Music Streaming vs. discs / records
Jeanwah
Posts: 6,363
Digital music: Can streaming save music sales?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22064353
Streaming services have reversed the fortunes of the music industry in Sweden and now generate more income than downloads or CDs. But can the model be replicated worldwide?
Keyboardist and respected songwriter Felix Persson is nestled into a red-cushioned seat inside one of Stockholm's ubiquitous coffee shops.
This particular cafe is owned by Benny Andersson from Abba, a band with more than a passing influence on Persson's electro-pop group Le Kid, who are also known for their catchy tunes and bright outfits.
Persson is a huge supporter of the dramatic growth of music streaming in Sweden.
"I am on the extremely happy 'Go, yay, we love it!' side of the debate," he says from across the dark wooden table.
"For the price of one album you can listen to as much as you want every month. It is democratic because it has moved the power from the decision makers at radio stations and labels to artists themselves, who can release the music they want on streaming sites and get paid for it."
Some 91% of digital income in Sweden now comes from streaming sites, compared with just 13% worldwide.
The services were the main force behind the Swedish music market's 13.8% growth last year, marking a return to a level last seen in 2005, according to the industry body the IFPI.
It was a figure most countries could only dream of, with global music trade revenues increasing by just 0.2%, the first rise since 1999.
The numbers also represent a big turnaround for a nation that used to have one of the highest rates in the world for unauthorised downloads and was home to the notorious file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.
"We were the worst in the class," says Per Sundin, managing director for Universal Music in Sweden at his office in the capital.
"At international meetings, people looked at me like I was something the cat dragged in because I represented Sweden, where piracy had destroyed the market for everyone."
He is now being asked to travel around the world to give presentations on how music streaming has transformed the record industry in his country.
"I am 100% sure that this is the future. Streaming services will be the next step for global music consumption," he says.
Spotify the difference
By far the most successful streaming site in Sweden is Spotify, a Swedish company, which launched in 2008, a year before tough new laws to combat illegal downloading were introduced. More than a third of the country's population is registered with the site.
The walls of its new Stockholm premises are covered in street art and vintage concert posters and there is a bar for hosting gigs, a computer games room and even a football field.
"Spotify really started [in order] to combat online piracy, so I would say we didn't create a behaviour that didn't exist, we just transferred it to a legal medium," says the company's chief product officer, Gustav Soderstrom.
"It offered the same principle that you could get music for free, but all the music was licensed and it was better than the piracy networks because you didn't have to wait for the whole file to download before you could listen to it."
He believes the reasons the site has proved especially successful in Sweden include the affordable, widespread access to some of Europe's fastest and most accessible broadband services. The size of the population also helped.
"Sweden only has about 10 million people and so you reach a tipping point where so many people are using the service that the social aspect of music works really well. You can share a playlist... which wasn't really possible technically with the piracy networks."
Royalties rip-off?
Worldwide, Spotify now has more than 24 million active users in 25 countries. Six million of those pay for the premium service, which removes adverts between tracks and offers and mobile access to playlists, even when the user is offline.
On Tuesday, it is announcing its first markets in Asia and South America and increasing its presence in Europe. But it faces tough competition as it works towards the goal of becoming a "global product like Facebook".
There are existing rivals such as French business Deezer, already available in 182 countries. And tech giants Apple and Google are preparing to launch streaming services.
Streaming services make their money from adverts or monthly subscriptions from premium users. For Spotify, the fees are about $15 (£10) in Sweden and the UK and $10 in the US. The more a track gets clicked on, the more it earns for the rights holder, be that a label, artist or composer.
But like many of its international rivals, it faces continued criticism from performers who say their songs need to be played hundreds of times to generate the same kind of income that they would earn from a single download or CD sale.
Last year, US-based cellist Zoe Keating released her earnings in a public Google document, saying she had received just $281.87 (£179.70) after her songs were streamed 72,800 times on Spotify.
For Daniel Oliver, a successful Icelandic singer living in Sweden who had a number one last year, "the positive thing is you get really good exposure and you can approach your fans really easily".
"But when it comes to getting the worth of your work, these streaming sites are definitely not good. I have to have a side job in a bar as well to make a living."
