The price of music has been in flux since it was first commodified on wax cylinders. Artists have rarely had much say in that price, though, or in how much of the money reaches them—and in some ways recorded music has never been worth less. As long as you have a stable Internet connection, you can hear anything from several vast, overlapping catalogs at any time. Streaming services have made countless hours of music available for monthly subscription fees that average around $10, and if you’re willing to listen to ads, it can all be free.
Spotify is the most popular service: according to a December 2019 report by Midia Research analyst Mark Mulligan, at this time last year it had 36 percent of total streaming subscribers worldwide, and this spring it claimed 271 million users, including 124 million subscribers. As a result, it’s been able to exert industry-wide influence on pay rates. The way Spotify calculates royalties is far from simple or transparent, though. The rate can vary depending on type of listener—subscribers generate more royalties—and by what country they’re in. In the U.S., mechanical royalty rates are set by the Copyright Royalty Board, while performance royalty rates (Spotify pays both) are mostly negotiated with organizations such as ASCAP and BMI. Other countries have their own mechanisms.
To its credit, Spotify has attempted to address the COVID-19 pandemic’s devastation of the music ecosystem. The company has donated ad time to governments and charities, and it’s created a music relief fund to match up to $10 million in donations. In April it also debuted a new feature called Artist Fundraising Pick, a button that artists can add to their Spotify pages in order to solicit donations for themselves or for charities of their choosing.
The market of streaming listeners is simply too large to ignore. Curran estimates that for Sooper’s most successful projects, streaming revenue is large enough to match sales revenue. “Not having digital revenue would be a huge loss,” he says. Because streaming has low or no barriers to entry for listeners, it can help artists grow a fan base—it’s much less of an investment to stream an unfamiliar album than to buy one. Placement in the right streaming playlists, whether created by users, labels, publications, or the services themselves, can also help musicians reach new audiences.
Despite a steep but brief dip in March, streaming consumption has continued to increase—unsurprisingly, self-imposed isolation and social distancing haven’t decreased people’s appetites for music. But if your goal as a fan is to help the artists you love support themselves, streaming their music is probably the least helpful thing you can do, short of nothing at all.
