Discussions about the music business almost always devolve into anecdotes and opinions, and I think it’s fair to say that most musicians make their moves based on some combination of conventional wisdom, gut feeling, impulse, and the stand-out successes and failures experienced by a few of their peers. In the midst of the constant hustle,… Read more: Streaming Research: The Background and Data

The charts below represent information gleaned from 2.4 million streams across 29 different platforms from 40 artists/groups. For more on the background and data set, go here. What’s immediately clear is that Spotify dominates the field, capturing 71% of the streaming activity in the data set, almost 7x as much as the second-place platform, Apple Music.… Read more: Platforms: A Stream Pays Artists a Third of a Penny

What does the typical professional musician earn in streaming royalties? Does spending a ton of money on mixing and mastering boost the likelihood of popularity on streaming platforms? What about music videos, social media ads, and publicists? What separates the talented-and-popular from the talented-and-obscure on these platforms? To explore these questions, I asked my musician… Read more: Streams and Earnings: 75% of Samples Artists Earned Less Than $3 Per Month

From August 2018 On Friday I joined Jessica Lurie and Arne Livingston in opening for and sitting in with Victor Wooten, Dennis Chambers, and Bob Franceschini, musicians I’ve been listening to and admiring for half of my life. Here’s what happened and what I learned: They walked in and sat down to watch just as… Read more: Lessons Learned