However, Spotify has now become the biggest source of income for some of the country's most popular artists, such as Stockholm-based House DJ Avicii who signed with Universal Music Sweden in August 2010 and has had five hits with the label.
"Spotify offers a proven revenue generator through streamed music," says Avicii's manager, Ash Pournouri.
"In Sweden, where the reach is greatest, the major labels are dependent on Spotify to bring their financials up to the levels of past glory days."
Vinyl revival
Not everyone is as sold on streaming, however. And even in some major economies such as Japan and Germany, three quarters of music is still sold in a physical format.
"I don't download and I don't stream and I know that is partly because I am of an older generation," says Larry Farber, who runs a music, film and book store on the edge of the hip Sodermalm area.
"It does feel like physical music is mostly dying. I will sometimes be in the store and just think, 'What am I doing?'"
Most industry experts agree that the trend towards digital music is unlikely to be reversed, but even Spotify's Gustav Soderstrom has admitted that he understands "the need to create some physical manifestation of something you really like".
He says he wasn't a real "music aficionado" when he joined Spotify and his growing record collection demonstrates how streaming sites work to expand users' musical passions and horizons.
"That is kind of my personal mission, to take boring people like myself and get them back into enjoying music."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22064353
Streaming services have reversed the fortunes of the music industry in Sweden and now generate more income than downloads or CDs. But can the model be replicated worldwide?
Keyboardist and respected songwriter Felix Persson is nestled into a red-cushioned seat inside one of Stockholm's ubiquitous coffee shops.
This particular cafe is owned by Benny Andersson from Abba, a band with more than a passing influence on Persson's electro-pop group Le Kid, who are also known for their catchy tunes and bright outfits.
Persson is a huge supporter of the dramatic growth of music streaming in Sweden.
"I am on the extremely happy 'Go, yay, we love it!' side of the debate," he says from across the dark wooden table.
"For the price of one album you can listen to as much as you want every month. It is democratic because it has moved the power from the decision makers at radio stations and labels to artists themselves, who can release the music they want on streaming sites and get paid for it."
Some 91% of digital income in Sweden now comes from streaming sites, compared with just 13% worldwide.
The services were the main force behind the Swedish music market's 13.8% growth last year, marking a return to a level last seen in 2005, according to the industry body the IFPI.
It was a figure most countries could only dream of, with global music trade revenues increasing by just 0.2%, the first rise since 1999.
The numbers also represent a big turnaround for a nation that used to have one of the highest rates in the world for unauthorised downloads and was home to the notorious file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.
"We were the worst in the class," says Per Sundin, managing director for Universal Music in Sweden at his office in the capital.
"At international meetings, people looked at me like I was something the cat dragged in because I represented Sweden, where piracy had destroyed the market for everyone."
He is now being asked to travel around the world to give presentations on how music streaming has transformed the record industry in his country.
"I am 100% sure that this is the future. Streaming services will be the next step for global music consumption," he says.
Spotify the difference
By far the most successful streaming site in Sweden is Spotify, a Swedish company, which launched in 2008, a year before tough new laws to combat illegal downloading were introduced. More than a third of the country's population is registered with the site.
The walls of its new Stockholm premises are covered in street art and vintage concert posters and there is a bar for hosting gigs, a computer games room and even a football field.
"Spotify really started [in order] to combat online piracy, so I would say we didn't create a behaviour that didn't exist, we just transferred it to a legal medium," says the company's chief product officer, Gustav Soderstrom.
"It offered the same principle that you could get music for free, but all the music was licensed and it was better than the piracy networks because you didn't have to wait for the whole file to download before you could listen to it."
He believes the reasons the site has proved especially successful in Sweden include the affordable, widespread access to some of Europe's fastest and most accessible broadband services. The size of the population also helped.
"Sweden only has about 10 million people and so you reach a tipping point where so many people are using the service that the social aspect of music works really well. You can share a playlist... which wasn't really possible technically with the piracy networks."
Royalties rip-off?
Worldwide, Spotify now has more than 24 million active users in 25 countries. Six million of those pay for the premium service, which removes adverts between tracks and offers and mobile access to playlists, even when the user is offline.
