A half of a dime is like 15x more than they actually pay, on average. So yeah, that would be a lot of money! But the song has over 2 billion streams on Spotify alone so even at that "low" payout rate, it's still like $7 million in royalties.
He’s from the UK so was probably just saying a small amount. I think I would have known that a dime was 10 but not that a nickel is 5.
Source: also from the UK
Half a dime is a southern saying implying something is cheap or inexpensive. Grew up hearing folks say *that ain't worth half a dime!* when implying something was cheap.
Seeing how Stewart Copeland and his family (including Police manager Miles) are all from Alabama. 'm sure Andy probably picked it up from them.
I didn't know that really? They have maybe the most interesting family of all time one the father is one of the founding members of the CIA raises the family in the Middle East amongst other places too Stuart Copeland is one of the greatest drummers of all time first with curved air than with the police not a huge fan of either band but I can appreciate them. Three miles is one of the most important and promoters of that era he promoted The Smiths the greatest band that ever was or ever will be.
Just like how people think Doc Brown's line in *Back to the Future* about the Delorean having style is a serious statement and not the joke it was meant to be because it was a piece of crap car to us folks that were around back then. Doubly so for any joke about a Delorean always straddling the lane because it's so good at following "white lines"
Yeah the car is known to be bad at car things, but it has always looked unique. 99% of style is looks. Are you sure that was a joke? Have the writers ever confirmed that?
Before there were nickels...they were called half dimes and contained no nickel metal- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half\_dime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_dime)
Both valued at 5 cents on the face but a half dime is a different coin :0 Discontinued in the USA though in the late 1800s. At the time there were both 3 and 5 cent nickels oddly enough.
Whenever I talk about money I always double the number and say "half" right before it. You don't?
How much is that shirt? "It's half 48 dollars." Haha - maybe he was thinking of 5p but wasn't sure about American money so he said half a dime? Who knows...
"Yeah but those dipshits split it four ways, I keep it all myself" - [Kid Rock](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxGNTg6_IQRSy5jKqIk39RzyU9t-dDa0OC?si=Gjc7ZtaGSlxUxxye)
I think he only played on the first single right? Now I'm wondering what ever happened to him. I can go look it up but there is something deeply unsatisfying about being able to Google something.
TIL that was originally an Insane Clown Posse beat. And the number of songwriters doesn’t mean much. It features multiple interpolations & samples, of course there were gonna be several listed songwriters. Only two people actually made the song.
Raid a garage sale and buy every 70s album you see. Dump cool sounding loops into a sequencer; name yourselves Daft Punk.
New music is built on old music in multiple ways.
That would be split amongst all members of a group right? And possibly managers, agents, producers, writers, the label, and other people involved in the process depending on contracts so his take home could actually be much much lower?
All 3 members of The Police are the lucky ones. All of them were full-grown adult men when they signed their recording contract, not gullible kids signing a bad contract.
They were also on I.R.S. Records, which was owned by Stewart Copeland’s brother Miles, who also managed them. So I’d very surprised if they didn’t have one of the best deals in the industry.
Slightly incorrect - the band was on the parent of I.R.S in A&M Records, never on that label directly. Although I believe Stewart’s Klark Kent project released under I.R.S.
Not necessarily, but it certainly opened doors for them to perform in countries that were otherwise untouchable for other bands. Places like Egypt which their father had very close ties with.
Sting was about 26 years old when he joined/formed The Police. By that time he was married, educated, played in a jazz band at night and taught school for a couple of years. Thats a far cry from a kid.
Sort of. Yes the “performance royalty” goes to the songwriter and publisher, but there are other ways that Andy Summers is likely in the loop for a cut of some form of royalties.
As a band that self-manages our catalog, and using Ditto as our digital distribution provider, we’re paid $0.006 per play on Spotify. We then split that fractional penny four ways. In case anyone was wondering, we’re absolutely laughing our way to the bank; as in laughing away the tears at our 75¢ individual quarterly checks or whatever.
Good thing we can count on making more in one night at a club with 100 people in the crowd than we’ve ever made in the nearly 10 years we’ve had songs on streaming platforms.
Real radio and publishing is where the money is. I had a song picked up by a small radio station and spun decently, didn't last long but when we got our first royalty check afterwards it was hundreds of dollars, seemed to work out to over $1 a play on certain stations
You don't have to record them but you technically get royalties when your songs are performed live. Music venues have to pay the different music associations to host live shows.
