What Rick Beato Hears When He Listens to Spotify

Rick Beato is looking at the wrong chart

Rick Beato has 5 million YouTube subscribers and the ear of a generation of musicians. When he says something about the state of the industry, people listen. Yesterday, he said this: it is “almost impossible to make it as a musician nowadays if you’re young unless you have rich parents.”

He named names. Gracie Abrams, daughter of J.J. Abrams. Audrey Hobert, whose father produced Scrubs. Sabrina Carpenter, whose aunt voiced Bart Simpson. He traced the money from wealthy families through professional songwriters and publishing deals to the Spotify Top 50, and concluded that the ladder has been pulled up. The working-class band, the garage origin story, the bartender who pays rent and rehearsal fees from the same paycheck - that world, in Beato’s telling, is gone.

He is not entirely wrong. But he is looking at the wrong chart.

The chart he is not looking at

We publish a weekly chart on Skaldera called the TOP 20 Albums Worldwide. It ranks albums by sales - not streams, not playlist adds, not TikTok virality, not algorithmic favor. People pay money. The chart counts it.

Four weeks of that chart, spanning April 2026, produced roughly 60 unique entries across 15 genres and buyers in 34 countries. We went through every one of them and looked at their backgrounds. The number of nepo babies: zero. The number from documented wealthy families: zero.

Here is who was there.

KNEECAP, a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish and English, entered at 9. Mo Chara grew up in West Belfast, an area whose relationship to privilege is the precise opposite of Beato’s thesis. The band’s subject matter is working-class youth culture, Irish language rights, and post-Troubles identity. Their name references paramilitary punishment shootings. Their album title, FENIAN, reclaims a sectarian slur. Their biopic premiered at Sundance and was shortlisted for an Oscar. None of this required a famous parent. It required something to say and a community that recognised the voice.

Father Dionysios Tabakis, a 52-year-old Greek Orthodox priest who serves at the Church of Panagitsa in Nafplio, entered at 13. He plays fretless electric guitar because the absence of frets lets him reach the microtones closest to the human voice. Paradise Metal bends Byzantine church modes through shoegaze drone and amplifier worship. 150 copies pressed. Listeners in 21 countries. His publishing deal: none. His industry connections: he is a priest.

Panchiko, a Nottingham band who made a shoegaze EP in their bedrooms around 2000, pressed roughly 30 copies, and broke up. One of those copies ended up in an Oxfam charity shop, where a stranger found it in 2016 and uploaded it to 4chan. The disc was damaged. The audio was distorted by rot. A cult following formed anyway. Four years later, fans traced a barcode on the cover to the specific Oxfam branch in Sherwood, Nottingham, and found the lead singer on Facebook. He had no idea anyone had heard the EP. The band reformed, and in April 2026, their new album charted at 19.

Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods worked a string of minimum-wage jobs - warehouse, security, benefits office - into his 40s before the duo broke through. Their single appeared on the chart. So did a record by CALM DOWN, a collective re-enacting the mythology of The KLF in village halls along a ley line from Stonehenge to Liverpool, selling records hand to hand. So did a cassette box set from Geometric Lullaby, a vaporwave label run from a farm in Buffalo Center, Iowa, by a man whose other job is fronting a depressive black metal band on Nuclear Blast. Every cassette ships with tarot cards.

None of these people have rich parents. Several of them are doing quite well.

What the data actually says about class and pop music

Beato’s examples are real. Gracie Abrams’s father is J.J. Abrams. That is true. But anecdotes assembled from the upper reaches of the Spotify charts are not a dataset. The closest thing to a dataset is the Sutton Trust’s A Class Act report, published in late 2024, based on 1.1 million higher-education records and the ONS Labour Force Survey. It is the most rigorous study of class background in the UK creative industries ever conducted.

The finding that matters: 8% of UK pop stars attended private school. The UK population baseline is 7%. Pop music, specifically, is not the preserve of the privileged - not in the UK, and not by this measure.

The figure that does circulate in op-eds - “60% of chart-topping musicians attended private school” - is a misreading. The 60% conflates classical music, where private-school attendance runs to 43%, with pop, where it sits near the population average. Classical music has a class problem. Pop music, by the best available evidence, has a different one.

