Gary Numan: 'One of my songs got over a million streams – I got £37' | Hacker News Reader

Gary Numan: 'One of my songs got over a million streams – I got £37'

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The people who want to go back to the "glory days" of CD's are forgetting that struggling artists existed in that day and age too. A lot of indie artists pressed a small run of CD's for a couple grand and never even broke even. Still happens today. I have multiple wannabe artists in my family.

For a lot of people making music should really stay a hobby. They are not very original in their music and lyrics. Or simply not very good. Or very good for a small niche. It's still possible to succeed, but not just by putting out CD's and expecting to sell them all for a nice profit. You need to explore the other options available. Like teaching, living room concerts, blogging, vlogging, etcetera.

If it's purely about producing and getting your art out to people, there has never been a better time. Just do what you like to do and get it out there. Who knows, you'll be streamed a lot somewhere, like my brother in law's songs are streamed a lot in Brazil without ever visiting that country.

Many open source developers are happy working on their hobby for "free". Some artists should do the same.

This is the correct answer

Most people "are not good" because our political system is centered around making money, not on mastering an art form. Many societies did this in the past, but as it's "no longer economically viable," no one cares today. Today, in order to master an art form and actually make something worthwhile, you have to be entirely self-motivated.

> Many open source developers are happy working on their hobby for "free"

Really not a good comparison. Open source developers tend to have no issues finding paid work, often because they worked for free on open source. The same scenario doesn't exist for artists.

> Many societies did this in the past, but as it's "no longer economically viable," no one cares today.

Can you name a few?

Virtually every civilization pre-Industrial Revolution?

I think you would need to explain why you think pre-industrial civilization preferred "mastering the art" to "making money".

Painters sold their paintings or did commissions, musicians sold their compositions or wrote them on demand, glassblowers and blacksmiths worked to sell their ware.

This is a topic that can't even begin to be summarized in a HN comment.

In the past, it was far more common to subsidize the training of artisans, or at least ensure they were economically subsistent, because the culture recognized the value of aesthetic beauty toward achieving civilizational goals.

Today, in 2021, this doesn't happen so much. Primarily for two reasons: aesthetic relativism ("Beauty is just an opinion and all opinions are equally valid") and cost ("Why design beautiful buildings when ugly ones are cheaper?") Rather than pay more money to ensure that the market for craftsmen is stable, we'd prefer to save $20 and buy some plastic junk. Ditto for other art forms.

Who subsidised the artisans? Wealthy individuals.

So essentially, they had a job and a boss.

I think it may be that you couldn't really change your status with money. It's not like today when you did something great and your wealth changes by orders of magnitude.

So your status came from being a master. Somebody in very high regard because he is practically irreplaceable. He brings us great clothes. Nobody else around can do it so well. And no, that doesn't mean you could charge a lot for them, because the market is too small and people who are buying from you are the people you depend on for getting the goods that you need.

> Open source developers tend to have no issues finding paid work, often because they worked for free on open source. The same scenario doesn't exist for artists.

Acknowledging the "paid in exposure" meme, having some free work to point at when potential employers/customers ask for references is still extremely useful for an artist, just like open source contributions are for a programmer.

Imagine you're picking between two bands to play at some event (back when those used to happen). One has 3 references amd that's it, the other has 2 references but a million plays on Spotify. I know which one I'd go for...

Absolutely. That's how it works for the artists in my family.

There are more analogies with Open Source developers. For example, you can't expect that you'll become famous for writing a simple Homebridge plugin. Just like your thirteen-a-dozen blues song doesn't make it to the top of the charts. Thousands or even millions of people may use it, but you're mainly doing it to scratch your own itch. The statistics are just a feel good bonus.

> For a lot of people making music should really stay a hobby. They are not very original in their music and lyrics. Or simply not very good. Or very good for a small niche.

I'm not a music buff by a long shot but on one of our first dates my partner and I went to Brighton during the Brighton festival. During a rain shower we heard some live music coming from a pub and went in. We've since followed that band whenever we get a chance.

At first I was full of optimism that they were on the cusp of hitting it big. Their music is as good as anything we hear played on the radio. Live their performance is exceptional.

For reasons I don't fully understand they don't seem to have moved on from where they where when we first encountered them, a small indie band with a niche but loyal following.

I guess my point is that skill isn't the only factor. I suspect a big part of it is luck and connections.

Most people who have gotten big on the streaming platforms will talk about endless grind - I believe a depth of content sets up a virtuous cycle on platforms like YouTube. Yes you might have an Uncle Roger moment where you go viral and get that massive step up but many other streamers will talk of putting out years of content before getting traction.

Not sure how it works specifically with music because you can't really churn out endless original content. I guess part of the churn can be covers or live performances.

Connections do help tho - getting someone to promote you on their channel always helps but I'm told the online content community are actually extremely supportive and friendly.

Luck and connections are definitely a big part. But do you have any records from that band which you listen to at home? Some bands are just live bands and even if they did great mixing and mastering experience of just listening to them and not watching them live is not that great compared to other things out there. At least that was the experience in my local jazz bar (although lack of professional recording could be the main reason).

If you only include people who are trying to "make it" (as in you remove musicians in it for the love, not to make a career, or happy to have a niche career), or who are making a career of it, generally you fall into one of three categories:

- good, with terrible marketing/no connections/luck

- not good, with great marketing/great connections/luck

- good, with great marketing/great connections/luck

I know so many and have bought so many records from amazing bands who've never had a lucky break and basically don't understand the internet. Then there's loads of dreadful music and one hit wonders in the charts where someone has been marketed incredibly or they've had some viral luck or whatever - but they fade away pretty quickly.

Then you have those people who consistently write great music, with great marketing and a lucky break. Who have long, rich careers. But like unicorn startups and everything else, this is never going to be everyone.

