Fixing everything, really slowly

Regular readers will note my interest in how much artists get paid for their music. Essentially I’d like to see total transparency and realistic options for musicians to make it big without signing to a major record label.

This is just an uninformed ideal of mine, so I was really interested to find this article about the prices musicians are paid for online music streaming.

It seems we have a long long way to go:

We7 does indeed pay the 0.085p per stream rate that the PRS set. I ask him why, according to their press release, 1m streams can generate anything from £2,000 to £4,000. Is it because different record labels have different deals with We7?

“Yes, the range is indicative of unsigned artists (but registered with the PRS), small labels through to significant labels,” Purdham said. “Most of the music on We7 is popular music so on average we tend to pay at the higher rate of the scale.” In other words, songs by major-label artists get a higher per-stream rate (this does not apply to songwriters, however).

via Behind the music: We7′s streaming success | Music | guardian.co.uk.

I’ve not used we7, but I am a big user of spotify and last.fm. I thought it would be interesting to work out how much revenue I might have given to some of my favourite artists assuming they’d been paid 0.085p per track and they were all streamed online. Neither of these assumptions are true but these days I’m almost exclusively using spotify so it’s an interesting statistic.

Since October 2006 I’ve been logging most of the music I’ve played through last.fm. I’ve played 36438 tracks since then. You can view what I’ve played here. At 0.085p per track that would be 3097.23p or £30.97. A CD might have 12 tracks so thats roughly 1p per album to the artist each time I play the record.

That seems a pretty small, but really it’s very hard to tell if that is better or worse than the traditional model of CD’s and radio play. A key advantage of internet music technology is it should enable much greater transparency around pricing. But it just isn’t happening. I think less people would buy from iTunes or stream from Spotify if they knew how much the middlemen were making compared to the artists. I guess this is why the pricing discussed openly …