On Tuesday, it is announcing its first markets in Asia and South America and increasing its presence in Europe. But it faces tough competition as it works towards the goal of becoming a "global product like Facebook".
There are existing rivals such as French business Deezer, already available in 182 countries. And tech giants Apple and Google are preparing to launch streaming services.
Streaming services make their money from adverts or monthly subscriptions from premium users. For Spotify, the fees are about $15 (£10) in Sweden and the UK and $10 in the US. The more a track gets clicked on, the more it earns for the rights holder, be that a label, artist or composer.
But like many of its international rivals, it faces continued criticism from performers who say their songs need to be played hundreds of times to generate the same kind of income that they would earn from a single download or CD sale.
Last year, US-based cellist Zoe Keating released her earnings in a public Google document, saying she had received just $281.87 (£179.70) after her songs were streamed 72,800 times on Spotify.
For Daniel Oliver, a successful Icelandic singer living in Sweden who had a number one last year, "the positive thing is you get really good exposure and you can approach your fans really easily".
"But when it comes to getting the worth of your work, these streaming sites are definitely not good. I have to have a side job in a bar as well to make a living."
However, Spotify has now become the biggest source of income for some of the country's most popular artists, such as Stockholm-based House DJ Avicii who signed with Universal Music Sweden in August 2010 and has had five hits with the label.
"Spotify offers a proven revenue generator through streamed music," says Avicii's manager, Ash Pournouri.
"In Sweden, where the reach is greatest, the major labels are dependent on Spotify to bring their financials up to the levels of past glory days."
Vinyl revival
Not everyone is as sold on streaming, however. And even in some major economies such as Japan and Germany, three quarters of music is still sold in a physical format.
"I don't download and I don't stream and I know that is partly because I am of an older generation," says Larry Farber, who runs a music, film and book store on the edge of the hip Sodermalm area.
"It does feel like physical music is mostly dying. I will sometimes be in the store and just think, 'What am I doing?'"
Most industry experts agree that the trend towards digital music is unlikely to be reversed, but even Spotify's Gustav Soderstrom has admitted that he understands "the need to create some physical manifestation of something you really like".
He says he wasn't a real "music aficionado" when he joined Spotify and his growing record collection demonstrates how streaming sites work to expand users' musical passions and horizons.
"That is kind of my personal mission, to take boring people like myself and get them back into enjoying music."
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
But at home with the $5,000 home audio system? Spin the black circle!
Did you read the OP? The trend is going towards musicians making money by streaming over cds. Musicians in Europe are already making more money by streaming over cds & vinyl.
bmxlive.tv starting thursday(time trials) to watch some great BMX racing in Manchester England all the way to sunday,keep your eye on a kid named Rusty.
Godfather.
I guess I'm more old-school and just prefer the other ways of listening to music. Plus I'm not on the computer enough - at home, anyway - to warrant it. And, as was mentioned, gotta use the good sound system!
(good luck and safety to your son, Godfather! I love watching bmx)
But seriously, I really miss analog radio- not to mention real people playing real records like Abe "Voco" Kesh and Dusty Street used to on KSAN.
"Analog love songs will save the world."
I thought I read it. I guess I read what I wanted to hear!
nothing beats that.
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
Winnipeg 2011
St. Paul 2014
http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8993-the-cloud/
Making Cents
Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi breaks down the meager royalties currently being paid out to bands by streaming services and explains what the music business' headlong quest for capital means for artists today.
By Damon Krukowski, November 14, 2012
I'm sure each generation of musicians feels they've lived through a time of tremendous change, but the shifts I've witnessed in my relatively short music career-- from morphing formats to dissolving business models-- do seem extraordinary. The first album I made was originally released on LP only, in 1988-- and my next will likely only be pressed on LP again. But in between, the music industry seems to have done everything it could to screw up that simple model of exchange; today it is no longer possible for most of us to earn even a modest wage through our recordings.
Not that I am naively nostalgic for the old days-- we weren't paid for that first album, either. (The record label we were signed to at the time, Rough Trade, declared bankruptcy before cutting us even one royalty check.) But the ways in which musicians are screwed have changed qualitatively, from individualized swindles to systemic ones. And with those changes, a potential end-run around the industry's problems seems less and less possible, even for bands who have managed to hold on to 100% of their rights and royalties, as we have.
