The world of streaming is not a kind one for artists. In the past, consumers have had to purchase entire albums in order to listen to songs. Now, users can simply pay a small, monthly fee to a streaming service and have endless amounts of music at their fingertips at all times. This type of setup is fantastic for the average person. Unfortunately, artists suffer the brunt of the negative effects of streaming.

How Streaming Affects Artists

Artists do not generally receive as large amount of royalties from streaming as they would from album sales — streaming one song will give an artist only a fraction of one cent. For well-known artists like Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran and The Weeknd, streaming still has the potential to make them millions of dollars. But for smaller artists, the world of streaming is convincingly harsher. It takes hundreds of streams to cover the price of just one download. Without millions of people streaming their music, it is impossible to make a fair wage off of their art. Because of the unfairness towards smaller artists, new methods of bridging the gap are popping up. Resonate is one of these methods.

What Is Resonate?

Resonate is a new streaming service that aims to change streaming into something that benefits artists. Resonate offers a stream-to-own style of service — instead of monthly fees, users buy credits to listen to songs. The deal offered is that listening to a song nine times will equate to buying it. This way, discovering music costs close to nothing and users are able to gradually buy the songs they grow to love.

According to Resonate’s website, monthly costs end up being roughly the same as those for streaming services like Spotify, Amazon Prime and Apple Music. The biggest difference is in the way that artists are affected. Through Resonate, even artists who are not as famous as those on the radio are supposed to earn livable wages. According to Resonate, artists are paid directly per-play or until the song is downloaded.

With Resonate, artists are able to make more with consumers being relatively unaffected in terms of cost. Resonate has gained hundreds of signed artists on their platform. Those who join the streaming service are able to be a part of an active community that helps make important decisions for the future of Resonate.

Lee’s Thoughts

Essentially, Resonate is a new service that strives to be more ethical than mainstream streaming services while keeping costs the same for listeners. The service seems to be made by and for artists. The active community formed on the platform is something entirely new to me and is an exciting aspect of Resonate. The music on the platform, although somewhat unfamiliar, is incredibly promising. Whether or not Resonate grows into something huge or stays small is something I am personally very curious to see — if something like this does turn into a popular service, the world of streaming could be forever changed.

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