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Originally posted by TayGod
No, it cheapens music. If artists are not paid fairly, then what reason do they have to produce quality music. I don't think streaming is the future, unless you are the greedy corporate CEO at the top of the streaming world. And Taylor has actually proven that she makes more off of Album Sales than from streaming. Even, if Taylor is a millionaire 200 x over, (She has made that from full value realized off album sales) and not from streaming. If Taylor relied on streaming solely, she would not have become rich. This is the point she is making and is offering the olive branch to other artists to take a stand against greedy streaming services and greedy labels. It is about music quality in the end and that can only happen when artists are being paid fairly.
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The cut taken by Spotify is comparable to iTunes, which I believe takes about 30%.
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Spotify pays out nearly 70% of its total revenues to music industry rightsholders – labels, publishers and collecting societies – who are then responsible for paying musicians and songwriters their share.
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But for some reason, people in this thread like to use Pandora to bash Spotify.
From one source on Pandora:
Pandora pays 4 percent of its revenues in royalties
Both Pandora and Youtube pay less than Spotify. If you want to promote your fave’s music, it would be better to link to the Spotify stream, rather than one of the other streaming services.
Is Taylor still on Youtube and Pandora?
In Europe,
Spotify Royalties Overtake iTunes Earnings By 13%
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Kobalt, a company that helps collect music royalties on behalf of thousands of artists — including “half of this week’s Billboard Top 10″ and musicians like Maroon 5, Lenny Kravitz, Dave Grohl, Max Martin, Bob Dylan, and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis — says that in the last quarter in Europe, revenues from Spotify streams were 13% higher on average than revenues from Apple’s iTunes for its customers.
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The problem is not Spotify, it is the record labels:
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Conglomerates like Sony have sub-labels and publishing company subsidiaries. So Sony, as a record label, on the one hand charges Pandora a huge amount for rights to its catalog; and then, as publisher, threatens to withdraw all its music from Pandora because it believes the royalty rates are too low.
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The real winners, right now, are the labels. They are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue just from licensing, with no need to pay for distribution or manufacturing. Spotify alone is reported to have paid $100 million to the three major labels to license their catalogs.
And guess what: 25 percent of Spotify is owned by the three major labels. That’s a great business — licensing your catalog to a company you own a big piece of. If Spotify goes public or gets sold off to some big cable company or Internet giant, the labels get another huge payday. And in many cases these upfront payments are tied to overall revenue — so as the streaming piece grows, the licensing revenue surges.
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Perhaps the problem for Taylor, is that Big Machine is not one of those record labels with investment in Spotify?
Perhaps she should speak out about greedy record labels?
But I don't see that happening.
None of the major pop girls are going to need a second job, which is what some people are suggesting. Lorde, who is very new, has over 600 million streams on Spotify. Taking a payout of 0.7 cents per stream, the rights holders would be getting 4.2 million and perhaps Lorde gets to keep 20-25% of that. I think she would be doing o.k. with 20-25% of 4.2 M when you add touring.
The major pop girls should have well over a billion streams each (if not, their label is doing something wrong). Perhaps in future, a major artist might have to get rid of one of their multimillion dollar homes, but not all of them.
