What musicians get paid on Spotify

FYI,

How Musicians Are Fighting for Streaming Pay During the Pandemic

 

I don’t think there’s much there there to fight for?

 

Wasn't there a *really* long pre-pandemic thread about this?

 

Not *this* article since it came out yesterday. But feel free to ignore thread.

i mean, it’s not like asking folk to post opinions on Led Zep or similar...

 

But really, which do you prefer in order: Whole Lotta Love, Stairway, or the backwards bit about Satan and child groupies?

 

Interesting article. Basically, they’ve made payment a convoluted mess. The more I read the more frustrating the system became.

 

While I don't feel very sorry for the mainstream corporate rock artists who are wealthy and living comfortably regardless of the current pandemic situation, there are numerous lower tier artists from all genres who need a source of income at a time when live gigs aren't feasible. Many artists in this category also rely on merch sales from their concerts as another income source.

 

I suggest musicians make ends meet til concerts return by offering remote music lessons

And singers can offer remote meet and greets.

 

Wonder what % of merch sales is via website vs. website after a concert vs at a concert?

Venues are disappearing right and left in ATX. And there are only so many t-shirts one can buy/wear.

There’s a more fundamental problem than Spotify at play.

I also wonder why more artists who have made it haven’t joined to create more of their own labels to help other artists. Yeah, I guess I am kind of against the labels.

 

That may not work well for lesser known groups, but I agree that would be a creative area I would be interested in.

 

My reaction too. They’ve diffused it so much there’s no one party/sum to go after - congrats, contract lawyers! Music: the ultimate middle man ride.

 

Sure. My basic point is - when time are tight I would focus my energy less on how to revive an apparently obsolete business model of earning a living off recordings and instead focus on
"What service can I offer in the present situation that folks will pay me for"

And if you aren't someone big enough that folks will pay you for lessons or meet and greets - perhaps you need to look at what else you can do. And of course what benefits are available to you.

But Spotify - no matter what changes are made - will never be lucrative for someone with such a low level of appeal that they have no fans interested in paying even for personal 1:1 (albeit virtual) interactions

 

Yes, I still agree with this. Similar thoughts ran through my mind as I looked through the article regarding ‘owning’ the actual demand that is out there as well as ‘owning’ your own demand-gen (to the extent possible).

It would be an interesting business idea: form a financial advisory for artists that helps them develop their own ‘reasonable’ goals/objectives and assist in developing avenues and channels to enable that. At the end of the day, I wonder how many bands’ ‘managers’ are actually valuable (vs. the money they extract)? I would guess that many musicians have no idea what their goals are, just payin’ dues, eking by, waiting to be discovered or waiting for someone to dump a treasure in their lap. Perhaps many would consider the idea ‘going corporate’. But it’s not and infinitely better than going broke.

This is an area where Anton Newcombe has put into practice his original very practical ideas.

 

Tasmin Little, a celebrated classical violinist based in the UK ... has more than 600,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, and her recordings are featured on popular playlists like Classical Essentials, which has 1.9 million followers. Little tweeted last month that she was recently paid £12.34, or around $15.50, for six months of streaming on Spotify, a period in which she would have had over 3.5 million total streams, according to her current statistics.

I truly can’t get my head around how artists, their management, and indeed the whole bloody industry got themselves to this point.

 

I would think you might find that amount in your couch cushions

 

Mark Lindsay (Paul Revere & The Raiders) posted a photo of a check for a nickel last week. A nickel.

 

Artists with original material would do better. Not sure how composers compensation compares to artists.

 

Uhhh. You can blame lobbyists and the streaming services themselves. That's who came up with the way payments work.

 

Artists in the US make nothing from the US from streaming. The only money made in the US is by the owners of the master tapes, and the songwriters. The songwriters get shafted by a 6 tiered ridiculously low payment method that's set in stone. The master tape owners get to negotiate how much they are paid. Gotta be careful in that situation too, though, as you can't ask for more than you are worth to the streaming service.

 

Most musicians don't know what they're doing period. They have bad management, think the industry will love them because Mom and Dad came to all their local gigs, and honestly think it's easy to make a living at it.

My advice to every musician/songwriter who comes here is to have something else your good at so you can have a reliable job to fall back on. 99% of the time, you'll need it!

 

When people see a number like 600,000 they think of the days of vinyl records where that was a colossal number. In terms of streaming, it's small. 600,000 listeners is nothing. Ed Sheeran has 53,000,000 monthly listeners. Tasmin Little's 3.5 million streams in 6 months sounds like a lot until you realize Ed Sheeran has 318,000,000. By year's end there will be 100 songs that have been streamed over 1 billion times, each.

With an artist on Spotify typically getting $0.0035 cents per stream, Tasmin Little should have gotten around $14.000. If she got less than that, she cut a really crappy streaming deal with her label. She also should focus on Apple Music which pays almost 2x what Spotify does.

