Not everyone is Psy: music streaming will not save recording artists

[silicon_toad2000]

After digital downloads, streaming was supposed to save entertainment industries, allowing them to monetize the digital distribution of their products rather than keep losing to piracy and file-sharing.

The picture appeared complete when artists, too, seemed to have found a solution in streaming. Revenue from “Gangam Style” and related videos netted Psy, the K-Pop phenomenon, and his agent roughly $900,000 in shared ad revenue from YouTube alone as of last month, according to one estimate.

But for the majority of recording artists, royalties from streaming services are just that–streams whose trickle of cents and fractions of cents are insufficient to allow them to get by. Zoe Keating, a musician whose songs have been played on Pandora 1.5 million times, made some money from the streaming service, but only $1,652. For 131,000 plays on Spotify, the London-based streaming service, Keating received $547.71 dollars.

Rolling Stone calculated that recording artists receive roughly 19 cents for every 60 plays, which corresponds with the amounts Keating received from Spotify. (The songwriter gets nine cents for those 60 plays). That’s about one-third of a cent for a single play on Pandora, MOG, Spotify, or Rdio.

http://qz.com/48610

Anyone familiar enough with the music industry that knows how much an artist gets from the sale of a single?
I was of the understanding that the artist received nothing until they'd sold 1000's of copies.

[GhostShip]

The answers a bit more complex than you may at first think Silicon, firstly the artists share of a single is about 4.7 pence that might equate to between 7 and 8 cents US money. The next important number to watch out for is how much the artist is "indebted" to his/her label, this is notoriously hard to calculate as the labels control all such expenditure and hire producers, session backup singers/musicians and put up the expenditure for any advertising, of course if they hire the producer they hire at a different rate to the one the artist will be asked to pay, the middleman role in any outgoing expense is why the labels continue to take 90% of the revenues with the artist taking whats left, but of course the artist has to pay off his debt to the record company first before receiving any royalties for his "contribution". A savvy artist can write the lyrics and play their own instruments and do vocals etc as well as self produce and thus earn themselves a few more slices of the profit "cake".

You'll all comprehend from this that unless you have a set of highly successful albums and some numbers ones its hard for any artist to break even with the record companies, some artist may take tens of years to get any real cash flowing their way and that's if the record company has been decent enough in the accounting dept, many are notorious for creating false expenditures that are once again added to the artists side of the bill, now looking at streaming I personally cant see how the artist is ever going to make a dime from such endeavours but I may be proved wrong, it seems to me that a physical item holds its value whereas a download or a streaming purchase is actually worthless and thus its price is near nothing to the public, a vicious circle then it seems, some artists have given away their music and charged for fanwear and other artist promoted memorabilia, this is a more successful model used by some independents, however many work hard to get signed by a label and believe that in getting signed they will start to earn big revenues, the truth is that you have to record then get on tour and record and tour and then rest a bit before you end up on drugs or have a mental breakdown, its no life for a dog but for those willing to make such a sacrifice their fans dutifully reward them by purchasing something connected to the artist be it a CD or DVD or a t shirt sporting a logo, those are the real revenue delivery tools, making a disk or two and sitting back patting yourself on the back simply means the record company will own the copyrights (akin to a holding them as security for a mortgage) to your creativity until you pay them back and for some that's been never, many of the greatest musical hits are ones that generated no revenue for the artist as it was a one-hit-wonder or they didn't complete the 3 album contract thus meaning they got zilch bar some food and a roof over their head for a few months.   

That's been the story of most artists and while there are great and popular success stories there are thousands who have fallen into the trap of losing control of their own work simply because the recording contract was one that promoted immediate fame over a more sensible long term release schedule and the immediate fame model requires a lot more money to grease palms etc, the long term strategy relies on the artist being of saleable quality and having an innovative enough production strategy to thus obtain a decent fan following, good luck finding a record company that has such confidence in their promoted artists 

You've all seen American idol and its one hit wonder winners, need I say more.

[silicon_toad2000]

a fella at work uses spotify i think, he said its 5bucks (aussie) a month for all you want to listen to.
i think it's different to itunes, where you can buy a track, with spotify you just get to listen to it.
but even with itunes, you still dont have the ability to transfer it, you're just licenced to listen to it.
Bruce Willis found that out as he tried to sue apple so he could leave his itunes library to his daughter.