by Camden O’Keefe
I remember as a child that if I wanted to watch a film I would have to go down to Blockbusters and pay £3.99 to rent it for a week. But nowadays with streaming services and a few clicks of a mouse I have thousands of films at my fingertips. And the same has happened to music. Where we once had vinyl, then cassettes then CDs, we now have streaming. But has that been good for music or not?
It is easier to consume the music that we want than ever before. For example, I can open Spotify and search for almost any band or album and I can be listening to it in seconds. This is good technology: almost the entire catalogue of music ever produced at my fingertips, and for anything more obscure I can go on somewhere like YouTube. Also, being able to link Spotify with Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms has made it easier than ever to share the music you like with friends. Furthermore, up and coming artists have online platforms to post their music on, allowing them to easily expand their audience.
But despite all these advantages, I think that streaming has done a lot of damage to the music industry and the artists within it. I’ll be focusing on heavy metal, but these problems affect all genres. The biggest issue is the tiny revenues that artists receive through streaming. For example, one stream of a song on Amazon will earn an artist 0.009 pence which equates to 111 streams to earn £1. And YouTube pays even less, with the artist needing 833 streams to earn that pound.
To put that in perspective, to earn an hour’s wages at the UK National Living Wage (NLW) rate of £8.72 an hour through Amazon, a song would need to be streamed 970 times in that hour, and on YouTube that number jumps up to massive 7,267. Below is a table that I have borrowed from the Daily Entertainment Express (DEX) site, but added to as well. It compares the different rates of ‘pay’ offered by different streaming sites.
| Streaming services | Averages pay per play | Number of streams to earn £1 | Number of streams to earn one hour’s minimum wage | Number of streams to earn minimum wage for a year |
| Amazon | £0.009 | 111 | 970 | 1,425,900 |
| Tidal | £0.007 | 143 | 1246 | 1,831,620 |
| Apple | £0.0054 | 195 | 1615 | 2,374,050 |
| Deezer | £0.0045 | 222 | 1938 | 2,848.860 |
| Google play Music | £0.0044 | 272 | 1981 | 2,912,070 |
| Spotify | £0.0028 | 357 | 3114 | 4,577,580 |
| Pandora | £0.0016 | 625 | 5450 | 8,011,500 |
| YouTube | £0.0012 | 833 | 7267 | 10,692,490 |
OK big names like Metallica and Iron Maiden can easily accomplish these numbers, but what about the rest? And on top of that, not all this ‘revenue’ makes it to the artist anyway.
A government enquiry has established that most of it goes to whoever owns the music rights, with as little as 13% going to the artists – meaning that for that living wage the number of streams in the table above would need to be inflated even more.
The lack of income from streaming often forces artists to find other ways of making money. Looking back at old posters for concerts and festivals, the price almost seems like a dream. A good example is the Monsters of Rock Festival of 1988. The lineup included massive names like Iron Maiden and Kiss and the price of this you ask? £16.50, or £39 with inflation. However, nowadays a ticket to see Iron Maiden on their own will set you back at least £60, and streaming services are partly to blame. Why? Because without the income from CD sales, the artists are forced to increase ticket prices and rely on merchandise to make their money. This means that lots of people miss out on live shows as they simply can’t afford to go.
The current UK Government inquiry into the economics of music streaming may lead to an increase in the price per stream, allowing artists to finally make more money through these services. The inquiry is being led by Julian Knight MP who is the chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (DCMS).
In a statement he declared that the growth of the streaming market, “cannot come at the expense of talented and lesser-known artists”. The inquiry will look into the algorithms that streaming services use to create playlists in order to determine whether new music is being subsumed beneath big names such as Ed Sheeran and Drake.
When announcing the inquiry Julian Knight stated, “Algorithms might benefit platforms in maximising income from streaming, but they are a blunt tool to operate in a creative industry with emerging talent risking failing the first hurdle”.
Hopefully the enquiry will change the way that streaming works so that the music industry can support the people who actually make the music.