New series: How artist-friendly are music streaming platforms?

By: Chuck FishmanBrandon LandowskiCherie Hu

Published: 2023-05-23

Jump straight to a specific chapter in this series below:

Against a cutthroat competitive landscape and a growing wave of critique from regulators and industry professionals, music streaming platforms are increasingly trying to position their offerings as “artist-friendly.”

Royalty payment reform is currently at the center of the “artist-friendliness” debate — with the likes of Spotify and Deezer proposing changes to their payout models that would direct more royalties towards artists above a certain engagement threshold, and away from fraudulent actors.

But there are many other factors to consider when evaluating how streaming platforms can better support artists:

At Water & Music, we’ve spent the last several months working on a definitive ranking of which music streaming platforms best support artists . We’re thrilled to unveil our full ranking and analysis today, exclusively for Water & Music members.

How we built our rankings

We tracked nearly 90 different product features across eight major platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Studio, Amazon Music, SoundCloud, Deezer, TIDAL, and Pandora), with a focus on the following categories:

We also spoke on background with several artist marketing and product reps at major streaming platforms, to learn more about their respective goals, team structures, and future feature roadmaps. (Ultimately, no platform was willing to go on the record with us about their plans.)

Our full product matrix reveals clear patterns and trends in which DSPs are ahead of the curve on their artist-facing product offerings — and which ones are falling behind, in spite of PR campaigns that might suggest otherwise.

Who is this for?

Our goal in this analysis is to provide an objective, bird’s-eye view of streaming products from the artist’s perspective. We hope this report promotes cross-industry transparency and guides future strategy and decision-making for the following stakeholders:

Browse our full product matrix here .

Industry context: What’s in it for artists — and the DSPs themselves

Globally-minded music streaming companies continue to face an influx of both new users and new content. Within the last six months, Spotify and YouTube Music surpassed 200 million and 80 million paid subscribers, respectively. On the content side, 100,000 new songs are being added to streaming platforms every day, with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music now hosting over 100 million tracks each .

Yet, as discussed in Water & Music’s previous research , the total streaming revenue pie is not growing as fast as the number of new artists entering the market. This imbalance has led to a steady decline in average per-stream royalty payout rates over time, and an unsustainable , zero-sum-game environment for emerging acts.

In the context of career strategy, such unfavorable economics means that many artists and their teams treat streaming as a loss-leading investment in discovery and fan data . The hope behind this approach is that with the right marketing tools, artist teams can afford to take a loss on getting their music in front of a larger group of listeners, in order to access deeper business insights and direct the right fans to higher-margin products and experiences like touring, merchandise, and paid communities down the line.

In reality, though, there’s little consistency in the marketing tools that DSPs offer to artists to make even basic marketing and business decisions. Hence, given the critical role that streaming plays in a fan’s journey with music, artist teams are increasingly demanding better tools for facilitating, understanding, and capitalizing on streaming discovery and behavior .

While artists can get some data on how their music is consumed from independent distributors like CD Baby and TuneCore, or third-party marketing tools like Linkfire and Feature.fm , the DSPs themselves ultimately own direct data on listener behavior and preferences. Over the last 10 years, DSPs have been leaning into this data advantage more aggressively, building dedicated teams for proprietary artist marketing and analytics features — usually branded externally as “ X For Artists.”

Interestingly, these kinds of artist-facing product initiatives at DSPs are relatively new. Spotify for Artists first launched in 2013, while Pandora’s Artist Marketing Platform first rolled out in 2014; most competing FA offerings didn’t launch until several years later (e.g. Apple Music for Artists in 2018, Amazon Music for Artists in 2020, Tidal’s artist platform beta in 2022, and SoundCloud for Artists in 2022).

Ensuring the success of FA product offerings is increasingly mission-critical not just for artists and their teams, but also for the DSPs themselves, who face financial and branding pressures of their own. Given that DSPs are still unprofitable, they are visibly experimenting with alternative revenue streams beyond streaming subscriptions and ads — usually in the form of additional artist- and industry-facing services, such as Spotify’s paid Marquee advertising features and Amazon “ print-on-demand ” merch program. Amidst growing scrutiny from regulators, DSPs are also rushing to establish goodwill with artists and rights holders, in a way that is bleeding beyond marketing and PR campaigns into concrete product decisions.

Through a laser focus on the way streaming platforms are catering to artists — and where they still fall short — we hope to shed light on deeper financial and product-related needs, challenges, and opportunities across the wider music-tech industry. We look forward to unfolding this series in full, and welcome any feedback along the way at members@waterandmusic.com .