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> Musicians only make pennies on new albums—or fractions of a penny—where previously they made dollars. Is this really true? I mean the per stream payout is in

> Musicians only make pennies on new albums—or fractions of a penny—where previously they made dollars. Is this really true? I mean the per stream payout is insanely low compared to an album sale (I think it’s like $7/thousand songs played vs $1 per album). But album sales were just front loaded vs streams being paid out pennies at a time. If an album has 10 songs and I buy the cd, the artist gets $1 (if they’re lucky, they probably get much, much less). If I stream those 10 songs they get $0.07 (seven cents). But for albums I’ve bought I might listen to those songs hundreds or even thousands of times. If I streamed them all the artist ends up making more but it might be over 20+ years. I think I’ve listened to Joshua Tree 500 times but it came out in 1987. So that’s 35 years. While it’s only a few cents per year, over time it’s much more than what they’d get from an album sale. I’m also not sure what the alternative is and I haven’t heard of many proposed. Spotify is already $15/month. Even if they doubled their payout and upped the price to $30/month it’s still just pennies per year.

bcrl 3y ago
I used to love buying CDs from artists I liked at concerts in small venues so that the artist would get most of the $20 I was forking over. Sadly, I'm no longer in my 20s living in a large city that has lots of artists going through. The royalties from streaming are atrociously bad. Just read some of the speeches by the writers on strike to get an idea how the economics are setup nowadays.
- prepend 3y ago
  Are they worse than royalties on albums though? Those were atrociously bad as well. I think streaming pays out lots if you get to hundreds of thousands or millions of streams (the equivalent of selling 100k albums). The speeches I’ve read from writers on strike kind of blow my mind because they make $5-10k/week. I don’t think that’s comparable to artists as the average writer makes way more than the average singer.
- 20after4 3y ago
  not sure if this is currently accurate but a quick google search turned up these rates: $/stream | service -------- | ------------- $0.008 | apple music $0.00402 | amazon music $0.00318 | spotify That really isn't bad at all if the artist gets all of it.. On the other hand, if the record label is taking a big chunk of that then it is absolutely terrible.
paulpauper 3y ago
He calls himself the Honest Broker, but I have found on many occasions he plays fast and loose with the truth . I am not sure where he gets this figure from. He makes similar wild, unsupported claims like 'AI is dying' or 'Facebook/meta is dying' etc. He wrote an article when Meta stock was at $200 that it was going to die. Now at $310. He claimed that Chat GPT was a loss/failure on Microsoft's part because Bing search market share is flat (Chat GPT is way more than Bing). We need to hold people accountable for their claims.

bcrl 3y ago

I used to love buying CDs from artists I liked at concerts in small venues so that the artist would get most of the $20 I was forking over. Sadly, I'm no longer in my 20s living in a large city that has lots of artists going through. The royalties from streaming are atrociously bad. Just read some of the speeches by the writers on strike to get an idea how the economics are setup nowadays.

prepend 3y ago
Are they worse than royalties on albums though? Those were atrociously bad as well. I think streaming pays out lots if you get to hundreds of thousands or millions of streams (the equivalent of selling 100k albums). The speeches I’ve read from writers on strike kind of blow my mind because they make $5-10k/week. I don’t think that’s comparable to artists as the average writer makes way more than the average singer.
20after4 3y ago
not sure if this is currently accurate but a quick google search turned up these rates: $/stream | service -------- | ------------- $0.008 | apple music $0.00402 | amazon music $0.00318 | spotify That really isn't bad at all if the artist gets all of it.. On the other hand, if the record label is taking a big chunk of that then it is absolutely terrible.

paulpauper 3y ago

He calls himself the Honest Broker, but I have found on many occasions he plays fast and loose with the truth . I am not sure where he gets this figure from. He makes similar wild, unsupported claims like 'AI is dying' or 'Facebook/meta is dying' etc. He wrote an article when Meta stock was at $200 that it was going to die. Now at $310. He claimed that Chat GPT was a loss/failure on Microsoft's part because Bing search market share is flat (Chat GPT is way more than Bing). We need to hold people accountable for their claims.