Fair point. Admittedly, I wasn’t thinking about my response from a musician’s point of view.
Can you expand on your comment so I can understand the context a bit? I’m assuming from what you said that paid streaming services are not a positive thing for artists (or maybe smaller artists), and that it would be preferable if people were buying albums and singles outright? I’d like to understand it better.
Not the person you replied to, but I did work in the music industry for a little while. The short version is that streaming services and especially Spotify pay artists like shit. They work on a revenue share model based on the number of streams an artist gets per month so there isn’t really a fixed number, but it hashes out to fractions of a cent per stream typically. Even the more “generous” services like Tidal or Apple pay just over a cent per stream on average if you’re pulling in serious numbers of streams. I did the math once, and to make the minimum wage from streaming alone in my country, an artist would need to be pulling in over 600k streams per month on Spotify. Most artists will get a fraction of that. This is also assuming that the artist is entirely independent with no labels and distributors to cut in too, so the true number will be much higher for most.
If you purchase an album from an artist on Bandcamp once, that’s almost certainly going to be orders of magnitude the amount they make from streaming that same album over and over again.
Thank you for the explanation. Its a pretty shit situation from an artists point of view it seems.
I’m guessing there was never any way for artists to fight this model when it developed. It was made so attractive for consumers like me to have music available on tap, that it would have been impossible for artists to fight against that level of convenience and demand.
I didn’t realise the figures were that bad to be honest. I suppose I assumed that because it was a way to get music to more people really quickly, that it would benefit artists.
As a musician comments like this make me sad. Everyone really does expect music to be basically free these days don’t they?
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Fair point. Admittedly, I wasn’t thinking about my response from a musician’s point of view.
Can you expand on your comment so I can understand the context a bit? I’m assuming from what you said that paid streaming services are not a positive thing for artists (or maybe smaller artists), and that it would be preferable if people were buying albums and singles outright? I’d like to understand it better.
Not the person you replied to, but I did work in the music industry for a little while. The short version is that streaming services and especially Spotify pay artists like shit. They work on a revenue share model based on the number of streams an artist gets per month so there isn’t really a fixed number, but it hashes out to fractions of a cent per stream typically. Even the more “generous” services like Tidal or Apple pay just over a cent per stream on average if you’re pulling in serious numbers of streams. I did the math once, and to make the minimum wage from streaming alone in my country, an artist would need to be pulling in over 600k streams per month on Spotify. Most artists will get a fraction of that. This is also assuming that the artist is entirely independent with no labels and distributors to cut in too, so the true number will be much higher for most.
If you purchase an album from an artist on Bandcamp once, that’s almost certainly going to be orders of magnitude the amount they make from streaming that same album over and over again.
Thank you for the explanation. Its a pretty shit situation from an artists point of view it seems.
I’m guessing there was never any way for artists to fight this model when it developed. It was made so attractive for consumers like me to have music available on tap, that it would have been impossible for artists to fight against that level of convenience and demand.
I didn’t realise the figures were that bad to be honest. I suppose I assumed that because it was a way to get music to more people really quickly, that it would benefit artists.
Appreciate the explanation. 🙏🏼