> We effectively didn't, though, at least as far as artists are concerned. Streaming revenue is abysmal for artists.
But that's not Napster's fault. Spotify pays a lot of money for playing of a song, of that the artist only sees a tiny percentage due to music middlemen trying to relive the 90's.
And that's why I buy music off Bandcamp whenever I can, and thankfully most of the music I listen to is on smaller labels, so usually even more money goes to artists.
I'm just saying that the solutions that pop up once you "win" are not necessarily ones that provide a win for the people you are trying to protect.
I distribute my music through CDBaby, and looking at transaction history I've been getting $3.65 per thousand streams. That's not nothing, and is much higher than I'd get from radio.
Spotify is taking in a lot of money and paying 70% to labels, which adds up to a lot of money for artists depending on their agreement with their label/distributor. But the per stream rate is still very low because there are trillions of songs streamed annually.
I'm sorry, I don't want to sound dense but I'm not clear what your point is.
Are you saying that CD Baby is a better distribution technique than standard labels because you get good margins? I didn't know CD Baby until I just looked them up but they appear to be a distributor, so your $3.65 metric is still being paid by Spotify/Amazon/Apple. Please correct me if I'm wrong but that is much higher than the normal published numbers by 10-100x.
Is this an RIAA moment where labels are trying to make other people look like jerks rather than accepting what they do, or are people using the "per 1000 streams" poorly because they will always look worse on successful platforms?
I think the distribution of streaming revenues is generally reasonably fair, and people who say things like "Spotify pays artists nothing" are confused about either (a) how much money there is to divide up or (b) where it is going.
Anything is a lot of money if you offer no basis for comparison. A million dollars seems like a lot until you say that it's what you paid to build a downtown skyscraper.
The math here makes a flawed presumption: that you play a song only once after buying it from iTunes.
I obviously don't know your listening habits, so for you that may be the case. But people will listen to a single song far more often than once. Or otherwise there'd had to be 77.946.027 new users on spotify[1] last month all playing Ed Sheeran once. Clearly nonsense.
If you play every $1 iTunes song eight times on spotify, the costs (and therefore fees) will be on par: $10/month.
But that's not Napster's fault. Spotify pays a lot of money for playing of a song, of that the artist only sees a tiny percentage due to music middlemen trying to relive the 90's.