
How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online? (2010) - callum85
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/
======
quadrangle
Yeah, um, this assumes each stat to be the sole source of income, and to
compare to minimum wage we must assume 40 hour work weeks.

Anyway, if you can't make it as a musician, I guess you have to do something
else productive. Corey Doctorow gets it when he describes himself and other
people who make a living in creative arts as being in the 0.001%, the
extremely lucky few who get to have that as their career.

All professional musicians could disappear tomorrow and we'd still have enough
great and varied music to listen to for all of anyone's lifetime and also have
massive amounts of high quality participative music making by non-pros.

Incidentally, I'm a semi-pro musician myself but I long ago stopped fighting
the I-deserve-a-living-as-a-musician battle and switched to figuring out how
to be sure my contribution to the economy actually mattered.

~~~
whiddershins
Yes, your statement is accurate given that you don't think art or music need
to evolve with culture. That they don't play a vital part in human evolution:
spiritually, emotionally, culturally, philosophically.

If so, yes, the music that has been made is more than enough. And we don't
need any more music.

~~~
vidarh
You completely miss the point: All _professional_ musicians only account for a
tiny fraction of actual music output. If they all disappeared it would not
prevent art or music from evolving.

~~~
whiddershins
See my reply above. I doubt you, or anyone you know, voluntarily and primarily
listens to amateur music.

~~~
true_religion
He's saying professional as in 'all i do is make music'. There are plenty of
local bands where the band members have 2nd jobs.

~~~
whiddershins
yeah, and that's who you listen to all day? Really?

~~~
true_religion
Sure, I knew people in college who were part of the local music scene and
listened to it primarily.

I don't see why it is so surprising. People choose genres and primarily listen
to it all the time. The kind of music popular to make in your locality, is
definitely not the same genre that's played nationwide no matter how close the
similarities may be.

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wmeredith
This is from 2011. It's best to add a (2011) to the title in situations like
these. It's a good topic and good info, but considering the speed at which
music industry tech is evolving, the date of publication should have more
attention.

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earlz
I don't think the world is ready yet.. but here is my idea on how to let
artists make money in a fair manner without consumers paying too much.

Imagine a clone of Spotify. You can do offline streaming and such for all the
music in it. You pay $10/month for the privilege (which I think is fair). $5
or so goes to the company to maintain their servers and such. The other $5
though you can do interesting things with. Basically, each month you have $5
worth of "tip money". You can send however much money you want to whatever
artist you want.. or you could alternatively setup other neat dynamic setups
(the author gets 50 cents when you favorite his song, etc). .. The point being
that it's under the user's control. And, if the user chose to not tip any
artists this month(or they have left over tip money), then it's evenly split
between all the artists they listened to for the month (depending on song
count or whatever).

This model I believe would work because the biggest thing standing in the way
from giving your favorite band a tip is that it's through services that you
are not already using. I don't want to go to their website and then sign up
for paypal to give them a $1. The thing with this method payment is already
accounted for. You already paid. Now you just get to pick which band deserves
your money. This could even work with a free version by doing a model like for
every 10 ads you must listen to in a month, you get 10 cents added to your tip
money..

If I knew anything about the music industry, this would be the startup I'd be
behind. This wouldn't work with the label model, and giving artists tips isn't
really something I think most people would understand at this point... but
some day... some day.

~~~
saalweachter
That "totally fair" $10/month figure is the problem.

Spotify's benefit to the consumer is _they pay less for listening to the same
music_. Compare that to iTunes which doesn't save you any money, it just makes
it a whole lot more convenient. (As an aside, I was far more appalled by the
discrepancy between retail albums and iTunes albums: Both cost the consumer
$10, but the label gets 5x more from iTunes while the artist gets slightly
_less_ than the $1 they get from retail.)

You can save the consumer a certain amount of money by cutting out middle-men,
but at the end of the day if consumers are paying less money the producers are
earning less money. It only makes sense to the producers if it doesn't
cannibalize their existing revenue streams.

~~~
AndrewDucker
I pay £10/month to Spotify.

I was not spending anything like £120/year on music for several years before I
got my Spotify subscription.

~~~
saalweachter
... and you use Spotify because you pay less than £120/year for more music
than you would otherwise get for that value?

~~~
AndrewDucker
I use Spotify because I have the convenience of not having to think about
music - it's just _there_ whenever I want it, without me having to transfer it
anywhere, dig out CDs to rip, etc.

