With Spotify becoming available in the US, a question that I always had and had become dormant came to live again. How can artists profit from streaming services? Do they see a bump in their sales from people that after streaming their music want to own it? It boggles my mind, it’s understandable that physical CD’s have lost a little bit of steam to digital albums. But that is sales, it makes sense since having the physical production of a disc is taken out of the equation.But the question is, do artists profit for their music being streamed in services like Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, Grooveshark and others.
Yesterday, I finally found some answers to my question. The Information is Beautiful site, has an great visual graph that gives us a glimpse of what goes behind the scenes on the matter at hand. I am still studying the graph, I find it interesting that the amount artists get for streaming is so low. But, on the other hand, we can approach this differently. For decades people heard about artists on the radio, they would call radio stations with their requests. Is it really that different to stream someone’s music? The problem with this is that if people are able to stream the music as many times as they want, an album sale is out of the equation.
I believe there have been several events that have drastically changed the face of music. MTV gave a face to what people were listening to. YouTube allowed people to see that face on demand, at anytime, from anywhere. MP3 players, especially the iPod forever changed the way people listened to music.
But, the question remains, how will streaming services change the face of music? With big-hitters like Apple, Amazon and Google getting on the streaming game, there is certainly a great amount of change coming.
