Boards
Lower Dens on how little they earn from $potify vs Vinyl
http://lowerdens.tumblr.com/post/34308869231/on-spotify-and-music-consumption
Some interesting thoughts. This is basically the crux of it
'' We shouldn’t have everything we want all the time, not in music or anything else. The only reason we do have that relationship to music right now is because we’re taking advantage of technology and a lack of regulation. It makes sense. If that technology did the same thing for food or shelter, we’d be talking about that. Don’t tell me though that this is a consumer-dictated market; it’s this way because we’re taking advantage of it, not because we thought up and implemented a good way of doing things. Like I said before, just cause it’s so doesn’t make it right.''
And some stats:
A common independent deal is the 50/50 deal, wherein a label pays for everything up front, and then recoups (takes back via profits) their costs, after you which you and your label split the remaining profits. If your record costs $40k, and your record makes $100k, you get $30k. If Spotify paid you for an equivalent amount of plays on their paid subscription service, you’d get $1250.
—————————————————————————————————————-
Some statistics on how streaming, digital and physical sales compare:
In the US, ITunes pays the artist AND label $0.70 per song dowload. They then divide that according to the artist’s contract.
Streaming Price Index : Current Streaming Pay Rates as of 12/31/11
Payable to Artist/Label via digital distributor for sales from Jul to Dec 2011 *
[This is the equation: (# of plays) = (total $ paid) / (cents per play)]
Rhapsody
50,822 = $668.57 / .013 [53:1 Itunes Song Download]
Spotify
798,783 = $4,277.39 / .005 [140:1 Itunes Song Download]
* these figures are from an independent catalog of 87 albums / 1,280 Songs - BEFORE the distributor’s cut/fee.
By the way, these stats only account for plays on the Spotify paid subscription service. Plays from ad-funded streams pay more like .0009 cents. Numbers for every artist are different, I think, and I don’t know what ours are. But I looked around and found other peoples’ numbers and have a general idea.
Here’s an estimate of what happens to 5k of our albums, illegally downloaded, streamed in free Spotify, streamed in paid Spotify, bought digitally, and bought physically.
Illegally downloaded - $0
Streamed (free, ad-funded, 20 plays from 5k ppl) - $900
Streamed (paid subscription, 20 plays from 5k ppl) - $2500
Digital purchase (averaged; $1/album) - $5000
Physical purchase (averaged; $3/album) - $15000
That might happen for us over the course of a year. In fact, if does, we think we’re doing pretty good.
Five of us made the record. We pay a manager. For a year, in this scenario, each one of us gets this:
Illegally downloaded - $0
Streamed (free, ad-funded) - $153
Streamed (paid subscription) - $425
Digital purchase (averaged) - $850
Physical purchase (averaged) - $2550
Take from that what you will. Also, bare this in mind: we might sell 10k records a year. According to last.fm, we have about 100k listeners. How many of you use last.fm?