So after a live show, you send them a list of the songs you played along with the song writers, proof that the event happened along with the venue information and if all checks out then they get confirmed and you get paid (for your original compositions, if it's a cover band gig then it's just good bookkeeping)
Trial by fire my friend
(Protips: have a box full of spare cable, batteries, tape, Tylenol, etc that you just bring with your gear for emergencies. Also having a fan on stage is glorious and cheap, and looks great if you have long hair)
More than a hot second for me. "Don't you mean it looks great if the fan has long hair? ...wait, but why? Maybe for a metal band?"
Thanks for setting me straight.
No clue, honestly.
Of all our digital revenue sources, Spotify pays the least per ‘play’. Apple Music and Tidal pay significantly better, but their market share (and their artist ‘tools’) are nothing compared to what Spotify offer. As a small artist you essentially have no choice but to have your songs on Spotify, because that’s where the listeners are (statistically speaking). Traction on Spotify = traction elsewhere, unfortunately that’s only a one-way argument, as we’ve not seen traction on other services equal traction on Spotify.
Spotify has a strong market presence but if you go through a distributor you should be on more streaming platforms than just Spotify. Other platforms, (Pandora, Amazon, Apple, Soundcloud, iHeartradio,) have listenership too. People over estimate Spotify's market clout a bit.
Oh we’re on every platform; it’s just the correlation of increased streams on Spotify to increases other platforms is much stronger than the other way around, unfortunately.
I get the sentiment you’re making and not defending the terrible practices of Spotify lately (increase in monthly sub cost, paying artists less, killing car thing for no real reason) but your band has 179 monthly listeners. Of course you will never make anything through the platform and you know this, that’s why you already brought up the point of making more in a single show than 10+ years on Spotify.
It is definitely a double-edged sword. We gain more listeners and show attendees through the relatively frictionless practice of _just getting streams_. But the monetary and time cost of creating high-quality recordings for streaming is always a sunk cost. We’ll most likely never make back our studio costs from a release on streaming revenue alone.
So in our mentality, it would be rad to have thousands or millions of people listening to our songs every day, but we also know that it’s just not very probable. What we do know is that after every show, our stream volume increases across all platforms, which gets more people to shows. We’d much rather play a show than be in the studio, but we also recognize that a song with great streaming traction can equal more bodies in the venue. Ultimately, we’re happy there’s a means by which we can control what gets released, and how many slices our meager streaming revenues get cut into.
It's way easier for youtubers to get thousands of views though. Very mid channels can put out multiple videos per week each getting thousands, even tens of thousands of views. While accruing views on all their old shit.
It's extremely difficult for either a band or a YouTube channel to get to thousands per video or thousands of listens per month. BUT where the youtuber keeps pumping out videos the artist will only periodically have a release and generally wane from there.
A super small artist or a super small youtube channel will both make effectively nothing but a moderately successful band (say one that can travel the country getting gigs even if theyre not big ones) would be lucky to get more than a few thousand monthly listeners while a moderately successful youtuber is getting thousands of views per video 4-8 videos a month + old videos etc.
So it goes back to what the comment OP said where you need to make the money elsewhere. Comparing youtube CPM and spotify makes no sense unless you equate for how hard it typically is for each to get those views/listens.
People will listen to the same song over and over again. It's pretty easy to have a single person listen to your song 20 times if it's good. Good luck getting someone to watch your YouTube video 20 times.
The Youtuber has to constantly produce new content or they stop making money. A musician can put out an album every year and would probably be on the high end for number of new songs made in a year.
This is true to an extent, but most smaller musicians are going to stop making money if they stop making music, too. The Nearly Deads aren't the smallest band in the world or anything, but they are fairly small and they went a lot of years without putting out a new EP or album. They still had the occasional single, but that wasn't exactly enough to keep them relevant with the core fans of that genre.
The end result is that their new stuff is getting fuck all plays on Spotify compared to what the stuff they were putting out in the early to mid '10s was. So even if you can gain the uber fans who'll listen to one or two of your albums regularly until the end of time, it's *probably* not going to be enough to keep you making money.
So there's still that expectation that they'll keep making music the same way a YouTuber has to keep making videos. It's not a 1:1 comparison because there probably is a difference in time commitment in making two or three videos a week and making an EP or an album a year, but most of the difference has traditionally been made up by bands constantly touring.
That and a 3x a week frequency upload schedule on Youtube is a larger commitment of time than a typical artist album schedule. Not only that a youtuber can't make money from live performances unless they are already huge. A musician can.
