How are musicians supposed to survive on $0.00173 per stream? New law proposed

rze99

I love making and releasing my music, but glad it's not my income source.... well, it couldn't be!

New law proposed on streaming,

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/28/new-law-how-musicians-make-money-streaming

stickyfiddle

They’re not - musicians are supposed to be poor just like all of the other plebs. Stop getting ideas above your station! 

hollywoodrox

Society doesn’t value the arts  unless you live somewhere more enlightened 
  It’s very sad . A chap I know in Germany got a government grant to go on tour with his chamber quartet . Meanwhile here in the U.K. you can’t even get to see a dentist 

RocknRollDave

The only way things will significantly change is if us punters will pay significantly more for the service we currently get. I personally would not, and I suspect I am not in the minority.

barnstorm

'A maximum cap on earnings per track per month would insure a more progressive distribution of this new royalty, to help create more sustainable careers in more genres and in more diverse communities of music.'

This is an interesting idea. I wonder if the few artists who make a good wedge from streaming would be in favour. Many of them can make a strong argument that they deserve more than they already get, but the drop in earnings from this sort of redistribution of wealth would probably be less damaging than the bad PR if they opposed it. (Not that the idea will ever survive contact with our miserable reality, anyway.)

RocknRollDave said:

The only way things will significantly change is if us punters will pay significantly more for the service we currently get. I personally would not, and I suspect I am not in the minority.

I don't have faith that a price hike on its own would result in greatly improved terms for the artists. The major labels and streaming platforms have to be forced to give artists a bigger piece of the pie.

I think music should cost more, though. Don't know how to ask the question without sounding holier-than-thou, which I don't mean to: would it matter to you if (good) new music essentially dried up? Or if a bunch of the 'working-class' acts you enjoy were forced to pack it in?

chrisj1602

It’s so bad.

Imagine releasing your debut single, it’s a hit, you get 10 million streams in a week, you’ve made it… you’re famous, but you’re still going to work on Monday because you’ve earned £17,300 and there’s 4 of you in the band, and whoever else is waiting for a cut… 

It’s no wonder ticket prices are up.

Kurtis

Although, the top musicians seem to be doing alright. 

RocknRollDave

barnstorm said:

'A maximum cap on earnings per track per month would insure a more progressive distribution of this new royalty, to help create more sustainable careers in more genres and in more diverse communities of music.'

RocknRollDave said:

The only way things will significantly change is if us punters will pay significantly more for the service we currently get. I personally would not, and I suspect I am not in the minority.

I don't have faith that a price hike on its own would result in greatly improved terms for the artists. The major labels and streaming platforms have to be forced to give artists a bigger piece of the pie.

I think music should cost more, though. Don't know how to ask the question without sounding holier-than-thou, which I don't mean to: would it matter to you if (good) new music essentially dried up? Or if a bunch of the 'working-class' acts you enjoy were forced to pack it in?

It’s a fair question. Obviously the answer I want to give is ‘neither’, but I am not daft enough to believe that my actions as a consumer have no effect on the business.

When I say that I would not pay significantly more for music (than the £16.99 I pay each month for Spotify), it’s almost irrelevant to think about the morality I do/ don’t bring to the situation; I simply cannot afford to pay significantly more than that for music - I would just have to limit my consumption to what I could afford.

Another way of looking at it is that £17 a month is about the same as one and a half CDs at the prices I used to pay for them when I was an avid collector. If I am investing the price of 18 CDs each year, I don’t feel like I am short-changing the music world. I certainly didn’t discover 18 great new albums last year via streaming.


Point being, to pay huge amounts to artists from streaming needs huge amounts of money to come in from consumers, and I can’t see enough of the latter happening to allow for the former.

Unless we put up with more advertising, but I pay for Premium precisely so I don’t have to put up with advertising.

Sporky

chrisj1602 said:

It’s so bad.

Imagine releasing your debut single, it’s a hit, you get 10 million streams in a week, you’ve made it… you’re famous, but you’re still going to work on Monday because you’ve earned £17,300 and there’s 4 of you in the band, and whoever else is waiting for a cut… 

Over £4k a week each isn't bad. I'd consider playing guitar for that. 

mrkb

Sporky said:

chrisj1602 said:

It’s so bad.

Imagine releasing your debut single, it’s a hit, you get 10 million streams in a week, you’ve made it… you’re famous, but you’re still going to work on Monday because you’ve earned £17,300 and there’s 4 of you in the band, and whoever else is waiting for a cut… 

Over £4k a week each isn't bad. I'd consider playing guitar for that. 

But thats only for one week... you'd need 10 million streams every week..

Sporky

I'd take every other week off. 

digitalscream

The funny thing is that people seem to be treating streaming as destroying all other media. It's not; take a look here:

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Physical sales imploded independently of digital media. You'll note that, from 2008, digital downloads have been fairly static but CD sales were on a serious decline even before digital grew past being a rounding error. Since 2016, streaming has been the only part of that graph that's growing (apart from the weird anachronism that is vinyl), and the only part that decreased as streaming grew was digital downloads.

So...yeah, physical sales weren't killed off by streaming, downloads were.

Now, let's ask ourselves: why did CD sales tank? It's simple - the labels kept jacking the prices up to the point where it didn't make sense for anyone to buy. There was even a discussion on here about it in the early days of the forum, as I recall.

So...yeah, they could easily jack the prices of streaming accounts. It'd mean more money in the big platforms' pockets, so...why don't they? It's certainly not because they're already swimming in money; Spotify first became profitable in 2017, and it's only made a profit in eight quarters out of seven years since then, so they'd definitely have an incentive (ironically, artists are doing better out of the deal than Spotify are...).

