5 big changes in music streaming that every musician needs to know

Music streaming platforms have made a lot of new developments this year, including royalty changes, artist features, and more. Let’s catch you up…

by Chris Robley from the Reverbnation Blog

Music platforms are rolling out a lot of big things this quarter, from new royalty proposals, to new playlist formats, to new data features. 

Let’s catch up on five of the biggest recent developments in music streaming.

And to make it easy, here’s a quick video recap!

1. Controversy over the “artist-centric” royalty model

First, the debate continues over Deezer’s proposed “artist-centric” royalty model, which aims to pay less per-stream to artists who get very few plays, and more to artists who get more plays, putting an emphasis on music that listeners actually searched for, as opposed to more passive listening. 

2. New data about your music on TIDAL

TIDAL Artist Home has made a few additions to your artist dashboard, including:

• Your top 5 tracks
• Your top 10 countries
• And the age breakdown of your listeners

3. New Spotify Promo Cards for you (maybe?)

Spotify is bringing its “Promo Cards” to songwriters. Which is cool. But you have to already have an active Songwriter Page or Written By playlist on Spotify for it to work.

4. New Daylist format on Spotify

Daylist is a newly-launched Spotify format that serves up music customized to your daily patterns, so if you listen to Classical during coffee, and EDM at work, and hip-hop at the gym, it’ll try to match those moods throughout your day.

5. New in-the-moment listening via Spotify Jam

Spotify also rolled out something called JAM, which encourages people on the same wi-fi network — though you can also invite people around the world — to listen together in real-time and collaborate on the playlist. 

Can you imagine the fights that will ensue when one of your friends kills the party vibe by adding some weird track to the queue of your dance mix? Awkward!