Music steaming services – the good, the bad, and the underpaid* Streaming services offer new artists the perfect opportunity to meet millions of listeners. On the one hand, the number of monthly listeners and paying subscribers to some of the biggest online streaming services opens up endless possibilities for new artists, DJs and existing music composers and producers. As Perrin Lamb's story shows, streaming can give more artists the opportunity to succeed without the help of a record company. Despite not being paid much to release their work, up-and-coming young artists must make their music available on streaming services in order to reach audiences and be heard. The competition for streaming services like Spotify, Google Play and Apple Music is forcing artists to go all out, get creative, and do new things with music that others have never done before. Others, however, will argue that many artists thrive in the streaming world and have a steady cash flow, and that it all depends on the effort you put into promoting yourself on services like Spotify. A popular streamingrelated debate is whether services like Spotify pay artists fairly. Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, and other streaming platforms pay their artists based on how many streams they receive. Spotify premium is splitting 70% of a certain amount of money between all artists streaming that month. Spotify calculates the total number of streams in a month and then calculates how much of that is due to each artist's music. Spotify premium claims to pay between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream, but some indie artists claim to make less. Spotify premium also pays for music licensing from major label artists, which they don't do for indie musicians. YouTube music and Spotify premium offer on-demand access to millions of songs for a monthly fee. For years, Spotify premium has denied artists the option to release new albums only to premium subscribers. Born out of a wave of illegal streaming, Spotify and other services provide people with legal access to music. Today, it’s very easy for up-and-coming musicians to get in the door as unsigned artists, using third-party distributors or record services to make their work available on all streaming platforms. While anyone with a Soundcloud account can upload their work, other streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music require third parties to manage rights and act as distributors for unsigned artists. The debate about how much artists get paid on streaming platforms will never die down until platforms like Spotify specify how their artists get paid. Spotify, along with the industry, is facing criticism from some artists and producers who claim they are being unfairly compensated for their work as music sales decline and streaming increases. Spotify, the music streaming company, has come under heavy criticism since the launch of Spotify in 2008, mostly due to artist compensation. In recent years, Spotify has built close ties with everyone from Shawn Mendes to Camila Cabello to Justin Timberlake, shortly after being publicly recruited by the likes of Thom Yorke for both its business model and meager streaming payouts to artists. Founded in 2006, Spotify has become the largest music streaming service with over 345 million active listeners and 155 million paying subscribers. Streaming services may be taking a larger percentage of the music industry's revenue from artists than ever, but they also bring in a lot more money for artists. Now, 15 years later, artists are blaming and applauding streaming services for their role in bringing the industry back from the grave.
Most of today's music revenue comes from streaming, so it's no secret that making money as a music artist is hard when people don't pay for music anymore. As a result, the internet has made it much more difficult for artists (and their labels, when applicable) to make a decent amount of money from music sales. In the era of streaming, artists had to find other ways to make a living. As streaming continues to evolve at breakneck speed, the system by which artists are paid for the music they listen to has not evolved in parallel, meaning that, as dissenters point out, many artists are still underpaid. And cut labels. While music downloads, CD and album sales (both physical and digital) directly impact an artist's earnings, streaming payments are more complex. When artists compare their album sales to streaming revenue, streamers end up paying less, and sometimes a lot less. If you want to help indie musicians, you can stream their material to a higher paying service, where they are more likely to get paid more for streaming. Simply streaming your favourite artist, or even encouraging your friends to do so, doesn't guarantee they'll make money from your listening. Swift and other artists portray streaming as a terrible thing for musicians and artists, but they frame the theme in a way that ignores the enormous monetary potential of streaming for artists and the role of labels in all this confusion. In march 2012, Patrick Carney of the black keys stated that "Spotify is not being fair to artists" and further noted that streaming services are "becoming more mainstream, but the point has not yet been reached where royalties can be replaced." record sales with streaming royalties Warner Music Group CEO Stephen Cooper acknowledged that labels pay to get artists on streaming playlists.
Cited sources 1. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/streaming-platforms-keeping-moremoney-from-artists-than-ever-817925/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/criticism_of_spotify 3. https://www.makeuseof.com/music-streaming-services-help-or-hinder-artists/ 4. https://spinditty.com/industry/why-so-many-artists-hate-spotify 5. https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272423/taylor-swift-spotify 6. https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3162085/reality-spotify-artiststheres-no-money-streaming-music 7. https://www.reviews.com/entertainment/streaming/music-streaming-royalties 8. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/technology/streaming-music-economics.html 9. https://www.smudailycampus.com/ae/how-music-streaming-helps-and-hurts-artists 10. https://excusemythoughts.com/streaming-services-are-they-helping-or-hurting-musicians 11. https://www.npr.org/2019/07/22/743775196/the-success-of-streaming-has-been-great-forsome-but-is-there-a-better-way 12. https://www.recordingconnection.com/reference-library/recording-entrepreneurs/howthe-internet-changed-music *Please note that this is purely a test article written by AI and it offers no genuine advice or actual endorsements and should be otherwise ignored. The publisher accepts no liability for any statements made or websites linked to.