Digital Payola

Let’s say you’re a musician with compositions on the various platforms. In this case, let’s reference Spotify. Every artist gets treated equally, right? After all, they are just streamers (players) of music. Wrong. It should concern you that they literally sell preferential treatment if you can come up with the cash. In many ways, it’s like the payola scandals of the 1950s on radio (read about it online because it was transformative). If you’re willing to pay, you will get more access and play. But in reality, 99.999% of the time, when you pay for preference it doesn’t help your music career, it just puts money in their pockets. Note that when you’re streaming well over 100,000,000 songs like Spotify, the chances of big success is .001% at best, even when you pay for it. Don’t let star dust blind you. The story of music success is the same now as it always has been: being in the right place at the right time with the right song and having the right person hear it.