Yeah! Screw you, musicians that want to earn minimum wage! http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...
The data it is based on is some small numbers from the first months after Spotify launched, before the revenue strems had actually started. No hard numbers are released, but it is generally acknowledged in Sweden that Spotify is now the largest online income for artists.
If that's not enough money for an artist, then the problem is really that the artist isn't popular enough when people get to decide for themselves what to listen to.
Exactly. According to this article[1] (in Swedish) about Lady Gaga making $340 from a million Spotify listens to a single song, the same number of listeners on the radio would have made her $15.
[1] http://www.expressen.se/noje/1.1787187/lady-gaga-tjanar-1150...
Lady Gaga had the most popular song on Spotify, with one million listens. Now she gets her money from STIM [Sweden's collecting agency for artists etc]: 1,150 SEK ($170 USD).
Lady Gaga's "Poker face" was the most popular song on Spotify during the music service's first five months, according to the first payment of STIM money made on behalf of Spotify, according to STIM's own paper "Stim-nytt". The song was played one million times - which yields 2,300 SEK ($340 USD) that Lady Gaga and songwriter partner Redone share.
Dogge [Swedish artist] upset
Rapper and songwriter Dogge Doggelito is upset when he hears the sum. - It's sick. We musicians have no rights, you don't get paid any more. Lady Gaga would have made more money driving an unlicensed cab one night at [known place in Stockholm].
"Better than file sharing"
Artist and songwriter Alexander Bard [another Swedish artist] doesn't want to comment on the sum without knowning how Lady Gaga's contract with her label looks, but says: - 2,300 is more than zero which she would have gotten from Pirate Bay. It's better than file sharing, says Alexander Bard.
The future
Both Alexander Bard and Dogge Doggelito believe that Spotify and similar services are the future. - These are teething troubles. I hope that we creators one day in the future will be paid reasonably and fairly, says Dogge Doggelito. "Stim-nytt" compares the sum to if "Poker face" had been played in the radio show "Sommar" that averages a million listeners. Then the STIM payment would have been only 100 SEK ($15 USD).
(I also note that the amount referred to in this article is the amount given to songwriters. Not all musicians are songwriters.)
This means that with downloads you get a rather crude measure of a song's popularity - you count the number of listeners instead of how often the song is actually played. It also means that a popular song will never stop being a source of income with a streaming service, as opposed to downloads where every user pays for the song only once.
About the privilege of selecting songs, according to the numbers in the article you pay 23 times (or maybe 12 times, it's a bit unclear) as much for being able to do so than you do if someone else selects the song for you.
Also, unless I'm mistaken it's the recoding's copyright owner - the label in most cases - that gets paid, and they in turn pay the artist. According to that other infographic, the artist gets about 15% of the amount the label gets.
Whether radio was a profit center or not is beside the point, but whatever, maybe touring and merch can be the new one, or not.
I for one don't feel obliged to come up with a way for them to sustain the wealth of a bygone era.
Furthermore there is the complication of "likelihood of sale". If I self-promote a CD, I may not sell my needed quota of 143 albums per month. In fact for an unknown the best chance to earn cash is playing at a bar. Streaming provides a longer-term ROI AND simultaneously possibility of having "pirates" actually buy your work, which equals profit.
Furthermore new free model for spotify = less chance that an artist will get many plays as you can't listen to that song over and over.
Can someone explain how this makes the data in the infographic grossly wrong?
It has been reported later on that the amount of money paid out has increased substantially, but no hard data is given since that seems to be considered a trade secret.
Correct pricing, in an economic sense, is that which an undistorted market will bear, using whatever definition of "undistorted" you like. It's that simple.
My definition includes the absence of violence, threats of violence, or dishonesty.
If the only reason people aren't using BitTorrent downloads is threats of violence (which is what threats of internet disconnection are, albeit at several levels removed), then it isn't a free/undistorted market.
So if I wrote a program, say an iPhone app, using lots of time and creativity, but no-one wanted to buy it, do you think I should get paid for it anyway? If so, where would the money come from?
All moneys made off of one song. From 1971. Sonnofabitxch.
On the whole, I think they are. I haven't heard anyone here (or anywhere else) complain that hardly anyone bought their iPhone app that they put a lot of effort into.
I remain skeptical that programmers will be so happy to see their livelihood "disrupted" when and if it happens to the extent it's happened to artists.