These per-stream payouts come from an independent label with a catalog of roughly 1,500 songs (that will remain anonymous). The time period is cumulative from 2012 through February 1st of of this year.
Using the above per-stream data, this is how many streams are required to equal the payout from one iTunes Store song download.
The data was published by The Trichordist. The iTunes calculation is based on a 70-cent payout (roughly 70% of 99-cents). Everything is before the digital distributor takes their cut.
Written while listening to The Weeknd.
Regarding the Spotify rate of .00521… is this supposed to be a subscription streaming rate, or an average between subscription and ad-supported rates? It can be misleading if not labeled correctly.
Most likely an average between Premium, Unlimited, and Free.
What really pisses me off about services like Spotify is they don’t give the artist a choice any longer. Spotify, more than any other service, due to their sheer size, has become the new music mafia.
It used to be, you made an album or single, pressed it up on vinyl or CD and you made a deal with a distributor who then sold it to stores for you. But you as the artist / lane; made a deal with the distributor for how much they, the distributor will buy it from you for. And in turn, they usually turned it around to the store after adding another 50% on top of it and the store added another 25-50% on it. But it was the artist and label that said, ‘This is what I think my product is worth. And this is what you can buy it for.” And if you are greedy, the distributor could say, “Take a leap.” But there was kind of a set price for what singles, EP’s and albums were sold to distributors for and we all made a decent living if you made a decent product. And digital distribution was supposed to help artists profits go up by getting rid of wasteful packaging and physical products having to be manufactured.
And then came Spotify. Now that they are the worlds largest streaming service, in their mafia like ways, they say, “We are the biggest. So either you list with us or your music doesn’t get heard. Ohm and by the way, bend over. because we are going to pay you shit for your music.”
Their whole, “The more people stream, the more we’ll pay you, only works if you are a major artist with major millions of promotional dollars behind you.” Joe Blow, no matter how indy popular he or she gets, is never going to get paid what a Gaga, Beyonce, Madonna or Kayne gets paid per stream. Ever! So it’s an automatically unfair model for the small artist and smaller labels who are once again, getting F*cked by the industry.
do you know what keystone means?
I was involved in distribution in the early years of the 21st century. The artist never had a say in wholesale price structure, unless they were DIY.
Yes JTVDIGITAL I have been a record label owner and artist since 1989. So yes, we have had the ability to set the price on our products. If you did not, you were doing something wrong. At least we always did in dealing with RED our distributor for 14 years. Besides new material we specialized is licensed compilations similar to the Now That’s What I Call . . . compilations. And when we had some really crazy hot tracks on it, we sold it to distributors for a few dollars higher. And when it was an luke warm one, we shaved a few dollars off.
And you missed my point about the Beyonce, Madonna, Kayne and streaming. Spotify clearly states in it’s accounting that their rate changes depending on how popular your track is, i.e., how much it’s streamed. Unlike 99% of the other streaming services that have fixed rates, Spotifies changes by volume. And again,. as a label owner I know this first hand. So when an artist like a Beyonce, Mariah, Madonna or Keyne have multi million dollar marketing campaigns behind them, they are going to be streamed at an astronomical amount more than an indy artist no matter where the indy artist gets radio play or not. So their sliding scale is bullshit and does not make for a fair playing field.
Joe Blow, no matter the format is never going to make as much as the stars you mention. Comparing Joe Blow to Multi-platinum artists is like saying my kitchen sink will never hold as much water as Lake Erie.
The comparison is to the rate per stream for a track, not the overall income of the artist. He’s saying Joe Blow should be able to make as much per stream as a big artist, but it isn’t working that way. Obviously Joe Blow won’t make as much overall income as a big artist, that’s not a debate.
I am literally cancelling my Spotify service after reading this, and switching to Google Play. Holy crap.
Say what ?
Is this publisher or performer rate?
I meant, authoral or performer payout rates.
It’s from a label, so I’m assuming it’s payouts on the sound recordings.
And “the label” has a big part in the small payout in the streaming controversy
Interesting numbers….
I find it interesting Xbox Music pays so much per stream considering they have a free service. I’d say they have almost zero free users or that the rumor of them not paying for free streams is true. The competitors that do offer free services, Rdio and Spotify, pay significantly less on average as would be expected. I’m not following where the money is coming from unless Microsoft is significantly subsidizing it.
Amazon shouldn’t actually be paying anything at all. All the music they stream was already purchased.
“Amazon shouldn’t actually be paying anything at all. All the music they stream was already purchased.”
Well, that’s what they argued, at first.
So I guess this is what Microsoft is doing with all that XBox Live Gold membership $$$ they force you to pay just to access Netflix/Hulu.
Again, the truly mindblowing part here is Google Play.
