I have 2 questions for you:
1) How much, exactly, should an artist get paid per stream of a song?
2) Please tell me exactly what you would be willing to pay per stream, no subscription, just a la carte.
Apple Music Reveals How Much It Pays Artists Per Stream
How much do artists make while you rock out to their songs? Apple revealed the answer.www.makeuseof.com
From the services standpoint: Assuming the above article is correct, copyright holders get .01 per stream. If Apple charges 10.99/mo a user can stream 1099 songs a month for a break even on your subscription. Apple of course is losing money on that because they handle all the backend and the service. If you listen to Apple Music all your waking hours, 16 hours times 60 is 960 potential listening minutes in a day and lets say the average song is 3.5 minutes... 960/3.5 is 274 songs a day. Your monthly "allotment" based on the sub cost would be used up in approximately 4 days. Or if you just take 1099 songs a month divided by 30 days your "allotment" is 36.6 songs a day.
From the artists standpoint: They could sell a song for 1.29 (current cost of Today's Hits on iTunes store). By the time profits from that amount hit the artist... I'm gonna spitball it at .30, I have no idea but it seems reasonable by the time everyone gets their cut. Remember, Apple, Spotify, etc are not responsible for the ills of the music industry.
OR
They can hope that everyone just "rents" music forever. I think the artist wins in the streaming scenario, even at Spotify compensation.
So back to my first question. Based on the subscription costs and how that pays out, how much should an artist get for a single stream? More importantly, are you willing to pay a higher subscription cost to accommodate that? Even if you are willing to pay it, will the average user pay it?
It's easy to say "pay XXX person more" but that money comes from somewhere.
I don't claim to have all the answers here, but a long time ago, I did play in a local band and we put out a couple albums locally/regionally. So I've been on that side of the equation before.
First off? I really think the artists all tend to lose in the streaming music era. That's the real reason you hear so much complaining about lack of compensation. The business model itself doesn't really work to pay them anywhere near the actual value of the work they're producing. Part of the problem is that it changed the entire music listening/purchasing experience. Before the streaming era, there was more of a collective sense that you were "buying the music you liked". Yes, we know the recording industry insisted that was totally incorrect and you were simply buying the right to listen to the songs/albums as often as you wanted, on the physical media they provided them on, until it wore out or got damaged or what-not. And you weren't allowed to play it in a commercial setting without paying additional royalties. But for the general public, they were "buying the albums", as far as they were concerned. They paid the asking price and got to take a physical product home, complete with liner notes and some cool artwork. They could play it on any device they wished that could read the media, and they could even make copies of it for friends (whether legal or not). That whole "ecosystem" for music drove a LOT of people to happily pay $18.99 or so for a new CD, even back 30 years ago or so when that $18.99 went a lot further than it does today.
Streaming caused everyone think of music as a commodity you buy "in bulk". You don't want to pay much for any single album or track because you don't get to own it at all anymore. There's nothing physical to store on your shelf. A given song could disappear at any time if the service decides to stop streaming it, and you have no control over it. It's also limited by requirements like having a good data connection, or taking extra steps to download the songs for temporary offline play in advance if you know you want to listen to them later. (And again, if you do that, it's only for play on that one device, subject to your digital rights approval it grants you when it sees your subscription is current.)
And while one could argue you ALWAYS had radio streaming the music to people at no cost to them? They had zero say-so in choosing to listen to specific songs at specific times. Calling in and begging a DJ to play a song was the best you could do. And obviously, it was all funded by the commercials you had to put up with. On top of that, though? People used to rely on the radio as kind of a "purchasing guide". People bought most of their albums after deciding they liked at least one or two songs from it that were getting played repeatedly on the radio. Streaming pretty much negates the value that once had for musicians, because few streaming users will listen to a specific album's music so many times, it more than covers what they would have paid to own it on cassette or CD in the past.
Secondly, streaming music makes it really easy for people to listen to *anything* out there. This one's a double-edged sword. On one hand, I like the fact it opens people's minds. I think you have more listeners today who will tell you they listen to multiple genres of music (say Country, R&B, classic rock and heavy metal) than you ever did decades ago. But the downside is, it dilutes things so you get all these listeners who listen, scatter-shot, to a wide variety of tracks while streaming music for a few hours. But that means they're not listening to YOUR music for as many plays, as a given musician. When they had to pay the $10-20 to own your physical album, they were listening to it a lot and forming more of a loyalty to that genre/type of music. So end result? Lots of artists making a few pennies here and a few there, instead of having large groups of "followers" of the type of music specific artists created, who kept buying and playing those tracks as the majority of what they listened to.