Music, like a lot of things, follows a power law distribution.

There's no real mystery in it.

They are not very original in their music and lyrics.

That's obviously not a requirement for becoming a professional musician.

Or simply not very good.

That, of course, is a bigger issue. But at the same time, it's really not that the people who make it are orders of magnitude better than the best ones of those who don't. Like in many other areas of life, there's factors other than excellence that play an important role, and a lot of them boil down to luck.

You can't get nowhere without some heavy-weight business insiders supporting you, even if you're that youtube wunderkind that then has a cinderella-like career. So much of a career is due to successful management, networking, and just being in the right place at the right time. Mind you, you gotta be good, and you gotta work, but that alone is not enough.

Yeah, none of those punk bands succeeded because they were rubbish on their instruments!!

Also, Paul McCartney didn't do very well because he had rubbish lyrics like "In this world in which we live in" - how many times can you say "in" ? or "someone's knocking at the door; do me a favour, go to it, open it and let them in" - stating the obvious...

The Beatles where very good in making catchy melodies though.

Exactly. "Good" is a very context-dependent term.

"In this world in which we're living"...

Oh I misheard/misremembered!! Thanks!

To be fair, John Lennon was a far better lyricist--mostly because Bob Dylan told Lennon that his lyrics sucked. Lennon took that really hard and really worked on it.

This is possible but this is highlighting the music INDUSTRY, not the music HOBBY. The industry exists to make money and always has done. It doesn't exist simply for the joy of playing music, in the same way that the software industry doesn't exist simply for the joy of writing software. It exists to make money.

Sure, people can write open source software or play instruments at home but it isn't enough to live on by itself (ie it pays zero). This scenario is highlighting the problems with the INDUSTRY, since the artists are effectively now volunteers and won't even make a fraction of the minimum wage for their work.

There are multiple problems with the current set up:

1. In the past, record labels would promote individuals they thought could sell. People would look to the record labels and charts for "popular" music. Since there are so many ways to decide how to listen to music, so the labels have less control to "dictate" or push specific artists.

2. The availability of everyone to release their own music has diluted the market so now there is so much volume, nobody gets heard. eg. everyone shouting the news in the street instead of a newspaper.

3. The cost of streaming music is WAY WAY WAY too low. They priced an entire month of music at about £10, the same as a CD. That's 720 hours (30 days) for the same price as just over an hour of music. This works out at £0.013888888888889 per hour, or just over 1p for an hour of music. This is then SPLIT between the streaming company, the label (if one), the artist's manager, and the artist.

1p for an hour of ANY service is not sustainable, let alone if you split it again.

4. The streaming services are independent commercial entities that can charge what they want and negotiate payout fees with the record labels. Despite not being a cartel, no invididual company can charge more than their competitors or they will be seen as poor value. No record label wants to set up their own streaming service, so they are at the mercy of the streaming service for the price, to some extent.

5. Nobody values music. Maybe this is because some people have the radio on as background noise (like the noise of a fridge or household appliance), or because nobody would pay at least £40 a month for music (eg. 1 CD a week), it is now disposable, so the pricing of streaming has been a race to the bottom.

Maybe it's because they think that music artists are billionnaires and don't understand the time costs of learning an instrument, buying an instrument + gear, recording a song, mixing a song, mastering a song, pressing a CD or uploading to different platforms, promoting the release and believe they are only paying for the 4 minutes of audio they've just heard.

This doesn't even start to cover the costs of distribution or touring (van/truck driver, local roadies at venue, mixing engineer, monitoring engineer, sound engineer to ensure the output of the mix is appropriate for the venue since each venue is very different, equipment techs for larger bands, insurance for gear, insurance for venue, food for staff, accommodation for staff, publicity agent) so everyone thinks it's dirt cheap and a band is driving round a country and magically having equipment appear for them to play.

In short, the industry is dead.

> 3. The cost of streaming music is WAY WAY WAY too low. They priced an entire month of music at about £10, the same as a CD. That's 720 hours (30 days) for the same price as just over an hour of music. This works out at £0.013888888888889 per hour, or just over 1p for an hour of music. This is then SPLIT between the streaming company, the label (if one), the artist's manager, and the artist.

But, unlike movies or any other service, the music service is repeatable and potentially generates infinite value over the years, with very minimal cost of maintenance. Once it is submitted to spotify, it is there forever, generating revenue, without you doing anything at all.

But that IS the same as movies and any other service - once it is available on iTunes does the film producer need to do any more work to make revenue? No. Once someone has written their software and hosted it somewhere, do they need to do any more work to extract money from it? No.

Yet the film industry saw sense to charge £7 - £13 for a film rental or purchase PER FILM and not charge £10 for an entire month of cinema films.

This isn't true for Netflix since they get old films, but it isn't true for "just at the cinema" new releases.

But, usually*, people do not re-watch the same film more than once or twice (except when you like it very, very much :) ).

I usually listen to a song multiple times each day.

It still doesn't reduce the initial price/cost of the film simply because you choose to watch it only once. You still paid a reasonable price for it, and can rewatch it many many many times if you want.

This isn't the same with the music cost - you paid a tiny amount; they made a tiny amount of money - that's the unsustainable bit.

I'm the opposite to you - I will watch a film a few times, but only if I enjoyed it (as you said). I don't listen to the same song multiple times per day, let alone multiple times per week.

>I usually listen to a song multiple times each day.

Used to be I bought a CD for say $10, listened to it probably hundreds to thousands of times, say around a penny per listen. Then I'd resell the CD, say for $5, and someone else could get another 1000 listens with no money going to an artist.

An artist used to get around 10% minus packaging costs, so say at most $1 per CD.

So an artist then could get under 0.1 cents per listen, maybe vastly less.