I've listened to vastly more new music since I got Spotify, because I could
try things without having to buy a single or an album.

That's worth £10/month to me.

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cliveowen
A musician who relies on Spotify to make a living isn't a musician. In the
music industry money comes from concerts, there's no way around it. Recorded
songs are best thought of as marketing.

~~~
clicks
So, by that logic, the Beatles at about the time Revolver was released... were
not musicians. Because, as you may or may not know, with the Revolver album
they became a studio-only band. They neither _wanted_ to play concerts (they
were sick of playing concerts, started fearing getting shot, etc.) nor _could_
they play because of limitations of live performance technologies at that
time.

But ignoring the Beatles for a moment, what about totally electronic music
that's of a kind that can't be played live in any meaningful way? And what
about people like me -- who have absolutely no interest in buying band
t-shirts (I prefer wearing plain clothes) or attending live concerts?

~~~
tomjakubowski
> Because, as you may or may not know, with the Revolver album they became a
> studio-only band.

That's famously _almost_ true ;)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFJFsyAAoZ4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFJFsyAAoZ4)

~~~
clicks
The album 'Let It Be' (which was performed at the famous rooftop concert) came
to be precisely because of McCartney's insistence that they for once create an
album without any double-tracking, fancy technology, etc. and perform it live
in a televised setting (as opposed to live in a concert setting -- which they
were still unwilling to do).

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incision
Not the best submission title.

Spotify isn't mutually exclusive of the myriad other ways musicians can earn
from their music online, many of which are described on this very same
infographic.

~~~
callum85
I thought that was clear from "...to earn minimum wage _on Spotify_ ". I'm
happy to change the title if you can suggest better wording?

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EdgarVerona
This doesn't actually feel like an unreasonable number. Even a radio station
with a small broadcast radius playing your song once could get that many
people to hear it per day - I think people may be assuming that the value of a
single person listening to a song once is worth more than it actually ought to
be.

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CoffeeDregs
I find the graphic very misleading in that it mixes units. It seems very
reasonable that price-per-album would be 10x the price-per-song since an album
generally has about 10 songs on it. It also seems reasonable that price-per-
song would be 50x price-per-play (using low-end royalty deal and Rhapsody
payments) since, on average, I probably play songs about 50 times before I
move on. So for synthesizing "replacing album revenue" the Rhapsody payments
seem fair.

"Replacing radio revenue" [ie. you don't control song order/flow] seems to be
about 30% of "replacing album revenue" so Pandora is $3/month instead of
$10/month.

If the above is reasonable then Spotify seems well off the mark on pricing.
Also, I don't understand why the label share is 80% of revenue.

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confusedsquirel
This was posted a few months ago. I asked a question then, that I will ask
now. How much money does Spotify have to pay the record label? Usually the
artist gets most of their money taken by the label.

See here:
[http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/](http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/)
and here:
[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml)

Record company math is very similar to movie studio math. Both systems are
designed to make people very rich, just not the ones actually doing any of the
work.

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gabriel34
Although this number clearly states the unfeasibility of subsisting solely on
Spotify plays of a few songs composed, it fails to translate this number to
the present value of the expected plays throughout the years before the song
becomes public domain.

Such value would constitute a fraction of the payment the artist would get for
composing those songs, since, as mentioned in another comment, "selling" your
songs on Spotify does not require you to refrain from selling them elsewhere.

Only given the sum of the present value of all the different passive sources
of revenue the artist will get from a song and the time he spent writing it
can we begin to compare his remuneration with the minimum wage.

~~~
gabriel34
Other point I saw recently here at HN is that the recording companies get the
lions share of the revenue that comes from recording because investing in a up
and coming artist has a high risk, therefore must bring high profits to be a
viable business model.

Those business who don't milk the successful artists don't have money to take
a chance with the up and coming artists while rewarding the investors at a
competitive rate, which means they don't get investors for future growth.
Other sources of money for a business include it's own money (which we
established such a business wouldn't have) and loan (which require the
business to have a higher return rate than the loan's interest).

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lewisflude
Musicians make money from touring and selling merchandise primarily. This
statistic is still quite interesting, it really puts it into perspective how
little money there is for most artists to make on platforms like Spotify.

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grahamburger
Which is equivalent to what, one play per day on traditional radio? Maybe
less?

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jpswade
Or just 6,929,156 for one week of the year, around Christmas time...

