Folks, would you believe that there are millions of people listening to radio every day and once they abandon radio for Spotify, the money will just roll in. That’s what YouTube argued in 2016 and Daniel Ek continues to repeat the same line. There’s no reason to expect such a one-to-one transfer of audience, but it’s nice to want things.
Happy that Cherie answered a fairly open question about the effects of donation links on streaming platforms. Lotta nice press releases and not much else.
It’s very rare that I include interviews but this one is a strong exception. Jake Colvin did a lot of research for this (yes, I’m cited), and though I don’t always agree with some of the solutions proposed by Colvin or Hou, it’s certainly the kind of post-streaming dialogue I’d love to engage in.
Good news? Even though every country is reacting to the coronavirus in their own ways, it would appear that China’s music industry, at least on the digital side, was always more diversified than western music and that’s helping in this moment. While there is a confused scramble to figure out livestreaming and things like tipping, such features were already well incorporated in Chinese platforms.
These TikTok viral hit stories tell such a similar story it can get a bit boring. Yet, I do appreciate this one simply because it’s easy to see when something is truly viral and not put through a playlist machine to juice up the numbers and climb the charts.
Neither of these pieces are about music but both offer a couple insights I find helpful for thinking about streaming platforms. The first, from Stoller, mentions some fairly blunt regulation that could be headed towards some of the platforms. In a music context, this could mean imposing radio-like restrictions on streaming platforms, which isn’t a new demand. The other piece points out the fact that delivery platforms (as they exist now) are just completely broken. In this regard, I do find an interesting parallel to streaming, where a solution could just be to find a way to reduce the number of layers involved.