In an unsurprising twist, income inequality is reflected in the streams artists receive with 90 percent of streams going to the top 1 percent of artists. The data was compiled by Alpha Data, the analytics company that powers the Rolling Stone Charts, “for on-demand audio and video streams of music released between January 18th and July 17th of 2020 show this disparity; Spotify also recently confirmed a similar in its own data.”
Per the data compiled, “the top 10 percent of artists take nearly all the streams. The top 160,000 artists who released music during that time period saw 99.4 percent of the streams.”
However, that’s nothing compared to radio plays, where the top 1 percent of artists received 99.996 percent of plays. 
Platforms like Spotify have tried to spread out the inequality with editor-led playlists, and even though New Music Friday isn’t even the most popular editorial playlist on the platform — that’s Today’s Top Hits with over 26 million — it’s still one of the most frequented playlists with front page placement every Friday. And by and large, the top 1 percent of artists are overwhelmingly featured on the playlist.
While Spotify and other platforms arguably have a responsibility to represent all artists on their platforms equally, it’s also up to the consumers whether or not they want to dig for new music and artists.
You can read the full report via Rolling Stone.
Photo via Rukes.com