Its a bit of a pipe dream to be a small scale digital only musician whereas as youtuber, that's all you have realistically.
I use Distrokid to distribute. So far I’ve only ever spent more than I’ve made, so my music streaming art is done at a loss. I mostly just do it so my family can have easy access to listening to my music. Never really had any other listeners. Also not really trying to find listeners. I just happen to make a lot of music that I really enjoy.
However, I did notice some people using a few of my songs on their TikTok videos. Plus, Shazam always says one of my songs gets asked about worldwide. So I’m not sure if someone else stole my song and used it somewhere, or if my song was just so generic 😂! But that gets me a few streams here and there. Enough that I’ve made about $40 in three years. I got the most from Amazon Music, strange enough. I didn’t really get into the details to know why, though.
I'm going to give you a listen, just so you can earn 1/4 of $0.006 - I like to help out my fellow redditors. If enough of us do our part, we can earn you a full penny
There used to be half dimes before they made nickels. I actually have a few in my coin collection. So maybe boomers might remember the term from listening to their grandparents when they were kids.
No, a half dime.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half\_dime](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_dime)
But yeah, a nickel. However I think Spotify pays more like 0.005
I listened to the song "Wings" by Tyketto 682 times last year, and they only made like $2.08 off of it. I watched a Beato vid, and he gave some sort of percentage that artists got from Spotify, and I just did the math.
Really kinda shitty.
Ok, but if you had bought the cd and played it over and over, it's probably about what they would have made. And in this case, they'll continue to make money when you listen to it this year or next year.
For anyone wondering what that math is - Spotify splits a portion of the subscription fees paid by the listener across the artists they listen to, and then averages it to provide the per listen number for that artist, so it’s not a flat rate. You get paid more per song if someone listens to only your music. And you would get paid even more per song if everyone listened to only your music.
What if I bought a CD just once and listened to it for the rest of my lifetime or streamed it for the rest of my life, which way would make the artists more money?
So, apparently Spotify pay at 0.004 cents per stream.
Let’s say an album is $12
That means I need to stream the album or any combination of the songs 3000 times in my lifetime.
I would say there’s a lot of artists I’ve listened to that would have gotten more money from me from streaming than buying their CD’s in the past 10 years.
I can see on last fm that my top listened to artist I listened to 2897 times in the entire of last year.
I think the artists who are worse off are the ones who prior to streaming you would have bought the cd, listened to a few times and never again.
So now you can stream them, let’s say a couple hundred times and then you’re done. Instead of making $12 from your one time purchase even though you won’t listen to them anymore, they’ve instead made like 10 cents.
> What if I bought a CD just once and listened to it for the rest of my lifetime or streamed it for the rest of my life, which way would make the artists more money?
Depends on their record deal. Some new artists make virtually nothing from their initial deals. It's that second deal where they become rich (assuming they remain relevant).
Spotify is a shitty company for multiple reasons. I hate the fact that they tried to privatize podcasts by buying up podcast companies and making the podcasts exclusive to Spotify regardless of what the podcasters actually wanted. I hate that their biggest star is a conspiracy-slewing hack. And I hate how little they pay to musicians.
If you feel bad about how little they're paying your favourite bands, choose a better streaming platform. Apple Music pays more. I'm not saying they're a perfect company or anything, but they're better than Spotify in at least those three ways.
What's even better than switching platforms is just buying merch and going to shows.
They don't make much on any streaming platforms, you'll do more good just buying a t shirt tbh.
I bought a CD for $10 and I listened to 682 tracks from it, the artist would get 1.4 cents per track played. Surely better than Spotify, but this doesn't account for any costs in actually producing the CD and getting it to the listener. And the CD will never generate more money. They more someone listens to it, the less the artist makes per play. With spotify the artist get payed every time someone listens to a song. even if they have listened to the same song 1000 times, it continues to pay the same amount every time.
Spotify is much less friction to get people to pay for listening to your music. Someone posting here has a band and I'm listening to their music right now. I wouldn't have bothered to buy their album, not really my style, but I'll listen to the music if it's on Spotify because it doesn't require actually deciding to lay out $10 to buy an album.
Just to remind people: Spotify is playing millions of different tracks simultaneously right now, to individual listeners, because those listeners chose the song. It is not a radio station that attracts people to tune in to songs that get pushed on them by playing highly attractive selective music. Anyone at all can their music on spotify. Spotify does not need anyone artist's music to keep listeners, and as such the inherent value of any single play to Spotify is undoubtedly less than whatever fraction of a cent it pays out to the artist.
