INDUSTRY: Streaming Revenue Controversy

I have done lots of research into music streaming revenue controversy. I found an article on the Guardian which discusses how much musicians really make from Spotify, iTunes and YouTube. This article puts some figures on how revenues have collapsed from physical media sales and also on the explosion in streaming and associated revenues, by using an infographic. 

For Spotify Premium, it costs £9.99 or $9.99 per month. There is a free option but this option  means you have to listen to advertisements all the time, you can only listen to the music with internet, the audio quality is low, you can't pick any track you want to listen to and you don't have unlimited skips. 

This infographic on the left, suggests that to earn the minimum USA monthly wage which is $1,260 an artist which is signed, in terms of physical sales, would have to sell 105 self-distributed CDs, 547 album downloads on iTunes, 1,826 single tracks on iTunes and 457 Retail Album CDs. 

Secondly, in terms of streams would have to get 1,117,021 plays per month on Spotify, 4,200,000 streams on YouTube, 172,206 plays on Google Play, 1,260,000 plays on Deezer, 180,000 plays on Tidal, 663,158 plays on Rhapsody and 420,000 plays on beats. 

In terms of Spotify that means that every individual stream or play of a track earns $0.0011 for the artist. 



To conclude, the main point that I am trying to make is that physical sales earn an artist a lot more revenue than streaming sales do. 

As for my artist that I have chosen (Astrid S) I have looked at her Spotify and picked her most streamed track - 'Running Out' which she only actually features in because it is actually Matoma's track. It states on her profile that she has 5,698,455 monthly listeners on Spotify. 








I would like to make the point that the traditional music industry model has been through disruption from digitisation (though it hasn't rebalanced the competition in favour of Indies), so labels are looking for new revenue sources. Merchandise is a key factor - for example I went to see Ellie Goulding in Luxembourg in 2011, she was selling posters, T-shirts etc. at the gig venue and lots of people at the end of the concert wanted to buy this merchandise. 

Dua Lipa VIP packages

After looking at multiple electropop genre website examples, I discovered that on Dua Lipa's website she was selling VIP packages for her gigs. 

The basic breakdown is clear though - most major artists (Indies too) will gain more money from tours than album sales. It is the same case even combined with streaming (which is now bigger than physical sales and download sales combined). 







A good example I would like to discuss about steaming payments controversy is One Direction. I found an article on Music Business Worldwide which discusses that their latest album, Made In The Am, was a big success,

"selling just over 1m copies across the UK and US in 2015 after being released in November 2014. Judging by the 2014 calendar year performance of its predecessor album, Four, it’s a fair bet that the newer album sold around 3.2m units across the world before last year was finished. At an average US sale price, you’d therefore expect it to have grossed somewhere around $36m – although that is without streaming revenue. Being generous, adding in streaming and single sales, let’s round it up to $50m.The fact that this total is approximately one sixth of the size of 1D’s 2015 tour gross probably tells its own story.
The fact it’s less than half of the band’s secondary ticketing gross alone tells another". 

To summarise, One Direction's latest album 'Made In The AM' sold over 1m copies across the UK and US in 2015 after being released in November 2014. This album overall, made an estimated $50m, made up of streaming and single sales. $36m of this total was physical sales and $14m of this was streaming sales. This was basically approximately one sixth of the size of One Direction's 2015 tour gross.