Twitch and TikTok Help Revolutionary Artists Bypass Great Music

With concert halls closed, musical careers must instead be forged on streaming platforms.

It s been a terrible year for the majority of artists who make most of their income from concerts and tours. Yet a small but growing number are using the latest technology to break into Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok.

Musicians like Jayda G and RAC have bounced back from canceled tours to earn Grammy nominations with the help of apps like Distrokid, Submithub.com and fortunes.io. The tools help artists distribute and market their work, share royalties, break into popular playlists, and identify songs that resonate most with listeners.

These capabilities have long been the preserve of large companies such as Universal Music Group of Vivendi SA, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. Today, technology makes it easier than ever to be a successful independent musician – distributor AWAL said hundreds of them are now making more than $100,000 a year from streaming.

Merlin, a non-profit organization that negotiates distribution rights and royalties on behalf of independent labels and rights holders representing self-publishing musicians, accounts for around 15% of the market. The organization has seen its share of major digital music platforms grow by 3.5 percentage points during the pandemic, CEO Jeremy Sirota told Bloomberg.

Some 68% of independent artists said they make more music during lockouts, according to a survey by Midia Research. He said the number of releases of their own music direct to fans increased by 31% between 2019 and September this year to 4.7 million.

“These artists, who tend to be earlier in their careers, play by different rules to established artists by either releasing themselves directly or by entering into service contracts with new generation record companies,” the analyst said. Midia, Mark Mulligan.

Here are some independent artists who are making do, and even thrive, in the shadow of the coronavirus:

RAC

The Portland-based musician and producer (real name Andre Allen Anjos) was set for an album tour in March when the live stage froze. It now offers live streaming sessions to paid fans on Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch, and uses the Patreon crowdfunding platform to provide listeners with additional access and benefits for a monthly subscription. Its sessions average 600,000 views per week. You can’t play enough festivals in a week to reach that number, he said.

In some ways, live streaming has an advantage over physical performance. Several cameras give RAC fans a glimpse into his playing technique that they never would have had at a live concert. I can really knock him down and have some semblance of privacy. It looks like a new medium.

Chris Webby

The Connecticut rapper has been the biggest hit of his career with nearly 60 million streams on Apple Music and Spotify since early March. I’m not saying that I can pull the strings of certain labels, but in theory I can operate the same and I own my music and that’s the biggest problem for me, said Webby. The key to his success is volume and consistency: By uploading a new track every Wednesday for nine months of the year, he has managed to acquire 1.5 million listeners per month.

Webby is nostalgic for the traditional approach still loved by many musicians: the slow, painstaking crafting of an album you take on tour. Now “it’s all about singles and algorithms,” says Webby. “You have to learn this and stay at the forefront of these platforms.”

He has different agents to distribute his work through YouTube and Spotify, and uses back-end apps that analyze songs that click with listeners, which he uses to choose songs for his next album. There’s one for Apple Music, another for Amazon Music, so someday I’ll find a song doing amazingly well and decide to shoot a video for it. And Webby always mixes his credentials: Two days ago I dropped a song with a new singing approach, something like Johnny Cash, which is unlike anything I’ve done before.

Ryan celsius

Celsius’ laid-back lo-fi vaporwave brand wowed stressed listeners during lockouts. He publishes his work himself and manages other musicians in the same genre, including Speechless, whose monthly listenings have roughly doubled since February to around 2 million, helped by the lockdown-themed song ‘Isolation’. Speechless is constantly collaborating with different artists and labels and spreading so that there is no single point of failure, Celsius said.

He said the solo artists are also collaborating more or creating their own labels using amuse.io, a distribution platform that handles accounting and complex royalty splits. Another, Submithub, allows musicians to improve their streaming profiles by connecting to curators of the most popular playlists. Fortunes.io notifies an artist when their track has been placed on a Spotify or Apple playlist so they can make more noise for their work on social media.

Covid has created a situation where everyone is almost on the same playing field – the impact of a big artist label on marketing is much less, Celsius said.

Jayda g

When the lockdowns canceled her sets in Tokyo, San Francisco and Glasgow, the London-based, Canadian-born DJ aired a series of Virtual Get Downs broadcast live with donation links to raise funds for theaters. and local charities. The resulting social media publicity helped Spotify listen to Jayda G’s latest EP eleven times, earning it second place on the platform’s largest electronic editorial playlist, mint.

She used the unlock feature of Apple Inc.’s music discovery app, Shazam, and offered exclusive behind-the-scenes video content to entice fans to add her tracks to their playlists on the service.