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Mariah Carey’s record-breaking day shows how little musicians make from Spotify
- elliott34 8y agoSpotify doesn't pay artists. They pay the labels. And labels pay the artists. What artists get paid has nothing to do with Spotify.
- johnzim 8y agoThe Music Industry did this to itself - because it disliked the amount of power the iTunes music store had, it decided to allow Spotify's frankly obscene business idea to float. Well, one of those partners earned them lots of money and the other massively devalued their goods. What's even more laughable is that the iTunes Music Store represented a massive 'save' for the industry - prior to that they'd earned ~$0 on digital music thanks to rampant piracy. I wish this could be seen as the high-water mark of stupidity for the industry but I know it well enough to be sure that's not the case.
- msabalau 8y agoWhile it is interesting to see how much a superstar makes off a ubiquitous Christmas classic, it might have been nice to see how irrelevant and immaterial streaming royalties are to normal musician, For sheer resourcefulness (and humor) I enjoyed seeing the band Freezepop include a $3 royalty check in their Kickstarter music video, and offer the check itself as part of $400 backer reward.
- baby 8y ago$92,400 in a day. How little. For a single song (released in 1994 at that). How detached from reality can people be?
- rhacker 8y agoYeah but after splitting up the money between various parties, it's what maybe a Toyota camry each? Nothing right? I finished paying off my toyota camry a couple years ago. It took 5 freaking years.
- baby 8y agoIt's a pretty hefty sum for a 3-min song.
- gus_massa 8y agoI don't know about profesional musician, but in the university we have a small YouTube channel about math exercises for the students. A 10 minutes video (of amateur level) involves something like: * 6 hour of preparation: We have to select the topic and the exercise. And also thinking how to split the solution in the blackboard. * 2 hours x 3 persons for recording: One person for the writing, one for the voice and me. We retake each step many times, and we discuss before and after each take. * 6 hour of editing: Fix the sound (volume, big background noise, try to fix errors). Fix the writing (typos, recolor part of the writing, move some text). Also, change the speed of some parts, because sometimes writing is boring, but remember to resynchronize the voice. (Some videos are easier and involve less time, some are more difficult and need more time to be finished.) After all the preparation and edition (I hope) it looks very natural and it's very difficult to realize how much time it involves. But it is not at all at a profesional level. So a 3 minutes song is not created in 3 minutes.
- mbesto 8y agoI can write programming script that took me 3-min to write, but creates $90k worth of business value. What's your point?
- phyller 8y agoYou guys are missing the point. It might be the all-time highest payout from Spotify. Because of Spotify, many many people will not buy the song. So what once would have been millions of dollars in revenue is much less, and the entire music industry is splitting a rapidly shrinking pie. Yea the very very top will still make enough money to live in big houses and drive big cars, but the middling people can't live off their take. So in order to make it you have to become an international sensation.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- drewg123 8y agoOne that apparently took 15 minutes to write. If only I could derive a lifetime of income from 15 minutes worth of work. Another interesting tidbit is that if it was a patent rather than a copyright, the rights would have expired 3 years ago. I spent far longer than 15 minutes just talking to the patent attorney the last time I filed a patent.
- so33 8y agoThe song may have taken 15 minutes to write but I can guarantee it did not take 15 minutes to record, produce, and promote the song.
- jstarfish 8y agoAlso took far longer than 15 minutes to build her brand and audience to the point where she's releasing celebrity holiday albums that anybody cares to listen to instead of fading into obscurity. But for the lack of a holiday album, Limp Bizkit might still be with us. That said, holiday albums are just a ploy to net royalties in perpetuity-- you're guaranteed airtime and income once a year for as long as Christmas and copyright law exist. Nobody should expect to be making bank on long-tail efforts.
- Reedx 8y agoPicasso is sketching at a park. A woman walks by, recognizes him, and begs for her portrait. He agrees and a few minutes later hands her the sketch. She is elated about how wonderfully it captures the very essence of her character. What beautiful work it is. She asks how much she owes him. "5000 francs, madam," says Picasso. The woman is incredulous, outraged, and asks how that's even possible given it only took him 5 minutes. Picasso looks up and, without missing a beat, says: "No, madam, it took me my whole life."
- theandrewbailey 8y ago... The woman pays the outrageous sum for the portrait, but Picasso still (somehow) owns it for the rest of his life, plus 70 years.
- paol 8y agoYou're missing the point. This is the absolute ceiling of success that can be reached in Spotify. If the payout of that is 90k, what do you thing the payout of the typical artist is on Spotify?
- pjc50 8y agoSo if the price is $15 and there are N users playing M streams of songs ... how much is really available to each artist? Note that they don't make any claim about spotify's margins or profits here. It's a submarine article to demand they raise prices (and pass the increase on to the labels).