It pays about 10 times more than Spotify per spin and it’s twice as big in the US…
I imagine the payout per stream will fall in the future. Currently the device support and integration remains behind the competition, which gives people less ways to rack up plays. Less plays results in a higher average payout per play. They also have a feature unique to Google Play, which is the ability to upload music you bought to Google Play and combine that music with subscription music. I doubt Google pays much if anything for the streams of music people have uploaded, which means not every song people play will result in royalties keeping the average per song that wasn’t uploaded higher.
“I imagine the payout per stream will fall in the future”
…and I imagine it will rise. 🙂
“Currently the device support and integration remains behind the competition”
Nobody cares — Google Play is already twice as big as Spotify in the US.
And it will rise… why exactly? Because you will it done?
Spotify has over 1 million paying subscribers in the US. Google Play Music does not have 2 million, nor do they have the millions of free users generating royalties. Google Play’s free users generate little to zero revenue for the music industry.
Google Play All Access is not twice as big as Spotify in the U.S.
Pandora: 40.3%
YouTube: 24.4%
Google Play: 5.7%
Spotify: 2.8%
Source: Digital Music News. (I won’t paste the link as it takes forever to get through dmn’s spam filter, but the headline was: YouTube and Pandora Control 65% of all Streaming Music In The US.)
Interestingly that very study didn’t have any idea how many of those customers were paying, which very few are. The pay rate for the free version is far worse than Spotify’s free version and rightly so because you can only stream music you own.
Are those numbers for Google Play All Access or Google Play Music Cloud?
Those numbers don’t look right. I’m pretty sure that YouTube is the #1 streaming service.
Pandora streams more music in the U.S. than YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, and iTunes Radio combined. And by a long shot.
Actually no. YouTube is the largest music streaming service not only in the US but the world. That’s a fact. Nobody uses Pandora anymore.
here: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/02/13/youtubepandoracontrol
It’s a good read!
And yet you still don’t see it’s not about the per-stream rate, it’s about the total revenue. Sigh.
Unfortunately, the total revenue is determined by the per-stream rate.
Yes, but unfortunately nobody’s streaming music through Nokia.
But they certainly use Google Play — which pays 10 times more than Spotify and is twice as big in the US.
Cellist Zoe Keating just released some new sales/streaming revenue data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkasqHkVRM1OdHg2eWZRYVp1YmgyUDFvbWtwLWNCN0E#gid=0
Sales are still overwhelmingly larger than streaming income, but the percentage of revenue due to streaming is higher than in her previous figures, IIRC. It’s also interesting to note that she gets more from Pandora (via Soundexchange) then from Spotify , despite Pandora’s low pay per play rate.
What’s amazing is just how much money she makes from yawn worthy music. Pretty inspirational.
Well, admittedly it’s not dance music (…except in a way it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlnHCr1xb_c ), but that doesn’t make it yawn worthy!
Her last album was #1 on the iTunes classical chart and high on the Billboard classical chart for months. Modern classical music (or whatever Zoe calls it) may be a small niche, but it does have the advantage that people who like it tend to be willing and able to pay for it.
Of course, the figures are not net of costs, so they are not simply ‘income’. In Zoe’s case, as her recording process is relatively simple and self-sufficient, the recording costs are probably at the lower end of the scale.
Her music is so fucking boring. Can’t listen to it for more then a minute without shutting it off.
There is no reason for any per stream payout or monthly subscription! Both should value equal to ZERO.
All streaming services should function as supper customized personal music pleasers. Set you parameters, country or EDM and let them massage you to total nirvana.
The trick – do not show them or limit info on what you play. They love something? Make them pay for ID and full
ownership at the same click. Discovery moment monetization at $.39 /tune bringing over 100 billion in 2020.
But you’d just use shazaam to find it out for free…
Amazon Cloud is not a fucking streaming service.
Well, Amazon said the very same thing once upon a time…
It’s annoying that these studies never include Youtube figures when it accounts for such a large amount of streaming.
Great point. I have no idea what the payout figure would be.
Does anyone?
You can not calculate per-stream pay-out for YouTube since the revenue is not per stream…what artists/labels get as part of the monetization programme (with Content ID…etc.) is a share of the AdSense revenues.
Depending on where the money is collected from (artist channel or UGC) the revenue share is different.
However the collectig societies like SACEM who have an agreement with YouTube pay the songwriters’ royalties based on views (so kind of per-stream), the basis in 2012 was 7.5€ every 50,000 views; deal terms are still being negotiated for 2013 revenues (this is public data available from the Sacem website).
It’s not bad at all keeping in mind these are only songwriting/publishing royalties.
This would be a nice figure to include, but as you point out it is widely variable.
I work at a large indie, maintaining anonymity on purpose because our specific payouts have to do with our distribution deal, etc. but for UGC per stream payout the range is right in the middle of the pack on YouTube tending a bit towards the left on the graph. For some artists it does approach the Google Play number, for others it’s right in line with Napster.