The reason is that streaming is the only growth segment of note in the music industry right now, and they've learned their lessons from the mistakes of the past. If they fuck that up, there's nowhere left to go. 

barnstorm

RocknRollDave said:

barnstorm said:

When I say that I would not pay significantly more for music (than the £16.99 I pay each month for Spotify), it’s almost irrelevant to think about the morality I do/ don’t bring to the situation; I simply cannot afford to pay significantly more than that for music - I would just have to limit my consumption to what I could afford.

Another way of looking at it is that £17 a month is about the same as one and a half CDs at the prices I used to pay for them when I was an avid collector. If I am investing the price of 18 CDs each year, I don’t feel like I am short-changing the music world. I certainly didn’t discover 18 great new albums last year via streaming.

That's a totally reasonable calculation, and I'd guess that £17 a month is more than the average listener used to spend on records – it's just that the distribution of your £17 is unfair. 

Also right to point out that plenty of new music is rubbish. I'm aware that I'm putting much less money into the pot than I used to, because I'm generally buying music I've already heard and that I know I like; God knows what percentage of albums sold in the 'old days' were bought by people who'd heard one single and found that the rest of the record was disappointing.

It's not comparable with Spotify, but I like the model that Bandcamp sort-of enforces, where that is the wish of the artist: some number of free listens to a given track before you get a prompt to buy it. I think that gives a good balance between encouraging people to explore and trying to get something approaching fair value for the artist when they've created music that people really like.

barnstorm

digitalscream said:

The funny thing is that people seem to be treating streaming as destroying all other media. It's not; take a look here:

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Physical sales imploded independently of digital media. You'll note that, from 2008, digital downloads have been fairly static but CD sales were on a serious decline even before digital grew past being a rounding error. Since 2016, streaming has been the only part of that graph that's growing (apart from the weird anachronism that is vinyl).

Now, let's ask ourselves: why did CD sales tank? It's simple - the labels kept jacking the prices up to the point where it didn't make sense for anyone to buy. There was even a discussion on here about it in the early days of the forum, as I recall.

So...yeah, they could easily jack the prices of streaming accounts. It'd mean more money in the big platforms' pockets, so...why don't they? It's certainly not because they're already swimming in money; Spotify first became profitable in 2017, and it's only made a profit in eight quarters out of seven years since then, so they'd definitely have an incentive (ironically, artists are doing better out of the deal than Spotify are...).

The reason is that streaming is the only growth segment of note in the music industry right now, and they've learned their lessons from the mistakes of the past. If they fuck that up, there's nowhere left to go. 

That chart doesn't show, though, the relationship between the decline in CD sales and the increase in file sharing.

The streaming services convinced people to stop stealing, but only by offering a model that rubber-stamped the idea that any one piece of recorded music has a monetary value close to zero.

RocknRollDave

barnstorm said:

RocknRollDave said:

barnstorm said:

When I say that I would not pay significantly more for music (than the £16.99 I pay each month for Spotify), it’s almost irrelevant to think about the morality I do/ don’t bring to the situation; I simply cannot afford to pay significantly more than that for music - I would just have to limit my consumption to what I could afford.

Another way of looking at it is that £17 a month is about the same as one and a half CDs at the prices I used to pay for them when I was an avid collector. If I am investing the price of 18 CDs each year, I don’t feel like I am short-changing the music world. I certainly didn’t discover 18 great new albums last year via streaming.

That's a totally reasonable calculation, and I'd guess that £17 a month is more than the average listener used to spend on records – it's just that the distribution of your £17 is unfair. 

I don’t honestly know what the answer is other than paying less per stream for more popular streams, so that the people who need it - the people whose tracks are streamed less - get a larger slice of the pie, and the Ed Sheerans, Adeles, Iron Maidens of the world get less per stream, but still get plenty because they attract so many streams.

Problem is, this would annoy your Ed Sheerans, Adeles and Iron Maidens, and you don’t want to drive them away from your platform.

guyinlyon

RocknRollDave said:

The only way things will significantly change is if us punters will pay significantly more for the service we currently get. I personally would not, and I suspect I am not in the minority.

Wrong. If streaming services paid what streams ARE WORTH and expected an ever-so-much-smaller profit things would be better.

RocknRollDave

guyinlyon said:

RocknRollDave said:

The only way things will significantly change is if us punters will pay significantly more for the service we currently get. I personally would not, and I suspect I am not in the minority.

Wrong. If streaming services paid what streams ARE WORTH and expected an ever-so-much-smaller profit things would be better.

As mentioned above, the problem with your argument is that streaming services don’t actually make enough money to do this; Spotify, for example, has for most of its history not been profitable.

Fingers657

Streaming services suck and musicians are never going to make any worthwhile money from them.
Spotify is the worst.

digitalscream

guyinlyon said:

RocknRollDave said:

The only way things will significantly change is if us punters will pay significantly more for the service we currently get. I personally would not, and I suspect I am not in the minority.

Wrong. If streaming services paid what streams ARE WORTH and expected an ever-so-much-smaller profit things would be better.

They'd have to make a profit first in order to make that argument valid. Spotify, for example, prioritises rights holder payments over its own profit.

The only problem with that is the law and the contracts artists signed. That's why independent artists make more from streams than signed artists, and (coincidentally) that's also why signed artists are generally the ones pissing and moaning the most - they signed abusive contracts. If they'd stop doing that, the labels wouldn't be able to get away with so much and suddenly we'd be hearing about this an awful lot less.

Sporky

There are too many people publishing music for most of them to have any realistic hope of earning money from it. 

digitalscream

Sporky said:

There are too many people publishing music for most of them to have any realistic hope of earning money from it. 

Honestly, most of the music being published doesn't deserve to earn any money in the first place. The home recording boom, great as it can be, has a lot to answer for.