- maxxxxx 8y agoInstead of worrying about superstars making only 92k/day maybe you should worry about how much the typical artists makes. In today's winner-takes-it-all world there is a good chance that if Carey made much more the average guy still would make nothing.
- jlarocco 8y agoI love music, strongly support musicians, and buy tons of music, but you're not going to make me feel bad that artists can "only" make $92k a day on Spotify.
- webdood90 8y agoI think the point is an elite artist tops out at 92k, meaning unknown artists will be making peanuts for their contributions. You're not supposed to pity that top tier artist, only realize that the ceiling is relatively low for everyone.
- autokad 8y agoI agree. if it were a bank exec I'd bet they would be going on about income inequality
- xbryanx 8y agoI never understand why Spotify is so cheap. I'm a bit of a music head, but I would absolutely pay twice as much for the subscription service. Or is Spotify primarily making money off ads or data?
- pjc50 8y agoThe price is roughly at equilibrium with piracy.
- tbihl 8y agoAt this point, piracy only makes any sense if you can't meet the requirement of accessing their servers monthly to maintain access to locally stored songs.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y agoThe article and the comments here are all making it seem like Spotify is the one being cheap. In reality that’s probably the maximum that they can pay to even come close to turning a profit while the distributors are still in the mix: http://fortune.com/2016/05/24/spotify-financials/ http://fortune.com/2016/05/24/spotify-financials/ That article is from 2016 yet they are still losing money. There would be a lot more money involved for both Spotify and the artists if they went the Netflix route and cut out the record label middlemen. I’m sure they are trying to do that but for whatever reason they haven’t been successful yet. Probably because the back catalogue of the record labels has a lot more leverage than the back catalogue of a bunch of movies. I wonder if they went the route of churning out a ton of original content if that would gradually increase their influence and get people to sign with them for future releases because they would be paying more. It’s a precarious game, since I’m sure the record labels will be happy to yank all of their music once they get wind of Spotify trying something like this out.
- creaghpatr 8y agoThe article is unclear about which distribution channels her and her partners invested in to earn $60M in royalties since ‘94 before being “shafted” by Spotify for an effort-free return of $92k in a single day. Plus, Spotify did her a solid by making her the top song on the top Christmas playlist thus solidifying her position on the Christmas charts for years to come.
- paol 8y agoI love Spotify, for the service and just for the fact that it exists (just look at the fragmentation shitshow that is movie & tv streaming, with enormous amounts of back catalog still unavailable anywhere, to see how much worse we could have it) But it should plainly obvious that the price charged is not sustainable.
- jlarocco 8y agoSorry, but I can't feel bad for somebody whining about only making $92k in a single day from work they did 24 years ago. Maybe Spotify is ripping off artists, but this story doesn't demonstrate it.
- kbutler 8y agoNo - how many times have these people paid for this song? If they had bought the CD (and many of them have) or the cassette (and many of them have) or the mp3 (and many of them have) or the iTunes AAC (and many of them have) they could play it infinite times and never pay Mariah another red cent. The music industry keeps trying (and sometimes succeeding) to convince people that they deserve new payment for the same work on every form of new media forever.
- dgzl 8y agoDon't they, though? (Within copyright limits) If you buy a cassette, the quality and experience is much different than something more contemporary. Doesn't the work of data-conversion and remastering warrant additional funding? > How many times have these people paid for this song? You're really only paying for the medium, and renting the music.
- jjeaff 8y agoCassette to CD, I agree or record too. But once I buy the CD, I can rip it losslessly and it is the exact same ordering of bits no matter where or how I play it.
- dgzl 8y agoWhat about if the artist changes the music, like Yeezy did on TLOP. Would you pay again for a new version of the music? What about in the future, when we add new dimensions to our music, that requires additional remastering? Our current music formats are really great, but I wouldn't be surprised to see another transformation before too long. Maybe downloadable VR concerts, or some integrated rumble data to assist with bass boost. Or possibly holographic versions of the artist performing. You'll be buying the same music for as long as the industry can keep turning the knob, just enough to bring new interest.
- kbutler 8y agoA concert recording is a separate work. A music video is a separate work. An online stream of an existing audio recording is not a separate work.
- TACIXAT 8y ago>Spotify pays whoever holds the rights to a song anywhere from $0.006 to $0.0084 per play. It makes me happy that the cost of digital goods is falling. The distribution costs are so low for a digital item that this price seems much more in line with what people should pay for a download / stream. Interestingly, at $10 a month Spotify is charging users $0.00023 per minute (60 * 24 * 30). If each song is about 3 minutes, they're making money on anyone who spends less than 10% of their time listening to music.
- kbutler 8y ago...if that were Spotify's only cost of service. They also pay for bandwidth, servers, application development, customer acquisition, ...
