Show Review
Mvtant
in Los Angeles, CA.
It is crazy how much Spotify monthly listeners serve as a proxy for audience size for artists trying to make a living publishing and performing live music. When one consider to what extent guess work was involved BEFORE Spotify certified as a handy proxy for world wide audience size, the ability of Spotify to now directly quantify every artist in the world on the same scale is quite breathtaking. And, I might, add leveling, in that now any human can just open up Spotify and see how many monthly listeners every artist earth has updated on a daily basis.
And of course it isn't perfect and it's not like, a good thing, but is it accurate? Yes. This requires, again, taking Spotify monthly listeners as a PROXY for TOTAL audience size, not saying that artists make a living from Spotify streams because it doesn't seem like they do. But it does mean that if you have a certain number of monthly listeners, you should be able to make a living from royalties, touring etc. Here is how it works:
0-10 monthly listeners: Artist has no audience.
10-100: Artist has an audience of friends and acquaintances.
100-1000: This is the most second most frequent level for artists who have released songs on Spotify but who do not have a large audience.
1000-10000: This is a really big move up- and the start of what I would call a viable artist in the Spotify/streaming era. At the start of this range, 1000, you have Artists who have gone from 100 to 1000, meaning that there are likely total strangers and/or people who have paid to see or listen to their music. Or they've managed to generate some interest on the internet without releasing records or playing shows, which is fine. Artists who make it to 10,000 monthly listeners are at the threshold of viability.
10000-100000: This is the range where the biggest shift takes place. Artists at 10,000 monthly listeners might be touring regionally or playing lower capacity rooms on tour. They may be selling physical copies of their recordings at a steady clip. Artists at this stage may enter without some of the professional accruements of a professional music career: Label, booking agent, manager, business manager, etc, but by the time they reach 100,000 monthly listeners they probably have all of them or have made a conscious decision to NOT have some or all of those folks around.
100000-1000000: This is upper indie or major label level. Any artist with over a hundred thousand monthly listeners is going to draw intense interest from labels, managers, booking agents, etc. Because of the vagaries of audience composition in the internet era, they may not be able to succeed as touring artists and they may not sell any physical copies of their music. Bands that do tour and sell actual record/copies of their music can be at the lower levels of this tour and do quite nicely.
1000000-10000000: Almost inevitably going to be major label, internationally known artists, particularly once you get above 1 or 2 million monthly listeners.
10,000,000-100,000,000: I'm not exactly sure what the 100th biggest artist in the world has in terms of monthly streams but The Weekend, number one, has eighty million monthly streams.
So, like, my basic idea for a record label is, first of all, any independent label has to expect to start with artists that either have nothing on Spotify or have something but less than 1000 listeners. Any artist with more than that is spoken for or they don't want a label. The idea is just put something out, anything, a tape is great, a 7" is great. A 12" is not as great but doable, a CD even- just something. You don't have to make that many, because, if a band can sell 100 of ANYTHING it's worth pursuing. And then you put that on Spotify and just watch it. If it just sits there for years and the artist never climbs above 100 monthly listeners, that's bad. That means no one cares and probably that the artist hasn't been active by playing local shows let alone touring. If the Artist gets into the mid hundreds from zero then that is good but not great, worth putting out another physical product if the artist is enthusiastic about it but no loss if they aren't. If, after one release an Artist makes into the thousands of monthly listeners, even if it's just a thousand, that's a great sign. I'm pretty convinced that the majority of independent artists, maybe upwards of 60 to 70 percent, never do this.
Once an Artist breaches that barrier of a thousand monthly listeners, touring becomes increasingly important. I think if a band wants to go from one thousand to ten thousand monthly listeners, playing live shows is the most familiar and familiar route. Going from ten thousand to a hundred thousand monthly listeners begins to involve bigger tours, record labels spending tens of thousands of dollars, a booking agent who can get the Artist onto festival bills and of course releasing additional music. From a hundred thousand to a million it's most likely to be the lower levels of the music industry proper or the higher levels of the indie world.
Which is all a way to say that I was excited to see Mvtant live last night, like, two years after the record came out. Obviously, he hasn't been able to tour, but now he is opening all the dates on this massive Author & Punisher tour so I was excited to see him at Resident in downtown LA. I was just anxious to know how good his live show was, because while his sales have been pretty good, his streaming numbers haven't been great- which like- if a band can't tour- it's not fair to judge their streaming numbers. But man- the Mvtant live show is incredible- great energy, bouncing around on stage, and the songs are really good. Like early Nine Inch Nails before Trent had a band around him. If you have a chance to see Mvtant life you should take it you won't be disappointed!!!
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