3min chapter

Trapital cover image

The Music Industry’s Oversaturation Problem

Trapital

CHAPTER

Streaming Is Making It Harder for Artists to Earn Meaningful Income

TikTok is making matters worse because there's no need to even actually follow anyone Or, you know, really engage that much with the platform. We're going to see more and more of that, especially given a TikToks goals To try to expand into so many other places And then additionally every other app Trying to copy what TikTok is doing Because they see that being the norm.

00:00
Speaker 1
I think that we do see that happen more often than not And before we even got to this point where content is becoming more important And the creator, which I could talk about in a minute The objectives are just totally, like I said, misaligned Like the platforms need scale They need to monetize all of the combined audiences of these individual creators But the creators are looking more so for fanbases and engaged followers Than they are looking for these passive audiences So it actually, I think a lot of the struggles that creators are having With these platforms sort of echo issues that artists have had with streaming platforms In really interesting ways because it's similar to how, like, rights holders like labels Are monetizing scale of being able to own all of the songs And therefore all of the audiences of dozens, if not hundreds of artists But those artists individually will never have enough scale to earn meaningful income from streaming And I think the same sort of thing is playing out with creators now Where the platform is getting all the benefit because they get the combination of all these audiences And it's best for them if people are just mindlessly scrolling Whereas creators have just totally different objectives and a different way of earning money And then the current algorithm or like the one that everyone's trying to kind of copy Which is TikTok is making matters worse because there's no need to even actually follow anyone Or, you know, really engage that much with the platform Because you're going to be served content that is tailor-made for you, regardless So we're kind of teaching people with that kind of discovery-focused feed Not to actually follow individuals and more to just expect this constant flow of content And again, going back to the parallels with streaming It's interesting how we went from a few years ago talking about TikTok as this amazing democratizing force To now talking about how, well, yeah, it's democratized because everybody can post anything But it's impossible for anyone to get hurt We've gone through the same trajectory with streaming where five years ago We're all saying, oh my god, streaming is great, it's democratized the industry And in many ways it has, but now we're seeing all these second-order impacts Where it's really, really hard for anyone to break through the noise And it's really, really hard for anyone to earn meaningful income
Speaker 2
So, yeah The pattern is clear. You laid it out perfectly It's crazy When you think about TikTok, everyone talks about how quick it is to grow a following How favorable the algorithm is when you start off And all those things are intentional It is the easiest platform to be able to gain tens of thousands of followers And even more, but it's the hardest to be able to translate those followers Into actual fans because it's more likely that they are going to be passive Folks that are engaging versus active ones And we're going to see more and more of that, especially given a TikToks goals To try to expand into so many other places And then additionally every other app Trying to copy what TikTok is doing because they see that being the norm And now that that's what they see as the standard operating procedure For how to keep people's attention and engagement Everyone is trying to have their own version of that Yeah,
Speaker 1
no,

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