In 2025, US recorded music wholesale revenue reached a record $11.5 billion, according to the RIAA. Streaming drove $9.5 billion of that — 82% of total revenue for the fifth consecutive year, with 106.5 million paid subscribers. The revenue is real. So is the invisibility most independent artists face on the same platforms that generated it. What separates discoverable artists from the rest is rarely talent; it is access to promotional infrastructure that labels routinely budget for.
Why reach matters more than originality
When labels sign an artist, part of the contract is funding promotion, which ensures that the artists’ music gets found: It includes paid playlisting, paid media, social campaigns, and paid editorial support. When an artist does the same release by themselves, they’re up against hundreds of millions of tracks released every day, all released by artists in the same way, everywhere. There is no way for good-quality music to move organically on streaming platforms.
When the algorithm gets early indicators of engagement (saves, follows, and completions), streaming platforms assume the content is worth promoting to a broader audience. The release gets pushed into other listeners’ feeds and becomes the start of a viral trajectory for the track. A label will fund that initial wave in the standard release budget. Independent artists almost never have access to these resources.
From living the problem to building the solution
Palmer knew the barrier all too well, as a working musician with her own songs she couldn’t get to the market. She and her three founding partners started Artist Push in 2015, out of Tallinn, Estonia, with the mission of giving artists the tools the rest of the industry had taken for granted.
To date, the company has run over 12,000 promotion campaigns, over 40 million YouTube views and had five artists hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart. In fact, 309 artists have charted in the iTunes Top 100 and 115 in the Beatport Top 100—a particularly important milestone for electronic producers since getting on a Beatport chart puts their music in front of DJs who are looking for it. Today the company has grown to over 20 employees and four of the founders are female.
What the industry gets wrong about independent artists
The standard narrative is that the problem with these independent artists is that they just don’t have the talent or the backing. But the more accurate reading is that the music just doesn’t get promoted, something labels do as part of every release budget.
When a label launches a new artist’s record, the record will be funded with advertising prior to its release date. Labels will also get the song promoted on playlists (both editorial and paid) and will continue the ad spend through the duration of the release. An independent artist who does the same thing, on the same streaming platforms, with similar quality music won’t get those same returns. Many artists didn’t have a way to do it because they didn’t know how to do it or the results were unclear.
The company provides services such as YouTube promotion, Spotify campaigns, Beatport charting packages and campaigns to the Instagram, TikTok, and SoundCloud communities, all for musicians who don’t work with a label. Some artists are just starting out, others are bigger artists entering the U.S. market, but they are all in the business of running promotion costs as part of a release.
