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Music

The Spotify salary

For at least a decade now, the mantra in the music scene has been that internet-based revenue is the only hope to save the crumbling industry.[briefbreak]

And while every single independent label owner we’ve ever talked to about it admits that revenue from downloads and streaming services are not even coming close to making up for the death of the CD, the rapid growth of this sector in recent years has provoked much cautious optimism about the future.

Too bad author British author David McCandless had to go and rain on everyone’s parade by crunching the numbers to see just how many downloads and streams it would take for an artist to make minimum wage.

Click here to see the chart in full.

The results (if accurate), are depressing to say the least. To make minimum wage in the US ($1160/month) from a song on iTunes, an artist would have to rack up 12 399 downloads each month, which doesn’t seem much better than the meagre payout the major labels give from CD sales. In fact, it’s actually worse: via iTunes, the label makes seven times what the artist gets, while CD sales only get them twice what the artist takes home (which is still depressing).

Many people are now saying that the future of music consumption will not be based on downloads anyway, but rather streaming. Why fill up your iPod with files when you could instantly access any song you want for a monthly fee?

In Europe, Spotify has made great inroads and is becoming quite popular, but the service has been embarrassed about reports that even Lady Gaga only raked in a piddly $167 for 1 million plays of her hit Poker Face.

The company has since responded saying that those numbers are misleading, but has failed to contradict them with any real figures.

McCandless’ analysis of the available data suggests that to break minimum wage through Spotify, an artist would need over 4,549,020 plays each month, although he admits that in situations where the musician is also the sole songwriter they would only need 1,281,768 plays a month. That should be pretty easy for the average indie rocker to achieve, right?

It’s not all doom and gloom though.

Recently, the Isle Of Man floated an innovative idea to freely allow unlimited digital music piracy, in exchange for a small monthly fee added to every resident’s monthly internet bill. The money collected would then be distributed as royalties, similar to how radio play is handled in the rest of the world. It’s a bit reminiscent of how in Canada SOCAN was able to use the CDR levee to reimburse artists, but on a larger and more ambitious scale.

Since presumably the Isle Of Man isn’t hoping to make a profit off this venture, in theory the returns could be much better than the corporate alternative. At the very least, they’d be more transparent, which is something that always seems to fall by the wayside once profit-driven multinationals get involved.

If this idea spreads through the rest of the world, we might just be a lot closer to that digital music utopia we’ve been promised for so long.[rssbreak]

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