The Music Industry

    

    Ever since platforms like SoundCloud and Spotify have become the most used ways of listening to music, young artists can go viral and become successful due to the ease of uploading their own music. It's significantly easier to make music today compared to even just 20 years ago. All someone needs is a laptop/phone, a microphone, and some lyrics. This is great for artists who have the talent but just not the resources, right? I mean many of today's most popular rappers might not have become as popular if it wasn't for the internet and social media.

    This all seems great, but there's a problem with such young artists blowing up so quickly. Imagine at 16 years old, you release a song that gets millions of views overnight. You'll think it's the best thing to ever happen and you'll feel even better when a music label contacts you to sign with them. This is where everything in an artist's career goes down hill basically before it even started. Most of the times, these labels take advantage of these young artists' desire to want money fast. They'll offer the artist a lot of money as a signing bonus as well as a percentage of all the songs after that. In many cases artists would've been just as successful without a label, but once stuck with a label it's very hard to get out. They take a very high percentage of the artists money and even control what the artists put out, the artists don't even have creative control of their music anymore. 

    So if labels take a large amount of their money and also limit their music, why do artists even sign with them? There's really only two reasons artists sign with labels: money and connections. Like stated previously, it's not uncommon for an artist who goes viral to still be struggling financially, so the money and resources that a label has is very enticing to an artist. The connections are also very important. Having someone else on your song, especially someone who's more popular already, is a quick way to blow up and stay relevant. For these reasons, it's not very common for artists to be independent, which means not signed with a label. The most popular independent artist currently is Taylor Swift who just recently got out of being signed last year.


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