Saqib Malik Shares Untapped Insights About Streaming Business Of The Music Industry
Fans and supporters take delight in listening to the melody of their favorite musical artist, be it on Spotify or any other streaming platform. Have you ever thought of how your subscriptions of music streaming services affect the music industry as a whole? Let’s find out.
With the advent of music streaming services and their mainstream surge in the last decade, things have become highly commercial and fundamentally different in the music industry. Earlier while you used to purchase the recorded DVDs or cassettes of your favorite music artists, now you rather take leisure in streaming their songs online.
A plethora of streaming services are now available in the market. Few dominant ones being Spotify, Apple Music, Tunify, Soundtrack, and more. There are over 255 million users associated with these services.
Saqib Malik shares an interesting insight about the streaming business when he says “the US streaming market beat the recorded music market in the US in 2019. When we talk about the music industry now, 80% of the revenue of the entire music industry flows from streaming services”.
Saqib, who is also known as RSM in the online space, says that ‘streaming services have given more opportunity to the new talents than records could ever do’. The newcomers get a chance to get in front of their target audience and make an impact due to such streaming services.
But the question remains the same. How do such music streaming platforms make money? Why do we pay for these subscriptions? Well, it depends!
The streaming services not only make money off the user subscriptions. That’s definitely one way of doing it. The other major chunk of income for the streaming business model comes from advertising. Advertisers pay for exposure, with ads played every 15 minutes for 30 seconds, and can also include sponsored playlists, and homepage takeovers.
Spotify and Apple Music share 70% of their total revenue with the artists, music labels, and music companies involved with them. Depending on the number of streams an artist’s work gets, the payment is made. This is called royalty.
Having worked with elite artists and top production houses of the music industry, namely, Juicy J, 24hrs, Chloe Crowhurst, Billyracxx, Chase The Money, June James, Pitbull, Janet Jackson, DJ shadow, MAGIC!,Empire Distribution, Warner Bros, Think It’s A Game Records, Latium Entertainment, & 300 Entertainment, Saqib Malik has grasped the intricate ins and outs of the streaming business model.
A very crucial insight that Saqib shared about the hike in prices of streaming subscriptions was that artists and streaming companies are always in a bitter quarrel over who takes more money home. The music artists demand higher pay for their work and this, in turn, results in the streaming subscription cost more so that the artists can be given more in royalties.
Artists can also increase their chances of being featured on more playlists and ultimately earn more money by altering their music based on streaming platform algorithms.
“It becomes a zero-sum game. You being an artist either alter your music content as per the algorithms or get left out from the reach of the audience. This is what happens behind the scenes. This is digitalization in music”, said Saqib Malik.
Whatever be the case, music streaming services have made all of our lives easier and much more hassle-free. The idea of listening to music on the go had been made a reality by these services. The music industry truly experienced a revolution of its own with the advent of music streaming platforms.
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