The music industry’s weakest link: Getting from A to B

“Super premium” streaming tiers, special-edition vinyl, and direct-to-fan revenue streams all have one thing in common – and no, it is not just that they are about monetising fandom. 

All of these initiatives are focused on getting artists from B to C – from having a foundational listener base and some fans (step B) to growing that fanbase, touring, selling merchandise, and all the other things artists who have that foundation get to do next (step C). 

This is all good and necessary. But there has been comparatively less focus on getting artists from A to B – from releasing their first track to having a foundation of listeners to build on in the first place. This is a highly competitive industry where not everyone is going to make it – but it is hard to try and climb up a ladder when the first rungs are not even in reach. 

Imagine you are a brand-new artist starting out today. Where and how do you begin?

How we lost A to B

Today’s new class of artists have been dealt a one-two punch. “A to B” support has fallen to the wayside, at the very time they need it most – in other words, at the same time as it is also getting harder for artists to break through the noise, to get discovered by listeners, and to earn enough revenue to stay in the game until they do so. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Algorithms effectively punish tracks for starting from zero. If you are a superstar whose new track can immediately rack up listens, or get placed on a playlist where streams are inevitable, algorithms will take that momentum and run with it. However, if you are a lesser-known act and a new song release does not immediately hit, it is hard to get picked up
• Labels have been incentivised to sign artists who have already broken / had their moment, rather than spending resources investing in completely undiscovered talents. (The positive spin is that artists finally have the potential to break on their own, although actually doing so is getting harder)
• The pendulum has swung from total gatekeeping to complete lack of gatekeeping. This is a good thing, but it may be time for that pendulum to swing back to a logical middle – and replace gatekeepers with tastemakers whose actual job it is to discover and platform new music. It is great that today’s consumers are empowered to do this job themselves, but the reality is that most do not have time (or inclination) to do so, and true curation / tastemaking takes both talent and hard work
• Relatedly, there is a lack of clear discovery mechanisms. First it was the radio, then it was playlists, and then it was TikTok. Today, discovery is highly fragmented across platforms and other sources, without a clear leader
• The old stepping stones in the artist’s journey, like touring small venues and getting coverage in music media outlets, are disappearing due to economic factors. Newer artists who manage to break big often skip these steps, moving quickly from viral moments to arenas or magazine covers
• With tracks under 1,000 streams now demonetised (and even the monetised ones often earning very little), it is harder to keep the bills paid while trying to break into the music industry

Building back what the music industry is missing

There seems to be less investment in A-B than B-C, but that does not mean there isn’t any. SoundCloud updated its algorithm last year to help newly uploaded tracks get plays during the “critical post-release period”. Online radio stations and their DJs are (re-)emerging as tastemakers. And promisingly, many labels appear to be investing more in A&R. More of this is needed: Investment in early-stage talent from labels and other artist partners (followed by patience); tweaks to recommendation algorithms; and treating curation as a respected job that requires its own dedicated resources. 

A&R and marketing tactics need to change, too: Shifting towards a scenes-based strategy, where artists focus on steadily building core fanbases within scenes, rather than aiming for a kind of mass-market success that just doesn’t exist in the same way as it used to. Of course, streaming bears much of the responsibility as well, and we have outlined some ideas for a new system in MIDiA’s recent blog, “A model for a new streaming industry”.

Not only should the music industry invest in solving the A-to-B problem, but it needs to. Avoiding these issues is like if the investment industry suddenly ditched accelerators and VCs, leaving only hedge funds and global investment banks. It might sound dramatic, but the next generation of stars must be able to find pathways from A to B, if there is going to be a next generation of stars at all.