Well, he's British, so it's like a few pence or something...?? Quid? I dunno, I'm too busy counting all my half-dimes and fifth-quarters from my streaming royalties... Next imma go to Canada and cash them all in for some Tooneys and head to Timmy's!
I was curious, of the top 500 most played tracks on Spotify, they total 816 billion listens, or roughly 450 million listens per day. For perspective, Blinding Lights by the Weeknd has 4.3 billion total plays, 1.9 million per day, or roughly 0.5% of traffic.
Spotify's total revenue for 2023 was $14.3 billion, or ~$40 million per day, so any individual play is less than $0.09 of revenue. Spotify has a profit margin of ~5%, so any individual play is worth less than ~$0.004.
A half of a dime is like 15x more than they actually pay, on average. So yeah, that would be a lot of money! But the song has over 2 billion streams on Spotify alone so even at that "low" payout rate, it's still like $7 million in royalties.
> A half of a dime Also often known as a nickel. Are we not talking about this? What a weird way for him to refer to five cents.
He’s from the UK so was probably just saying a small amount. I think I would have known that a dime was 10 but not that a nickel is 5. Source: also from the UK
Fifty Kroner. How much is that?!!
He lived in the USA in the late 60's, Laurel Canyon I think
Lives in Beverly Hills now.
He was actually in the animals The bandited House of the rising Sun not the original lineup but one of the lineups
If I had a half a dime for every time someone refers to a nickle this way...
You'd have a Fifth of a Quarter?
Twentieth of a dollar.
Now *that* is Bogart energy.
You mean a fifth of two and a half dimes
No, its 2 tenths of a quarter
2/5 of a Bit.
... Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice!
Give me my Nickelback
Badum tss.
When we used to tie an onion to our belts, everyone said this.
Of course. That was the fashion at the time.
I calculate my royalties in bits
Half a dime is a southern saying implying something is cheap or inexpensive. Grew up hearing folks say *that ain't worth half a dime!* when implying something was cheap. Seeing how Stewart Copeland and his family (including Police manager Miles) are all from Alabama. 'm sure Andy probably picked it up from them.
Southern guy here, and I have heard half a nickel, because that's not already a coin, but have never heard half a dime.
I'm born and raised in Kentucky. I've heard half a dime from the older folks in their 70s or 80s. Mostly likely from before my time.
https://www.coinworld.com/voices/gerald-tebben/2_cents_of_course.html Quarties apparently
I didn't know that really? They have maybe the most interesting family of all time one the father is one of the founding members of the CIA raises the family in the Middle East amongst other places too Stuart Copeland is one of the greatest drummers of all time first with curved air than with the police not a huge fan of either band but I can appreciate them. Three miles is one of the most important and promoters of that era he promoted The Smiths the greatest band that ever was or ever will be.
So if they gave him a dime, he’d have to give them a Nickelback?
GTFO
Screw you. Look at this photograph. LOOK AT THIS PHOTOGRAPH!!
You dick - Spicoli
This is slowly becoming a reality with inflation. One day people won’t get the joke
Don't worry, AI-duped Ron Howard will awkwardly drop a new line.
Just like how people think Doc Brown's line in *Back to the Future* about the Delorean having style is a serious statement and not the joke it was meant to be because it was a piece of crap car to us folks that were around back then. Doubly so for any joke about a Delorean always straddling the lane because it's so good at following "white lines"
Yeah the car is known to be bad at car things, but it has always looked unique. 99% of style is looks. Are you sure that was a joke? Have the writers ever confirmed that?
Two bees for a quarter, that’s what we would always say.
What do you think 5 cent pieces were called, before they were made out of nickel?
Gimme five bees for a quarter you’d say.
So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.
All right you beat me to it. I was scrolling down hoping nobody threw that out there but you did.
I'm 49, and even *I'm* not old enough to care what anyone called a 5 cent piece in the 19th century.
You think 49 is old? Child, please.
*pssst everyone here besides us three is 12*
5 cents?
Two Fifths of a Bit.
Isn't that a common phrase? Like it's only worth a dime, but maybe not even half a dime. At least it wasn't weird to me as non native speaker.
Before there were nickels...they were called half dimes and contained no nickel metal- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half\_dime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_dime)
Gimme five bees for a quarter
He's British.
Well he’s not American so it’s all gibberish to us.
Both valued at 5 cents on the face but a half dime is a different coin :0 Discontinued in the USA though in the late 1800s. At the time there were both 3 and 5 cent nickels oddly enough.
