How Many Streams...
Famed record producer Jim Dickinson who played with the Rolling Stones, his sons formed the band The North Mississippi All-stars had a metaphor for the music business. He said it's a long tube of money traveling overhead through the sky. With much difficulty you claw your way up into it where it's a dirty, crowded, hot and degrading effort to stay there and get the money. Folk singer Otis Gibbs, I have tickets to see Otis next month, added to this by saying that this tube of money has leaks. A DIY guy like Otis sets buckets under these leaks and makes a living by going around checking his buckets and therefore avoids the nasty business of getting in the tube and staying there.
There was recently an article in the New Yorker Magazine about a famous record executive Lucian Grainge and the future of AI in the music industry. All that was interesting in it's own right but the article included this statistic from the research company Luminate. In 2023 there were 184 million tracks available on various streaming platforms. 86.2 % received fewer than a thousands plays. 24.8% or about 45 million songs received zero plays. There are 120,000 new tracks uploaded each day and many of these are not music at all but are "functional music" for a task such as meditating or exercising and are titled "Baby White Noise" and "Rain on Windshield." It's estimated they get 15 billion streams a month. A vacuum sound recently hit #7 on the Swiss Music Charts. The article pointed out that AI was likely to increase all this and there are agreements being signed so that artists cam make AI "functional" versions of their songs.
I haven't listened to any of this. What I have done is analyze my own streaming. My YouTube "Reggae on Tuba Man" has had 12 plays. That puts me somewhere under the 86% but well above the 24% that got a big fat zero.
Labels: cigar box guitar, electric guitar, music, tuba
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