This presentation develops Pine and Gilmore's Experience Economy and Zhang and Negus's Platform Musician. Revenue generation from streaming is discussed before moving on to discuss examples of musicians generating income outside of the Streaming Ecosystem. This is for a first year undergraduate module in Music Enterprise.

1. PLATFORM
MUSICIAN
OVERVIEW, ARGUMENTS, EXAMPLES
HUSSEIN BOON

2. ECONOMIC DISTINCTIONS:
HEADLINE POINTS
• Experiences have always been at the heart of the entertainment business, possibly not foregrounded nor identified as
such.
• the concept of selling an entertainment experience is taking root in businesses far removed from theaters and
amusement parks.
• New technologies, encourage whole new genres of experience, such as interactive games, multi-player games, and virtual
reality
• The growing processing power required to render ever-more immersive experiences now drives demand for the goods and
services of the computer industry.
(Pine and Gilmore 1998)

3. EXPERIENCE ECONOMY IN
MUSIC 1
• This schema could be adapted to suggest that
• recording is a product,
• radio and streaming provide a service,
• and a live event stages an experience–although this is not, as far as we are aware, how the
phrase “experience economy” has been adopted in discussions of the popular music industries.
• Rather, the terms have been applied loosely in discussions of a wide range of existing practices
such as copyright, branding, licensing, identity, and chart analysis. (Zhang and Negus. 2021:
543)

4. EXPERIENCE ECONOMY IN
MUSIC 2
• Given the malleable and inclusive nature of the term (what is not an experience?), other authors
subsequently stretched the idea to accommodate a plethora of practices (many already quite adequately
theorized with concepts of the “creative industries” and ”cultural economy”).
• The modest insight provided by Pine and Gilmore became overtheorized as marking a new stage in business
and commerce, rather than referring to an aspect of life that was receiving more emphasis as digital
reproduction, storage, and communication and social media allowed imagery and representations to appear
more abundant.
• The evidence from research on the music industries and live event sector that we have cited so far, suggests
that there is not so much a new type of “experience economy” but changing relationships between different
experiences, and shifts in how these are calibrated according to market price and cultural value. Some of
this may be explicable in crude supply-and-demand terms.
Source: Zhang and Negus 2021: 543

5. EXPERIENCE ECONOMY IN
MUSIC 3
• When it was relatively scarce the recorded album enjoyed a cultural significance in people’s lives
• subsequently declined with digital proliferation and abundance–a fall precipitated by the ever- shrinking size of the iconic album
artifact and its disappearance into a smartphone.
• As popular music events became fewer and larger, and more spectacularly staged, their scarcity increased the economic and social
value of live shows.
• Musicians and their managers recognized the increased revenues that could be generated from concerts and touring as the market
value of recordings declined.
• Live music is now experienced on social media platforms and mobile devices (in addition to that special event in the club, field, or
arena). The social value, the economic importance, and the performative possibilities of live music are not only transformed through
the integration of digital technologies into events, but through the embedding of live music in the social media that we use to engage
with the world and people around us. This process has provoked related debates about abundance and the attention economy.
Source: Zhang et al. 2021: 543-544

6. PROGRESSION OF ECONOMIC VALUE

7. SCARCITY IN MUSIC 1
• Due to its relative scarcity 'the [vinyl] recorded album enjoyed a cultural
significance in people’s lives' (Zhang and Negus 2021: 543)
• Yet in digital the end result is one of 'digital proliferation and abundance'
(Zhang and Negus 2021: 543).
• Streaming companies recognized this and so resorted to a new practice of
devising ideas of artificial scarcity grouped around the ‘attention economy’
(Zhang and Negus 2021: 545).

8. SCARCITY IN MUSIC 2
• This acts as a means to counter declining attention span but also two additional factors.
• the listener’s time is valuable and, given that there are so many tracks to choose from, that
curation, via the playlist, becomes the solution to this scarcity/abundance vs. time issue.
• many playlists are grouped around user activities such as music for study or driving, rather
than by style or genre labels.
• This leads to observations that ‘people are not giving music their undivided attention but are
creating a sonic soundtrack to accompany other activities’ (Zhang and Negus 2021: 545).