Next, a song plays on the radio to millions, and the artist gets (?). I think that was quite small too. Even then, touring was where most of the money was made - the CD and radio game was to get exposure and fans, many of whom would then pay $50-$100 for one evening of listening to the band live.

I'm not sure how all the econ works out now without spending too much time digging into it, but making music has never been a good income stream for any but a tiny, tiny percent of artists.

The whole INDUSTRY that you are talking about is what happened in LA in 70s. I don't understand why would you take it as picture of how things should be done. It has not been like that before and it's getting back to "normal" now.

Most musicians play because they need to. Because it's the only thing that makes sense. Nobody sponsors their years of very hard work which they do voluntarily and with joy before they become great at what they're doing.

Original bands are doing just fine. They have big following because they offer something new. They have patreon, sell tshirts vinyls and whatnot.

Many average musicians can afford equipment which top bands couldn't dream of 20 years ago.

If somebody wants to just create another pop song then yes they will have a hard time.

And existing artists who sold their soul to big labels may suffer because those companies never thought they would need to move a finger. Not ideal but there's some worse suffering happening in the world than that.

Big record labels and expensive CDs were basically a dotcom bubble. Music is entertainment and people have a lot to choose from now.

Those who need to play music will be fine and enjoy life with their instrument(s) as they always do. Those who went in with "I've heard there's some good money there" are getting disappointed.

' Those who went in with "I've heard there's some good money there" are getting disappointed'

This is true, but I think it's also more of the "I hear you can make SOME money there" or "I hear you can live on the money you make there" which is the point. You can't.

I am a musician and all of the guys I played with over 30+ years had main jobs alongside their gigging. There would be no way to afford it otherwise, and that was when CDs were being sold. The streaming issue has only made this worse, which is the point in question (is it a valid payout?), not whether every single artist can be a millionnaire.

It is also interesting about "selling their soul" because a lot of fans believe "their" band hasn't sold out and is doing it solely for the love of music - they never are. They might enjoy what they're doing ("do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life") but they would cease touring and recording if they were making £0.00. Even all the "alternative" bands were signed to labels and relied on distribution; they just promoted an image of not "playing the game" like everyone else, and being "alternative" even though they never were. It's an odd mindset people get when looking at bands and somehow believing that the musicians somehow lived without money and did their art solely for the love of the art.

In my ~10 years of buying CDs I probably bought 50 albums.

In my ~10 years of streaming on Spotify I’ve definitely spent a lot more than that on subscription.

I spent more than that since I have closer to 1000 albums. Never spent a penny on Spotify though. I didn't like the audio quality when I heard my friends (who strangely insisted on some amazing speaker, and then played grubby audio quality through the speaker...)

> They priced an entire month of music at about £10, the same as a CD. That's 720 hours (30 days)

Yeah, but who listens for 24 hours a day, all month?

Also, that £10 CD can be played infinitely. That's infinity hours of music, which comes out to around 0p per hour. That's completely unreasonable! ;)

The convenience of Spotify converted me from piracy, getting my money back into the recorded music game. I don't think I'm alone in that. That 29% cut quoted in the article doesn't seem unreasonable to me, especially when some of that is "new" money. What were the margins of old record shops?

That was the main thing I wanted to discuss, but let me also question some assumptions you seem to make.

> the labels have less control to "dictate" or push specific artists.

Why is that a problem? The curation and popularity lists are not gone, btw: the streaming services have taken over that role.

> The availability of everyone to release their own music has diluted the market so now there is so much volume, nobody gets heard

On the flip side, more people get the opportunity to be a little heard. Seems like a win to me. Also, there are definitely still those who are heard more than others.

People also forget the stranglehold the big labels had on the industry and retail. CDs were often expensive too - I remember paying £18 for albums from a large mainstream shop in the late 90s, not obscure but not ones that would have been in the charts. Compare that to the price of seeing that artist live at a proper music venue (not stadia) in a big city at the time - £40ish, maybe less.

Maybe my memory isn't great, but the market has been stretched with live music becoming substantially more expensive, while recorded music has become substantially cheaper.

I feel like if you want to be a professional musician, then that's exactly what you should be expecting to do with your time - playing music to people, not recording once and expecting to live off royalties forever. Recordings should be seen as marketing for the live performance.

I'm not really a fan, but Gary Numan is a case in point. He's been gigging forever and has made a point of making sure his tickets are affordable so his fans could continue to enjoy his shows, ensuring a lifelong revenue stream.

I think your memory is correct. I have all the old order details for CDs from 20 years ago and they've definitely got cheaper. I also have my old gig tickets from back then (I kept them despite some being a bit sweaty), and gigs have definitely gone up in price, maybe even 2 or 3 times the amount.

I am not sure recordings should be seen as the marketing for live performance though - what about bands in another country? They will never tour here. And I will never get to see The Beatles...

Also, recorded songs can sound very different to live songs, hence the "thin" nature of some of the live recordings. The ability to create a sonic soundscape on a recording is what makes it so special.

Recordings should be seen as art you are paying for. Nobody seems to mind buying a painting but objects to spending money on a CD. Baffling.

You can't get CDs anywhere near a easily as one could 22 years ago. All the old music stores I used to go to are closed. The big chains are gone. The small indie stores are all gone. Some of the boutique websites still exist, but it has been more than 10 years since I purchased a real physical CD.

One thing I do miss is that CDs are mastered far better than anything on iTunes or YouTube is these days. Modern music is compressed (not MP3 artifacts, but flattening of dynamic range) in a way that wasn't common back then. Algorithmic remastering of music by all the big websites is overdone in my opinion.

If you're buying lossless music files, it's not a matter of CDs sounding better. The audio compression you're hearing is a result of the loudness wars and pop music trends.

