We’re an Indie Label. And This Is Our First TIDAL Royalty Statement…

labelLabel Type: Independent

Streaming Service: TIDAL

Reporting Period: March, 2015

statement_aspiroMAR

46 Responses

    • TIDAL pays nearly 300% more than Spotify

      1 Million Plays on TIDAL = $14,430

      1 Million Plays on Spotify = $5,210

      Any questions?

      Look what NO FREE TIER can do for you!

      • Bilbo

        Using the average total, Tidal pays $10,101 on 1M plays

        • no, the AVG is $14k per 1m Plays

          …not sure what you’re looking at but the AVG column is reported in the document above….

      • JTVDigital

        Except that, for the moment, the chances to get heard on this service for an indie artist are something around 20 times less than on Spotify.
        What people don’t get is that it is not a matter of unit per-stream payout, it is a matter of volume and audience / reach.
        And the more users and streams there will be, the more the per-stream payout will decrease mechanically.
        This Tidal re-launch is a good thing overall, but don’t be too excited by these numbers.

        • Name2

          Uh, wut?

          I listen to a lot of Benjamin Booker, Pissed Jeans, Dirtbombs, US Girls, Moon Duo and Jimmy Sommerville on my Tidal account.

          How lazy do you have to be to argue that it’s a superstar-only outlet?

          • JTVDigital

            15 million paying subscribers for Spotify vs. 770,000 paying subscribers for Tidal.
            15,000,000 / 770,000 = 19,5 less users. Apologies for rounding to 20.
            Saying artists have 20 less chances to get heard with a 20 times smaller audience is a simplification since most people listen to mainstream music (there is not a 1:1 relation between number of users and average number of streams per artist). But you got the idea, hopefully.

          • js

            I don’t think he said it’s a “superstar-only” outlet. Of course these artists are on there, and good for you for listening to them.

          • lazy

            Calling him lazy tho? lol, I’m so confused

      • Ariel

        The point of the free tier is to draw customers. If Tidal pays 3x what Spotify pays, it needs a third of their subscriber base to reach the same absolute amount. So they’d need 6-7 million currently. which about 10x where they’re at now. And then to stay even with Spotify they’d have to grow at at least 1/3rd the rate.

        Considering they’ve fallen off the app store top 700 and Apple’s about to jump in, that’s not at all guarenteed.

      • Willis

        So, since they each have different listener bases, why shouldn’t an artist be on both and get money from each?

  1. GGG

    Not bad. 1.4cents is the highest I’ve personally seen from Spotify, so that being an average here is good. Now we just have to wait and see if that rate falls as more people sign up. Without a free tier, I’m assuming (hoping) it won’t, though, as it has for Spotify.

  2. so

    Good rate but nobody’s there. Good rate because nobody’s there.

  3. dr_after

    Statement says “F*** you, Mr. artist.” i guess.

  4. Anonymous

    This is quite good.

    They seem to have a fixed per-stream rate here, rather than buying into that “it’s nothing to do with per stream rate” idiocy spouted by Daniel Ek.

    It looks to me that the gross rate is 1.0358 us cents for the low fi stream and 2.0334 for the hi fi stream. Then 30% is taken off for Tidal (ie. split rate).

    This is pretty damn transparent actually.

  5. Tcooke

    This seems like the best streaming service for artists and consumers. Really, these artist investors could have directed their investments to less risky, less high profile assets instead. They often do, and those investments aren’t beamed out over the internet. It’s important they are spot with discovery and that they maintain strong relationships with all stakeholders. If they win, then they could also be apart of a better public performance accountancy if the software is integrated with a dj software and other public play platforms.

  6. Tcooke

    This seems like the best streaming service for artists and consumers. Really, these artist investors could have directed their investments to less risky, less high profile assets instead. They often do, and those investments aren’t beamed out over the internet. It’s important they are spot with discovery and that they maintain strong relationships with all stakeholders. If they win, then they could also be apart of a better public performance accountancy if the software is integrated with dj software and other public play platforms.

  7. Anonymous

    Interesting. But not a good indication of what is to come.

    The statement is from March. The service didn’t have their official relaunch party until the very end of March. April will be much more telling.

  8. superduper

    1 cent per stream still isn’t great. Even still, how do they know that it will be sustainable? The entire business model of streaming is based on diminishing returns.

    • Anonymous

      1 cent per stream is fine. If you buy a song off itunes how many times during ownership do you play it? 99 times? 99 x .01 = .99.

      • superduper

        That’s better but it’s still not great. 100 plays is a lot to make up for.

        • Jeff Robinson

          I wish each label and band and songwriter and performer got paid a penny a spin when listening to vinyl after the initial purchase…streaming reflects ‘current trends’. Loads of indie vinyl from the 80’s spinning in 2015 means NONE of those bands get any money when you listen. Is $9.99 for the record back in 1980 supposed to sustain the band today? Stream it instead and it could.

