Truth be told, the advent of streaming catapulted music consumption for the last two decades, with the majority of it being realized around 2007–2010.
With this advent, the music industry lost a ton of money and needed to reform how they were monetizing their main product, music.
With this came the creation of 360 deals, and strategic partnerships to get more cash flow from other sources while the music just became the bait to lure in potential fans into buying more into the artist.
In this conversation, we won’t go deep into this music history but we’ll explain why Independent Artists need to stop chasing streaming so indies can begin focusing their strategy on growing and monetizing their fan base with direct to consumer strategies — (which we offer on DIGITVL :-]) The independent artist has become a new market for music industry entrepeneurs to capitalize from.
Indie artists are sold the idea of increasing their streams that pay between $0.
004-$0.007 per stream, (you’d make around $4,000-$7000 after 1 million streams) paying hundreds of dollars for ads, spotify playlisting and much more to almost never recoup their spend.
This is because the idea of direct to consumer strategies isn’t being popularized to artists.
The idea that getting only 50 fans to spend $100 on your art, brand or music bundle can result in $5000 in income.
Much better than a million streams which you form no connection to.
A tangible item, a ticket to a show or an exclusive release is much more meaningful and proves to keep these fans coming back for more, than only being a song bite they heard and moved on from.
Most Artists that break into the multi-millions didn’t do so from music sales alone, but by selling a product from themselves or from brand partnerships that catapulted their net worth.
Just a few examples of this is J.
Cole, Rihanna and Kanye West.
