Radio play is actually one of the biggest earners for Artists in America. The radio stations pay a much higher rate than streaming services as well as royalties to writers which the streaming services are behind on.

Maybe he should have saved some of that drug money. But, whining is easier for Hollywood morons.

– The per-stream rate alone is really not a good indicator of what streaming services are actually paying out. In most cases, it is determined by taking a pool of money (usually a percentage of subscription or advertising revenue earned in a given period), and dividing that pool of money by the number of streams in that period. A typical user pays $10 per month. That user may listen to music on the service for an hour that month, or a hundred hours, but either way, they’re paying $10. The more time people spend listening to music on the service, the lower the per play rate is. A high per-play rate doesn’t mean that the service is paying out a lot of money. It means that its users aren’t using the service as often as others.

With that said, subscription services do pay a hell of a lot more than advertising-based services. I think it’s important to have advertising-based services, provided that those services are non-interactive in nature. The real problem is UGC services (YouTube, SoundCloud) and the ineffective safe harbor provisions that allow them to make music available interactively for free. While there is certainly promotional value for making limited content available there, they need to be reigned in so they’re not giving away the whole farm for free. Those articles that the EU are considering would help in that regard.

– The number 1,000,000 has historically been a magic number in the music industry. You sell that many albums, your album has just gone platinum, and you’re possibly making a somewhat decent amount of money from it. However, that number isn’t all that exciting in the context of streaming. A stream and a sale are very different things. If you buy an album, and it’s a good album, you’re probably going to listen to some of the songs on it more than once. 1M sales is a big deal, but 1M streams is not really something to get excited about, or expect a lot of money from. The problem is that streams have replaced sales. Few people are buying music anymore. Windowing new releases as CDs or permanent downloads would help with that, but no one wants to out of fear of piracy. I think a healthy music industry should have both sales and streams. Pay $10/month for older content, $1/track or $10/album for new releases. I don’t know if that can happen though.

So how much does all of the radio play add up to?????

$0.00

There are 50 000 000 pieces of music to listen to. There is a limit over time,however where that lot of songs will need to change and evolve as has happened throughout history. The styles, the content the fashion the rhythms melodies . The writers aren’t going to be able to give the time it takes to create this music while it’s so insultingly cheapened. It will hit a crisis point. Musicians love giving music to others but they need to live and be inspired by something. No wonder there are so many songs about misery. A lawyer or a farmer or a teacher or chef doesn’t give away their hard won skills for zero dollars neither should we expect it from them. Musicians aren’t stupid. For now it’s the goose that lays the golden egg. There was a saying in the seventies. “Give us manned not canned music.” There’s nothing like good quality live music in a concert hall. The experience itself cannot be outdone by a computer and a speaker of any quality. It never has and never will.
Temporarily only.

Dont lobbyist for your industry always compain about how these platforms were cheapening music but then when negotiations with youtube once broke the prospect of being shut out from the platform cuased them to panic?

“Do you ever stop to think about the great material not entering the market because who, other than a completely exploitable newbie, would want to play this winnerless game?”

And there’s the rub. Until the spigot is shutoff completely, streaming services will have a healthy supply of content to share. Spotify and Apple Music have something like 50M songs to choose from with more added everyday. And why? Because there are plenty of people trying to create something and share it with the world. No different than users of Facebook or Instagram. Just like Facebook has ‘cheapened’ the value of public discourse, so has YouTube with music. I’m not saying this is right or wrong, but it is what it is and there’s certainly no going back at this point.

The only thing I think of Is Whining rich boy and his label crying about “oh my money youtube Spotify” in an age when they get more bank then ever before when they were doing CDs in the 90s and trying to ban that before it started making them money becuase before that it was going to destroy music like everything else before it as well.

” If services paid per play, then Drake could probably single handedly put a company like Spotify out of business with the volume of plays his content gets.”

There’s an old saying: “If you wanna have a dance you gotta pay the band.”
For god’s sake, napster showed up in what, 1997 or something? And you all still haven’t figured out how to honestly pay creators for digitally transmitted content?
Do you ever stop to think about the great material not entering the market because who, other than a completely exploitable newbie, would want to play this winnerless game?
An industry with untold miracles to give, bottled up and stifled by clueless execs crimping the digital distribution systems with their big data and small imaginations.
Thanks to DMN for the coverage.