          • superduper

            I think you may be missing the point. Even though artists are technically speaking being paid, the amount is so minimal that it doesn’t really matter. Yes, buying music is a one-time purchase but that is usually more rich and beneficial.

          • Anonymous

            But far more people will be willing to stream a particular song (at no additional cost to them) than buy that same particular song for $1.29 or $.99 on iTunes.

            If 1 million people buy the song at $.99 but 10 million people stream it for ~$0.01 per stream, it doesn’t take long before the stream revenue potentially overtakes the download revenue.

          • superduper

            Still not necessarily true. You may say it adds up but there’s no proof that it actually will. The real problem lies in (x) main things:
            1) Streaming payouts will most likely always be low, so it will still take long to break even for an artist.
            2) Numbers don’t add up in streaming. It is extremely hard to predict how many songs will streamed for any given artist for any given track. It’s like throwing numbers at the wall when you try and predict things like streaming totals per person. To put it a little more simply, how many times do you listen a song? Any song? It’s hard because its incredibly variable. Some people listen to songs more times than others and figuring out even approximate figures is near impossible. You say 10 million streams equals 1 million downloads but is this really true? You can’t predict it.

            Another thing, why would $1 per song not be attractive? In my opinion its a very good deal. I think people should be glad for 1 dollar downloads because that’s a very attractive rate.

      • Anonymous

        “If you buy a song off itunes how many times during ownership do you play it?”

        Not 100, that’s for sure. 🙂

        Perhaps 15 — if it’s a nice track.

        • Luther

          I listen to my favorite songs (the ones I also spend money on) well over 100x each in the first month or so.

        • Anonymous

          100 times is actually quite achievable. It won’t happen overnight. But say someone listens to a fair amount of music during their daily activities (in the car, while they workout, play video games, work, etc.) they can easily rack up 100 plays over the course of several years. Anyone who listens to the radio regularly has probably heard the majority of the songs on the radio dozens to hundred+ times and they don’t even realize it because nothing keeps track. If we can shift people’s listening habits from radio and ipods to streaming, there is a lot of revenue to be made.

          Also keep in mind that streaming makes music much more available too. People won’t buy all the songs the listen to but they will gladly stream it when it costs them nothing extra. So if you go from 100,000 people buying your songs to 500,000 streaming then you only have to rack up 20 plays per listener to come out even.

  9. Eye O'Vene

    oh….boo-hoo. you guys will cry about any record business bad news. now, get out there and write a song (if you have the ability)

    • Jay Dovner

      I remember when Napster happened, I was in the thick of it. Most of the known bands came together on this, to protect their future. Now that the labels decided to become even more greedy, now look what they have done. Where are all of those famous bands now? Retired, enjoying their millions, they don’t have the fight or the hunger anymore. Same goes for the Execs up a the labels. They are about to call it quits too, so they don’t care what happens to this industry.

    • Name2

      They cry about good news, too – or at least fudge the numbers and produce pointless charts.

  10. Anonymous

    Some of those numbers are overinflated.

    Mar2015- quantity 631 x unit $ .020334 = gross 12.830948. my calculator gets 12.830754.

    ok either I don’t know how to use a calculator or these numbers are questionable.

  11. Crazy

    $.01 . per stream is twice Spotify on-demand rate of .005. In fact, unless Tidal can actually get enough suckers to pay $20 per month, $.01 is not sustainable. But why should that stop anyone.

  12. Terrestrial?

    Rather than $0.00, just think if terrestrial radio paid a penny per spin. Those top 40 artists would be making another $500K per month from Z100 (NY) and KIIS (LA). Talk about non sustainable.

  13. HansH

    Stop staring at rates alone. The # of streams is maybe more important. BTW the Aspiro/Tidal rate for US streamsn in March is about $0.0072508 as far as I can tell. Just a little more than Spotify.

  14. Ed Jennings

    Consider the “source” of this past, dated information. It is prior to the 3/30/15 TIDAL HiFi relaunch.

    “Tidal pays a 75% royalty rate to ALL artists, writers and producers,” Jay Z wrote. There was some confusion on the Internet about whether “royalty rate” was a percentage of Tidal’s total revenue. According to Vania Schlogel, TIDAL HiFi’s Chief Investment Officer it is. The industry standard royalty rate, she says, is 70% (roughly 60% to record labels, roughly 10% to artists via publishers). Tidal pays 62.5% and 12.5% (which equals the 75% Jay Z is referring to).

  15. clintone.com

    Something smells fishy. My YouTube channel gets 6000 views per month alone and I just received a check for a penny. These payouts must be in a parallel universe because in my universe they don’t exist.

  16. Dilan

    The payment we got from Spotify per million streams, around US $2,000.0 dlls About .002 per stream. It look like Spotify pays depending to whom they need to pay to. Majors looks like they got the highest payments, Indies are ripped off by Mr Ek abominable need to steal from struggling musicians.

    At least we can see here that Tidal pays 7×1 to Indies compared to Spotify. It looks like Spotify will be an empty courtyard pretty soon.