If You Like Competition, You’ll Love The Music Business

Music research company Chartmetric just released its Year In Music Industry Report, and if you’re an artist or band, you probably shouldn’t read it. The report indicates that at no time in history has there been as much competition for the ear as there is today, and it’s only getting worse.

Chartmetric now tracks 11.3 million artists, which is a 1.7 million increase over last year. Probably what’s most startling is that an average of 4,600 artists were added to the Chartmetric platform every day. What’s more, there were 25.7 million tracks ingested, which is a 30% increase over 2023!

So Much Unheard

The report is an eye opener, but this next part of profound.

Chartmetric profiled over 11 million artists on Spotify, but only 1.58 million (14%) have more than 10 listeners from month to month! Of this 1.58 million, only 37% have more than 1,000 monthly listeners.

Think about that for a second. 86% of artists don’t even get 10 listens a month, and that’s not just for one song, but all their songs! That means that probably your family listened to it once, and never went back.

So where are these new artists coming from? Most come from the United States, which has a 32% share, then it drops off swiftly to the U.K. (4.7%), France (3.8%), Germany (3.7%), then Canada (3.6). It would be interesting to discover exactly why the U.S. dominates in new artists, and it would be easy to say because of the country’s affluence, but the other four countries have a similar level of affluence. Could it be that young people in the rest of the world just don’t have as much desire to create music? I’d like to see a study on this.

All By Myself

Another data point that the report shines a light on is the fact that 66% of artists today are solo.

The fact of the matter is that this figure would probably be nearly as high in previous decades if today’s power of the personal studio and online distribution would have been available. After all, why bother with the politics of a band and the time it takes to rehearse when you can record your songs as masters by yourself at home?

And that’s exactly the crux of the problem. It’s so easy to record tracks on your own for little or no cost, then distribute them online, that anyone can do it. And in the United States, everyone does! There are no gatekeepers, which previously separated the wheat from the musical chaff in the past. It’s a musical free-for-all in which only the lucky few stand out.

Still, I’ve always believed in the saying that an artist does it for him/herself, while a craftsman does it for everyone else. A success in the music business has to be a little of both, but good for you if you’re following your muse and don’t much care if anyone listens or not.

That said, I’m so happy I’m no longer an artist.