And back in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say...
Whenever I talk about money I always double the number and say "half" right before it. You don't? How much is that shirt? "It's half 48 dollars." Haha - maybe he was thinking of 5p but wasn't sure about American money so he said half a dime? Who knows...
Like half a million sounds better than 500K
U whut guvnah? Half a dime that's easy a shilling.
Ha correct. Are you a coin collector.
A half a dime is like a joint or two.
True nickelback haters refer to them this way
I’ll take half a dime and you can have a Nickelback.
Isn’t he British? I’m impressed he even knows what a dime is!
"Yeah but those dipshits split it four ways, I keep it all myself" - [Kid Rock](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxGNTg6_IQRSy5jKqIk39RzyU9t-dDa0OC?si=Gjc7ZtaGSlxUxxye)
Shows what Rock knows. The Police are a trio.
It’s also Steve-O’s quote, and in reference to *NSYNC
Maybe I got wooshed, but aren’t there *five* members of *NSYNC
It’s in reference to Metallica.
Yeah, it’s a joke. Not my best work, but dropped into a casual conversation, It would’ve gotten a chuckle, I think.
"I bet they're not even real police."
If they were real police, kid rock would be at the head of the line to polish their boots.
“Hey, guys, wanna go shoot some Bud Light cans?” ~Kid Rock
Unless you count the original guitarist
If he got a cut of their earnings that would be impressive
I think he only played on the first single right? Now I'm wondering what ever happened to him. I can go look it up but there is something deeply unsatisfying about being able to Google something.
When you write a hit, just make sure to dub it over Sweet home Alabama instead of paying a band. 400 IQ
Eight songwriters are credited on "All Summer Long": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Summer_Long_(Kid_Rock_song)#Composition
TIL that was originally an Insane Clown Posse beat. And the number of songwriters doesn’t mean much. It features multiple interpolations & samples, of course there were gonna be several listed songwriters. Only two people actually made the song.
Raid a garage sale and buy every 70s album you see. Dump cool sounding loops into a sequencer; name yourselves Daft Punk. New music is built on old music in multiple ways.
I always felt there was some Werewolfs of London in there as well.
I mean, the intro and the verse is Werewolves of London, the pre-chorus and chorus is Sweet Home Alabama.
Motherfucker is using 2 bands and paying neither He's solved the music industry
He definitely paid them.
Just let me be mad at kid rock, ok
At current rates it's about $5 million. At next year's rates that'd be about $3 million.
That would be split amongst all members of a group right? And possibly managers, agents, producers, writers, the label, and other people involved in the process depending on contracts so his take home could actually be much much lower?
“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost? 10 dollars?”
So what, should the guy with 2 billion streams worry about 5 cents? Come on!
Bad news Andy… if you get half a penny you’ll be among the luckiest on the whole platform.
Sting would be the lucky one. Andy Summers didn’t get a songwriting credit, despite creating that guitar line.
He also gets them all from the P Diddy song too IIRC
I wonder how volatile that number is these days
Performance royalties count too.
All 3 members of The Police are the lucky ones. All of them were full-grown adult men when they signed their recording contract, not gullible kids signing a bad contract.
They were also on I.R.S. Records, which was owned by Stewart Copeland’s brother Miles, who also managed them. So I’d very surprised if they didn’t have one of the best deals in the industry.
Slightly incorrect - the band was on the parent of I.R.S in A&M Records, never on that label directly. Although I believe Stewart’s Klark Kent project released under I.R.S.
Their dad was also one of the founding members of the CIA. Which also helped them quite a lot during their career.
So the CIA and IRS were funding The Police?
Not necessarily, but it certainly opened doors for them to perform in countries that were otherwise untouchable for other bands. Places like Egypt which their father had very close ties with.
Damn TIL
Yeah, Andy Summers was 36 or so. Probably good for them having someone older in the band
Sting was about 26 years old when he joined/formed The Police. By that time he was married, educated, played in a jazz band at night and taught school for a couple of years. Thats a far cry from a kid.
Yes of course, they were all experienced but Andy had over a decade of working in music
Sort of. Yes the “performance royalty” goes to the songwriter and publisher, but there are other ways that Andy Summers is likely in the loop for a cut of some form of royalties.
I’m not certain but probably has a point for performing. Not as much but still a good chunk for a big song like that
Stingy strikes again!
https://preview.redd.it/9rd4tegb4n3d1.jpeg?width=400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6356a6fa3c69be1e91208a650d94b47f31784363 .