Who knows a reputable indie label for hip hop/ talking word musician?
Great graphic representations, Paul Resnikoff. Thank you for this. And thank you to the independent label who provided the information.
Then we need the yearly income split per streaming service included in the graph.
Pay per stream does not matter, the volume is much more important.
You’ll get something like:
1. Spotify
2. Google Play
3. Deezer
…and most others will be close to 0 in terms of income.
+1
According to this information Myspace music (on-demand) pays less than Pandora (radio). Why does anyone license their music to a service that pays so little?
Rhapsody and Napster are the same company
What pisses me off about services like Spotify is they don’t give the artist a choice any longer. They’ve become the new music mafia.
It used to be, you made an album or single, pressed it up on vinyl or CD and you made a deal with a distributor who then sold it to stores for you. But you as the artist / lane; made a deal with the distributor for how much they, the distributor will buy it from you for. And in turn, they usually turned it around to the store after adding another 50% on top of it and the store added another 25-50% on it. But it was the artist and label that said, ‘This is what I think my product is worth. And this is what you can buy it for.” And if you are greedy, the distributor could say, “Take a leap.” But there was kind of a set price for what singles, EP’s and albums were sold to distributors for and we all made a decent living if you made a decent product. And digital distribution was supposed to help artists profits go up by getting rid of wasteful packaging and physical products having to be manufactured.
And then came Spotify. Now that they are the worlds largest streaming service, in their mafia like ways, they say, “We are the biggest. So either you list with us or your music doesn’t get heard. Ohm and by the way, bend over. because we are going to pay you shit for your music.”
Their whole, “The more people stream, the more we’ll pay you, only works if you are a major artist with major millions of promotional dollars behind you.” Joe Blow, no matter how indy popular he or she gets, is never going to get paid what a Gaga, Beyonce, Madonna or Kayne gets paid per stream. Ever! So it’s an automatically unfair model for the small artist and smaller labels who are once again, getting F*cked by the industry.
This is slightly incorrect. The pay per stream is the same, whether your are Beyoncé or the latest indie band playing in your basement.
The only difference is that when Beyoncé gets billions of streams, indie garage band makes 10, at most.
As usual the things to focus on are talent, making good music (‘good’ being highly subjective yes), be a good performer, marketing, promo, growing your fanbase by all means, get more exposure and opportunities, go on tour, collaborate with other artists…etc.
And with a little luck you will be the next Beyoncé and make tons of cash from Spotify, amongst others.
i detest this pervading attitude that only things of massive scale have any worth. Such a market-driven idea of art. I imagine this is what Thatcher & Reagan would say if they were in this debate. It’s disgusting, especially when the things that have really propelled culture forward were mostly not mass-market.
That’s not the point. It is not a matter of ‘worth’ or ‘quality’ or any other subjective criteria. It’s just reality.
People buy / stream more music from big acts than smaller ones, that’s a fact.
Nobody is talking about art here, it’s business / marketing whatever you name it.
I don’t like this neither, it’s just how things are.
Choice is relative. Certainly you can set your price for a physical product (or PDD, for that matter), but unless you fall in a very narrow band you aren’t going to get distributed, which means you get nothing. (which you yourself admitted, “But there was kind of a set price for what singles, EP’s and albums were sold to distributors”) The streaming services are offering you a rate to get into their library, and you can accept it or not.
Remember that every time your get played on a streaming service, that copy disappears forever. It can never be re-listened to, never be re-sold. If you rent a car for a day, you pay $50 – but that car may be worth $20,000. After that day is over, you never get to use that car again unless you pay again. Would you pay $5000 a day to rent a Nissan Altima? 2000? $500? Even Spotify is paying $166/day for that car, which seems overpriced.
YouTube is the world’s largest streaming service. Not Spotify. https://gigaom.com/2014/02/27/youtube-is-the-worlds-biggest-music-streaming-service-says-spotify/
Another fuel to fire post from digital music news………
People don’t seem to get that if someone is only listening to your tune once on spotify the chances of that person actually buying your track for £1 on itunes is slim to none. So a single stream off spotify is coverage and a royalty from one single play of a track and said track can be leased out and collect royalties for all eternity.
Consumers aren’t going to change – streaming is too easy. I use it on the daily and happily pay a premium too.
I’ve started releasing music, it has all done quite well in my genre charts. Yet I still upload all of my music to filesharing sites, torrent sites, spotify and other streaming services. Why? coverage is the most vital thing in order to avoid obscurity and cut through the noise. There are literally 100’s of revenue streams that can all trickle in and add up to a reasonable amount of cash. Putting all your eggs in one basket will never win in this new digital ecosphere.
