Music has become much more accessible during modern times thanks to the growth and advancement of the internet, but at what cost to the artists?
Long gone are the days of record labels and album sales. The introduction and continued use of streaming has dramatically decreased the amount of album sales, reducing CDs down to a novelty item. Selling digital albums is an option, but a great deal of consumers prefer the ease of subscribing to a monthly service that allows access to any song on their platform.
A great majority of an artist’s income today comes from touring and merch sales, but what happens when one of those becomes an unviable option? During the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, artists were unable to tour and were unable to support themselves from streaming revenue and merch alone. According to Headphonesty, an artist must reach 100,000 streams in order to make $1,000 from Apple Music, with each stream earning the artist one hundredth of a cent.
Spotify is even worse at paying artists, with an artist having to reach 303,030 streams in order to make $1,000 at just $0.0033 a stream. The best paying streaming service appears to be Tidal, which requires 76,924 streams to reach $1,000 at $0.013 a stream. This is a much better deal than Spotify’s streaming payout, but in the grand scheme of things there is not that big of a difference between the two. I have never used Tidal, and I don’t even know anyone who does or has used it in the past, so racking up that many streams seems like it would be an issue in itself.
As someone who is currently in the process of recording my first album with my own band, I can’t help but feel a little worried about the future.
I know that it will be a good, long while before I start to see any sort of monetary return from my musical endeavors, and I hope that the industry can one day see changes put in place to support the artists who supply the music.
