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Spotify made £56m profit, but has decided not to pay smaller artists like me. We need you to make some noise | Damon Krukowski (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If you want to do the maths, the maximum one can possibly earn in Spotify royalties is $0.003 a stream. It doesn’t add up to a living wage for most artists.

And now, to make matters far worse, starting in 2024 Spotify will stop paying anything at all for roughly two-thirds of tracks on the platform. That is any track receiving fewer than 1,000 streams over the period of a year.

Honestly, does the 1k floor matter much? Based on the above text, the most that such a track can possibly make is $3/year. It's a safe bet that most aren't sitting right at 999 views and the maximum revenue per track; most are probably well below that. I have a hard time seeing someone caring much about that.

I'm not saying that there isn't possibly some kind of business model for which a track making $1/year or something this might make sense (massive numbers of cheap machine-generated tracks targeting very specific tastes, that all get a few views each). But for conventionally-produced music, I think that if you're making a song that's generating 50 cents or 10 cents a year or something, it's basically not on your radar financially.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

There's bands I listen to that have <10 monthly listeners. They still deserve their $3 a year IMO.