Consider Pandora and Spotify, the streaming music services that are becoming ever more integrated into our daily listening habits. My BMI royalty check arrived recently, reporting songwriting earnings from the first quarter of 2012, and I was glad to see that our music is being listened to via these services. Galaxie 500's "Tugboat", for example, was played 7,800 times on Pandora that quarter, for which its three songwriters were paid a collective total of 21 cents, or seven cents each. Spotify pays better: For the 5,960 times "Tugboat" was played there, Galaxie 500's songwriters went collectively into triple digits: $1.05 (35 cents each).
To put this into perspective: Since we own our own recordings, by my calculation it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000 plays on Pandora to earn us the profit of one-- one-- LP sale. (On Spotify, one LP is equivalent to 47,680 plays.)
Or to put it in historical perspective: The "Tugboat" 7" single, Galaxie 500's very first release, cost us $980.22 for 1,000 copies-- including shipping! (Naomi kept the receipts)-- or 98 cents each. I no longer remember what we sold them for, but obviously it was easy to turn at least a couple bucks' profit on each. Which means we earned more from every one of those 7"s we sold than from the song's recent 13,760 plays on Pandora and Spotify. Here's yet another way to look at it: Pressing 1,000 singles in 1988 gave us the earning potential of more than 13 million streams in 2012. (And people say the internet is a bonanza for young bands...)
To be fair, because we are singer-songwriters, and because we own all of our rights, these streaming services end up paying us a second royalty, each for a different reason and each through a different channel. Pandora is considered "non-terrestrial radio," and consequently must pay the musicians who play on the recordings it streams, as well as the songwriters. These musicians' royalties are collected by SoundExchange, a non-profit created by the government when satellite radio came into existence. SoundExchange doesn't break our earnings down by service per song, but it does tell us that last quarter, Pandora paid a total of $64.17 for use of the entire Galaxie 500 catalogue. We have 64 Galaxie 500 recordings registered with them, so that averages neatly to one dollar per track, or another 33 cents for each member of the trio.
Pandora in fact considers this additional musicians' royalty an extraordinary financial burden, and they are aggressively lobbying for a new law-- it's now a bill before the U.S. Congress-- designed to relieve them of it. You can read all about it in a series of helpful blog posts by Ben Sisario of The New York Times, or if you prefer your propaganda unmediated, you can listen to Pandora founder Tim Westergren's own explanation of the Orwellian Internet Radio Fairness Act.
As for Spotify, since it is not considered radio, either of this world or any other, they have a different additional royalty to pay. Like any non-broadcast use of recordings, they require a license from the rights-holder They negotiate this individually with each record label, at terms not made public. I'm happy to make ours public, however: It is the going "indie" rate of $0.005 per play. (Actually, when I do the math, that rate seems to truly pay out at $0.004611-- I hope someone got a bonus for saving the company four-hundredths of a cent on each stream!) We didn't negotiate this, exactly; for a band-owned label like ours, it's take it or leave it. We took it, which means for 5,960 plays of "Tugboat", Spotify theoretically owes our record label $29.80.
I say theoretically, because in practice Spotify's $0.004611 rate turns out to have a lot of small, invisible print attached to it. It seems this rate is adjusted for each stream, according to an algorithm (not shared by Spotify, at least not with us) that factors in variables such as frequency of play, the outlet that channeled the play to Spotify, the type of subscription held by the user, and so on. What's more, try as I might through the documents available to us, I cannot get the number of plays Spotify reports to our record label to equal the number of plays reported by the BMI. Bottom line: The payments actually received by our label from Spotify for streams of "Tugboat" in that same quarter, as best I can figure: $9.18.
"Well, that's still not bad," you might say. (I'm not sure who would really say that, but let's presume someone might.) After all, these are immaterial goods-- it costs us nothing to have our music on these services: no pressing, no printing, no shipping, no file space to save a paper receipt for 25 years. All true. But immaterial goods turn out to generate equally immaterial income.
