[franl]

> Another opinion popular with no one: AI will have on artists the same impact that Spotify had on the music industry that is, it will kill any revenue flow for anyone outside of the publishers and big artists/players.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but how much money do you think the 7500 creators on Spotify making $100k+ [1] would be making without Spotify or other streaming platforms? My guess is closer to zero than 100k.

Also 0.09 percent of 8 million creators making 100k+ [1] sounds horrible, but my guess is that should be taken with a grain of salt. How many folks are included in that 8 million who registered, but uploaded nothing? How many uploaded once or twice? How many uploaded and did ZERO promo of themselves? How many are just plain terrible musicians?

A number of years ago when I stumbled on him, Russ was pulling in a few hundred thousand per year from streaming. Looks like he’s making 100k per week as of a couple of years ago [2]. Yes, he’s probably an outlier. But he works his butt off on his craft, handles production and writing himself, and markets himself well.

Headlines like “Big tech and AI destroying the indie music industry” get more clicks and attention than “Streaming platforms provide income where once there was none” so shrug.

[1] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/02/24/spotify-artist-e... [2] https://twitter.com/russdiemon/status/1325853093074923520

[franl]

Found the video where Russ says he was making around $100k per month before any label involvement: https://youtu.be/OebNTkTfzHU. I know this is the land of “that’s just survivorship bias!” And I certainly agree that luck and timing plays a massive role in billionaire level startup success, but this guy in particular is a few orders of magnitude of success below that (even if he’s still an outlier). I’m sure he still benefited from luck and timing, but he also was methodical about creating music non-stop, getting better at production, rapping, and writing, and marketing himself. My point being show me someone who has worked as hard and as smart as he has, who picked a niche of music that has large audiences (aka high Total Addressable Market), and who released as much content as him, and I will show you someone who is having non-trivial streaming success - again maybe not $1M+ annually - but something material beyond just scraping by. That doesn’t mean Big Tech is absolved of sin in how it distributes profits or exerts monopoly control or whatever, but I think we often overlook the opportunities these networks have provided for people that would otherwise live in obscurity with no audience whatsoever.