With Company’s like Spotify pushing for streamed music for a monthly fee instead of an upfront fee to download the song. The question how much does an artist make from the stream and how many streams does it take to break even.
But how does this ‘stream rental’ framework look on the other side of the coin, to the artist? Figuring out just how lucrative streaming services like Spotify or Apple’s iTunes Match cloud feature, which streams you songs you already own from the cloud, is tough. Mostly, that’s because there is a lack of transparency from both parties. The artists are at times reluctant to share numbers and the streaming services don’t want those deals exposed either.
So here are some interesting numbers shared today by Josh Davison of Centro about streaming revenue garnered from his band Parks and Gardens on both Spotify and iTunes Match. They shed what I feel is an interesting and harsh spotlight on just how little each song play nets him just under 1/3 of a cent when streamed from Apple’s cloud music service and slightly more than that from Spotify:
So Parks and Gardens would need to see over 3 plays for any song to get them a cent of revenue from a song on iTunes Match. And they already pay distribution service TuneCore $50 a year just to get their music out there on these services. So they need over 15,127 plays of their songs to break even on distributing them alone. The number is better on Spotify, where they’d need to see 5,171 plays. TuneCore takes no slice of their sales.
The difference between iTunes Match and Spotify, of course, is that iTunes Match earnings are a bonus being earned on top of an outright purchase of the song. Once a user has purchased the song and a user subscribes to iTunes Match, they’re allowed to stream that song from the cloud.
[Thenextweb]
