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The vast majority of musicians can only support themselves via live performances. This was true before streaming services. It was true before the Internet. It's

by cletus 15y ago

The vast majority of musicians can only support themselves via live performances. This was true before streaming services. It was true before the Internet. It's still true. Radio stations pay (through a complicated scheme) royalties to songwriters. There are no performance royalties (whereas there are on Internet-streamed radio, which can be seen as a victory for radio broadcasting lobbying). Major label artists typically earn nothing from music sales [1] due to RIAA accounting. The parallel artists shouldn't be drawing isn't to the cost of purchasing a song or a CD but to radio royalties. If a radio station plays a song, how many people hear it? How much do they earn per listener? Unfortunately, that's really hard to answer. Streaming services should be viewed as a means of discovery and curation. The bigger the audience you have the more you can make from live shows, which is your staple income unless you're the Rolling Stones, Sting, the Beatles, etc. To focus on the <1 cent per stream figure is shortsighted. You should be letting as many people as possible listen to your music. There's a reason tech companies typically start by giving away their services: build an audience and you can scale. This applies to musicians. Think about it: charging $5/head for 50 people at the local bar to listen to you takes you exactly the same amount of time as charging $50/person for 10,000+ people to listen to you in a large concert venue. Sure not everyone is going to get so famous but I guarantee you this: if you don't get relatively well-known, your income from music sales in any form won't sustain you or even be that significant.

dgurney 15y ago
I like a lot of what you say in this - especially the last sentence. Out of curiosity, though, does anyone have numbers on the "spread the word" free model? I'd love to see some hard evidence (it that's even possible to collect) that it works. A lot of people are essentially saying "focusing on album sales to the exclusion of free streaming is shortsighted" -- but how do we know that's true, aside from an intuitive gut reaction? Are tour revenues for Spotify artists increasing? Are more people going to gigs? There must be numbers somewhere. I should also note that a large percentage of tour revenues are from album sales; I don't know to what extent Spotify is cannibalizing those. So it's true that tour revenue is probably the number one income source, but don't forget how important physical merch sales are on those tours.
twainer 15y ago
Some facts on the ground here are just wrong - although the intuition feels correct: "The bigger the audience you have the more you can make from live shows, which is your staple income unless you're the Rolling Stones, Sting, the Beatles, etc." As someone who has been in the business I can tell you that touring is very expensive and complicated - especially when you get into the middle-zone for a band where they want to tour regionally rather than just play out in their home town. Touring has become more competitive for bands and listeners-attention as well. Even for bands with small ambitions the amount of so-called 'fans' is often uselessly misleading because you can get a false sense of how committed a 'fan' is and how many true fans you actually have. On the higher end, take an artist like Imogen Heap - who has a huge, cult following, has had some hits on the radio, won a Grammy, has a very lean production situation, and plays out by herself. That sounds like the perfect situation in the modern scenario - but she decided not to tour after her last Grammy-winning album because it was too expensive. Touring does not in any way solve any of the problems of people not paying for music. As far as streaming services being viewed as a means of discovery and creation - that benefit is for the listener and not the artist. There is a hugely compelling argument to be made that the enormous and chronic amount of choice actually prevents people from forming deeper relations to things. To give one example, drawn from an Economist article maybe 5 months back - in a British supermarket shoppers were given a choice between a table with 6 jams to try or 25 jams to try. In either case, anyone who tried jams was given a coupon for the jam of their choice. Many more people stopped by the table with 25 jams, but the redemption rates were hugely different: 30% for the those who stopped by the table with 6 and 3% for those who stopped by the table with 25. One can debate it many ways, but there can be no denying that the range of choice and access has fundamentally changed how a consumer relates to the possibilities in their environment. I deal directly with plenty of indie bands: exposure hardly matters because it does not equal attention. That's what boosters of the free-model don't appreciate. Things that people get for free are assigned less attention, less care than things they have to decide, and pay for, and own. That's the bitter truth. If you want a fan's attention, inspire them to pay for something - and not .30 for a download, but $10 for an album. My counsel to young bands is to try and do just that - charge real money and make real product. Then at least you know where you stand. Chugging along on a illusion of fandom by getting people to 'like' you and stream your music for free is a lesson in futility. Spotify is more like a search engine for music. It's a nice thing for the user, but truly meaningless for an artist. The new people making it big are doing so in spite of things like Spotify, not because of them - and that hardly makes Spotify qualifiy as an asset/savior in my book. Think about it: 1 million spins on Spotify would gross you $2000 - which is a small budget to produce a truly professional single track. 20 million spins would throw off enough money to give you the budget [$40,000] that was granted to low-end rap acts in the late 90s for an album-length release - not counting promotion of any sort of course. Consider that 20% of our mythical 20 million spins were actual iTunes dloads instead of Spotify listens. A band - even one on a major label - would earn well over $300,000 - and from a single track. No matter how adroit the magical thinking the truth is the same as it has always been: sales = money.

