06/2015



Taylor Swift has the right idea: Musicians should be better compensated for their online music. Problem is, she'll have to find folks willing to pay for digital music in the first place.

The rift between Apple Music and Swift over royalty rights obscured a hard truth about streaming music: Consumers love it, but they don't want to pay for it.

Spotify, by the far the largest music subscription service, has 20 million paying global subscribers.You would need five times that number of paid subscribers to make streaming music a decent revenue stream for most musicians, say analysts.

That's because of the way royalty rates are designed. The digital download pays the highest percentage, followed by premium services like Spotify and then ad-supported services, which pay much less than premium. Premium is 11 times higher than ad-supported.

The big acts are seeing money from streaming. It's the up-and-coming, working and mid-level acts that are seeing very little, and Twitter and forums are full of gripes from these musicians that they're getting lots of online exposure, but few dollars.

In the vinyl era, acts strived for gold (500,000 copies) and platinum (1 million). Now a band has to shoot for the moon to see serious money. Think 100 million streams, says Ted Cohen, managing director of Tag Strategic, a consultancy.

And the acts that get streamed the most, of course are the superstars. Spotify runs a weekly chart, showing the numbers of streams reaped by the top hits: This week, Rihanna's FourFiveSeconds is No. 1, with just over 15 million streams.

That equates to about $75,000, which has to be split with the music publisher, record label and the artist.

"What people don't realize is that income equality also applies to music," says music blogger Bob Lefsetz. "The rich will get richer, but the poor and middle won't do much better."

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Have label, bands, musicians, singers and/or songwriters every gotten rich off of radio alone?

1. Record sales

2. Concert Tours

3. Merchandise

WTF... lets put on our critical thinking caps.

As I've said before, music streaming is a nich market... no more no less. Casual listeners never purchased a lot of music in the first place... now they have NO incentive to purchase much of anything at all. The landscape has changed, the music business model has been usurped by the Internet. Once upon a time the music industry had an automatic solid built in audience... that audience or potential audience they once had, have scattered to the wind. You may have grown ass men and women playing video games... they spend billions on video games ?!

As I've sayed up-teem times the music Industry is going to have to figure out who's their base (their new base) and draw up model to get those folks to be their army. I'm sorry, the music isn't the fucking prom queen , dancing queen.. anytpe of Queen anymore. Guess wha? I'm soooo sorry.

To the arist...

Some of the most clueless,unorganized, splintered group of folks you'd ever meet. Take a page form Unions/Organized Labor and organzied across the board. Because everyone is now being fucked, get off the drink and drugs and handle your shit. People get bank loans every second of everyday to start a business. What business do you know signs over a % of their company profits and/or intellectual propery for life? Can't these folks start their own publishing company? Have any of these artist ask themselves why didn't we have the forsight... been at the forefront of creating something like Pandora / Spotify? Why can't the top artist reach back and help up & coming artist, so they can reach back and help someone else? It seems all the folks can agree on is they aren't being paid for their music.

I'm just sayin'

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[Edited 6/24/15 14:53pm]

I know of a few acts that have done quite well by featuring their tunes in video games. Turns out hearing a song over and over in a game is similar to hearing it over and over on the radio.

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Plus in our youth-obsessed culture, alot of these kids are sort of talented but still KIDS. Suddenly they're flying around the world in jets or picking their favorite color for the interior of luxury sportscars that are being gifted for them, as billboards, to enjoy/promote.

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Its sad. Here is another perspective on the Apple Music thang:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frederick-chen/dear-taylor-dont-hate-the-freemium_b_7649920.html

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Its an interesting perspective, I especially liked the athlete comparison: "The price of a seat in the basketball arena -- that's for the team that's paying for his services to figure out. His job is to play basketball and win games."