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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.