There is currently massive debate surrounding the potential for musicians to make money out of their recorded music. A lot of commentators are now pointing at the live concert market as an artist’s main money earner with their recorded work reduced merely to an advertisement to be given away as free advertising.
The introduction of music streaming websites like Spotify that pay the artists ‘per play’ was meant to introduce another stream of revenue for artists and labels but in reality they have seen little of the advertising and subscription money generated. This week it transpired that Lady Gaga got paid a paltry £108 for over a million plays of ‘Poker Face’ on Spotify!
David McCandless at InformationisBeautilful.net has illustrated the challenges facing musicians with this graphical representation of how many CDs/internet plays it takes an artist to earn the US average wage. For the data sources and the full article visit How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online? | Information Is Beautiful.
As the graphic shows, compared to selling CDs at gigs the revenue from streaming is virtually pointless and I think it further emphases how important it is really focus on doing incredible live shows and offering your audience some really solid music and merchandising items to take away with them after the show.
Steve Lawson makes the astute point in this article asking DO musicians earn online? that in many ways streaming and CD sales should not be compared because they are actually part of a cause and effect cycle. Spotify streams shouldn’t be regarded as a revenue generator but as a method for fans to discover you and then come to your gigs & buy your album. Certainly music discovery has been at the heart of sites like Spotify and Last.fm and was even what initially drove the MySpace boom. How to turn that discovery into an income stream that you can live off remains a huge challenge that I think can be different for each individual artist and is as much down to hard work and perseverance as it is about producing music that connects with people.
UPDATE: Really good reply to the initial graphic and great discussion in the comments from Bruce Warila at Music Think Tank.