CHTST
Andy, I’ve got really bad news for you.
As a band that self-manages our catalog, and using Ditto as our digital distribution provider, we’re paid $0.006 per play on Spotify. We then split that fractional penny four ways. In case anyone was wondering, we’re absolutely laughing our way to the bank; as in laughing away the tears at our 75¢ individual quarterly checks or whatever. Good thing we can count on making more in one night at a club with 100 people in the crowd than we’ve ever made in the nearly 10 years we’ve had songs on streaming platforms.
Real radio and publishing is where the money is. I had a song picked up by a small radio station and spun decently, didn't last long but when we got our first royalty check afterwards it was hundreds of dollars, seemed to work out to over $1 a play on certain stations
Yeah, mechanicals are where it’s at, and just a hard hurdle to jump over.
Yup, don't forget to record and report all your set lists too! Those royalties seem trivial but add up nicely if you play a lot
What function does recording and reporting your set lists serve?
You don't have to record them but you technically get royalties when your songs are performed live. Music venues have to pay the different music associations to host live shows. So after a live show, you send them a list of the songs you played along with the song writers, proof that the event happened along with the venue information and if all checks out then they get confirmed and you get paid (for your original compositions, if it's a cover band gig then it's just good bookkeeping)
But the writers of the songs you covered get paid when you report it so it's still good karma.
Yeah, we’re definitely getting better at this than we used to.
Trial by fire my friend (Protips: have a box full of spare cable, batteries, tape, Tylenol, etc that you just bring with your gear for emergencies. Also having a fan on stage is glorious and cheap, and looks great if you have long hair)
I was so confused for a hot second because I was thinking different "fan".
More than a hot second for me. "Don't you mean it looks great if the fan has long hair? ...wait, but why? Maybe for a metal band?" Thanks for setting me straight.
How many plays do you get a quarter?
Our *real* answer is almost always going to be, "not enough." But we're averaging around 100 listeners/month on Spotify and gradually growing.
I mean, how much do you expect to get paid then? 500 plays netting $3 isn't great, but what do you think is fair then?
No clue, honestly. Of all our digital revenue sources, Spotify pays the least per ‘play’. Apple Music and Tidal pay significantly better, but their market share (and their artist ‘tools’) are nothing compared to what Spotify offer. As a small artist you essentially have no choice but to have your songs on Spotify, because that’s where the listeners are (statistically speaking). Traction on Spotify = traction elsewhere, unfortunately that’s only a one-way argument, as we’ve not seen traction on other services equal traction on Spotify.
I'll throw a few listens on Apple Music for you now.
Thanks for the love! Every little bit helps. Hope you enjoy the songs (and no worries if you don’t).
Spotify has a strong market presence but if you go through a distributor you should be on more streaming platforms than just Spotify. Other platforms, (Pandora, Amazon, Apple, Soundcloud, iHeartradio,) have listenership too. People over estimate Spotify's market clout a bit.
Oh we’re on every platform; it’s just the correlation of increased streams on Spotify to increases other platforms is much stronger than the other way around, unfortunately.
Is Blurcurve the bands name? I'll have to check you guys out.
Yeah. There are pretty strict self-promotion rules on the sub, but we've got links to songs on our profile.
I get the sentiment you’re making and not defending the terrible practices of Spotify lately (increase in monthly sub cost, paying artists less, killing car thing for no real reason) but your band has 179 monthly listeners. Of course you will never make anything through the platform and you know this, that’s why you already brought up the point of making more in a single show than 10+ years on Spotify.
It is definitely a double-edged sword. We gain more listeners and show attendees through the relatively frictionless practice of _just getting streams_. But the monetary and time cost of creating high-quality recordings for streaming is always a sunk cost. We’ll most likely never make back our studio costs from a release on streaming revenue alone. So in our mentality, it would be rad to have thousands or millions of people listening to our songs every day, but we also know that it’s just not very probable. What we do know is that after every show, our stream volume increases across all platforms, which gets more people to shows. We’d much rather play a show than be in the studio, but we also recognize that a song with great streaming traction can equal more bodies in the venue. Ultimately, we’re happy there’s a means by which we can control what gets released, and how many slices our meager streaming revenues get cut into.