- msvan 8y agoDigital goods are not worthless because they can be downloaded easily. Distribution costs shouldn't matter much when determining price. Competition should though, and there is plenty of competition for people's time between digital goods. Also, I'm sure Spotify pays for engineers, offices, lawyers, designers, servers, marketing, avocado toasts and other essentials in addition to royalties.
- pureliquidhw 8y agoI agree with your underlying point, but distribution cost absolutely matters when determining price. Competition for time is a great way of framing why I pay for many services. I pay $10 to Spotify to avoid hundreds of commercials each month, it is absolutely worth it to me. Same with Netflix. Would do the same with Gmail if it was an option.
- extra88 8y ago> Would do the same with Gmail if it was an option. It is, pay for G-Suite.
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- IshKebab 8y agoHow does the record high profit ($90k per day) show how little musicians typically make?
- scarface74 8y agoIf one of the most enduring popular songs of the last 20 years makes $90K in one day and its a very seasonal song. How much would the average artist make?
- IshKebab 8y agoAnywhere from 0 to $90k/day. Ok I guess we can assume that music earnings have a somewhat long tail, but hopefully you get my point - the maximum doesn't tell us much about the distribution.
- danepowell 8y agoPennies per play is a hard metric to grok. Let's compare this to CDs. Assume a CD costs $10, and half of that goes towards the distribution of the physical media. It has maybe ten tracks. If you listen to it every day for a few months that's roughly the same "price per play" if I'm doing my math right. Maybe that's a little high for an estimate, but streaming is still within an order of magnitude, and probably reaches way more customers than a given CD track ever did.
- sbhn 8y agoThere is so much more choice in music now than even 10 years ago. Spotify or not, the monopolisation of your hearing time by a few chosen musicians has been significantly reduced. Less pie for each to share around. Also, spotify is not the only way musicians make money. Its only one of the ways they reach there audience and monetise it. Madonna for example would expect to earn 50 thousand a day from youtube, not to mention all the other less talked about revenue channels.
- Johnny555 8y agoHow much did it earn from radio play during that time? I didn't hear it once on Spotify, but I must have heard it dozens of times this month on the radio in the car.
- bickfordb 8y agoSupply, meet demand
- smohnot 8y agoSo Mariah earned $92k in ONE DAY (Dec 24th) this year. My gut is that she probably earned at least 20x that this year- the song is popular throughout December. So she earned a couple million bucks on Spotify this year. The song has made $60m in history... So a couple million on Spotify this year seems pretty damn good.
- gralx 8y agoPut this in context. Profitable musicians make most of their money from ticket sales to live shows. Recordings serve that business model mainly as promotional material. Profitable recording acts like the later Beatles have been extremely rare exceptions. This Spotify news is a far greater tragedy for record companies, whose entire business model relies on royalty collection, than it is for the artists themselves. But rentier business models don't deserve a whole lot of sympathy.
- rasz 8y agoThis, successful musicians actually work for a living https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/8481384/beyonce-jay-z-on-the-run-ii-tour-sales-by-the-numbers https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/848138...
- ykevinator 8y agoPoor musicians.
- __initbrian__ 8y agoI want to see an analysis that turns the $60 million into price per play. how many times a person with a Casette/CD would listen to it over the life of the medium. radio deals and how many people heard it on the radio each deal. What other avenues are there? Commercials? $60,000,000/(2018-1994+1)/(25 days before Christmas) = $96,000 for each day in leading up to Christmas And what are the current numbers for listening share? What percentage is spotify compared to radio, tv, youtube, itunes, owned media? Also curious about how to compare the value for owning the cd,digital copy, etc. v. listening on spotify? A cd is $10? which would give me only a month of Spotify? But then expand that to my entire media collection and then I wonder where it breaks even--10% of my time? Current Spotify premium user because I like the curated playlists
- bachmeier 8y agoThat's a lot more in one day than many people make in a year for doing actual work (the work of creating this song was done years ago). If that's all the market's going to pay someone that has already reached a level of wealth that they can't spend in ten lifetimes, I won't lose any sleep. If you can live with the market when someone's making millions, you can live with the market when they're unable to make $100,000 in a day from one source and for one song.
- samspenc 8y agoQuick calculation: $92,400 a day x 365 days a year = $33,726,000 That is, assuming you made that much every day of the year (on Spotify), you would make $33.7 million a year. Granted, you're not going to be able to replicate Christmas plays throughout the year, but still, that number doesn't seem small, even for a well-established artist.
- celerrimus 8y agoLet's say that in one month a year, this song earns on avg. like $40,000/day. It's around $36,000,000 over the period of 23 years. It's not that bad, compared to $60,000,000 earned in royalties since its release. I assume that they count multiple sources of revenue here, like radio licenses, royalties from movies and ads where this song was used, etc. So $92,400 per day only from one medium, is not that bad.
- spectrum1234 8y agoThis article could be titled "Look how much music poor people can access for $10 a month (or free, with ads)"