I've heard that was done to CDs as well. E.g. people psychologically prefer louder music so mastering practices have done this at the expense of dynamic range.

This kind of explains it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

http://georgegraham.com/compress.html

That doesn't sound inclusive. Many people for various reasons can't play live (e.g. because of disability) or for given genre it's not possible to perform it live in a meaningful way. What should those artists do? Only fit and agile artists deserve income?

> They are not very original in their music and lyrics. Or simply not very good. Or very good for a small niche.

Even if you're very good, it's a gamble; almost all celebrity stories contain the element that they simply met the right person or were in the right place at the right time. And fame doesn't correlate with how good you really are; there are various famous musicians who aren't technically good at all, but got their breakthrough for some other reason. So it is almost impossible to plan a successful career a priori or to estimate its chances of success. Just like in a game of chance.

I should have added that marketing yourself as an indie is also important.

As well as timing and luck.

I don't think marketing is the decisive measure; sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it's unnecessary. As a famous example I mention Billie Eilish; I read that they uploaded their first famous song only on Soundcloud so that a friend could hear it; so not exactly an (intended) marketing measure; but as luck would have it, thousands then suddenly discovered and heard the song. The rest is history. But I know far more at least equally talented musicians who upload songs to Soundcloud without anyone taking notice.

Obviously marketing is not the dominant factor if you're as good and original as Billie Eilish.

Unfortunately beeing "good" and "original" is not enough; and even if you make it as a musician, it doesn't mean that you can make a reasonable living from it (which is also addressed by the article).

PP's thesis was that many people on soundcloud are as good and original as Billie Eilish (or more so).

Presumably many musicians on soundclound are persistent and hard-working as well as insanely talented and original.

Marketing isn't the dominant factor for a new artist winning the pop music lottery. Luck is.

There's a lot of great music out there that will never be a hit song, and it's nice that we can still listen to it.

Is it not same concerning everything in life? "Favor comes to prepared minds".

> Favor comes to prepared minds

There are very many prepared minds to which the favor never comes.

> Is it not same concerning everything in life?

Sure, we all depend on fate, but there are many proven life courses where you can't make a decent living just by being lucky.

Give examples, please.

I see lots of people shouting about this on social media. I think it feels 'wrong' because 10 thousand plays of your song feels like a big number. I mean 10 thousand sales of your single would make you some nice money, right?

Actually selling CDs was hard. Selling music is hard. Streaming is so much more passive than people credit and so much more like the radio.

I'm absolutely with you - financially lots of people weren't successful before streaming and lots of people will continue to be unsuccessful today. Do it because you love it and if you can make a career (or even some extra cash) out of it be super thankful - there really hasn't been a better time to actually get people to hear your art.

It’s likely that the whole 10k streams came from people leaving Spotify on auto play and that no one particularly liked the song and certainly wouldn’t have found or paid for it in a CD store.

Yep. Or, because people are different and wonderful in their own way, it's entirely plausible that it's just a small group of people who really like your stuff and play it from time to time. Even if the rest of the world is completely ambivalent to it.

The answer is simple don't do something which people are willing to do free out of passion.

No one deserves reward for unloading more supplies into already oversupplied market.

>> The people who want to go back to the "glory days" of CD's are forgetting that struggling artists existed in that day and age too

Too? I'm not sure what that has to do with Gary Numan. CDs came out in 1982. Gary Numan's first hit #1 on the UK charts was in 1979. He released a 2017 album that charted at #2. He has released music consistently for over 40 years, and there are multi-volume tribute albums of people covering his songs. And he had a side career as an aerobatic flying instructor to fall back on if everything went south. That's not a struggling artist.

The point I'm reading in this is, if someone like that is getting next to nothing back from his music being used to make people money, what chance does an actual struggling artist have?

Although I also appreciate Mick Jagger's point about the music business where he says that prior to 1970 you didn't make any money from record sales because the record companies just simply refused to pay you.

Every time I hear this kind of complaint, I wonder what kinds of horrible deals they've made with middlemen.

I have some music available for streaming. In November, I had a total of 5126 streams, which gave me 14.611 USD.

If we extrapolate that to 1 million streams, it would be $2850, but Gary is saying he's getting less than 2% of that.

The aggregator I'm using (my only middleman) takes 15%, already subtracted from the numbers above. Gary's middlemen apparently take over 98%. That sucks, but it doesn't appear to be the fault of the streaming services.

One caveat to note about these numbers is that the value of streams seem to differ a lot between countries. It's possible that Gary has more listeners than I do in less-lucrative countries. I don't think it could cover the whole difference. The most likely explanation is that Gary's record company is taking most of the money, and/or he has to split it with others who were involved in the creative process.

If anyone is interested in my earnings data (further analysis, charts, peer review, whatever), it's available here: http://dolkow.se/files/streams_nov20.xlsx

I think you are on the money. The article doesn’t say why he got paid so little and just repeats the same non info and says streaming services should pay more. But like you said, they do pay far more than what he got so the money is going somewhere else and isn’t the fault of the streaming services.

There are apparently labels which do nothing but help you get in to the streaming services and charge next to no fee but then you lose out on the services they provide.

Oh, and I assume that the big labels have better deals with Spotify than my small aggregator does -- earning a better per-stream rate.

My partner and I recorded a Christmas album in our basement and put it on Bandcamp for "pay what you want including $0". We made over $400, but as of today, it's only been downloaded/streamed 500 times.

I'm sure if Gary asked around his friends and family what they'd like to hear on his next album, he could probably make more money.

That kind of suggests an interesting tradeoff: do I want the bandcamp money from more dedicated fans, or the convenience and discoverability of streaming services?

Admittedly, I may be making a false dichotomy there.

