Nowadays, tuning into the radio can feel like visiting a foreign country. Many stations play a small and repetitive catalog of fan favorites that feels increasingly stale. At the same time, songs that have passed their moment in the cultural zeitgeist hang around the airwaves as stations struggle to keep up with tastes moving at light speed. The radio is no longer the primary place for songs to be recommended and shared, having largely been replaced by subscription-based streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music. This transition has had profound effects on how music is made, shared, and compensated.
Before one analyzes the ways streaming has changed music, it’s important to understand the limitations that held radio back and made it vulnerable to being replaced. Back in the days when music was primarily stored on physical media such as vinyls, cassettes, or CDs, radio stations filled a gap in the market. It introduced people to new music and freed listeners from the burden of carrying around their music library with them. But as Walkmans gave way to the iPod, it became easier to transport a greater quantity of music, and listening habits shifted away from relying on what the radio was playing.
Beyond technological advancements, cultural changes have also contributed to making the radio obsolete. Federal guidelines that govern the use of public airwaves – which AM and FM radio stations operate on – ban the use of curse words and references to sex and drugs. This regulation has been in place since the 1970s, and it is why artists have often released clean or radio versions of their songs. Many artists have come to view this regulation as restricting and burdensome, opting to forgo radio versions of their songs altogether. This decision has taken on even more significance as hip-hop and R&B — both genres that often run afoul of these restrictions — rose in popularity over the last few decades to become two of the most popular genres in the country. This restriction leaves radio stations unable to play some of the most popular songs, even as streaming services offer them on-demand, alienating millions of potential listeners and further shifting consumers towards streaming services.
By now, the shift to streaming seems complete. Streaming accounted for 84% of the music industry’s revenue last year. Since streaming services have firmly cemented themselves as the dominant players in the industry, they’ve begun exerting their influence to set the rules and terms of engagement for artists. In one of the most noticeable changes of the streaming era, songs are getting increasingly shorter in order to optimize royalty payments. Under Spotify’s payment formula, users only have to listen to the first thirty seconds of a track to register a stream and thus a royalty payment, rendering the rest of the song irrelevant to profit margins. As there are only so many hours in a day, artists stand to make more money by releasing multiple short tracks that each count towards a payment rather than a few longer songs. Aside from shortening songs, this formula also incentivizes artists to open with the chorus or a catchier hook in order to keep users listening up to the thirty-second mark, which has played a part in shrinking the average instrumental intro from twenty seconds in the 1980s to five seconds in 2015.
In the United States, royalty rates for both radio stations and streaming services are set by the Copyright Royalty Board, which updates the rates every 5 years. While this is supposed to set industry-wide standards that consider the interests of both artists and distributors, streaming platforms have created loopholes to pay a different rate that they determine themselves. In 2024, Apple Music announced it would pay artists 10% more for tracks recorded with spatial audio. This announcement generated controversy among smaller artists who pointed out that recording in spatial audio can cost an extra ten to twenty thousand dollars per album, posing a barrier for artists who can’t afford those expenses. For its part, in 2024, Spotify reclassified premium accounts as bundles of podcasts and music, allowing the service to pay out a lower mechanical royalty rate. Spotify was sued by the Mechanical Licensing Collective over this change, and the case remains ongoing in a decision that would impact $150 million of the platform’s revenue.
The shift toward streaming services has created two main ways for music to be shared. The first is through company-curated playlists, such as the Spotify mix Rap Caviar that has nearly 16 million followers, a figure that dwarfs the audience of most music radio programs. The second is through a service's recommendation algorithm that suggests artists and songs a user might like based on their listening history. These two features not only replace a role previously filled by radio DJs, they also place a significant amount of power and influence squarely in the hands of streaming services. Without discerning human tastes, algorithms often base their recommendations on more superficial qualities, such as the name of the playlist or songs by artists already in the mix, regardless of whether or not they match the genre or vibe a user is trying to cultivate. A particularly egregious example is Spotify’s daylist mix, which is meant to track your listening habits and suggest songs in genres you tend to listen to at given times. Yet it often gets led astray, and can end up recommending Phoebe Bridgers on a bossa nova playlist or Lorde on a playlist meant for West Coast hip-hop.
While the shift away from a radio centered music industry has made it easier than ever for artists to upload their music to services and connect to fans, this democratization has been a double edged sword. If everyone has the same ease of access to put their music out, it becomes that much harder for individual artists to stand out in a crowd of millions.
This conundrum is exactly why streaming service’s algorithms are so vital, and these platforms know it. Spotify runs their Discovery program, offering artists a chance of improved visibility in the platform’s catered recommendations in exchange for a lower royalty payment. Musicians must then struggle to choose between better chances at visibility or marginally better pay. For smaller artists, this can be an incredibly difficult question to answer as they try to make a living. This situation was complicated further by Spotify’s rule change in 2023 that stopped paying artists for songs that get less than one thousand streams a year in an attempt to crack down on artificial streaming.
These changes aren’t necessarily felt equally across the industry, as larger artists have been able to exert their influence and fame to extract favorable concessions. A prominent example of this unequal landscape was Taylor Swift’s boycott of Spotify in 2014, when she opted to keep her catalog off the platform until the royalties paid out to artists were increased. Spotify subsequently acquiesced to her demands in 2017, ending the 3 year standoff. Yet this negotiation is one that few artists can conceivably pull off, leaving most performers at the whim of the new streaming kingmakers.
The shift away from radio is just the latest upheaval artists have faced in the last few years as they navigate the industry. In recognition of the new power dynamics at play and the challenges smaller artists face to get by, new proposals have been floated to alter the way streaming companies share their profits. Some advocate for changing how services pay artists for each listener’s stream, giving artists greater control over their profiles and recommendations, and reducing the amount of corporate-curated playlists that get recommended to users. While each proposal has benefits and drawbacks, the variety of suggestions indicates a broad discontent among artists. Governments spent the 20th century trying to regulate the radio system to ensure fairness, and it may be time to turn a regulatory eye towards the streaming industry in this new era.
Source: https://www.tastemakersmag.com/articles/the-death-of-radio