Music is a sound vibration, it is not and never will be a physical thing (sur eyou can package it up physically, but it is a vibration none the less) In order for music to proliferate, it needs to move freely without hindrance or obstruction (ie paywalls) this organic natural flow will bring the right people to you who want to pay for concert tickets, mp3’s, vinyls, merch etc. The rest of the streamers are just helping to promote your music to potential fans.
Change happens, deal with it
Exactly. This is the message to angry / moaning artists: deal with it. Adapt yourself to the new market reality.
This is called evolution.
People will not stop listening to music, and streaming services will not disappear.
There is no magic, it is an extremely challenging and competitive environment, but there are many ways to achieve your goals within this ‘new music industry’ how some may call it.
No Dan & Yes JTVDIGITAL I have been a record label owner and artist since 1989. So yes, we have had the ability to set the price on our products. If you did not, you were doing something wrong. At least we always did in dealing with RED our distributor for 14 years. Besides new material we specialized is licensed compilations similar to the Now That’s What I Call . . . compilations. And when we had some really crazy hot tracks on it, we sold it to distributors for a few dollars higher. And when it was an luke warm one, we shaved a few dollars off.
And you missed my point about the Beyonce, Madonna, Kayne and streaming. Spotify clearly states in it’s accounting that their rate changes depending on how popular your track is, i.e., how much it’s streamed. Unlike 99% of the other streaming services that have fixed rates, Spotifies changes by volume. And again,. as a label owner I know this first hand. So when an artist like a Beyonce, Mariah, Madonna or Keyne have multi million dollar marketing campaigns behind them, they are going to be streamed at an astronomical amount more than an indy artist no matter where the indy artist gets radio play or not. So their sliding scale is bullshit.
Yes you set the price, on a physical product or on a download.
Streaming is different, there is no ownership, no unit-price for the consumer.
How do you set the price upstream of something that has no unit price?
And yes there is a ponderation based on volume, market share…etc., but there is no major difference, nothing significant enough to change the game between big and small acts.
As you say “have multi million dollar marketing campaigns behind them”, this is what makes the difference and creates volume.
So ok, indie artists can’t get multi-million $ marketing campaigns, so what is the solution? Seriously.
Evidence from Google Play suggest otherwise. Google Play data shows that All Access Subscribers buy more music from the Play Store than they did before becoming subscribers.
I posted this on my Facebook page today. I’ve just pulled my 4 albums from all streaming services. They all remain available as digital downloads and hard-copy CDs. If you were listening on Spotify, I’d like to explain the decision.
After over a year of promotion and research, I’ve concluded that the musician always makes more money selling far fewer hard copies and digital downloads than the streams ever can. And the listener who has to spend more money likely listens closer and values the music more.
The exposure that comes from a streaming service is worth something. It’s just not worth Spotify’s $0.00521 per stream to me. Even after many 1000s of paid listened-to tracks, the streaming services have not demonstrated a value to a vendor like me, even as a loss leader or a marketing vehicle, because there is no way to upsell from it.
That said, The Last Whoop-dee-doo! will still be available on Pandora and we hope, soon, on jazzradio.com. Music & Mirth will still be played on jazzradio.com. These are the only two streams that pay next to nothing, but have some marketing value, precisely because the consumer is unable to “possess” or replay the track at will.
I think this is the future: musicians and labels will increasingly pull their catalogs from the streamers. While I am not an important cog in the wheel of the industry, I hope musicians of note will commit to an intelligent evaluation of these services, much as I have done. Make it a rational business decision and act accordingly..
Some very relevant points here.. Thanks to this page I just discovered that our music was being streamed for such a pittance on Deezer. If I wanted to let people play the music for free whenever they wanted it I would have put it on Soundcloud!
If it is truly Radio, like Pandora, then ok.. but if people can just play the song again as if they own it then I think it constitutes some deception in the distribution industry that I don’t like.
I agree with Ritchie.. I am either selling the track or giving it away, to do both disrespects the people who payed for the track!!! Buying the track then becomes simply a goodwill gesture on the part of the consumer/fan. So might as well set it up as a donation service and get the money direct on bandcamp and forget the distibutors.
It would certainly be interesting to find out if many people only use say Spotify or streaming services, or if they too use multiple ways to find music they like.
Another question: does Spotify, etc. pay out songwriter royalties to APRA? Or is the income limited to the recording? If they pay out songwriter royalties I am pretty sure it would be more than the above amount? (which I assume is just for mechanical rights)
yours,
Would you rather them stream it through a service like Deezer, Play Music All Access YouTube, or would rather them download your music illegally through The Pirate Bay, or other torrenting sites? As streaming music has gained popularity piracy of music has being going down.
Not true. Google’s Play Music has marketing value. They pay more than other services also and people that are subscribed to Play Music BUY more music in the Play Store. Also having your music streamed beats letting people steal your music from torrenting sites. Music streaming services have dramatically reduced music piracy rates.
nokia pays the best I go for the money why would you talk about spotify if nokia paying the most