The new advertising in the music industry?

The music industry has gone through a turbulent past few decades with the digitalization of the medium disrupting their traditional album sale business model. The transition from the physical record sales to online subscription based streaming has provided an enormous amount of added value for consumers, who now have the entire library of music produced within a few clicks reach, while only paying a fixed subscription cost every month. One stakeholder that has however not profited as much from this streaming transition are the musicians, who have seen their incomes decline significantly due to the lack of streaming royalties. While the platforms do provide artists access to reach a new larger audience, that they otherwise would not have reached, the incomes from streaming are often not enough for professional musicians to make a living. During the years Spotify has had conflicts with several popular artists such as Thom Yorke and Taylor Swift, who have withheld their music from the platform due to complaints about insufficient compensation (Hogan, 2015).
This decline in music royalties has caused artists to search for new creative ways and business models with which they can make money from streaming. One recent example of this is the band Vulfpeck who have been quite active in criticising the payment system from Spotify and trying to come up with alternative ways to make money. In 2014 the band released an entirely silent album, called Sleepify, on Spotify and encouraged their fans to stream this while sleeping. With the 20,000 dollar gained from the Spotify streams they organised a free tour for their fans to attend (McIntyre, 2014). For their newest album, that is going to be released, Vulfpeck have come-up with a new business model to monetize their music. They have auctioned of two minutes and 30 seconds for track 10 on their new album on eBay. Effectively they are working around the system of Spotify to sell their own advertising space on their album.
With this they have created an interesting application of advertising that raises the question of who has the right to advertise along music streaming, the artist or the platform? While this article is being written the album has not yet been released, while the online auction has sold for a bid of $70,100 while it remains a mystery what track 10 will contain (O’Brian, 2020). It will be interesting to see how this development will be received in the market. Does Spotify tolerate artist advertising on their albums? Do consumers accept it when there is advertising on the albums they are listening, even though they are paying for a advertising free Spotify? Which individuals or companies would like to pay for such advertising space and how much money can be earned with this?
Even though the modern streaming platforms, such as Spotify, have been positively received by consumers, artist are not yet satisfied by the compensation provided. While streaming can be considered as the new dominant way for music consumption, the market has not yet completely adapted to the development and it will be interesting to see which developments will continue to arise in the effort of artists to successfully monetize their content.