None of this is the fault of streaming services or their subscribers; this is record label greed and naive artists making bad business decisions. Where the artist wins in all of this is brand building and public awareness leading to touring for which the artist keeps all the revenue. Tough times in the pandemic, but Tasmin should do just fine when she can perform again.

 

As discussed in other threads and presented here for those who weren't with us, it's been this way in the recording industry since the 1940's. Labels lay out big money and take huge risks in breaking an artist and that artist doesn't have expectations on making a living on the sales of those recordings, they just hope to break even on their advances. The artists instead make money on touring. On that huge explosion of fame through the decades after they have flamed out, that artist can continue to tour for the next 50 years on the strength of those old recordings and the publicity and fame brought to them by the labels.

Today with streaming, it's win-win for artists but in the long game, not the short term. They get more recognition for bigger and longer tours and they get a perpetual cut of streaming revenue for the rest of their lives. Just today I streamed a Loverboy album. First time Loverboy has been paid by me for their music since 1981.

 

Don Henley speaks out about streaming revenue in this Billboard interview after testifying in Congress. He specifically addresses YouTube. It’s funny that so many people here rail against Spotify but seem to have no problem with YouTube and all the videos that get posted here.

Here is part of his testimony:

“As a 55-year veteran of the music industry, I was invited by the chairman of this Senate subcommittee to come here and testify on behalf of the music community — songwriters, musicians, music publishers — all of whom are now unfortunately known as content providers,” Henley said, reading testimony that he had written himself. Speaking calmly, in a jacket and tie, Henley explained why the law — originally designed to allow telecom companies to invest in building out high-speed broadband without worrying about legal liability — has not only enabled piracy, but also become “negotiating leverage to pay license fees that are well below market.” The elephant in the room? YouTube. (YouTube often points out the aggregate amount it pays out to the music business — $3 billion in 2019.)

This is from the interview:

Is there a generation gap here? It sometimes seems that newer artists are working more closely with YouTube, although some of them have been just as outspoken about this issue.

If some artists want to allow their copyrighted works to be viewed on YouTube for nothing, or next to nothing, they can have at it. But it should be a choice, and right now it’s not. Creators who don’t want their works pirated online should not have to bear the burden of sending a takedown notice for every violation. It’s costly and time-consuming. At this moment, there are approximately six billion posts on YouTube, with about four billion of them unclaimed. The small and mid-tier artists simply don’t have the time or the means to deal with that — it’s overwhelming. In a world where 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, more than one billion videos are viewed on TikTok per day, and there are over 500 million daily active users on Instagram, it’s clear that massive online services are flourishing, while artists have no ability to combat the rampant infringement that occurs on these platforms. But the platforms are clearly capable of removing infringing content.
...

And among the tech giants, there are some that are worse than others. It is hard to get an exact rate, but a stream of a song on Apple pays approximately $0.006 (just over half a cent), while the same stream YouTube can pay as little as $0.00087 (less than a tenth of a cent). Why does YouTube pay 15% of what Apple pays? The DMCA is the culprit. But the real question is, why does any artist want to support a platform that pays them so much less?

....

Today, Google’s YouTube controls almost 60% of all streaming-audio business, and revenues at Google have grown from $430 million in 2002, to $162 billion in 2019. YouTube alone is a $15 billion-a-year business, with well over 100 million people streaming music on its platform, just in this country, yet it pays out less than 10 percent of the total streaming-audio revenues artists receive. More creative content is being consumed than ever before, but less revenue is flowing to the creators and owners of that content. The situation is well documented in Jonathan Taplin’s 2017 book, Move Fast and Break Things.


There’s a paywall for Billboard magazine now but at any rate here’s the link to read the entire article. As is usually the case for Mr. Henley, he has a lot to say.

Eagles' Don Henley: Giant Online Platforms Rip Off Creators & Congress Can Help

 

Good post.

I respect Don Henley immensely and am a fan, but what he's not factoring into his argument is that billions of people watch a video on YouTube to discover a new artist or new song and then go to something like Apple Music or Spotify to stream that song or artist 100's of times. So its a bit unfair to slam YouTube when it tends to be a one-and-done experience.

My son discovers Boys Of Summer on YouTube, goes to Apple Music, adds the song to his library, 'likes' it, and will stream it 300 times in his life paying $2.10 to Henley which is a substantial sum for a single song. If he discovers the End Of The Innocence album and streams that 50 times in his life, that's going to pay Henley $3.50. These are staggering sums compared to what an artist used to make- $1 per CD and $0.10 on singles.

"Social media" is a giant rubber band ball where all the individual strands (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, et al) don't mean much individually but pushed together equal something very significant. An artist today needs to participate actively on all these strands to reach the audience.

 

Sure but artists have contracts with master tape owners granting them a share of licensing revenues (though the first revenues that come in are used to recoup any advances artists received).