homie the only thing streaming benefits right now is music publishers, spotify and the artists are losing money like it's oil being produced during the industrialization.
The last update that I saw was that Spotify would be in the green if it didn't have to give severance pay to a large number of employees after mass layoffs, and also some real estate expenses that seem pretty unusual for a streaming service to have...? They should just ask Wisconsin to build them a place for free, those idiots will do anything for industry.
To put that in perspective... If you listened to 30+ songs a day, a thousand a month. And you only listened to ONE artist. That artist's label company would get $1.73 for the month, and of that, the artist would probably pick up like 50c.
Ok, not defending the record and streaming companies but this is nothing new. In the past if you bought an album the artist would see around 1.50$. At an average of 13 tracks on an album you would have to listen to the full album 133 times to equal 3$. That would be close to the band getting 1.50 depending on their contract. This math makes a lot of assumptions about royalties that are varied and complex but I listen to many albums more than that on streaming.
Bands never made tons of money off record sales, there are lots of better ways to support bands you like. Royalties are often paid to the band in merch, so buy a CD or vinyl directly from the band. Same for anything they sell directly at concerts or on their site.
That said I would love to see better shares for the artists, but it’s unlikely going to get better because screwing artists goes back decades.
The access to Spotify is also super easy. I was in bands and unless you were already popular or had a record deal, getting your CD in stores was almost impossible. I managed to get my bands CD into all the hot topic stores in my state but it was a huge undertaking for a 20 year old kid that just wanted to play music and knew nothing about getting upc codes and negotiating margin and managing inventory.
When Spotify came around I was able to put my music up with about an hours worth of work which was mostly entering banking details, uploading the songs and artwork, and writing a blurb.
I honestly want to start a record label just to put all the local bands I used to play with up on Spotify. Most of them broke up just before the barriers to entry fell down and now the music is lost forever.
Thats why RTJ drop their albums for free. The money is in fans buying merch, buying limited edition vinyl pressings, appearance fees, licencing the songs to tv and movies touring and concert appearances.
On their own label, they have absolute control of how the money is spent.
I feel like people are starting themselves blind on per-stream revenue in a bad way - no one is actually paying per stream. Not the customers, not the streaming companies, not the labels. This is the deal when it comes to streaming platforms - you get to listen to as much as you want for a fixed amount of money per month.
It's a little bit like saying someone who bought a CD in the 90s for $10 and listened to every song 100 times is a 10 times worse customer than someone who bought the same CD and listened to every song just 10 times. Yes, the person who listened to the CD 100 times paid 10 times less on a per-song listen basis, but that's quite simply not relevant.
I think the latest issue now is how Spotify for example is changing their revenue sharing model in a way that big artists (i.e. Taylor Swift) get a bigger chunk from the pie and smaller artists get close to nothing in % from streaming income. So the value of a single stream for a song is different depending on who you're listening to.
they're exactly the same customer, the difference between those two is actually negligible, ignoring the new middle man and VC funded tech company in the way.
Both someone who streams, and someone who buys the CD are paying the same amount of money, the difference is that the person streaming gets a MUCH broader wealth of music, and much more music to listen to, for the same amount of money. Which means, on average, you would expect someone who uses streaming to pay less than someone who buys physical media.
Turns out small artists who pay middle men (publishers, who rake in billions a year) money to host their music on platforms like spotify, who then makes zero money because they run an unprofitable business (damn, if only there was a way to make money from this) and the listeners, who earn them, on average, 0 dollars, from a stream. Which means they lose money.
Pirating your favorite bands music is going to make you more likely to buy an actual physical release, or digital. Thus paying them more in that one interaction than they have potentially ever been paid in your lifetime of listening to them on a streaming service.
Btw, just have a think about the fact that artists, and spotify make ZERO money, more than likely negative money. Only to have a middle man raking in literally BILLIONS of dollars a year. Capitalism truly is something isn't it? Oh and i haven't even mentioned money laundering on spotify either, that's a whole other thing.
something something, you build a gang, and you recruit young people who are below the age of being prosecuted, have them make music, music bot the music, and then you proceed to collect royalties on money you never made. All while actively washing drug money or something. Something something.
That figure is potentially misleading. You want to know how much of your subscription or ad revenue is paid out. The per stream royalty is diluted by non-paying users, or by users paying lower rates (in poorer countries, etc). If you move your subscription to a service that pays out a lower share, then you pay musicians less, even if the average payout per stream is higher.
Record companies have been stealing artist record sales for 70 years. This is nothing new to musical artists. The motivation to get on a streaming service is so sell tickets to your tour shows. Inflated album prices of the 90s made very few artists any money.
Streaming was never going to be profitable, it was the only option the music industry had to make any kind of money over piracy.
Most artists are happy to be making nothing on streaming, because giving access to your recorded music sells tickets. Tour tickets sales and merch has been the bread and butter for the musical artist for decades and remains the primary source of income.
man, it's a good thing touring provides paying audiences, and doesn't cost money. And take up substantial amounts of time, and take away from the amount of music you could releasing.
We need a users controlled streaming platform. First we have to get rid of those disgusting capitist rats, then we can work on a revenu model. People are willing to pay a small amount to access content, that' proven now, we just need to give the control to the users.
