INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The Kobalt EC-1, Part IIIStreaming services have made music ubiquitous, driving more exploration by consumers who don’t have to pay for
each song or album individually
Musicians are correspondingly able to find their own niche of fans scattered around the world.(This is the third installment of our EC-1
series on Kobalt Music Group and changes in the music industry
Read Part I and Part II.)As Spotify gained rapid adoption in his native Sweden in 2006, Kobalt’s founder - CEO Willard Ahdritz predicted
music streaming and the rise of social media would increasingly undercut the gatekeeping power of the major label groups and realign the
market to center more on a vast landscape of niche musicians than a handful of traditional superstars.Both of these predictions have proven
The question is to what extent and how are industry players actually realigning as a result?What musicians need in addition to the
administrative collection of their royalties (explained in Part II) is a menu of creative services they can tap for support
Kobalt’s AWAL and Kobalt Music Publishing divisions provide such services to recording artists and songwriters, respectively, and do so on
purely a services basis (getting paid a commission but not taking ownership of copyrights like traditional labels and publishers do).Niche
Global superstarsImage via Getty Images / rolfo eclaireThe whole music industry is growing substantially due to streaming music’s
mainstream penetration in wealthier countries and increased penetration in emerging markets.As the overall pie is growing, the non-superstar
segment of the market is indeed growing faster than the superstar segment, taking over a larger portion of industry royalties.According to
data from BuzzAngle, the top 500 songs in the US in 2018 accounted for 10% of on-demand audio streams — a dramatic decline in market share
compared to 2017 when the top 500 songs accounted for 14% of streams
Stepping back, the top 50,000 songs made up 73.2% of all US streams in 2017 but that declined to 70.5% in 2018.
