Is Spotify Worse Than The Old Days?
And A Case Study Of A Very Low-Level Band: Us
Posted by Charlie Recksieck
on 2024-06-25
Is there any way that (at least middling-to-barely successful) music artists to get their music out there without using, or being used by, Spotify? Perhaps, but I don't see it.
Even 10 years ago with our album releases, we were still selling CDs - and 10-to-20 years ago, if you had music on your phone it meant you were pretty savvy about downloading music files and transferring them to your phone.
But what if you really wanted to support an artist by buying their music directly so they got all of your $10 (instead of $1 to $5)? You probably don't have a CD player anymore, and these days you reasonably expect your music to follow you wherever you go and whatever platform you're on.
How does an artist get you that music where you can stream without that artist creating a dedicated app or streaming site? I don't know.
By the way, you're welcome to stream all of my and The Bigfellas music here - that's the state of music: we're willing to give our music to you for at least having the website traffic. This whole system is stupid and nuts.
Evolution Of Spotify
I'll be talking about Spotify here since they're on top, but when I'm talking about Spotify in this article, I'm talking about music streaming services in general.
We all have heard that Napster killed the music industry. It's not really true. Yes, it hurt the traditional music industry which, by all accounts, was negligently slow to react to downloading and streaming. Look at this graphic though. The recorded music industry is larger than ever.
In 2002, music was a $22 billion a year industry. That number dipped to $16b in 2014. But last year (2023) it reached an all-time high of $28b in 2023.
So, the music industry isn't dead. But where is the money going to. Artists still get some but it's the tech-bros and streaming services reaping the rewards.
Here's the big shift
Percentages of Recorded Music Going To Streaming Services
* 2013 -
11% share Streaming revenue $1.5 billion of $13 billion for recorded music
* 2023 -
61% share Streaming revenue $17 billion of $28 billion for recorded music
How Spotify Pays Artists
Here's a
kwettr.com breakdown of where Spotify dollars go:
Basically, Spotify
pays per stream $.003 to $.005
Again, it's not like there's no money in music. It's just that, like every other economic indicator, the divide of the rich and poor seems to keep spreading.
Taylor Swift got over $100 million from Spotify in 2023. There were
1250 artists receiving at least a $1 million payout from Spotify in 2023.
Spotify returned $9 billion total out to artists last year. At the same time, they make a $1 billion profit at the same time. I don't have good numbers on what the slice that record companies used to take off the top back in the day. So, while it's easy to grumble about streaming not paying artists, is the current situation any worse than the "good old days" of the 1970's and 1980's where bands would get charged tons of money for everything conceivably involved with putting out a record - resulting in a lifetime of indentured servitude and owing record labels tons of money?
The difference between then and now is that somebody like me can put records out now without a record company. Back in the day, if an artist wasn't signed, that's it. Thinking of it that way, I really don't feel like grousing about how little I get paid for downloads. I know that's not the usual talking point for musicians these days.
On one hand, I get it - if I wanted to make money, I would have gone into the stock market at a young age or bought a coin-op laundromat. That said, when the massive majority of musicians and songwriters do it as a side hustle or labor of love, the music we're going to get is going to suffer.
How Little We Make From Spotify, Personally
I'm about to show you some reports of some ASCAP songwriter royalties that I've received. Before I do, please realize that I'm not complaining about how little it is. I'm just trying to contextualize how the numbers look.
Just so you know, I'm probably a fairly typical musician who makes his living from his day job. Music income is a bonus. I play out often and the biggest similarity amongst U2, Lucinda Williams and I is that the majority of our music income is from live performance. Our level of success is that our music has been played on some college, indie and public radio, very little commercial radio, a few local TV performances, and some song placements in film and television yet nothing major.
We are not complete nobodies in music, just relative nobodies. That's a little background on our place in the industry. If we're smart, we can tour and come back with $100 more than we left, and over time we can recoup album recording costs over 10 years. I have a lot of friends in music who don't even do that well, and yet our whole enterprise is perhaps just one or two rungs above hobby. That's your background.
Here's a sliver of my songwriter royalties report from ASCAP, the songwriter organization I belong to. The amount of detail on these reports and from every county on the globe that they deal with is simply amazing. They do a great job of tracking and collecting.
Pretty bad month for these, it's been a while since a release so I guess that explains the bad stats on Amazon (which is also not the best streaming source of income for us). The other funny thing is that you never know why one song spikes more than others. For years we got a disproportionate amount of plays and payout for an album track, "Johnny Get Out Of The Sky" on Pandora. Why that song was a, for us, Pandora hit is mystifying.
367 people played this song, which got me 12 cents. In fairness, that's my songwriter cut - I also get the same amount as the publisher, and I split about 5 times of that amount since the band owns the master rights. I guess I really got 54 cents from those 367 plays. Again, I'm not complaining. It just shows the scale of the amount of plays one needs to really make money.
On the film/tv licensing side, here's another comparison. A silly song I put together for a very good friend of mine doing a show on Lifetime (I think) called My Crazy Ex. I loved the assignment, I love any assignment. Here's what I get for the streaming for this "song"
As compared to a broadcast in Belgium:
Did I say that the ASCAP reporting is a fascinating rabbit hole of where your music might appear, whether as a podcast's theme music, an Apple Music stream, or a music sting on a TV show being aired as a repeat in Nigeria.
I'm really just a dabbler in film and tv cues, though I'd love to do more. Musicians and songwriters are not on a fast track to riches. The idea to be a working songwriter or musician is volume; you're not trying to sell your song to a movie for $100,000 like Led Zeppelin would. You're trying to collect $1.25 in royalties 80,000 times.
What's The Answer?
Fuck if I know. Even though Spotify, Apply Music and Amazon Music have all been around for 10 years, in that time their piece of the music pie has grown (to 2/3 of all recorded music revenue), CDs and CD players have died off, and in the new system we haven't figured out a way to effectively sell digital downloads or streaming to willing and helpful fans.
Meanwhile, you can enjoy our music
on Spotify.