Which gets to the heart of the problem. When I started making records, the model of economic exchange was exceedingly simple: make something, price it for more than it costs to manufacture, and sell it if you can. It was industrial capitalism, on a 7" scale. The model now seems closer to financial speculation. Pandora and Spotify are not selling goods; they are selling access, a piece of the action. Sign on, and we'll all benefit. (I'm struck by the way that even crowd-sourcing mimics this "investment" model of contemporary capitalism: You buy in to what doesn't yet exist.)
But here's the rub: Pandora and Spotify are not earning any income from their services, either. In the first quarter of 2012, Pandora-- the same company that paid Galaxie 500 a total of $1.21 for their use of "Tugboat"-- reported a net loss of more than $20 million dollars. As for Spotify, their latest annual report revealed a loss in 2011 of $56 million.
Leaving aside why these companies are bothering to chisel hundredths of a cent from already ridiculously low "royalties," or paying lobbyists to work a bill through Congress that would lower those rates even further-- let's instead ask a question they themselves might consider relevant: Why are they in business at all?
The answer is capital, which is what Pandora and Spotify have and what they generate. These aren't record companies-- they don't make records, or anything else; apparently not even income. They exist to attract speculative capital. And for those who have a claim to ownership of that capital, they are earning millions-- in 2012, Pandora's executives sold $63 million of personal stock in the company. Or as Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek has put it, "The question of when we'll be profitable actually feels irrelevant. Our focus is all on growth. That is priority one, two, three, four and five."
Growth of the music business? I think not. Daniel Ek means growth of his company, i.e., its capitalization. Which is the closest I can come to understanding the fundamental change I've witnessed in the music industry, from my first LP in 1988 to the one I am working on now. In between, the sale of recorded music has become irrelevant to the dominant business models I have to contend with as a working musician. Indeed, music itself seems to be irrelevant to these businesses-- it is just another form of information, the same as any other that might entice us to click a link or a buy button on a stock exchange.
As businesses, Pandora and Spotify are divorced from music. To me, it's a short logical step to observe that they are doing nothing for the business of music-- except undermining the simple cottage industry of pressing ideas onto vinyl, and selling them for more than they cost to manufacture. I am no Luddite-- I am not smashing iPhones or sabotaging software. In fact, I subscribe to Spotify for $9.99 a month (the equivalent of 680,462 annual plays of "Tugboat") because I love music, and the access it gives me to music of all kinds is incredible.
But I have simply stopped looking to these business models to do anything for me financially as a musician. As for sharing our music without a business model of any kind, that's exactly how I got into this-- we called it punk rock. Which is why we are streaming all of our recordings, completely free, on the Bandcamp sites we set up for Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi. Enjoy.
On Spotify and Music Consumption
http://lowerdens.com/2012/10/25/on-spot ... nsumption/
By Jana Hunter of Lower Dens
This is a post about Spotify, about the things I said, others said, and my responses in kind yesterday on Twitter and Facebook.
I spent a good deal of time yesterday thinking about and discussing aspects of the flaws and strengths of streaming services. I asked, via Twitter, where to go to buy a digital copy of an album I wanted, and, unprovoked, slagged off Spotify in the process. I didn’t mean to, but did broach a somewhat passionate debate on a subject in which we and you that support us have a vested interest: music consumption. Discourse is incredibly important. We’re thankful that people can be open and honest with their beliefs, no matter the thrust or force of those beliefs. This post is meant to clarify mine.
On to the point:
Spotify in and of itself isn’t evil. It’s value as a promotional tool and a browsing resource is undeniable.
However, the way people use it and similar services is screwing musicians (and comedians). It’s also screwing anyone who uses it to feed the weird addiction to massive quantities of music that a lot of people seem to have these days.
Music shouldn’t be free. It shouldn’t even be cheap. If you consume all the music you want all the time, compulsively, sweatily, you end up having a cheap relationship to the music you do listen to. In turn, this kind of market makes for musicians who are writing with the burden of having to get your attention, instead of writing whatever they’d write if they were just following artistic impulses. It’s increasingly difficult and un-rewarding to write music that is considered, patient, and simple* when the market increasingly demands music that is easy, thoughtless, and careless.