9. SCARCITY IN MUSIC 3
• This position not only affects individual practitioners but also the
streaming companies and their need (desire) to ‘differentiate themselves
within a crowded marketplace’ (Drott 2018: 332)
• So it is in the practice that plenitude is transformed as a reversal of value
‘into a form of lack, reimagining it as a lack of lack, as scarcity become
scarce’ (Drott 2018: 333)
• Drott also identifies that scarcity returns ‘in the guise of the one perfect
song’ (Drott 2018: 336).

10. ONE PERFECT SONG
• Spotify in an attempt to identify the song that best matches the listener as
individual, their situation and mood (Drott 2018: 336).
• This creates a new destination for music activities with a new set of requirements
to please and new gatekeepers to oversee the process (Iqbal 2019)
• leads to situations where recommendation 'systems may privilege the content of a
small group of artists when maximizing user satisfaction' (Ferraro et al. 2021:
249).
• There is also the potential for Spotify's own recommendation algorithms to
recommend AI tracks created by Spotify as a sort of closed loop of this system.

11. THE PLATFORM MUSICIAN
• Is an overall term that challenges 'categories and identities of
musicians … previously shaped by the recording business (“recording
artist”) and events industries (“live performer”).
• is perhaps the clearest indication of the impact of platformization on
the popular music industry
• important shift signaled in the term
• the platform becomes a stage, as the stage becomes a platform.
(Zhang and Negus 2021: 551)

12. POINTS TO CONSIDER
• practitioners demonstrate the centrality of digital corporations and social
media platforms in 'changing experiences, economies, and industries of
popular music' (Zhang and Negus 2021: 540).
• Artists demonstrate their accumulable value 'within the economy of repetition'
(Attali 1985: 40), promoting a range of artefacts generated from their music
practice and related areas of interest, serving 'as raw material for
mediatization' (Auslander 2008: 28).
• not just material products and videos but also 'seeking to 'enterprise' his or
her life and self through acts of choice' (Rose 2010: 170)

13. STREAMING DATA 1
Total Number of Artists Achieving Min Wage Actual %
2021 8 million 13,500 0.16875
2022 8 million 16,500 0.20625
2025** 50 million 27,000*** 0.054
** see Twoey 2021
*** this is a projected number based on a doubling of the 2021 number
Table 1: Artists in the system

14. STREAMING DATA 2
*Source Spotify (2022)
Pool of Total Artists Pool of Tracks
100,000 53,000 3,420,000
500,000 15,000 1,200,000
1,000,000 9,000 719,000
5,000,000 2,000 194,000
10,000,000 1,000 103,000
Table 2: Artists and Tracks Capable of Meeting Streaming Thresholds

15. STREAMING DATA 3
* amounts are indicative using the Music Gateway (n.d.) streaming revenue calculator
500000 1000000 10000000 5000000
Spotify $2000 $4000 $40000 $80000
Apple $2500 $5000 $50000 $100000
Amazon $2500 $5000 $50000 $100000
Total $7000 $14000 $140000 $280000
Table 3: Number of Streams and Payments on Three Services

16. TWO POINTS TO CONSIDER
• The first one is that the vast majority of streams for the top 0.4% of
artists — 65% to 75% of streams to be more precise — are coming
from back catalog, not from new music.
• the top 0.4% of tracks (not artists) on streaming services, major-label
releases have been outperforming non-major releases by a factor of 6
to 1 for the past six years, even as supposedly democratic streaming
services have gotten more popular.
(Hu 2021)

17. IS PLATFORM MUSICIAN
BETTER?
• ‘platforms’ are defined as infrastructures that enable the design and use of
applications and connects various actors to communicate, interact, or sell their
products/services
• backed by the shift towards complex multi-sided markets
• through the process of platformization, cultural entrepreneurs are
reassembling the way they produce and circulate
• Even though some proponents see streaming platforms as rescuers of the music
industry, it seems as if they mostly bring advantages to consumers, record
labels, and themselves
(Mühlbach and Arora 2020)

18. EXAMPLES 1
• Jacob Collier – music artist
• Leo Moracchioli – video cover artist
• Andrew Huang – music production educator
• Cynthia Lin – music teacher
• Mary Spender – music artist/guitarist
• Dank Pods – music videographer culture/technology

19. EXAMPLES 2
Artist Patreon
Subscribers
Avg. Per Patron Monthly Projected
Revenue
Yearly Projected
Revenue
Andrew Huang* 638 $5.33 $5,061.47 $60,737.60
Leo Moracchioli 3,308 $2.67 $3,467.89 $41,614.64
Mary Spender 660 $7.50 $3,085.50 $37,026.00
Cynthia Lin 5,358 $5.33 $10,626.70 $127,520.40
Jacob Collier 1,361 $7 $6,015.62 $72,187.44
Dank Pods 27,971 $1 $23,775.35 $285,304.20
*Andrew Huang charges subscribers weekly
Table 4: Example Platform Revenue on Patreon

