Before I start, just to explain that I'm replying to your post Scotty but I'm not picking on you at all, it was just the first one that responded to mine and covered the points I wanted to make.
However, I'm a little bored of the claim that Spotify screws artists over (at least, any more than they've always been screwed over). Artists, as a collective, make as much as they ever did.
If this is true, and I don't know that it is, then it is largely due to them going on tour and charging a lot more for tickets than before. Before streaming companies came into the picture, bands and artists would make money off of album sales, even if it wasn't the greatest amount (courtesy of the record labels). These days, I imagine it's far less because of the streaming companies not giving people except the diehard fans any real motivation to actually purchase their music and therefore why you have many artists saying it's not worth recording new music any more and just becoming legacy touring acts instead.
The problem is, these claims seem to be based on the experiences of some individual bands, but don't stack up when looking in totality. To an extent touring and merch have indeed had an impact, but I can't see any reason that would be a bad thing. It's also not the only factor.
I posted a fair bit about this in a thread a year or two ago, which you can see starting from here:
https://www.dreamtheaterforums.org/boards/index.php?topic=55590.msg2689436#msg2689436Some choice bits and pieces based on the US (probably broadly representative of the wider global picture). The first two graphs are from an interesting bit of 2018 research by Citi called Putting the Band Back Together, the third is RIAA data.
Two important features in this graph:
- Artists' total revenue has consistently increased over time. It stagnated between 2000 and 2009 with widespread use of the internet, I'd guess due to piracy, but since subscription services rolled out in the 2010s it has shot up again and is at its highest ever level.
- Artists' share of total revenue was consistently decreasing until 2000, but has steadily risen since and is at its highest level since at least 1984. You can absolutely argue they're getting a bad deal, but the evidence does not support the claim that they're getting any worse a deal than they were before.
Interesting features from this graph:
- Crucially it does indeed confirm how dominant concert revenues have become, which has been the key driver of artists making more money. So in the context of COVID and minimal touring, this is a massive problem currently.
- Music sales have indeed declined, while income from music platforms (now dominated by streaming services but also including radio) has continued to rise. In total, income from music platforms is more than music sales ever made even at its peak around 2000.
This RIAA graph is really important (if it looks small, click it to make it bigger). It's adjusted for inflation so it's in real terms, and it only considers recorded music, so we can discount touring, merch etc. And we find that, contrary to popular belief, subscription services have in the past 6 years or so actually pushed up total revenue from recorded music to reach the same historic levels from the 70s and 80s. Revenues increased massively in the 90s once CDs became popular as they sold so much, but we also know from the Citi graphs above that artists made a smaller share in that period, so won't actually have seen all of that increase.
Most of the commentary on how evil Spotify is seems to be based on the experiences of individual artists, but this relates to your final comment:
Not only that, but you say "as a collective" - correct me if I'm wrong, but by that I assume you mean lumping in all the Metallicas, Kanye Wests and Taylor Swifts in with the thousands of bands (new and old) that are barely clinging to life, right? If yes, then I'd say the divide between those mega-stars and those lowly barely-known bands is far larger than before.
I'm not sure what your evidence is for these but I'm not following. The mega-stars have always been massive. If anything, in the old world they could get away with everyone buying their albums to be "in" even if they didn't actually like or listen to them. Streaming services pay out based on what people actually listen to.
I think the main difference is among the medium and small bands, and it's not just about streaming services. It's about technology more generally. It is now, relatively speaking, incredibly cheap and easy to write, record, produce and distribute music, and it's in distribution that streaming services have created a particular benefit for smaller bands. In the old world, the medium bands could still get picked up by a record label and make some money from their music. The small bands? Nothing. Couldn't make money and barely existed. Whereas now anyone can create and sell music, and what that means is that the total money the industry is making is shared between a greater number of artists. That makes it harder for the medium bands and some of the bigger ones, but it's amazing for the smaller ones who wouldn't have had a chance in the old world. They can't make a full-time job of it if they stay small, but they can do it successfully alongside other work, whereas before the up-front costs were too high without label backing. And there's a much greater chance of them getting bigger if they build up a following.
Topic: Spotify Celebrates 100th Dollar Given To Artists (Read 2255 times)