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It's way easier for youtubers to get thousands of views though. Very mid channels can put out multiple videos per week each getting thousands, even tens of thousands of views. While accruing views on all their old shit. It's extremely difficult for either a band or a YouTube channel to get to thousands per video or thousands of listens per month. BUT where the youtuber keeps pumping out videos the artist will only periodically have a release and generally wane from there. A super small artist or a super small youtube channel will both make effectively nothing but a moderately successful band (say one that can travel the country getting gigs even if theyre not big ones) would be lucky to get more than a few thousand monthly listeners while a moderately successful youtuber is getting thousands of views per video 4-8 videos a month + old videos etc. So it goes back to what the comment OP said where you need to make the money elsewhere. Comparing youtube CPM and spotify makes no sense unless you equate for how hard it typically is for each to get those views/listens.
People will listen to the same song over and over again. It's pretty easy to have a single person listen to your song 20 times if it's good. Good luck getting someone to watch your YouTube video 20 times. The Youtuber has to constantly produce new content or they stop making money. A musician can put out an album every year and would probably be on the high end for number of new songs made in a year.
This is true to an extent, but most smaller musicians are going to stop making money if they stop making music, too. The Nearly Deads aren't the smallest band in the world or anything, but they are fairly small and they went a lot of years without putting out a new EP or album. They still had the occasional single, but that wasn't exactly enough to keep them relevant with the core fans of that genre. The end result is that their new stuff is getting fuck all plays on Spotify compared to what the stuff they were putting out in the early to mid '10s was. So even if you can gain the uber fans who'll listen to one or two of your albums regularly until the end of time, it's *probably* not going to be enough to keep you making money. So there's still that expectation that they'll keep making music the same way a YouTuber has to keep making videos. It's not a 1:1 comparison because there probably is a difference in time commitment in making two or three videos a week and making an EP or an album a year, but most of the difference has traditionally been made up by bands constantly touring.
That and a 3x a week frequency upload schedule on Youtube is a larger commitment of time than a typical artist album schedule. Not only that a youtuber can't make money from live performances unless they are already huge. A musician can. Its a bit of a pipe dream to be a small scale digital only musician whereas as youtuber, that's all you have realistically.
I use Distrokid to distribute. So far I’ve only ever spent more than I’ve made, so my music streaming art is done at a loss. I mostly just do it so my family can have easy access to listening to my music. Never really had any other listeners. Also not really trying to find listeners. I just happen to make a lot of music that I really enjoy. However, I did notice some people using a few of my songs on their TikTok videos. Plus, Shazam always says one of my songs gets asked about worldwide. So I’m not sure if someone else stole my song and used it somewhere, or if my song was just so generic 😂! But that gets me a few streams here and there. Enough that I’ve made about $40 in three years. I got the most from Amazon Music, strange enough. I didn’t really get into the details to know why, though.
Hell yes. Nicely done!
I'm going to give you a listen, just so you can earn 1/4 of $0.006 - I like to help out my fellow redditors. If enough of us do our part, we can earn you a full penny
Man if we had a fraction of a penny for every time someone said that….
Every dime you takeeeeeeeeeee
So... like a nickel, then? Who says "half a dime?"
They used to have a picture of a bumblebee on them. Give me 5 bees for a quarter, you'd say.
Someone who isn’t American like Andy Summers?
There used to be half dimes before they made nickels. I actually have a few in my coin collection. So maybe boomers might remember the term from listening to their grandparents when they were kids.
No, a half dime. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half\_dime](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_dime) But yeah, a nickel. However I think Spotify pays more like 0.005
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five millidollars
Boss makes half a dollar, I make half a dime. That’s why I shit my pants on half company time.
yeah..... but do you really want a nickel... back?
That must sting
I listened to the song "Wings" by Tyketto 682 times last year, and they only made like $2.08 off of it. I watched a Beato vid, and he gave some sort of percentage that artists got from Spotify, and I just did the math. Really kinda shitty.
Ok, but if you had bought the cd and played it over and over, it's probably about what they would have made. And in this case, they'll continue to make money when you listen to it this year or next year.
For anyone wondering what that math is - Spotify splits a portion of the subscription fees paid by the listener across the artists they listen to, and then averages it to provide the per listen number for that artist, so it’s not a flat rate. You get paid more per song if someone listens to only your music. And you would get paid even more per song if everyone listened to only your music.
What if I bought a CD just once and listened to it for the rest of my lifetime or streamed it for the rest of my life, which way would make the artists more money?
Eventually streaming it would, but it would take a LOT of streams.
