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My Band Has 1M Spotify Streams. Want to See Our Royalties? (2016)

digitalmusicnews.com

21–30 of 86 posts

Re: My Band Has 1M Spotify Streams. Want to See Our Royalties? (2016)

#22
I assume "Specific time period accounted: 10/15/2013 – 2/15/2013" is a typo, right? The spreadsheet isn't sorted but it looks like the most recent date is 2/15/2016, so that's $5000 for 28 months, or about $178 per month.

That's not much. That could cover gas money for one or two band members. An average software engineer earns 2-3x that much every day.

Re: My Band Has 1M Spotify Streams. Want to See Our Royalties? (2016)

#23
post #21

That's really greedy. "Spotify charges around $0.015-$0.025 per ad served" https://blog.adstage.io/2018/04/03/spotify-advertising while "Average per-stream payout: $0.004891"

16-26% is better than CD sales (6% from the other link in this thread).

Re: My Band Has 1M Spotify Streams. Want to See Our Royalties? (2016)

#24
post #21

That's really greedy. "Spotify charges around $0.015-$0.025 per ad served" https://blog.adstage.io/2018/04/03/spotify-advertising while "Average per-stream payout: $0.004891"

I don't remember the free version running one ad per song, so I don't know why those numbers should compare directly?

Re: My Band Has 1M Spotify Streams. Want to See Our Royalties? (2016)

#25
post #20

I feel like it's a false analogy to compare Spotify Streams to CD sales. For a fairer comparison, you should measure against something more ephemeral. The biggest radio channels in the US have a few million listeners each. Let's say your record does ok, and gets airtime on a few second-tier radio stations. For easy math, let's do 20 plays * 50,000 listeners per play. This also gives you a total of one million listens…

I'm with this all the way. Appreciate this article is from 2016, but surprised the physical sale is still compared to Spotify streams. They're very different and I think Spotify is far more like radio with choice (a bit like Netflix and TV). I listen to lots of stuff on Spotify I never would have bought 15 years ago (thus no sale would be accounted for). But conversely, I suppose, I rarely buy a lot of records I listen to with fair frequency on Spotify. That said I go and watch live shows of a bunch of people I probably wouldn't have.

Times have changed. Everyone has to adapt. I doubt as many people are buying DVDs or Bluray anymore, right?

Re: My Band Has 1M Spotify Streams. Want to See Our Royalties? (2016)

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do sum it up. $5k for 1M streams. Which is reasonable or not compared to CDs depending on your assumptions. Let’s say a CD has ten tracks and the average buyer plays a CD five times. That’s fifty streams per buyer. One million streams yields twenty thousand CD buyers under this assumption. CDs are $10 (or were the last time I bought them ages ago). That means $200k gross, but the band would probably not see more…

Last time I heard a number, bands got a single digit percentage of the sale of a CD. Edit: Quick web search shows I’m right. https://bandzoogle.com/blog/record-sales-where-does-the-mone...

Thanks. So if the artist is both the performer and the writer, they get about ten percent. So that’s one power of two accounted for. I think my assumption about the typical number of CD listens is also quite conservative.

Re: My Band Has 1M Spotify Streams. Want to See Our Royalties? (2016)

#27
post #19
post #8

People still seem to be stuck quantifying the value of music (sales, streams, etc) against a time when there was less saturation and the actual cost of producing, marketing and distributing music was much higher.

Well yes, because that was a time when musicians could earn a living. It's legitimate to question the current situation.

The world is filled with talented people not using their talents in their job.

Why do you assume that musicians in particular must be the ones to make a living from their talent ?

Re: My Band Has 1M Spotify Streams. Want to See Our Royalties? (2016)

#28
post #19
post #8

People still seem to be stuck quantifying the value of music (sales, streams, etc) against a time when there was less saturation and the actual cost of producing, marketing and distributing music was much higher.

Well yes, because that was a time when musicians could earn a living. It's legitimate to question the current situation.

Plenty of musicians make a living out of this so I'm not sure your point.

The industry is saturated. Recorded music is cheap to produce and easy to consume. That wasn't always the case.

Re: My Band Has 1M Spotify Streams. Want to See Our Royalties? (2016)

#29
post #27
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, because that was a time when musicians could earn a living. It's legitimate to question the current situation.

The world is filled with talented people not using their talents in their job. Why do you assume that musicians in particular must be the ones to make a living from their talent ?

Maybe it's a broader proble with society.

Re: My Band Has 1M Spotify Streams. Want to See Our Royalties? (2016)

#30
I somehow keep being fascinated by people think they're ripped off. I mean sure, Spotify is making a decent buck out of it, but it's not like the artists are doing it for free.

There's much more to the whole process. Firs to earn something per play there need to be ads that finance it. Then imagine the technical hurdle and cost to host such a platform (ie Spotify cut) and then you actually being worth a damn as an artist.

1M views might seem like a lot, but actually its quite a limited resource for serving ads. The other thing here is that most artists wouldn't have a single view if it wasn't for one or the other distributor. Basically, the barrier is so low to entry and the risk is dispersed across a million other artists so you all get a very diluted value per view. But at least you get value per view. Otherwise, it would have been an all or nothing business, like it used to be. It's the same effect the app stores had for software devs.

In essence, you get low fees because those funds pay for the distribution and risk that is dispersed. The general pay scale is a hockey stick with the last couple % making the majority of the money.

Since you even got the opportunity to get in front of an audience, use it wisely as you need to pump those numbers up. It's a numbers game and your numbers are too low. You need double-digit millions to make a good living off of it. And that's just what it takes. It's not easy, not everyone will make it above the fold, for whatever reason life, luck, marketing...

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