Playlist: The Advertisement and Destruction of Musical Artists

Playlist: The Advertisement and Destruction of Musical Artists

By, Carl V. Johnson

& Jack W. Galliett

In the recent years a new way of organizing and listening to music has arisen. This new method is called playlists. They can be found on platforms such as Spotify, Pandora, Topsify, YouTube, Apple products, and many other platforms. A playlist is a way that you can organize music and easily access it whenever on the platform that you created it on. But what I want to look at is if playlists are destroying the musician's ability make a living, or do they support advertisement for the artist and can provide compensation?

First we should look at how the music industry has changed and become what we know today. First, it has become very digital in many ways. Here is a video talking about how the music industry we know today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PeroHX3e8k .

You could journey onto platforms like Youtube or Pandora Radio to find a new song or music video that catches your attention. Another popular program is Spotify. This program will allow you to find almost any type of music by a large number of artists and then you can follow the artist or add the song to a ‘favorite’ playlist or another playlist. These are just a few of the many programs that contain the function of creating playlists.

With a playlist, songs are being played on these platforms to give listeners an open chance to listen to any song an unlimited number of times. With this, people no longer need to buy albums because all of their favorite music will be on a playlist created by themselves or another person. With the lower amount of album sales, it will become more challenging for musicians to become self-sustaining. Musicians and bands will now have to rely on people, not necessarily followers, to play their music and tracks over and over. The reason why it is more essential to have more streams than followers is because it depend more on how much attention the video receives, or a in other words, streams or views. Throught seeing how many view a song or video has is how a company such as Youtube will compensate the artist.  How some platforms get money is that they might require that you pay a monthly fee to get special access such as no advertisements from different companies or other features, but it is usually a small fee. These fees are used to pay the people that work for the company and the artists that provide the content on their platform. Not forgetting that each platform usually has ads from other companies, the amount of money that gets returned to the artist is very small. The only way for artist to then get their song to be played more is by placing they in multiple playlists on multiple platforms in the hopes that their tracks will be listen to.

But with the concept of playlists there is an upside which is advertisment. Although there might not be as many sales when there were just CD’s and Vinyl's being sold, placing a song in multiple playlists across many platforms could possibly increase the number of people that hear and possibly purchase the track. One way that people can increase how they advertise is putting major artist’s songs into their own playlist to increase their popularity. Although it does advertise the major artist’s own song, it introduces the smaller artist’s music to an audience that enjoys the major artist. This can be very beneficial to any artist that uses this form of advertisement, but has its downfall of not just purely promoting the smaller artist.

With these forms of advertisement through playlists, artist can make a living, but it is a challenge. With the platforms that they are advertising on, they are getting very small compensation for providing the content on that platform. Within certain platforms, users can freely use the music and place the tracks in playlists of their own. This raises the question, when user of a platform that creates a playlist with an artist’s music, is it the artist’s right to get honors for providing the content of that playlist, or do they, the artist, own the playlist and get honors when anyone listens to it?

Works Cited

Dredge, Stuart. "List for Life: The Growing Role of Playlists in the Music Industry." List for Life: The Growing Role of Playlists in the Music Industry. Music Ally.com, 07 July 2015. Web. 14 Dec. 2015. <http://musically.com/2015/12/07/list-for-life-the-growing-role-of-playlists-in-the-music-industry/>.