Spotify has launched a slew of global RADAR programs. It will focus on up-and-coming artists from 50 markets worldwide. These artist will get solid Spotify support – programmed playlists, the new ‘On Our Radar’ playlist, and other marketing efforts.

Right now, Spotify has U.S. Alaina Castillo as an artist to watch. The Houston, Texas singer-songwriter has over 3 million streams and is known for the track “i don’t think i love you anymore” produced by RØMANS.

Other artists that made the radar list are Mali, When Chai Met, Toas Taba, Chake (India), Elaine (South Africa), merci, mercy (Australia), Ela Minus (Columbia), and Hervé (France).

In 2017, Spotify had a program called Rise which profiled Lauv, Russell Dickerson and Trippie Redd.

Major music labels make $1 Million from streaming. In fact, 80% of the music industry’s revenue came from streaming says a new report. Other figures worth highlighting –
Streaming revenues brought in $8.8 billion – that’s more than the entire amount of money made from recorded music in 2017. The total number of streaming subscriptions increased by 25%, which accounted for 93% of streaming revenue growth from last year.
Can artist earn a million an hour? Yeah right! Artists are earning about $0.012 per song stream on Apple Music or $0.003 per song stream on Spotify. Is this bad news for artists? Yes and No. It’s not the best for the singer-songwriter who wants to stay in the bedroom and release songs on digital streaming platforms. It’s not bad for the superstar artist that has a big fan following and can generate revenue through a variety of avenues.

We’d be better off if more tracks like The Whole 9 flooding the streaming platforms. It’s simple, the French singer-songwriter Marina Kaye delivers the goods – the video is well crafted too. The video has already clocked 300k YouTube streams since it’s release on Feb. 10th. Her first track Twisted landed on Spotify’s New Music Friday Europe with tastemaker support from Wonderland Magazine, Hotpress, and Celebmix. I would love to see this 22 year old have more U.S. presence. Give it a stream.

Spotify gives New Music Friday a makeover. With 3.5 million followers, the playlist remains one of the most popular which highlights tracks by established artists and emerging talent.
The playlist which launched in 2014 will be given a celebration with new cover art and New York and Los Angeles billboards. Spotify’s New Music Friday Playlist became a-much-needed-force that helped artists reach a new level of audience. The playlist helped launch Billie Eilish, Tones and I, Lil Tecca, as well as Lizzo – after these artists appeared on the playlist, their stream count went through the roof. In fact, I remember when I first discovered Lewis Capaldi’s ‘Bruises’ on NMF.

Do you know what I like about Spotify? That it makes an effort to back the artist community. This time they are doing good in trying to help the songwriting community that generally goes unnoticed. What they did was launch a new feature aimed at songwriters, giving them their own profile pages, complete with playlists of recordings of their songs. You’ll be able to seek out songwriters in the search bar just as you would searching for an artist. Moreover, you’ll be able to click on songwriters’ names in the credits and see the songs on the platform that they’ve written and their most frequent and collaborators. Although still in beta, I hope this ends up fully functioning and becomes apart of the Spotify platform.