We shouldn’t have everything we want all the time, not in music or anything else. The only reason we do have that relationship to music right now is because we’re taking advantage of technology and a lack of regulation. It makes sense. If that technology did the same thing for food or shelter, we’d be talking about that. Don’t tell me though that this is a consumer-dictated market; it’s this way because we’re taking advantage of it, not because we thought up and implemented a good way of doing things. Like I said before, just cause it’s so doesn’t make it right.
I’m writing this for selfish reasons. I want to be able to continue to make even a meager living doing this, because I love writing and playing music. I love listening to it possibly more than making it. If people decided my music wasn’t worth their attention, and I never put it in public again, I’d still be talking about this, wanting people who make great music to be able to keep making it, or in cases where they’re still making it but no longer bothering to subject it to a hostile market, to bring it back into the public again. I don’t want us to continue to lose touch with good music.
“Don’t be ruled by the market. art is supposed to be your way of escaping all that bullshit, not just another feeble manifestation of it.” – @theluyas
What’s missing is regulation, preferably by the consumer demanding not to get screwed.
It’d be ideal if the free and cheap services that Spotify offered had some limitations.
It’d be really something if people recognized and cared that they were getting cheated by the kind of relationship to art and music that corporate interests have made for them.
Do you think that’s possible? Do you think there are better ways? Do you still disagree?
Ask us a question or make your point on Tumblr (preferably), Twitter, Facebook, or our website, and we’ll do our best to respond.
Best,
Jana//Lower Dens
http://lowerdens.com
Ps. If you’re interested in statistics, jump down.
* – Simple here is used to denote a thing that holds a lot of weight but carefully reduces it to its purest form. This is something I respect over almost anything in the songs of musicians I love.
—————————————————————————————————————-
Here are some of the things that people said to us, and some the same arguments as above broken down as replies:
1) “Music should be free because consumers dictate the market, and they want it free.”
Consumers didn’t dictate this. Technology did. If technology provided loopholes for free food and shelter, that’s what we’d be arguing about. The truth is that the internet is an evolving technology, and we have a say in the evolution of this part of it. We, as consumers and humans, are bound to exploit advantageous situations; this is no different. However, if consumers don’t think about this and pursue a course that’s different than the one we’re on now, music will continue to suffer.
2) “Physical albums are too expensive.”
$15 isn’t unreasonable for a CD. $20 isn’t unreasonable for a vinyl album. You’re paying for the recording process, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, promotion, a quality product (one would hope), and a supplemental income for artists and labels.
Some albums cost slight more than this. This is because they’re made to (hopefully) blow your mind. A lot of musicians today who still work with vinyl are pushing for 180 gram vinyl and 45rpm, both of which make for incredible-sounding records. Likewise, a lot of musicians are offering higher-resolution album downloads. Similarly, some people offer colored or engraved vinyl, elaborate packaging, etc. They do all of this because they want you have something that means something, something that isn’t completely disposable. In comparison, low-res mp3’s are complete garbage.
3) “Streaming sucks now but it will get better”
Maybe. I’ll accept that. You know, though (don’t you?), that it won’t get better unless people demand that it gets better. Businesses don’t correct themselves to pursue ethical practices vs. profit without somebody making them do that.
4) “I used Spotify to find your music”
I used Spotify to find your music, too, if you are Liars or Steve Moore. Like you, I then went and bought those records, cause they’re great! It would be fantastic if everybody bought the music they found and loved via Spotify. You may have standards, but more and more of us accept that cheap/free is the way things are with music now, and they don’t go out and buy the albums they like, and musicians get screwed, and music consumers develop a cheap relationship to music and thus get screwed, too.
5) “Vinyl is precious and ridiculous”
You didn’t say why though, and your points are anything but self-evident, so I’ll just say that vinyl is also a vastly superior audio format when compared to compressed digital files, and it’s the way many musicians would like you to hear their music. The argument between vinyl and high-resolution digital formats is largely a subjective one. However, I will point out this quote from Neil Young: “”Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music. His legacy is tremendous. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.”
6) “People only listen to streaming services on their PCs”
And their iPhones, iPod touches, iPads, other smartphones…
7) “Record companies rob artists of profit more so than streaming”
A common independent deal is the 50/50 deal, wherein a label pays for everything up front, and then recoups (takes back via profits) their costs, after you which you and your label split the remaining profits. If your record costs $40k, and your record makes $100k, you get $30k. If Spotify paid you for an equivalent amount of plays on their paid subscription service, you’d get $1250.
