Within the music industry artists trade on numbers. How many streams, how many tickets, merch rate per ticket, what’s the clickthrough rate, pre-sales, pre-saves, playlist adds, followers, likes…all of those are parlayed into…more.
If you’re an artist, you can open up the artist Spotify app and see that one or five or a hundred people are listening to your music RIGHT NOW…BUT you have no idea what that music means to them. You can’t measure meaningfulness, joy and comfort.
You have no idea what their surroundings are, what the context of their life looks like, what they’re going through. You don’t know how they feel or what they want or where they’re going.
And that un-measurability is the underpinning of why this whole industry exists to begin with.
The music is being listened to by someone. Real people. Accompanying them on their journey, whatever it is. And to them its not about gross and net per stream or merch conversion…they’re simply listening. They’re doing the thing that you always hoped someone would do with your music.
For all that we can measure these days it’s the unmeasurable that is still the most meaningful and most important.
