MIRANDA MULHOLLAND
CD BABY’S KEVIN BREUNER
“I think what’s happening now is that any-
thing that is getting signed is already emerging,
if you know what I mean. There is a tendency for
artist and management teams to get out into the
world, get their music up on [streaming services],
and build some sort of audience for them prior to
getting record label interest. I think there are very
few examples now of artists who are finding re-
cord label partners before they’ve done anything
themselves,” explains Taylor. “Inevitably, every act
that is attracting record label attention these days
has something going on, whether it’s streams or
followers or some sort of data that backs up the
fact that the world cares. So, it is not as specula-
tive as it used to be. Secondarily, once that data
starts to reveal itself, there are a lot of record label
suitors who are at the table and are ready to do
business, which creates a competitive landscape
for artists, which is great.”
Of course, how the world works today is not how
it’ll work in the future. If streaming has turned
the music industry on its head in five years, what
might do it five years from now? We have an
indication already, and it won’t disrupt streaming
so much as alter how we interact with it.
“It seems clear to me that voice is going to
be the major interface of the future,” says Baptiste
at SOCAN.
The rise of smart speakers has been rapid.
Nearly 10 per cent of Canadian homes already
own a Google Home, Amazon Echo, or other
smart speaker. And unsurprisingly, music is a
key feature. A 2018 report commissioned by the
British record industry trade group BPI and the
Entertainment Retailers Association found that
music is the most common use of smart speakers.
The report also found smart speaker users listen
46 CANADIAN MUSICIAN
to more music per day and, crucially for
the music industry, are more likely to pay
for a streaming subscription. A complicat-
ing factor, though, is that, in an era where
streaming is accused of making the music
listening experience too passive, smart
speakers exacerbate that trend. In fact, ex-
tremely generic phrases like “play music” are
among the most common commands for
smart speakers.
“The questions you ask speakers are
more vague and generic, so it is going to
be more important to have good metadata
powering all this,” says Baptiste. “So, for SO-
CAN, it’s another reason that validates our
strategy to be a big player in the metadata
area and to make sure that we have as
much information as possible – accurate in-
formation on sound recordings and musical
works. And we always tell members, here and around the world, that their music should be discoverable
by new smart speakers. I think smart speakers are going to be very, very big.”
Taylor agrees, saying he has regular conversations with eOne Music’s digital and sales departments
about the importance of metadata and searchability on smart speakers.
“For my band, Harrow Fair, we were added to a playlist and saw a huge spike
in that song, hundreds of thousands of streams, but there was no difference,
really, in the rest of the album. So, it is not like people are finding the songs
and then are like, ‘Oh, I wonder who that band is?’ ... I think that is a bit of a
myth.”
Miranda Mulholland
It’s important to remember that, despite three consecutive years of growth in recorded music between
2015 and 2017 and that this trend is expected to continue, there is still a long way to go to make up for
those 15 years of losses. Global recorded music sales were $17.3 billion in 2017, with streaming account-
ing for $6.6 billion, making it the largest and fastest-growing segment. But there is a long way to climb to
reach the highs of the late ‘90s. Nonetheless, there are some bullish predictions floating around.
A report compiled by Morgan Stanley Research (that an investment bank is compiling a report on
the music industry says a lot in itself ) points out that “while digital downloads generated only $5 billion at
their peak in 2012, paid streaming has already exceeded that, with $10 billion in 2017.” It then adds that
passing 100 million paying music subscribers globally in 2016 was a huge milestone, but estimates it will
take only two more years to add another 100 million and could get as high as 575 million paying sub-
scribers by 2022, with that growth driven largely by smart speakers and connected cars.
There is a lot here to take in and consider, and we’ve only just scratched the surface of this conver-
sation. Looking at the big picture, it’s hard to be entirely pessimistic – who isn’t happy to see the music
industry growing again? – but is the current framework for streaming the fairest? Maybe, like Taylor says
bluntly, “fair is where you end up,” but it’s still the early days of streaming and where it might end up,
nobody knows for sure.
Michael Raine is the Senior Editor of Canadian Musician.