I've chosen the path that I hoped would make as many people as possible able to listen to my music. That includes not only Spotify, but also YouTube "videos" and free downloads from my website. The Spotify income covers my own Spotify subscription, which is nice, but I didn't make the music for money's sake. :)

And I realize the above may come off as judgemental, but that's not my intent. I hope it can be understood as an observation and an anecdote, not an argument about what others should do.

We didn't make the music for money's sake either, it was a happy surprise to wake up the next morning to find that many members of our community liked it enough to buy it (it's pretty clear that it can be streamed and downloaded for free, so my assumption is that the purchase was willful, with most people paying $15-$20). Reading this bit about Gary definitely made me wonder about the tradeoffs you describe.

The experience also has me strategizing on our next move. I'm applying the Lean mindset and focusing on the feedback we got from paying customers: "longer and more songs", "loved the clear crisp audio", "you played X, it's my favourite". We're doing a St. Patrick's day album next which is focusing on those pillars. I also may have splurged and commissioned an album cover off Fiverr.

What is the function of a middleman between musicians and streaming services?

Traditional record labels do a fair bit of legwork -- maybe not enough to justify the very high take they get, but I do at least know about the promotion, marketing, production, distribution, and other services they provide.

What is your middleman doing for 15%? I'd have (naively) expected that you would work directly with the streamer: "here is my audio file, send the money to XXX".

That's what I expected as well, before I tried. I assume Spotify just prefers to make a few big deals instead of lots of small deals. It saves them from having to manage all the individual payments, and probably the whole "is this really your music?" thing.

So the aggregator's fee is simply an entry fee. As you can see from my numbers above, it's not a lot of money. :)

To be fair, the aggregator I use offers a choice between 15% of the revenue, or a fixed yearly cost of $9.99 per release (first year may be slightly more expensive, depending on release size). Since I used to release a trickle of singles as I finished them, the per-release pricing definitely made no sense for me; the 15% thing was the best deal I could find when I started uploading in 2009-2010. Also, back then (not sure about now), some aggregators' terms actually demanded exclusive digital distribution rights, which was a complete non-starter for me: I wanted to put stuff on YouTube and free downloads on my website too.

That makes a ton of sense. Thank you.

I am wondering if Artist get paid less if the Stream was from smaller group of users?

i.e If one user decide to Repeat One Song a million times.

I don't know.

They can't allow obvious fraud, or there'd be money to gain in spinning up lots of VMs to inflate your stream count (and thereby your share of the total pie).

But people must be trying, I assume. Some will fall more or less clearly on the fraudulent side, and some are probably technically ok, just a little annoying or deceptive. Like duplicating popular playlists and adding your song to it: https://celebrityaccess.com/2020/01/08/the-dark-arts-of-spot...

"There are more avenues today than I have ever seen in my time doing this job." - Jason Iley, chairman and chief executive of Sony Music UK and Ireland

Like a number of comments made by record industry people about this, that may be factually correct, but it's missing the point. There definitely are more avenues than before. But almost none of them pay any money.

Streaming has removed most small bands' way of making money, by selling CDs directly to their fans. Most of them will just stream it, and won't realise the tiny amount of revenue this generates for the artists. Paying the artists you actually listen to - rather than slicing the cake up into infinitely small slices - needs to be looked at. Most people assume their money goes to who they listen to, not the artists who everyone listens to the most.

I wonder if a law enforcing more transparency couldn't help here.

It is in the interest of the music labels and the streaming companies to maximise their profit, which means minimise the pay-out to the artists.

Customers have to be very motivated to be able to make an informed decision. And most often they probably aren't really motivated and happily chose the cheaper option.

But I have hope, if the impact of the customers choice on their favourite artists is directly visible, it will create more pressure to increase the payout.

E.g. each time you listen the song on A, the artists gets X, if you buy the song the artists Y.

> Paying the artists you actually listen to

This is what Bandcamp is.

I agree, but nearly everyone I know has either Spotify or Amazon music.

And also most of them don't really care about this. I've been a musician since I was 13 and have made most of my income over my life from either recording, teaching or playing music, so I guess I have more of a dog in this fight.

I think it needs to be that the majority-used systems are made more fair - as with most things, people won't sacrifice ease of use for equity!

The solution is to pull your music off the platforms and charge your own price for it. You will likely find that no one purchases it and you get forgotten because very few people want to pay more for music when there is unlimited music available at a cheaper price.

You can’t force people consume your content and that they pay more for it. There is such a massive supply of music that naturally the cost will be quite low.

Doesn't spotify already distribute your subscription money to artists, based on your listens?

Yes, but it's much more likely your money is going to record labels rather than artists with something like Spotify. With Bandcamp, you are typically directly paying the artists, and you can always pay above the minimum price set by the artist if you wish.

CDs aren't the only merch to sell and all the other stuff (shirts, etc.) is easier to produce than ever and very profitable, and I feel like most people are well aware of that being one of the most direct ways to support their favourite artists.

This is true, but a tiny proportion of people buy merchandise compared to music. You will always find the t-shirt stand easily accessible at a gig for the artist despite the thousands of people at a venue, so believing that t-shirt sales will someone keep the artists profitable is likely wrong.

I don't have the personal experience from gigs with "thousands of people", as the only ones I've been to were not that huge, and at those the merch stands were always swarmed. If you are playing for an audience that big you are probably already good on ticket sales alone (which also tend to become more expensive once a certain audience threshold is crossed).

I also wasn't just guessing/assuming that, but relaying what I've been told by friends who are musicians (see also my sibling comment).

I hear this argument a lot, but never from musicians. I think it might be a factoid that music listeners spread around because it makes us feel better about what seems like an irreversible movement in the industry (which benefits us, since we get to pay less money for music).