—————————————————————————————————————-
Some statistics on how streaming, digital and physical sales compare:
In the US, ITunes pays the artist AND label $0.70 per song dowload. They then divide that according to the artist’s contract.
Streaming Price Index : Current Streaming Pay Rates as of 12/31/11
Payable to Artist/Label via digital distributor for sales from Jul to Dec 2011 *
[This is the equation: (# of plays) = (total $ paid) / (cents per play)]
Rhapsody
50,822 = $668.57 / .013 [53:1 Itunes Song Download]
Spotify
798,783 = $4,277.39 / .005 [140:1 Itunes Song Download]
* these figures are from an independent catalog of 87 albums / 1,280 Songs – BEFORE the distributor’s cut/fee.
By the way, these stats only account for plays on the Spotify paid subscription service. Plays from ad-funded streams pay more like .0009 cents. Numbers for every artist are different, I think, and I don’t know what ours are. But I looked around and found other peoples’ numbers and have a general idea.
Here’s an estimate of what happens to 5k of our albums, illegally downloaded, streamed in free Spotify, streamed in paid Spotify, bought digitally, and bought physically.
Illegally downloaded – $0
Streamed (free, ad-funded, 20 plays from 5k ppl) – $900
Streamed (paid subscription, 20 plays from 5k ppl) – $2500
Digital purchase (averaged; $1/album) – $5000
Physical purchase (averaged; $3/album) – $15000
That might happen for us over the course of a year. In fact, if does, we think we’re doing pretty good.
Five of us made the record. We pay a manager. For a year, in this scenario, each one of us gets this:
Illegally downloaded – $0
Streamed (free, ad-funded) – $153
Streamed (paid subscription) – $425
Digital purchase (averaged) – $850
Physical purchase (averaged) – $2550
Take from that what you will. Also, bare this in mind: we might sell 10k records a year. According to last.fm, we have about 100k listeners. How many of you use last.fm?
STATS FROM:
http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/201 ... ex-123111/
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/09/03/ ... nkin-cent/
http://help.tunecore.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/37v
That's a very good point but i'm not sure if I 100% agree with it. Thanks to the availability of music through technology my taste in music has broadened to a size I don't think it would have reached without the interwebz. However I have noticed that unlike back when I just bought cds I don't tend to remember track names as much and I don't hone in on one cd for as long as I used to.
Music should be cheap, I think that's played a major downfall for the industry. I've seen some shocking prices for a cd and now the last major cd retailer in the UK has gone bust. The industry fucked up in a lot of ways from marketing to pricing and now its paying the price. Big executives are freting because they want to keep their huge salaries but that model is no longer viable.
I like the idea of streaming services but I still like to own music to at least but on my ipod.
thank you my friend !
Godfather.
you're a good man Brianlux !
Godfather.
Thanks, GF. I try... but sometime I think I'm just a nostalgic old fool.
Mookeywrench- your idea that "Music shouldn’t be free. It shouldn’t even be cheap" is thought provoking. In a sense, I agree. I don't think we should approach music with a cheap mind set but I'm not sure it should be costly in terms of money because then it becomes elitist. In fact, it has done so to some degree. A lot of people can't afford to shell out a months' worth of food money to see a few hours of music. When I used to go to Filmore West in SF we got a whole night of great music- usually three bands and often big names for $3.50 and quite often a free hand bill and/or poster was thrown in. Now, back then $3.50 was a chunk of change, but all but the most poor (and I was fairly poor back them) could come up with the cash to see great music. Records could be bought on sale for about the same. But what I mean my not approaching the music with a cheap mind set was that we took the music seriously and so did the groups. These bands- be it rock, folk or jazz- took years to develop their sound. Sure, there were the flash-in-the-pan teenbopper groups but most music was taken seriously. I don't see that being the case so much today. This is probably what lead Bob Dylan recently to say that if he had grown up today he would probably have become a plumber instead of a musician (or something along those lines- I forget the exact quote).