hollowed out. Yes, the tail is longer than before because anybody can put something out in the world, but it’s also flatter because the world’s attention, enabled by technology, is being gobbled up by fewer and fewer actors.
Again, I don’t know that this is a problem, but it is a reality, and it will be interesting to see where that leads us.
– Tim