But in the end, if we want to incentivize artists to focus on making good music (as opposed to merch) we should probably be paying them for the music. That’s not to say we can will the current streaming trend out of existence (we can’t), but we shouldn’t necessarily let ourselves feel good about where this is going.

This isn't just a random factoid that I picked up, but what was relayed to me be multiple friends from bands that make part of their living off of music, and that mostly from merch. They are not in big well-known bands, but merch makes them enough money to pay their costs and also take time out of their freelance jobs to work on their music. They do sell some CDs, but never made a lot of money off of that (they haven't been around in a time where CDs mattered), and when I asked some of them once they said that they estimated that the loss of CD sales probably cancels out with the cheaper production costs of shirts.

For most bands that are not huge, they never made a lot of money with CD sales (in stores, not at the concert venues) anyway, as most of that money went to the labels anyway. The bulk of money was always in concerts and merch.

There are some reasons for criticizing streaming services and how they shape the music industry, but I don't think that replacing CD sales with less well paid streaming fees are a big one. That really only hits musicians that are already well beyond making a living off of music.

I personally don't like the focus on merch for funding creatives either (this also includes Youtube creators and similar), as I don't really need that many t-shirts personally that I would buy one from all of them. I rather buy their music via Bandcamp or donate to them via their Patreon.

The founder of Patreon had the same problem, he lost most of his income from a band. That's why he created Patreon.

There's a difference between a $20 CD and a $10 all you can listen to music account with no commercials. The artists are getting less money because music is worth less today. Technological change is making that job obsolete in the same way that illuminated manuscripts have become obsolete.

What job? The job of the artist? I sure hope not! I mean, ok, we don't have illuminated manuscripts anymore, but we still have typographers, illustrators (for books), painters etc., so the job has evolved, not disappeared completely. What technological change will eventually make obsolete are probably the record companies...

A lot of scholarly publishers today, even very respected names, no longer provide typesetting and expect authors to do all the work and provide a camera-ready PDF. The whole scene of publishing genre fiction directly on Amazon also eschews quality typesetting and often even basic editing and proofreading.

Just saying. There are a lot of jobs today that the market apparently no longer wants to pay for, even in the book world.

I am tempted to agree with what you say. I do believe that modern technology has lowered (financial) barriers to access art, no doubt.

However, if it's only artists that appear to be mostly suffering from this new reality, while big (record/copyrights/tech) corporations still appear to be doing very well, I'm inclined to argue that this is probably more about unfair distribution (even more than it traditionally already was) than about the argument you put forward.

No matter how you slice that cake, if in the end artists have to struggle to get by while others make a killing from exploiting their creations, then there is something fundamentally wrong. Personally, I think that today it might even be more wrong than it has been for a long time.

It’s not just that. The distribution models also discriminates against small bands. If the four bands I’ve listened to in December received 70% of my Spotify subscription payment, this would be much less of a problem.

That's a very important point. I know some indie artists who get way less than a subscription's worth of money each month, while having a bunch of "superfans" who mostly listen to their their music.

Basically the money we pay is not going to the bands we listen to. It's being used to appease some larger pop artist so they won't leave the platform. Or to finance the platform itself.

This Lack of transparency from streaming services is a much bigger problem than the amount of money paid per stream.

Sure one can argue that Spotify is free to do whatever they want with the money, but it's still not a fair deal for small artists.

From what I have seen, the pay is entirely by listen count and not taking the users subscription and dividing it by the % you listened to each artist. So if someone subscribed to Spotify and listens to 10 songs in the month, most of their subscription goes in to the pool and pays for people who had lady Gaga on 24/7 for a month.

I won't pretend to know the business, but when I read stuff like this https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml, I'm not sure the CD was much better.

Extract: " And that explains why huge megastars like Lyle Lovett have pointed out that he sold 4.6 million records and never made a dime from album sales. It's why the band 30 Seconds to Mars went platinum and sold 2 million records and never made a dime from album sales. You hear these stories quite often. "

Your post seems to blame the streaming companies rather than the record companies.

1 million streams in Spotify generally nets you c£2,740 - so in Gary Newman's case the issue is presumably the record label taking a huge £2,703 cut.

Independent artists can sign up directly with Spotify and get paid per stream, and Spotify's payment model is pretty transparent (they take a 30% cut of subscriptions and share the rest by time listened).

I've been thinking about this a bit. Compare a 1million view YouTube video (arbitrary $3/CPM(1000 views), so $3000), take the 16% cut in the article and you get $480. So Gary Numan's work is roughly valued one less magnitude than a YouTube video. I think that's a shame, but, it's not that far off.

Now you could argue Music isn't the same as a Video, but in my mind Videos can be just as timeless and classic as a tune.

Streaming/advertising creates that nice race to the bottom which evens the playing field (a view is a view is a view, a listen is a listen is a listen, 100 or 100000 it's all the same,) but people who are used to entrenched interests keeping prices high will be shocked.

It's race to the bottom for payouts. The owners are still rolling in Bentleys and sip champagne.

30% distribution fee is standard across so many things. Steam, AppStore, and it looks like Spotify as well.

Seems like the ones losing out are those that are signing record deals, giving over 41% (or 54%? The %s don't add up to 100 in the article,) to a label who... Just puts them on Spotify?

Spotify is in a good position to cut out record labels by working with artists directly.

I think anti competition bodies should look into it. It sounds like a market fixing if everyone charges the same.

Given videos are usually 10mins and music 3.5 mins, and youtube adverts are both more frequent and more targeted, that might even explain the last factor of 10.

The most viewed youtube videos are songs. Bruno Mars Uptown Funk is sitting on 4 billion views [0].

Music has way more impact than video.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-viewed_YouTube_vi...

The 16% is an estimated industry average. Older contracts don't have any streaming clause so lots of legacy acts are getting screwed. Payouts are $4k-10k per million streams, depending on service and label.