What pop has, and what Beato is correctly sensing, is a visibility problem. The people who appear on the Spotify Top 50 are disproportionately connected, funded, or both. But the Spotify Top 50 is not music. It is one chart, on one platform, measuring one kind of attention. Confusing it with the entirety of music-making is like standing in the lobby of a five-star hotel and concluding that nobody cooks at home.

What has actually gotten cheaper

The strongest version of Beato’s argument would be that the financial barriers to making music have risen so high that only the wealthy can clear them. This is the opposite of what happened.

In 2005, a professional-sounding indie album cost $10,000 to $50,000 to produce. Pro Tools HD ran above $10,000. Distribution required a label or a physical pipeline. In 2026, the floor is effectively zero. GarageBand and Cakewalk are free. Vital, one of the best software synthesizers available, is free. Native Instruments gives away 2,000 sounds. DistroKid distributes an unlimited catalogue for $22.99 a year. AI mastering runs $4 to $8 per track. The marginal cost of releasing a record has collapsed by two orders of magnitude in 20 years.

Bandcamp, the platform most aligned with independent artists, has paid out $1.71 billion to musicians since 2008. In the past 12 months alone: $218 million on 15.2 million digital albums. On a single Bandcamp Friday in 2025, artists earned over $3.8 million in 24 hours.

This is not a fringe economy. It is an economy that Beato’s frame does not account for, because Beato’s frame begins and ends with Spotify.

What has actually gotten harder

Here is where Beato deserves more credit than his critics give him. Something has gotten harder. He is describing real pain, even if he has misidentified the cause.

The UK lost 125 grassroots music venues in 2023 and another 25 in 2024, according to the Music Venue Trust. The average grassroots venue lost nearly £200,000 on live music alone, surviving only on food and drink sales. The touring circuit that once offered 22 dates across 28 cities now offers 11 dates across 12. In the UK, 84% of independent artists say they cannot afford to tour.

New York City has built zero artist-specific affordable housing units since 2015. The Lower East Side, the neighbourhood Beato describes living in during the early 1990s when he bartended on a boat and played in 5 bands, has lost 55% of its artist population. Beato’s own story - making $500 a week teaching guitar and covering rent, rehearsal space, and recording time - is mathematically impossible in Manhattan in 2026. In that, he is completely right.

The UK Musicians’ Census, surveying nearly 6,000 musicians in 2023, found that 73% of working-class musicians need a day job, compared to 31% of their middle-class peers. The median US musician earns $21,300 a year from music, according to the Princeton-affiliated MIRA study. The average musician cobbles together income from 3.5 different music-related activities.

These are real structural barriers. But they are barriers of infrastructure and cost-of-living, not of parentage. The problem is not that you need rich parents to make a record. The problem is that you need a second job to survive in the city where the venues used to be.

The wrong diagnosis

Beato’s error is not one of observation. It is one of scope. He looks at the Spotify Top 50, sees wealth and connections, and generalises to all of music. But the Spotify Top 50 is a bottleneck designed to be a bottleneck. It is a list of 50 slots on a platform that hosts over 120,000 new tracks every day. The competition for those slots is brutal, and capital is an advantage in brutal competitions. This has always been true of mainstream pop charts. It was true when payola ruled AM radio. It was true when MTV decided which videos got rotation. The mechanism changes; the dynamic does not.

What is new - genuinely, structurally new - is that the bottleneck is no longer the only path. A Greek priest can press 150 copies of microtonal sacred metal and find listeners in 21 countries. A band whose EP rotted in a charity shop for 16 years can reform and chart on the strength of a fan community that found them without any industry apparatus at all. Three men from West Belfast can rap in a language that even people at home don’t speak and play Glastonbury, Coachella, and Sundance in the same year.

The tools exist. The distribution exists. The audiences exist. What Beato calls “making it” is one definition, and it is the narrowest one available. The musicians on our chart have a different definition. It involves making the work they want to make, finding the people who want to hear it, and sustaining a life around both. By that measure, 2026 is not the worst time to be a musician. It might, against all structural headwinds, be one of the better ones.

The headwinds are real. The venues are closing. The cities are too expensive. The touring economics are broken. Those are the fights worth having. But “you need rich parents” is not the diagnosis. It is the Spotify Top 50 mistaken for the whole sky.