Paul McCartney and Kate Bush lead call for change to music streaming payments
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Making and distributing music to masses of people has never been cheaper / easier. Making music is easier due to availablility of software and equipment. Distribution is easy because of platforms such as Spotify, Soundcloud... and so on. Musicians struggling to make money from people listening to their music digitally might be related to the enormous available supply. If I never get to listen to X bands / artists music, then I'll get to listen to someone elses and will likely never even realise X band or artist existed.
Most musicians I listen to have been introduced to me via the mediums I use to digest music. When I was younger, TV and radio, now mainly Spotify and different playlists I subscribe to.
So the percent paid is higher as far as gross in, gross to artists. But the outlier rates are lower because there’s no special contracts.
I guess an equivalent is how much is the total ad revenue for radio vs what’s paid to artists (not labels).
Or the total revenue made from music retailers CS what’s paid to artists.
The novelty with streaming is there aren’t tons of steps and indirections.
Why doesn't Paul McCartney, who's extremely wealthy, spin up a music app to stream his stuff and ask people to pay for it? Because he wouldn't make any money from after setting up the infrastructure, marketing it, paying people, etc...