That does not align with my experience. On Christmas 2019, I recorded an album [1] of 9 "Snake Jazz" songs, each 30 seconds long, as a joke on a Rick and Morty episode. Published the album on CD Baby, and had them distribute it on all available platforms. Publishing cost me 80$.

Now, about a year later, I have earned 0.47$. 0.33$ of it come from Spotify, where I raked up a full 131 listens, averaging at 0.25 cents per listen. 0.25cents * 1e6 would amount to 2500$, which is admittedly still not much, but two orders of magnitude off from what is reported here.

That being said, I believe the main source of revenue for bands has been concerts in recent years (not 2020 though), with ever-increasing prices charged for live performances. I gladly accept that though - it is quite appealing to cut out the middle-man that were Music Studios up until the early 2000s.

With the barrier of entry to record an album ever-decreasing (using a Roland Octacapture, Reaper DAW, a Shure SM57 and lots of sweat you can get far), pretty much anyone can record an album in decent-ish quality in the comfort of their home, there is no more appeal to pay expensive studios to do a recording for you.

[1] https://music.youtube.com/browse/MPREb_2nw3eEydV25

True, unless you play the drums and don't want your neighbours to hate you forever and ever!

For those interested in how all these royalties work, I'd recommend reading "The Definite Guide to Spotify Royalties" by Jeff Price.

https://vi.be/files/research/the-definitive-guide-to-spotify... [pdf]

To quote directly from the introduction:

"When I began to write this article, I thought it would be a quick one. Yes, I knew there was a lot of confusion and misinformation about Spotify royalties in the world, but I naively thought, no problem, I’ll just lay it all out in a quick couple of pages.

I could not have been more wrong.

The complexity of Spotify royalties is, frankly, insane. So insane that it took me over a month and 40 pages (before including diagrams) to explain it all. No artist, label, songwriter, distributor or musician should be required to have a depth of knowledge of this complexity to understand a very simple question: “How much do I earn when my music streams on Spotify?” There should be a simple, easy to understand answer. But there’s not.

And to be blunt, it’s not really Spotify’s fault, nor is it the music industry’s fault, or the fault of U.S. Copyright laws. But when you put all three of these things together, you get a weird franken-monster royalty schema that has resulted from a new music business model built on consumers paying to have access to music, rather than paying to own it.

For each step described in the royalty calculation process, it took another step to explain the step preceding it, and the one preceding that one, and furthermore, the reasons why each step exists. Each step, in and of itself, makes sense, but together they are like peeling layer after layer of a never-ending onion."

How does this compare to being played once on the radio to an audience of 1m?

In the US artists are not paid for being played on the radio at all, only the songwriters. So that's an easy answer: $0.

BBC Radio 1 (the mainstream UK pop station) pays about £13 per minute of airtime, so if it's a 3 minute pop song, about 40 quid, or about the same as Gary Numan says he received here. (Source, which also has audience figures: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/bbc-radio-1-is-paying...)

(As the sibling answer says, it will depend on whether he's the songwriter or not)

This is distributed differently according to the station, and distributed according to the size of the artist I believe. I have a friend who worked out all the times he was paid on the radio over the years and sent a list off to the BBC and got something like £5 from it due to him being a small artist.

Not very sustainable.

I wish streaming was compared to radio more. I think so many artists compare streams to sales directly, but I think a radio comparison is far more apt (even if not quite right).

Exactly - for a lot of people it's used as wallpaper in the same way. They turn on Spotify and do eight hours of work, twenty days a month. 9600 minutes of music for which they pay $10. A tenth of a cent per minute. We can argue about how much of that tenth of a cent should go to performer/songwriter/label/Spotify/GCP, but I think increasing it is doomed.

Yup. For a lot of people it's radio without the DJs and ads, and more control over the musical choices.

In 2008, Benn Jordan (aka The Flashbulb and other pseudonyms), got tired of iTunes making money from his music and receiving no revenue for it, that he personally shared his new album "Soundtrack To A Vacant Life" via BitTorrent.

He attached a text file to the release, explaining how he makes essentially no money from iTunes and other platforms distributing his music and invited people to buy the album from his website directly. And that strategy seems to have worked.

Radiohead released their album "In Rainbows" exclusively online and invited people to pay what they want. As a result they made much more money than they usually made with that release.

He (Benn Jordan) recently posted a very interesting YouTube video where he discusses how streaming is working out for him and other artists like him now.

"Should we hate Spotify?":

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MXudOLStaXA

Relevant article from The Onion: Spotify celebrates 100th dollar given to artists.

https://www.theonion.com/spotify-celebrates-100th-dollar-giv...

There is quote from Mick Jagger who said:

> … it is a massive change and it does alter the fact that people don’t make as much money out of records. But I have a take on that – people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

To be honest I do not get all this complaining about streaming revenue. Don't get me wrong, I would love for musicians to be paid a higher amount for being played but this is just what the music industry has evolved into, also because this is the model that listeners have chosen.

My point is that the way it works now also comes with huge benefits for artists. Some years ago there has been no way to get played and discovered a million times as an indie artist. Today this is possible. Streaming services have replaced radios in many parts and it is possible for nearly everybody to get traction in that system. What also has changed is where artists make their money, which today is more in playing live and selling merch. It is true that in former times artists got much more for being played or selling records but this was reserved for artists signed by big lables and it was hard to get into that business.

As an anecdote, I remeber hearing Alfa Mist play live in Berlin and in disbelief stated how surreal it feels to play a sold out show in Berlin. He told how he some years ago was just for the heck of it recording and releasing an album together with his brother from their homes. Without them expecting it the album was catching on all over the world and they could tour it and live from it. I feel this sums up how streaming can be a big chance for artists.