20. 1000 TRUE FANS
• Kelly’s original formulation
• argues creators only needed to engage a modest base of “true fans”
• those who will “buy anything you produce”
• $100 per fan, per year
• for a total annual income of $100,000
• payment per year will fluctuate depending upon number of true fans or
uniqueness/desirability of offering
(Kelly 2008)

21. 100 TRUE FANS 1
• 100 True Fans and 1,000 True Fans aren’t mutually exclusive
• creator can cultivate a large, free audience on horizontal social platforms or
through an email list.
• creator converts some of these users to patrons and subscribers.
• creator can leverage some of these buyers to higher-value purchases, such as
extra content, exclusive access, or direct interaction with the creator.
(Jin 2020)

22. 100 TRUE FANS 2
• substantive difference between monetizing through 1,000 True Fans (at $100
a year) and 100 True Fans (at $1,000 a year).
• creator can earn $100 a year from a fan via patronage or donations
• collecting $1,000 a year per fan requires a wholly different product.
• These fans expect to derive meaningful value and purpose from the product.
(Jin 2020)

23. 100
TRUE
FANS 3

24. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1
Attali, Jacques (1985), Noise: the political economy of music, Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Auslander, Philip (2008), LIVENESS Performance in a mediatized culture, 2nd ed., Abingdon:
Routledge.
Cooke, Chris (2020), Dissecting the digital dollar, 3rd ed.. Music Managers Forum: London.
Drott, Eric (2018), Why the Next Song Matters: Streaming, Recommendation, Scarcity, Twentieth-
Century Music, 15(3), 325-357. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572218000245.

25. BIBLIOGRAPHY 2
Ferraro Andres, Serra, Xavier and Bauer, Christine (2021), Break the Loop: Gender Imbalance in Music
Recommenders, in Proceedings of the 2021 ACMSIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction
and Retrieval (CHIIR’21), March 14–19, 2021, Canberra, ACT, Australia. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6
pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3406522.3446033.
Hu, Cherie (2021), 'Just how difficult is it to make a sustainable living from streaming? ', Water &
Music, 27 September, https://www.waterandmusic.com/just-how-difficult-is-it-to-make-a-sustainable-
living-from-streaming/.
Iqbal, Nosheen (2021), 'Forget the DJs: Spotify playlists are the new musical starmakers', The
Guardian, 28 April, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/apr/28/streaming-music-algorithms-
spotify.

26. BIBLIOGRAPHY 3
Lin, Ji (2021), ‘100 True Fans’, Atelier, 19 February, https://li-jin.co/2020/02/19/100-true-fans/.
Kelly, Kevin. (2008), 1,000 True Fans. The Technium, https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/.
Mühlbach , Saskia and Aror, Payal (2020), Behind the music: How labor changed for musicians through the
subscription economy, First Monday, 25:4, URL:
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/10382/9411, doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i4.10382.
Music Gateway (no date), Streaming royalties calculator, https://www.musicgateway.com/royalties-calculator.

27. BIBLIOGRAPHY 4
Pine, B.J. and Gilmore, J.H. (1998). Welcome to the Experience Economy. Harvard Business Review.
Available from https://hbr.org/1998/07/welcome-to-the-experience-economy.
Pine, B.J. and Gilmore, J.H. (2011). The experience economy, Updated edition. Boston, Massachusetts:
Harvard Business School Press.
Rose, Nikolas (1996), Inventing our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

28. BIBLIOGRAPHY 5
Spotify (2022), Loud & Clear, Spotify, https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/.
Towey, Hannah (2021), 'This payments and distribution platform used by Frank Ocean and Childish
Gambino is fighting the music industry's 'starving artist' culture', Insider, 12 September,
https://www.businessinsider.com/stem-music-payment-distribution-platform-spotify-royalty-accounting-
frank-ocean-2021-9?r=US&IR=T.
Zhang, Q. and Negus, K. (2021). Stages, Platforms, Streams: The Economies and Industries of Live
Music after Digitalization. Popular Music and Society, 1–19. Available from
https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2021.1921909.