There's this streaming co-op that me and my friend joined a few months ago. It's still in the building stages but hopefully it gains some traction. It's called jam.coop
Isnt Lemmy proving otherwise? But yeah, keep paying Spotify because "convenience" and I'll keep buying albums on bandcamp because it's the only current fair option.
I'm more concerned that streaming platform algorithms prioritise passive listening (maybe not more concerned... I'm not sure how concern is quantified). It goes against their business model to risk serving users music that might actually push, and thus potentially expand, their taste. Music that is challenging may cause a user to stop listening. Better for the auto play algorithm to serve up safe bets, homogenising the general popular music gene pool. Like serving endless Big Macs in case tom yum is too spicy or lamb shoulder is too rich. As a result, the way to find success in the era of streaming platforms is to play G-D-Em-C and sing about the boy/girl you like/liked. This causes a feedback loop where bland music leads to bland tastes, which leads to bland music...
btw, if you want to broaden your taste in music, go listen to an entire album with a few or just one song you like from a particular artist a couple of times.
You like one album they've done, go listen to the other work they've made. Trust me, it's very worthwhile.
You could tell how good the album was by where they placed the banger. If it was the last song on Side A, then you knew the album was going to be solid. If they put the hit song on A1, that meant it was probably going to be trash because they don't trust you to make it through 3-4 more songs before getting to the one you bought the album for. There are always notable exceptions -- they put the hit song on the end of Record 2 side B and then it wasn't even credited on the album (Train in Vain). But that album is 2 records of excellent songs with the possible exception of Jimmy Jazz.
This was how it worked until about 15 years ago. I got far more deeply into music and artists back then than now. I always feel I'm skating the surface with streaming, and the suggestions bore me.
Yeah I almost exclusively listen to full albums. Definitely helps give context to the music and understand the artist better. I also agree that you should give it a few listens. Some great albums need you to dial in before you really fall in love with them. It's a more active process than just listening to an unending algorithmic recommendation stream, but the effort is rewarded!
Because there's a fuckload of people streaming and because they've already paid for it, they do it for hours every day.
There's artists on tens of billions of streams. That's enough to live on for anyone.
Of course if you've got only a few thousand streams then you're going to make fuck all, but you probably weren't going to make anything anyway. You might get a few fans from discovering things on Spotify who might turn up to your gigs or buy that T-shirt or whatever, but with that number of listeners you probably wouldn't even have got any radio play in the old days, let alone make money from albums.
Most people never make money on art, no matter which art it is, or what business model they use. It's just life. If you never hit that mainstream vein, you're going to need a proper job.
Commercial radio stations pay about 12 cents per play, while college stations pay about 6 cents per play. Half of the money goes to the publisher and half goes to the songwriter or songwriters.
It's always been a crap shoot for musicians. They make more money touring which is why even really successful musicians tour well into their twilight years.
Record sales are also a crapshoot. Someone else posted the numbers for those in this thread. Streaming allows more access by more people to more music. But that access results in a cost. The cost is less pay per listen. The entire industry is broken.
The average middle class income in Canada is $70,000. All I have to do is get 40.5 million streams per year to afford a small home 2 hours away from the city where I play music.
Honestly, you can be a full-time musician or you can have a comfortable life. You can't have both.
You're probably still right but the comparison to a job doesn't make sense because the labor component isn't continuous for streaming. The job would be live touring, streaming would be additional income on top.
I would agree, but shows on the road habitually pay close to nothing because musician compensation hasn't really increased in the last half century. So generally you make money off of album sales and merch sales at shows, not really money to live off of either.
They don't need money to survive, they just need exposure which is what Spotify provides them. Musicians can survive indefinitely on nothing but praise cocaine and exposure.
Having a musical idea, and recording it, expressing it the way that you thought it... That required a lot of effort, from a lot of engineers, at a studio, with a lot of expensive equipment... As recently as the mid 90s.
Now we've got Jacob Collier, winning Grammys from his bedroom.
To assume you can live off streams today would be like a journalist thinking they could survive off of tweets 3 years ago. Getting well edited thoughts out to the masses via the press required a lot of effort from a lot of engineers, at a studio using lots of expensive equipment.
This is a moot argument. You're saying the system doesn't support artists and that artists shouldn't expect it to. Why not? Why can't the system be changed? Streams should not be equivalent to tweets and it's dumb to think they should be.
Ask the nearly completely dead newspaper industry or the dying book publishing industry. History repeats itself.
This artistic medium has met its proverbial printing press. The way to get paid for music is not by streams. They're worthless. I could get more streams than your favorite local Indy band using just white noise. Streams are worthless. About as valuable as getting eyes on any comment in any thread. Music is commoditized.
If you don't like the rate the current major platforms give, you could choose to use one of the many alternatives that (presumably) exist.
And if they really don't, I could build you one in a couple of weekends with all the open source resources and federation protocols available today.
But none of that matters because all the paying customers are on those major platforms. And until you convince users to move off those platforms, you're basically their bitch. They'll pay you whatever they happen to feel like paying you.
You get paid jack shit for streaming. You also got paid jack shit for radio play. The flip side to all this is It has never been easier for an artist to manage their own career.
Not that long ago if you didnt sign onto the multi-billion dollar a year label who took an obscene amount of the money (google a 360 deal if you want to get real mad) nobody heard your shit ever. But you can also form your own label, make your own merch, do your own socials, promo yourself and keep 100% of what you make.