So, apparently Spotify pay at 0.004 cents per stream. Let’s say an album is $12 That means I need to stream the album or any combination of the songs 3000 times in my lifetime. I would say there’s a lot of artists I’ve listened to that would have gotten more money from me from streaming than buying their CD’s in the past 10 years. I can see on last fm that my top listened to artist I listened to 2897 times in the entire of last year. I think the artists who are worse off are the ones who prior to streaming you would have bought the cd, listened to a few times and never again. So now you can stream them, let’s say a couple hundred times and then you’re done. Instead of making $12 from your one time purchase even though you won’t listen to them anymore, they’ve instead made like 10 cents.
> What if I bought a CD just once and listened to it for the rest of my lifetime or streamed it for the rest of my life, which way would make the artists more money? Depends on their record deal. Some new artists make virtually nothing from their initial deals. It's that second deal where they become rich (assuming they remain relevant).
Spotify is a shitty company for multiple reasons. I hate the fact that they tried to privatize podcasts by buying up podcast companies and making the podcasts exclusive to Spotify regardless of what the podcasters actually wanted. I hate that their biggest star is a conspiracy-slewing hack. And I hate how little they pay to musicians. If you feel bad about how little they're paying your favourite bands, choose a better streaming platform. Apple Music pays more. I'm not saying they're a perfect company or anything, but they're better than Spotify in at least those three ways.
What's even better than switching platforms is just buying merch and going to shows. They don't make much on any streaming platforms, you'll do more good just buying a t shirt tbh.
True. Why not both?
I bought a CD for $10 and I listened to 682 tracks from it, the artist would get 1.4 cents per track played. Surely better than Spotify, but this doesn't account for any costs in actually producing the CD and getting it to the listener. And the CD will never generate more money. They more someone listens to it, the less the artist makes per play. With spotify the artist get payed every time someone listens to a song. even if they have listened to the same song 1000 times, it continues to pay the same amount every time. Spotify is much less friction to get people to pay for listening to your music. Someone posting here has a band and I'm listening to their music right now. I wouldn't have bothered to buy their album, not really my style, but I'll listen to the music if it's on Spotify because it doesn't require actually deciding to lay out $10 to buy an album.
The artist makes like $2.00 from a $10.00 CD sale though
0.07c per track
Pretty sure Andy Summer never got even a dime in royalties ever for this song let alone from Spotify.
Just to remind people: Spotify is playing millions of different tracks simultaneously right now, to individual listeners, because those listeners chose the song. It is not a radio station that attracts people to tune in to songs that get pushed on them by playing highly attractive selective music. Anyone at all can their music on spotify. Spotify does not need anyone artist's music to keep listeners, and as such the inherent value of any single play to Spotify is undoubtedly less than whatever fraction of a cent it pays out to the artist.
Dawg you’re getting .004 per trillion plays relax
I saw Snoop moaning that he made “only” 40K off of 1 billion streams
He should look into that. At the standard rate of $0.003 per play, he should have made $3 milllion. Someone is skimming too much of his money.
I’ll pass it on to him
While it’s a good amount of money, that is still incredibly low for the streams
Mirror: https://archive.ph/xV7eh
Who wants to tell him?
Half a dime!. Bro it's your money. Figure it out and divide that guess by a factor of 100.
Well, he's British, so it's like a few pence or something...?? Quid? I dunno, I'm too busy counting all my half-dimes and fifth-quarters from my streaming royalties... Next imma go to Canada and cash them all in for some Tooneys and head to Timmy's!
A nickle?
Half a dime, that’s so adorable lol
Half a dime? Could be a useful currency amount. They should look into making that
Half of a dime is a pretty weird way to describe one-fifth of a quarter.
it's about a fifth of a penny per stream. 2 billion streams is about $40,000
Too bad it's not even close to half a dime
‘Half a dime’… is that like ‘One Fifth of a quarter’?
Half a dime, fucking Jeff Bezos over here.
Mr. Summers is 81 and not American. Cut him some slack on all this.
I’ll give you a whole dime for King of pain. Every breath you take a couple cents max
It’s not even close to half a dime for every play
I was curious, of the top 500 most played tracks on Spotify, they total 816 billion listens, or roughly 450 million listens per day. For perspective, Blinding Lights by the Weeknd has 4.3 billion total plays, 1.9 million per day, or roughly 0.5% of traffic. Spotify's total revenue for 2023 was $14.3 billion, or ~$40 million per day, so any individual play is less than $0.09 of revenue. Spotify has a profit margin of ~5%, so any individual play is worth less than ~$0.004.
Can you imagine if The Police announced a reunion tour. In 2025. What the fuck would that look like