Back to torrenting I guess. If I’m not mistaken snoop said he made 45k off 1 billion plays. Thats ridiculous
ansc's number was $4 per thousand plays.
Your number is $3 per thousand plays.
It sounds like you basically agree with ansc. While Spotify might be cheap, that cheapness is not the problem Snoop is having.
You say: $450 / 150,000 = $0.003 per streamed track.
The two sets of numbers don't seem so far apart that the discrepancy cannot be explained by rounding errors.
A very rough global average per-stream payout is often estimated at around $0.003 to $0.005. That brings the payout for 1 billion streams between $3,000,000 and $5,000,000. Let's go with the lower end. This is actual money paid out by Spotify for 1 billion streams, as in, a bank transfer of $3,000,000.
How do you get from there to $45,000?
- As with any legacy artist, the record label gets most (maybe 70%). Why that is, oh well. It's less shocking if you think of the label as an employer and how little an average employee gets compared to what they produce. Do you need an employer? Absolutely not. Do you need a record label? Absolutely not. Anyway, a 70% cut would leave the artist with $900,000.
- Expenses: There are various costs associated with producing, distributing, and promoting music, hotel costs. Let your imagination run wild. Safe to say: This is a black hole, depending on how you want the process to look. If Snoop wants to sit in a big studio for months, he pays prices, for month, but that's not required to make music. Renting a high end studio on end is lifestyle. Sure, it's an expense, but it's like complaining about your profit while driving a Porsche. Awkward. Let's assume a 20% deduction here, reducing the revenue to $720,000.
- Focus on Publishing Royalties: Publishing royalties are just one part of the total royalties an artist earns. So there's quite a bit of double accounting going on if you want to pretend that the above costs are all deducted from your Spotify income.
If we assume publishing royalties make up only 10% of the total, that brings the figure down to $72,000.
- tldr: Snoop is living the big life, confused about money, and then proceeds to confuse others about money.
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/s...
The business has changed since streaming and self publishing but the labels took bets on artists and gave them expensive recording studios and marketing dollars, gave them some basic money, and in return took the majority of rights to the first few albums.
They also knew that if the artist truly made it big they would likely go to a different label where they could get better terms or start their own where they’d keep all the money after the initial contract which drove their side higher.
The record label model clearly doesn’t work as well in modern days but it was successful for good reasons at the time it really flourished.
Or just buy it on bandcamp friday and give it all to the artists :)