How niche genres are surviving in a hostile streaming-centric environment
Text and photography by Isaac Hodgson
The gig is about to start, and as the final woops are let out silence falls over London’s Corsica Studios. Ana Roxanne begins with a bassline no faster than 30bpm, and layers soft hums over each other. The crowd doesn’t dance or jump, they sway, and take the opportunity to relax in the sound. As she begins to sing, I start to realize how special this gig will be, and I’m completely lost in her sound.
For the next 45 minutes, Ana takes us on an ambient adventure with live mixing, vocals, piano, and guitar, all in their softest forms. She blends natural sounds of flowing water with heavenly twinkling synths to create a truly otherworldly atmosphere. Alongside her calming visuals of fireworks, stars, streetlights, and sunsets blur and ease us further into tranquillity.
It really was one of the most relaxing spaces I’ve ever experienced, and if you hadn’t guessed, totally different from a typical concert performance. It was quiet enough that I was worried my camera shutter might disturb the people around me. Apart from her own tracks, she beautifully covered songs by Sibylle Baier and Julee Cruise’s “The World Spins” (of Twin Peaks fame).
“They already don’t pay them a lot, do they?”
Ana’s London gig comes fresh off the heels of Spotify’s announcement that in 2024, they will stop paying artists for any tracks with under one thousand streams. This makes up around two-thirds of all music on Spotify, yet they have no reason to listen to them (it’s not as though they have been – this has been an ongoing struggle for years). Now, streams of songs from small artists will be monetized – only that the revenue earned through this will go to bigger artists. Fans of small musicians will be directly funding the big names, even if they never listen to them.
“They already don’t pay them a lot, do they?” asked Poppy, a fellow Ana fan when hearing this. The amount that artists have made per stream has been low for a long time, and currently sits at $0.003 per stream; clearly not enough for anyone to make a living on. But this feels like a final kick in the teeth for small artists, considering Spotify’s quarterly profits of over £56,000,000. They fail to support the majority of musicians on their platform and use the fact that they don’t pay them enough already as an excuse to take everything away.
This makes me wonder how artists like Ana, whose music fills such a niche category in the music industry, get a footing at all in the music scene. It upsets me to think of all the other more obscure musicians who cannot support themselves through their work, and the experiences like this that I’ll never get to see. How can artists gain recognition for their work without appealing to the mainstream? And is there an alternative to finding music through platforms that continue to refuse to support their creators?
I found Ana years ago, thanks to the wonderfully random YouTube algorithm (unfortunately another platform that doesn’t monetize smaller creators). Asking around the venue, most people found Ana through Spotify; “We rely on Spotify for its convenience”, says Dana. And I’m inclined to agree, it’s one of the most social, easy-to-use platforms for music, and its scarily good AI-assisted algorithms for recommendations only make it more addictive. She also agrees that Ana’s performance was incredibly relaxing: “I wish I was lying down in a planetarium or something”.
As I’m sure we’ve all been well reminded by our friends’ Instagram stories, Spotify wrapped has just come around, and more than ever the spotlight is on it as the go-to music service. Really it comes down to us, the consumers, to support independent music that we love and find smaller artists. Buying merch and using alternative platforms that pay their artists better (like Bandcamp) are both great ways to look after those you enjoy. Or, when possible, take a chance on a gig that might not fit the norm; if my experience at Ana’s is anything to go off, a smaller audience can create a really delightful, unique environment.