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

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

#41

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

In case anyone is interested in alternatives, I think we live in an amazing time for non-streaming music consumption.

I run the VLC app on my mobile devices, which allows me to spawn a web server served off the mobile device that I can connect to in the browser on my laptop or desktop PCs.

I can upload raw music files (mp3, ogg, etc etc) onto the mobile devices seamlessly, and it categorizes them by album.

I only ever buy full album or track digital downloads from bandcamp or Amazon music. Zero DRM, just straight archive files of mp3s usually (bandcamp lets you select which audio file type for a long list of options).

For unknown music, you usually pay what you want or pay a small price like $1 on bandcamp, which is almost always worth it even when just testing out some music I’m not sure if I’ll return to yet or not, especially compared with the negative externalities of subscriptions with Spotify.

I consume probably 5 different $10 albums per year and maybe another few hundred or so LPs or individual tracks at about $1 each. My music budget is probably about $250 / year, which is roughly twice the price with Spotify premium.

I could go on another rant about how Spotify’s content discovery / collaborative filtering offerings are extraordinarily poor and provide genuinely negative value for me when I previously used the product, but regardless I feel very happy to avoid Spotify’s negative externalities. That is well worth an extra $10/month of Spotify-avoidance-fee to do it with non-streaming options.

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

#42

Post by ianai »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #34
untog wrote: 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.

When was that? Since at least the 1960s, music has been a winner-take-all hit driven industry. You’re either The Rolling Stones, Motley Crue, Madonna, or at best a one-hit-wonder. The vast majority of bands are (and always have been) local groups who play their town bars, occasionally go on tour, and have day jobs. I’m not saying this is good, but it’s the way things have always been. There was never some “good, hone…

Actually I’d like to see more live performances. If there’s so much talent in search of work then that should be possible. But people also only want to hear the stuff off the radio exactly as they heard it.

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

#43

Post by bachmeier »

nikanj wrote: 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 would be _extremely_ surprised if they would net much more than $5000 from these radio listens.

Me too. Unless they've recently changed the rules, the artist gets nothing when a song is played on the radio.

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

#44

Post by ajaimk »

kakarot wrote: post #39
Arqu wrote: post #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 ar…

They are getting ripped off. Many record companies, in their own financial interest, reduced the royalty cost for streams with Spotify in exchange for revenue shares. I would feel pretty ripped off if I made a big, delicious cake, and as a reward I get one tiny slice while I had to watch everyone else eat the rest. Maybe not if making cakes is just a small hobby for me, but definitely so if it's my career .

Citation please

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

#45

Post by stdclass »

As an artist with 250k streams myself, I don't really think that you should directly compare it to CD sales etc.

If you compare it like this: a single play on a popular radio show can get you 250k listeners and you get payed well below 50$ per play.

So getting a couple grand for 1mio plays vs. ~250$ for some airtime on the radio seems like a decent deal to me.

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

#46

Post by barry-cotter »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #34
untog wrote: 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.

When was that? Since at least the 1960s, music has been a winner-take-all hit driven industry. You’re either The Rolling Stones, Motley Crue, Madonna, or at best a one-hit-wonder. The vast majority of bands are (and always have been) local groups who play their town bars, occasionally go on tour, and have day jobs. I’m not saying this is good, but it’s the way things have always been. There was never some “good, hone…

This is bullshit. It used to be possible to make a living off of selling recorded music, whether records or cds, and people cared about, and bought albums, in large numbers. Now the only way to make money if you’re not nationally famous is gigging. Gigging used to be something you did to get people to buy your singles and albums. That was where the money was and that was how mid-list artists made a living. Now that’s gone. The midlist are people trying to make it, on the way out or being supported by daddy’s money.

Things are different now. Records and cds lead to more people being able to make a living making music.

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

#47

Post by yummybear »

So about half a cent per stream in payout? I have no experience in the music industry but as a consumer somewhere around a cent per song is what I would imagine would be reasonable to charge.

So this is in the ballpark of my expectations - as a consumer.

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

#48

Post by jrace »

n-a wrote: post #16

How does Tidal compare in terms of paying artists

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/01/16/streaming-music-... {tidal}"Last year, the service reportedly paid $0.0110 per play. This year, The Trichordist found that the platform paid $0.01284 per stream. "

{spotify} "Last year, the service paid out $0.0038 per play. Not much has changed this year. With a reported 51.51% market share in the US, Spotify pays $0.00397 per stream."

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

#49

Post by jdmichal »

source99 wrote: post #17

How much revenue does Spotify generate for the 1M streams?

I think this question is part of the problem. Every stream is actually negative revenue for Spotify. It costs them money to have a song in catalog that is amortized per stream, and it costs them money to stream that song each time. And some listeners are paying a subscription, which means fixed revenue but variable streams and therefore costs. While others are ad-based model, so hopefully variable revenue but guaranteed positive per stream...

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

#50

Post by jondubois »

I've written over 20 blog articles about software development over the past couple of years; each article is typically thousands of words. My blog has had hundreds of thousands of views in total (targeted at developers; a valuable demographic) and I've made $0 from it. I find that writing blog articles is easy and I like doing it. If you want to make money from anything, unfortunately, you've got to compete with people like me who are willing to do the work for free.
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