I am currently paying Amazon something like £15 a month for myself and one family member to access their streaming service. Since we tend to listen to the same handful of curated channels and albums month in month out, I'd say we're overpaying for the convenience by a considerable sum.

Yes, it is true we have an unlimited choice of alternative tunes to listen to but the reality is that we just don't.

This is why multiple ways of paying for music are so important, because for my £14.99 a month on Spotify I've listened to (since 2020-03-01) 2,733 different artists[0].

That would simply not have been possible under the traditional business model.

I think a comeback for buying music should happen, but this streaming model is so incredibly fertile for discovery of new artists that I think even with such low cost-per-listen rates it's still good value to artists.

[0] According to my Last.fm.

It probably is fertile for discovery of new artists, but that conversion rate -- it might as well be all of that fantastic "exposure" you'll get by doing my website for free.

I've been to concerts of artists I simply would not have discovered if it weren't for Spotify, their curated playlists, and their algorithm.

I can absolutely guarantee this for my personal circumstance

These artists have been from all over the globe, my favourite being The Chats from Australia which I went to see in Manchester.

Exposure in music is much more genuine than in design/development like you say since the concerts have always been a significant portion of the income for artists (AFAIK).

0. I fucking love Gary Numan.

1. I’m not remotely surprised.

2. Because the recording artist economy has always been fucked[1].

3. Because Gary Numan is more known for his influence than his work (like Leonard Cohen).

4. Because people wanted Taylor Swift so much she gave in even though a young twerp could see the scam.

I know it’s a pandemic and we can’t go to live shows, but y’all. If you want your beloved music to survive and thrive. Go to (virtual) shows. Buy shirts and posters. Follow your artists and buy what they’re promoting. Record sales and streams are promotional marketing, you’re paying marketing executives for them.

[1]: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music

If Numan had gotten £37,000 for a million streams (30 seconds or more), that'd be 3.7 pence per listen. Hardly an unreasonable ask.

"Tony Harlow, chief executive of Warner Music UK, cautioned against disrupting the system. 'This is an evolving situation,' he said. 'It is being well-governed by a market that is efficient and nimble and it doesn't need any change.' "

Ooo ... now there's a surprise.

If musicians would get together, create their own streaming service, they could pay a very good wage to people to run it, quit the system, never feed the fat, fat whales again, and certainly pocket 1p a listen.

Would be interesting to hear how much smaller artists make on sites like Bandcamp in comparison (but I can't find Gary Numan there, only remixes!)

I think Bandcamp takes a 10-15% cut of the price you pay to the artist, but yeah, it's mostly independent labels.

No one seems to mention that a million streams is actually not that high. It's a big number but if 10k people listen 100 times that's not huge.

Good music is typically listened to multiple times - if you really like a song and you listen 3 times a day you're at 90 listens in a month already.

That's probably not sustainable but you start to see how 1 million is impressive but also quite achievable.

If you put and ad on Youtube and want a million people to watch it, you probably have to pay ... $1000? $10,000? $100,000? I dunno. But I know you will not receive money for it.

The question is: Is a song a product or an advertisement?

I tend to think it is an advertisement. Every young musician dreams of becoming a star. Not so much to pay their bills but for the fame.

I think the free market prices things right. You cannot demand people to pay for watching your advertisements.

Nonetheless, I wish artists would put their output on their own websites. This centralization in giant silos where people consume music mindlessly and get showered with additional ads devalues their art even further.

If the song advertises an artist, what does the artist have to produce to make money? And Numan isn't really dreaming of becoming a star.

> I think the free market prices things right.

Right for what?

None the less there is a question of whether the record labels and streaming companies are using their near monopolies to extract more from artists than they could in a competitive market.

Since the artist gets paid an order of magnitude less than the minimum wage, it isn't extraction of value/money from the artist - it's extortion.

> I think the free market prices things right. You cannot demand people to pay for watching your advertisements.

I think you are getting confused between 'the free market' and 'free as in beer'. You can get people to pay for listening to music, that is a very well established business model.

Music is awesome but it's also a commodity with more content being generated every day than we could ever consume. It's simple supply and demand.

I remember a time I was able to buy a CD for 10 bucks and could play all the tracks infinitely, no questions asked.

I think you can still do that.

Now Cars is stuck in my head, arrrgh

Mine too, but not his version. Go figure.

If Gary Numan does not want to make his songs available for streaming, can he do that without us having to know about it?

How is this something relevant for HN?

> The label heads told MPs their cut from streaming was a fair reward for the risks involved in developing artists, recording, marketing and distribution.

Smooth, but also a juicy lie because:

Labels haven't paid for new artist development since Napster was shutdown. New artists learn their craft on their own dime and record their first (or more) album in their bedroom. There is no cost for marketing or distribution with streaming.

Recording costs are subtracted from artists' payments by labels.

What the label head deliberately left out is that new deals are "360 deals", meaning the whole pie, where the label gets additional revenue streams: streaming royalties, live performance, merch and often Patreon (pays the rent for a lot of artists) payments.

Regarding the £37 for 1 million streams, that would take some forensics to unravel. But factors are if Numan doesn't own his masters, what the separate songwriting credits are, and that US streaming services operate with legal rules that disadvantange artists when paying for streaming.

The artists who've done well at capturing value are Steve Vai (self-managed, as advised by Frank Zappa) and Joe Bonamassa (dedicated boutique artist mgmt.) It gets real thin after that.

Source: I know Youtube music artists and have done the math with them. I tell them not to sign label deals (be their own publisher), and as a result they're all cash flow positive while following their artistic vision - with no lawyer surprises.

If the label doesn't offer the artist anything and they can do all by themselves, don't sign a contract with them.

As simple as that, nobody is forcing new artists to join the labels...

Streaming is racketeering.

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