What Rick Beato Hears When He Listens to Spotify
Beato says you need rich parents to make it in music. A sales-based chart of 60 artists across 34 countries found zero nepo babies and a Greek priest with 150 copies pressed.
| 7 min read
Signal
Opinion, essays, industry commentary, building in public
5 articles
The Chart That Spotify Can't Play
Half the TOP 20 Albums Worldwide are not on Spotify. The ones that are earn less in a week of streaming than they made from fewer than 200 direct purchases.
| 16 min read
Shooting in the Dark
The copy-paste promotional strategy - carpet-bombing every platform with the same post in the hope that one of them lands - fails for reasons almost nobody in music promotion describes correctly. There are three of them, and none involves the surveillance network you think is watching.
| 15 min read
The Door Nobody Opens
The effort heuristic is older than AI, and it decides whether anyone presses play. Research shows album covers that read as machine-made cost musicians listeners before a single note is heard.
| 10 min read
Why Skaldera Exists (And Why the Music Industry Made It Necessary)
The music industry's infrastructure is built for the industry's convenience, not the artist's. An album landing page is the most undervalued tool in an independent musician's catalog, and the page is only the beginning.
| 8 min read