In a Flat World, the Local Music Band is the Crumbs

For all those with Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Deezer, or any musical streaming service. the world is open to anything you want to listen to. So do you listen to the top musicians out there or do you listen to your local favorite?

The answer is probably a little local, a lot of classic (older than 20 years old) music, and the top artists in whatever genre you’re into.

So as a local or new artist, you can’t expect to get a huge following. the probability doesn’t work. Even if you’re awesome…so awesome that someone other than your girlfriend listens… you’re going to have to do something to break through other than the music.

Take your own musical interests, and let’s extrapolate to the world. Let’s assume you listen 50% of the time to local musicians (let’s be generous and say you listen to 10 local musicians), 25% to classic stuff (I’ll use Beatles, AC DC and Tom Petty as examples, but it could be Merle Haggard, or Madonna), and 25% to the top musicians, let’s use Taylor Swift and others in that genre as our example.

So you listen 100 hours a month or about 2,000 songs. 50% to 10 local bands. Each of those bands get 100 listens from you (woohoo! 30 cents! awesome!). Then that’s 25 hours or 500 listens to classic songs and 25 hours to top hits songs. Let’s assume this is typical for music listeners, although I suspect people listen to less local. That means a huge number of people are all listening to the classic and top artists, but only the local people are listening to the local.

But there’s maybe 100 top hit bands, and maybe 1,000 classic musicians, but 100s of thousands of local bands. So spread those listens out over that many local/small bands, and you’re lucky to get any listens.

And it’s skewed a lot towards hits and major classic bands. But, there is hope. 66,000 artists on Spotify, according to Billboard, made over $10,000 in a year from Spotify. That’s cool.