Can musicians make a living on $.003 from Spotify?
From 2020 to 2021, the number of users on Spotify, the world’s biggest music streaming service, jumped 30%. That same year, artist Mike Block had one of his best streaming years to date with 230,000 streams. Block posted his music streaming statistics to his Facebook page and while he was grateful, he had some questions.
“Where is the money?” Block wrote. “Where is the money?”
In an interview later, Block said that Spotify wasn’t something he looked to as an income source. “In the grand scheme it’s essentially 0%,” he said, referring to the percentage of revenue he made.
In 2008, Spotify was released to the world and it quickly rose to be the biggest music streaming platform. For decades the model had been based on buying vinyl, tapes, CDs, and digital downloads but after Spotify was introduced, the music industry flipped to digital streams. According to Spotify’s website, over 80 million songs are available to everyone for the small price of $9.99 a month. Users also have the option to have a free account that is supported with advertisements.
Traditionally, artists made revenue from album sales, but with the introduction of streaming services like Spotify, musicians are forced into a different kind of system. According to HaulixDaily, artists can expect to make $.003 per stream and that is only if they receive 100% of the royalties. Oftentimes artists split royalties with labels, songwriters, and producers, so they only end up making less than 20% of royalties.
While musicians like Mike Block acknowledge that he too uses Spotify to listen to music and it extends the reach of his audience, the music platform is transforming the way many artists make a living.
Prior to digital streaming, songs would only appear on the radio for six months but that changed with streaming, said Elizabeth Tallman, 60, an adjunct music business professor at New York University. “Music now doesn’t have an expiration date,” she said. We can now listen to music from any decade and Spotify craftily creates or algorithmically generates playlists with the sole intention of a user finding new music.
However, these playlists shift users away from the traditional ways of discovering music like going to a record store, turning on the radio, and even getting recommendations from friends. “It’s really shortened our attention spans, and now we are being told what’s good.”
Tallman says the one good thing that has risen from Spotify is that the platform makes it more accessible for anyone to self-publish and release music.
Liz Pelly, 33, a freelance journalist who often writes about Spotify’s issues, pointed out the “Loud and Clear” section of Spotify’s website, which reads as a shallow press release that is an effort to explain their process. “I think ultimately it’s all hollow in the grand scheme of things and this is a model that is extremely unethical that doesn’t work for the majority of independent musicians,” Pelly said.
As a result, many unions have been created to try and combat this issue. The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) has been focused on raising awareness and building campaigns around the realities of the streaming economies for smaller independent musicians. Independent artists often operate like a freelance journalist or adjunct professor who has multiple jobs.
“They have a lot of different employees but they think of streaming services as one of their biggest employers.” Pelly said. UMAW functions around this idea of a “penny per stream” which, according to Pelly, is an effective campaign strategy to engage more people and get them aware of the economic realities of being an independent artist.
As an independent artist in 2017, Mike Block went to a Spotify office to perform and give his perspective on being a small artist to the company. He said he was pleasantly surprised by the number of musicians and passionate people working for the company and that all his concerns were well aware of. But since then, he’s been conflicted. “The value that Spotify gives to their artists, let’s just say maybe that’s what they need to do to be a business,” said Block. “That’s fine but it makes people not buy albums and it makes people not buy other products that support artists.”
Pelly thinks that the average person can make small changes to help fund smaller musicians. “I think buying music directly from artists and independent record stores, exploring new digital experimentation that would put more power in the hands of artists, and supporting things like local community radio as a way to discover new music or independent music, public funding for the arts,” Pelly said.
While Block says listeners should campaign and fight for equity with Spotify, we simultaneously have to be pointing people away from the streaming model to other platforms and ways that we can support musicians. Bandcamp is a platform financially more beneficial to artists, and offline, there are always concerts.
“In some ways it’s not the end of the world that in order to make money musicians have to play concerts, like that’s actually the core of the musical experience and the recorded side of that historically was secondary and it’s kind of returning to that which is not the end of the world but it does make it harder financially for musicians,” Block said.
So if you are deciding whether or not to spend that money on a concert next month remember what Block says, “I guess what I’m trying to say is that you should go see concerts to support the artist.”
