What Streaming Music Services Pay (As of 2017)

[EnochLight]

Not sure how many of you have your stuff up on Pandora, Spotify, Tidal, etc - but the payout for these services remain painfully low, with pretty much all of these companies writing off huge losses every year. I often wonder how long this business model can remain viable...

I recently had my new single accepted on Pandora (which remains the only streaming service that is actually difficult to get rotation on), but I only sent it to them because I figured - what the hell... Just having it heard all over is reward enough.

Any of you guys use any of these services (either as a consumer or a contributing artist)?

2552-Musicians-Streaming_UNSIGNED-23rdJun-1.png (88.42 KiB) Viewed 823 times

[raymondh]

Wow that's a depressing graphic!!
Carl has put our Pacific Deep releases up on Spotify and Apple Music.
I'm not sure how much he's raked in so far, but our most popular track is at around 1600 plays on SoundCloud, so that would make a cool six bucks if we achieved the same in the Spotify.

[Some Desperate Glory]

So I looked it up. Since we uploaded our Pacific Deep catalog to Spotify we've made..... drumroll, please....
..... wait for it ....
....

$ 0.80

Not sure how much we've made on Apple Music yet as they haven't paid us yet.

[EnochLight]

I remember a news article about Lady Gaga years ago when she had one of her singles getting huge playback on Spotify. She racked up like 2+ million plays at the time... and got a check for ~$1000 USD. My figures may be off, but I remember it being some pathetic amount for millions of plays, and her utter disgust at the whole thing.

Streaming music payback, even for major platinum selling artists like Lady Gaga and anyone else on the top 40 charts, is laughably low. No one expects to make any money off of any of these.

[bxbrkrz]

Not sure how many of you have your stuff up on Pandora, Spotify, Tidal, etc - but the payout for these services remain painfully low, with pretty much all of these companies writing off huge losses every year. I often wonder how long this business model can remain viable...

I recently had my new single accepted on Pandora (which remains the only streaming service that is actually difficult to get rotation on), but I only sent it to them because I figured - what the hell... Just having it heard all over is reward enough.

Any of you guys use any of these services (either as a consumer or a contributing artist)?



2552-Musicians-Streaming_UNSIGNED-23rdJun-1.png

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=7506457
http://variety.com/2018/biz/news/music- ... 202750409/
Maybe a brighter future.

[Oquasec]

Worry about those when it's a dollar every dozen plays.

[EnochLight]

2552-Musicians-Streaming_UNSIGNED-23rdJun-1.png

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=7506457
http://variety.com/2018/biz/news/music- ... 202750409/
Maybe a brighter future.

Perhaps, but that bill is really aimed at musicians who released material prior to 1972, and only applies to music sold/streamed for the US market.

[bxbrkrz]

2552-Musicians-Streaming_UNSIGNED-23rdJun-1.png

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=7506457
http://variety.com/2018/biz/news/music- ... 202750409/
Maybe a brighter future.

Perhaps, but that bill is really aimed at musicians who released material prior to 1972, and only applies to music sold/streamed for the US market.

Still a positive step. The giants hold the money and will do everything to not let their power go. A sad situation that will not change any time soon. https://venturebeat.com/2017/01/07/bloc ... -industry/ I can hope. One day.

[kuhliloach]

It's unclear to me why an artist would allow their music on the above platforms when Bandcamp clearly pays a fair amount per sale, is easy to use, and has a great streaming app. As the popularity of Bandcamp grows we should see more artists using this model eventually prohibiting their works from being on Spotify and other low paying sites.

[EnochLight]

It's unclear to me why an artist would allow their music on the above platforms when Bandcamp clearly pays a fair amount per sale, is easy to use, and has a great streaming app.

Easy: market saturation. No one knows or cares about Bandcamp except for artists. The average consumer is going to go with what's easy and what's in their pocket (iPhone/Apple Music/iTunes, Android phone/Google Music/Amazon Music, and all of the streaming apps).

When I sell my wares through Apple, I know that I immediately have my wares available to the 200+ million people who bought iPhones last year alone (currently about 1 billion active devices), and the roughly 2 billion Android devices active globally.

[Marco Raaphorst]

It's unclear to me why an artist would allow their music on the above platforms when Bandcamp clearly pays a fair amount per sale, is easy to use, and has a great streaming app.

Easy: market saturation. No one knows or cares about Bandcamp except for artists. The average consumer is going to go with what's easy and what's in their pocket (iPhone/Apple Music/iTunes, Android phone/Google Music/Amazon Music, and all of the streaming apps).

When I sell my wares through Apple, I know that I immediately have my wares available to the 200+ million people who bought iPhones last year alone (currently about 1 billion active devices), and the roughly 2 billion Android devices active globally.

Put it on all these platforms including Bandcamp I would say. All different markets, people etc.

[EnochLight]

Put it on all these platforms including Bandcamp I would say. All different markets, people etc.

Depends on how much you end up selling. Bandcamp charges 15% out of each digital sale, plus you lose fees to PayPal when you accept payments. With Apple and Google and most of the other stores, you lose 30%, but are provided detailed sales reports including the area where you customers (fans) are, and have much larger market exposure.

But yeah, it wouldn't hurt to put them up on Bandcamp. I may do that.

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