by cletus 15y ago

dgurney 15y ago

I like a lot of what you say in this - especially the last sentence. Out of curiosity, though, does anyone have numbers on the "spread the word" free model? I'd love to see some hard evidence (it that's even possible to collect) that it works. A lot of people are essentially saying "focusing on album sales to the exclusion of free streaming is shortsighted" -- but how do we know that's true, aside from an intuitive gut reaction? Are tour revenues for Spotify artists increasing? Are more people going to gigs? There must be numbers somewhere. I should also note that a large percentage of tour revenues are from album sales; I don't know to what extent Spotify is cannibalizing those. So it's true that tour revenue is probably the number one income source, but don't forget how important physical merch sales are on those tours.

twainer 15y ago

Some facts on the ground here are just wrong - although the intuition feels correct: "The bigger the audience you have the more you can make from live shows, which is your staple income unless you're the Rolling Stones, Sting, the Beatles, etc." As someone who has been in the business I can tell you that touring is very expensive and complicated - especially when you get into the middle-zone for a band where they want to tour regionally rather than just play out in their home town. Touring has become more competitive for bands and listeners-attention as well. Even for bands with small ambitions the amount of so-called 'fans' is often uselessly misleading because you can get a false sense of how committed a 'fan' is and how many true fans you actually have. On the higher end, take an artist like Imogen Heap - who has a huge, cult following, has had some hits on the radio, won a Grammy, has a very lean production situation, and plays out by herself. That sounds like the perfect situation in the modern scenario - but she decided not to tour after her last Grammy-winning album because it was too expensive. Touring does not in any way solve any of the problems of people not paying for music. As far as streaming services being viewed as a means of discovery and creation - that benefit is for the listener and not the artist. There is a hugely compelling argument to be made that the enormous and chronic amount of choice actually prevents people from forming deeper relations to things. To give one example, drawn from an Economist article maybe 5 months back - in a British supermarket shoppers were given a choice between a table with 6 jams to try or 25 jams to try. In either case, anyone who tried jams was given a coupon for the jam of their choice. Many more people stopped by the table with 25 jams, but the redemption rates were hugely different: 30% for the those who stopped by the table with 6 and 3% for those who stopped by the table with 25. One can debate it many ways, but there can be no denying that the range of choice and access has fundamentally changed how a consumer relates to the possibilities in their environment. I deal directly with plenty of indie bands: exposure hardly matters because it does not equal attention. That's what boosters of the free-model don't appreciate. Things that people get for free are assigned less attention, less care than things they have to decide, and pay for, and own. That's the bitter truth. If you want a fan's attention, inspire them to pay for something - and not .30 for a download, but $10 for an album. My counsel to young bands is to try and do just that - charge real money and make real product. Then at least you know where you stand. Chugging along on a illusion of fandom by getting people to 'like' you and stream your music for free is a lesson in futility. Spotify is more like a search engine for music. It's a nice thing for the user, but truly meaningless for an artist. The new people making it big are doing so in spite of things like Spotify, not because of them - and that hardly makes Spotify qualifiy as an asset/savior in my book. Think about it: 1 million spins on Spotify would gross you $2000 - which is a small budget to produce a truly professional single track. 20 million spins would throw off enough money to give you the budget [$40,000] that was granted to low-end rap acts in the late 90s for an album-length release - not counting promotion of any sort of course. Consider that 20% of our mythical 20 million spins were actual iTunes dloads instead of Spotify listens. A band - even one on a major label - would earn well over $300,000 - and from a single track. No matter how adroit the magical thinking the truth is the same as it has always been: sales = money.