I didn't think I would love Spotify as much as I do. But it's so amazing and convenient. I still purchase albums of artist I enjoy to show support, on top of streaming since it is a constant revenue stream for the artist as the plays add up.
Digital track sales this past week totaled 19.9 million downloads, down 4% compared with last week (20.6 million) and down 10% stacked next to the comparable week of 2012 (22 million). Year-to-date track sales are at 1.1 billion, down 4% compared with the same total at this point last year (1.2 billion).
--------------------------------
It looks like singles download (digital track sales) have peaked. It's downhill from here.
As sales of CDs plunged over the last decade, the music industry clung to one comfort: downloads continued to sell briskly as people filled their computers and iPods with songs by the billions. Now even that certainty seems to have disappeared, as downloads head toward their first yearly decline. So far this year, 1.01 billion track downloads have been sold in the United States, down 4 percent from the same time last year, according to the tracking service Nielsen SoundScan. Album downloads are up 2 percent, to 91.9 million; combining these results using the industry’s standard yardstick of 10 tracks to an album, total digital sales are down almost 1 percent.
Even as downloads decline, however, some experts say that rapidly growing income from streaming may finally help turn the overall industry toward positive results. Last year, streaming and subscription services generated $1.03 billion in revenue, up 59 percent from the year before, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, and many of these providers are reporting robust growth this year.
474 euro for 96,655 streams at Spotify = 0.0049 euro per stream or $0.0065 USD at current exchange rate
at the same rate, 100 million Spotify streams = $0.0065 x 100 mil = $650,000 in royalties
There are many songs that have surpassed the 100 million streams mark on Spotify now.
What I need to know is does that $650k go to the artist themself, or is it split like $1.29?
'Cus if so, a song with 100 mil streams is most likely a 5 million digital seller. That means they'd make $5,000,000+ on digital sales, versus $650,000 on streaming.
I'm very thankful for Spotify for providing me my bops when I'm broke. Can listen to my bop while supporting the artists!
I will spend a few coins for it soon.
Spotify on Tuesday unleashed a load of data, revealing that each time a user listens for a song, rights holders are paid between $0.006 and $0.0084. Over the course of 2013, the company says it will have paid $500 million in royalties, representing half of the $1 billion Spotify sent to rights holders since setting up shop in 2008.
The stats were unveiled as part of a new Spotify Artists webpage, a site where rights holders can access analytics tools to track their performance on the streaming-music platform.
Using the same rate, in order to generate $1 million in royalties, a song would need to be streamed 119,047,619 to 166,666,667 times.
For the month of July 2013
p.s. Who is this global star that Spotify is talking about?
Quote:
Spotify pointed to an unnamed “global star” to which it paid $3 million in individual royalties over the past year, a sum it expects to double in 2014. It added that this particular artist wasn’t its most played artist and that there other stars were paid more than $3 million in 2013.
p.s. #2. Spotify is still tiny. With around 8 million paying subscribers and about 25 million free users worldwide. Which mean in the countries that Spotify is available, maybe around 4% of the population use the service. As Spotify gain more users, it will pay a lot more. It pays 70% of its revenue as royalties.
Quote:
As Spotify has grown, it has taken on an increasing amount of red ink. Last year, the company lost nearly $80 million. About 70% of the money taken in, Spotify says, goes right out the back door in the form of a payment to rights holders.
Finally, Spotify clarified a big source of frustration for anyone trying to write about or understand how much it pays per stream.
The answer: Although Spotify pays copyright holder every time a song is streamed, it has no set figure for how much it pays out per stream, which is why previous estimated figures vary so much. The whole thing is a big collective. Some users pay, while others listen for free and put up with advertising that generates another little stream of cash. All of that money goes into a big pot, then gets split up among artists depending on who streams the most, with additional tweaks made for the country in which the listening took place.
After all of these calculations, Spotify says it ends up paying out between $0.006 and $0.0084 per streamed song.
Of course, the initial Spotify checks containing that money go to labels, then the money filters through to publishers, recording artists, and songwriters, according to how their contracts are set up.
Basically, if a song is streamed say 140 million times and get $1 million in royalties.
This $1 million in royalties goes to
1) the labels
2) publisher
3) songwriters
4) recording artists
divided up according to the contract the artist sign with the labels.
IF the artist is his own label like Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, then they get the whole $1 million royalties
So if you're an indie musician and you have a HIT song (you wrote the song, record the song, own the song). In order to earn $1 million royalties, you need it to stream between 119 million to 167 million times on Spotify.
Or sell around 1.41 million on Itunes at $0.99.
Very rarely does an indie song (a song without a major label) does that well.
Its mobile service had previously only been available to users who paid $10 a month for a subscription.
Now, users can pick tracks they want to hear and listen for free — with commercials.
The caveat is that they can’t listen to the exact song they want to hear, exactly when they want to hear it. Instead, they’ll need to play tracks on playlists and albums randomly in shuffle mode.
Here's a demo
You can also try it for yourself on your Android / iOS devices.
-------------------------------
Basically, it's FREE (ad supported) on mobile devices.
It's SHUFFLE PLAY. You can shuffle play an album or a playlist.
Data reviewed by The Wall Street Journal showed that one major record company makes more per year, on average, from paying customers of streaming services like Spotify or Rdio than it does from the average customer who buys downloads, CDs or both.
The average "premium" subscription customer in the U.S. was worth about $16 a year to this company, while the average buyer of digital downloads or physical music was worth about $14.
Other data from the same company showed that in the long run, even many individual albums eventually make more money from streaming services than they do from downloads.
Underscore that phrase, in the long run.
The acts were identified in the data only with generic descriptors. When they first hit the market, all the acts' albums made more money from download or physical sales than from streaming.
It took 34 months for an album by an "indie rock/pop group" to make more money from streaming than from sales. An album by one "modern male R&B rapper" reached that juncture after just four months.
In both cases download revenue flattened as sales flagged, while streaming revenue continued to climb as people kept listening to the music.
Notably, pop acts, which tend to rely on heavy marketing, were the least likely to see the revenue from streaming services exceed sales revenue. That is because online listening—and therefore revenue—tended to level off for those types of acts at about the same rate as their sales.
In Sweden, where streaming subscription has overtaken downloading as the most popular method of acquiring music, the difference is more pronounced.
An average premium subscriber there is worth about $17.75 to the company, versus less than $4 for the handful of people who still buy music.
The lesson for record companies and artists appears to be: making disposable hits may once have been a viable business, but new technology could demand tunes built to last
Streaming works for established artist. But the Indie market will suffer in my opinion.
Established artists will benefit but indie music will benefit more from streaming in my opinion. Spotify premium ($10/month) subscribers tend to listen to more music and in greater diversity. You can say they are the "music fanatics." So they tend to listen to more diverse artists.
Radio: only play established artists
Streaming: discovery, word of mouth, recommendations from your friends etc... It doesn't cost much to "check out" new artists. Search, play the album.
In order to get $100,000 in royalties, the indie artists catalog need to be listened to 14 million times in total
If this indie artist have 50 songs, that would be 280,000 streams per song.
Difficult to achieve? yes, but more possible every day.