Getting noticed on streaming services is extremely tough. New music is almost always coming out, and unless you're releasing new content constantly like Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wants you to, you're probably not getting noticed.
So how bad is it out there to come across some lasting attention? According to a new study published by Rolling Stone using US analytics firm Alpha Data, you're basically nothing in the bigger picture if you're not in the top 1% of artists.
"If you were to take the more than 1.6 million artists who released music to streaming services in the past year and a half and ranked them by their total streams, you’d find that the top 16,000 of those artists pulled in 90 percent of the streams," Rolling Stone reports.
The curve gets a little worse too. As Musically points, the top 10% of all artists account for 99.4% of all streams and almost 50% of artists have fewer than 100 total streams.
The top 1% of artists accounted for 54% of physical sales, as well. Look at this chart:
The bright side is, at least streaming is an improvement from radio, where the top 1% get 99.996% (basically all) of the earnings. Read the full article here.
