Why Do Most Artists Focus On Spotify? (and should they?)

I've seen a lot of people on social media arguing that instead of sending people to Spotify, you should send them to Title or Apple or Amazon or whatever because those platforms pay two times or even three times more per stream. But there's actually some very clear reasons why people send people to Spotify specifically. And we're going to go with those in this video, but also talk about why you don't necessarily just want to send people straight to Spotify. So, let me show you some numbers and I think it'll make sense. Apple Music. I'm just going to go by the AI overviews. It's from what I've seen, they seem to be reasonably accurate, but if it's a little different, you know, look it up for yourself, but it should be close enough here. That's really what we're going for here. Apple Music has 93 million paying subscribers that are active every single month. YouTube Music has 125 million paying subscribers, or at least that are active every month. This this number it includes both YouTube Music and YouTube Premium, which keep in mind uh most of those people that use YouTube Premium don't actually use YouTube Music. They just use it for YouTube Premium. Uh I am one of those people. So, want to bring that up. But even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and say all 125 million are using YouTube Music, we'll just count that for now. Uh Amazon Music has 80 million monthly active users. All right. So we have 80 million 125 that's 200 at 93 that's 300 million monthly active users. Spotify has 700 million. So and and those are the as far as I know those are the next three biggest platforms. Like if you look at something like Title which I'll go pull up really quick. So Title doesn't publish anything publicly but old reports are estimating it was 3 million in 2016. It's very likely smaller now. Although this thing down here says 5 million. So I don't know. Let's just say 5 million. Doesn't even matter. It's so much smaller than all the others. It's it's, you know, right? It's it's less than 1% of Spotify. So, title is just not even part of the equation here. Um, 700 million monthly active users. Like, this isn't just dead people or not dead people, dead uh dead users, like inactive users. This is like people who log on every single month. Now, a lot of them are free users. That's a advantage that Spotify has over a lot of other platforms that it has a free tier, which is actually one reason why Spotify pays so much less. A premium streamer plays 2 point times more than a free streamer. Meaning like if you're on Spotify paying you, your streams are worth 2.2 times more than if you were on a free plan. So by not paying for Spotify, you are essentially paying artists less straight up. Um but even if you count just the premium users, two it's almost 300 million. So Spotify's premium users alone add up to just about the same number as Apple, YouTube, and Amazon Music combined. Again, keep in mind a lot of the Amazon Music people, like I have Amazon Music because I have Amazon Prime, or at least I have some tier of Amazon Music. I have YouTube Music because I have YouTube Premium, but I don't really use it. I have Apple Music because my cell phone plan, Verizon, gives it to me for free. Uh, I very rarely use it. It's just it's free, so I'm signed up, right? So, I am a statistic in all of three of these, but I don't use them. I am part of the Spotify number. That's the only streaming platform I really use aside from watching like music videos, right? Or, you know, listening on vinyl or something. So, this is the biggest reason why everyone talks about Spotify. We're not talking about Spotify for the the money per se per stream. We're talking about Spotify because the reality is most artists make most of their streaming money from Spotify specifically. It's not unusual for me to see that someone has a 100,000 streams on Spotify per month. They'll have 10,000 or less on Apple Music and then they'll have maybe a smaller amount on YouTube Music and an even much smaller amount on Amazon. Typically, every so often I'll see someone that does really good on Apple or really good on Pandora even or really good on iTunes or whatever. But for most people, Spotify has by far the biggest number. So even with Apple paying like double of what Spotify does, it's still paying overall much less than what Spotify does. So that's one part. It's just straight up volume. And and that also comes into not just like the the Spotify numbers, but when you're going to marketing to people on social media or ads on social media, it's much easier to target those people, right? If if you give meta like, you know, 700 million people to target, it's going to have more flexibility in finding like your people than if you give it like five million people on title, right? Because in that 5 million, a lot of them might only like hip-hop and then some of them might only like EDM, right? So, if you're like this rock artist, there might only be 100,000 or 500,000 people who are in the countries you're targeting who like rock music. Probably even less than that once you subdivide the countries and the ages that you're actually looking for for your music. Now, the other part of this is the recommendation algorithms, which I've talked about before, but but