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How are musicians supposed to survive on $0.00173 per stream?
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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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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 $1.73 for the month, and of that, the artist would probably pick up like 50c.
To give an alternative perspective.
Dua Lipa "Levitating" has made 3.4 Million dollars on streaming revenue. Blinding Lights by The Weeknd is over double that.
Then the real success stories are the Indies. Run the Jewels only have 1.2 Billion streams but that 2 million dollars is their 2 million dollars.
Its peanuts per stream but anyone anywhere in the world can be a fan and show their support by ordering an overpriced Tshirt from the website.
Ok, not defending the record and streaming companies but this is nothing new. In the past if you bought an album the artist would see around 1.50$. 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.
RTJ.
Man so many acronyms. Cant know em all.
TIAFPMWAA
Return ~of~ The Jedi.
Yeah thats my bad. Run The Jewels.
Presumably not run the jewels as it seems they charge for theirs?
For RTJ 3 and 4 If you registered before the release date they sent a code to redeem on Google Music for the full album for free.
No catch, no strings, no being pestered with marketing emails till the end of time.
So, I just asked a GPT to name some famous bands with the initials RTJ and literally Run the Jewels was the only answer.
Edit: GPT = Good prompt texter.
Considering there are 10s of millions of users that doesn't seem too bad tbh.
You're looking at the mega successes. It'll be nice for musicians with thousands or tens of thousands of listeners to be able to feed themselves