Spotify is really the biggest platform when it comes to algorithmic pushes. There's times you can get on an algorithm playlist on Spotify and it will 10x the streams you get in a song. It's not always that dramatic, but it's not uncommon to see a 2x or 3x every so often a 10x of your streams because of the algorithm, especially when you look at like over a longer duration of time. When you look at something like Apple Music, they don't even give you the tools to track that data, but you you you very rarely see any kind of like big substantial push and like an algorithmic traction. And same goes for like all these other DSPs, right? Title gives you pretty much no stats. YouTube Music gives you the YouTube analytics, but it's kind of hard to parse out YouTube Music. And there are playlists on algorithmic playlists on YouTube Music, but again, they're kind of hard to track and see exactly where your music's being pushed. Now, that being said, I don't think you should just share Spotify links because the reality is there's still a lot of people that don't use Spotify and the situation might change, right? If you spend all of your effort growing on one platform platform, you don't really know what's going to happen to that platform in 5 years. Uh, so what I recommend is every time you're sharing your music, use a smart link service like this. This is feature FM. You could also use hyped it. You could also use submit hub links. It's free. You could also use whatever one your distributor uses. There's a lot of options here. Smart links are like they're kind of becoming a commodity. There's probably minimum 10 platforms you could choose. Personally, if you're looking for some great paid ones, I'd say hyped it, Smart Noise, Feature FM. I have links in the description for all of them. If you're looking for a free one, Submit Hub links, it doesn't have all the features of the premium ones, but it's great. And the paid ones all have their own kind of own price points and features and advantages. So, check them out. I think for a lot of people, hyped it uh is is probably the most accessible and followed by smart noise being pretty close. And then feature FM is like if you're looking for a a more sophisticated solution there specifically if you like a label or marketing agency feature FM is really good which is what what I use it for is for my agency and my label but anyways all these platforms can be used and so what you can do is instead of just linking to Spotify in your link in bio uh one you should have a link in bio tool like a link tree in your Instagram right so when you go to your Instagram don't just plop a Spotify link in your page put like a link tree or a beacons or a Lelo whatever link equivalent platform you can think of. Feature FM has one. If you have a paid account, they include it as part of the plan. And then in there, you can have links to your individual songs. And in that, you can have links to your individual smart links, right? So, if someone goes to your link in bio and they go to your page and there's all these things like, check us out on this platform, check us out here, or check out this song. When they click on that song, it shouldn't just take them to a platform. It should take them to a page like this where they can decide where to go listen. And maybe on that page, you can also include a link to your store where you're selling your album as well. So, yes, Spotify does pay significantly less than a lot of other DSPs. They don't pay the least, but they're definitely kind of on the lower end, but the reality is they just you end up making more money because of the sheer volume of users and the algorithmic recommendations of the platform. And one actually interesting thing to keep in mind is that Spotify actually does pay out the same rate of the money it takes in as Apple Music and YouTube Music and Title. they all pretty much just pay out 70% of all the money they make to the rights holders, artists and labels. The reason why Spotify pays so much less per stream is because they have that free tier. So, they're getting way less money for those people, but they still have to pay out for those streams. And they do treat those separately, but it pulls down the average. Secondly, there's kind of this whole mentality on Spotify that there should never be a silent moment. So when you finish listening to something on Spotify, it just autogenerates infinite music that it thinks you'll like so that it doesn't cause silence to occur. And essentially this causes more streams to exist in the platform which dilutes the streaming pool. Right? Spotify pays out by looking at the pool of money that's in the system divided by the number of streams in the system. So creating more streams in the system actually reduces the payout per stream. And reducing the money in the system causes also to have a reduced payout per stream. So, even though they all pay out the same percentage, the ratio of that money to streams actually is what causes the month-to-month differences in payouts per stream. Anyways, hope that made sense, but if you have any questions, let me know in the comments below. And if you want to see how you can market your music, check out this playlist right here to see what I have to offer there. Anyways, thanks for watching and I'll see you next video. Bye.