How does artist, like Madonna, get paid by Apple Music or Spotify when they play her music? Does she get paid every time we listen to one of her songs?
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Yep. Spotify, for example, pays between .3 and .5 cents per stream on average. Doesn’t sound like much, but if someone gets a few million views, it adds up. Spotiify, meanwhile, makes money on the ads you listen to between songs, or the subscription fees you pay.
You get paid for every 1000 listens.It takes about 140,000 streams to make $1,000 on Apple music and double that for Spotify. The rates vary depending on the deal with the record company.
Streaming services keep track of how often their music is played and they have a set rate for how much each listen is worth. Each month, they send each artist (or their music label) a payment based on how many plays they’ve received.
Depends if the artist even owns the rights to their song. Lots of times some random rich person has bought the rights to the song so the artist gets nothing.
I know this a bit, it’s somewhat-secret but not really.
So there are blocks of users that are aggregated together (say, “18-25 year olds in LATAM”, etc) — I don’t know how the blocks are defined exactly in terms of market and demo currently, but the blocks exist.
The users in these blocks pay money to use Spotify, and that revenue gets totalled up. Often there are promotions etc that get some discounts (labels have to sign off on these), so between that and how many people use Spotify in that block and how much Spotify costs there and how easy it is to retain users (recurring payments can be really tough in some markets), the blocks get wildly different revenue.
Within the block, streams are added up. A stream counts if it’s at least 30s of a song. Artists then get money proportionate to their fraction of the streams for the block — except that the fraction to them (vs Spotify) also varies according to the agreements their labels made. And on top of that, the artists themselves have separate agreements with their labels on how much the label takes vs pays out to the artist.
So Spotify might get to keep more money from a block if they’re playing more music from a label that gave Spotify a more favorable deal, e.g. The majors pretty much all have exactly the same payout rates (and would sue the dogshit out of Spotify if they didn’t), but there’s a lot of licensed content from other places as well, hence the “fake bands” thing where Spotify algorithmically pushes music it sort of commissioned.
Keep in mind the money doesn’t go to the artist per se, it goes to the owner of the music. Rick Astley doesn’t get spit per play, the owner of that particular song does.
Some performers own all of their music, some own none, many split it one way or another. Works the same in acting. Sir Alec Guinnes (Obi Wan) wasn’t impressed with the money he was paid (he was pretty much the only recognized actor in the original trilogy) so he required residuals on top of that. The franchise was far more powerful than anyone expected and he made over $100M on residuals alone, far more than he was paid, while most of the other actors got shafted.
Streaming services pay out roughly 70% of their revenue to rights holders.
Rights holders are those that control the master (specific recordings) and those that control the publishing (the underlying composition). The master is usually controlled by labels (for major label acts like you’re asking about) and the publishing is controlled by songwriters and publishers.
There is no fixed per stream rate but it averages out to about $.003-$.004 per stream for on-demand plays. (There’s more nuance to this regarding different publishing side royalties but it’s not really ELI5).
BUT…major labels also get guaranteed minimum payouts as a licensing fee. So to answer your question…what major label artists get paid from streaming really depends on 1) how much they write their own music, 2) what their royalty rate with the label is, and 3) what their contract says regarding catalogue licensing fees. The latter was a big fat zero until a few years ago when Lady GaGa and then Taylor Swift made it publicly clear that that was fucked up.
Yes. Very little per play. I’ve made like 30 dollars from Spotify in 3-4 years. And it costs me to keep my music up there. But at least it offsets it.
The streaming services get permission to stream songs online by paying the songwriters & publishers through a middleman called a Performing Rights Organization (PRO). They also pay the record companies directly for permission to use the sound recordings.
The licensing fees charged by the PROs and record companies are typically based on how big the streaming service is, and for these bigger services, it’s a promise to pay a flat rate per song play, or per certain number of plays. The fees are negotiated and collected periodically (e.g. annually). The PROs and labels take their cut, and then distribute some portion of the rest as royalties to the publishers, songwriters, and performers.
How much these artists ultimately get is affected greatly by the contracts the artists have with these publishing & record companies. Record companies get most of the streaming licensing fees but have huge expenses and often pay very little in royalties to the performers. Publishers get less in fees but typically pay out most everything they get to the songwriters.
So yes, *essentially* you can say the artist gets paid a certain amount of money per stream. It’s not immediate, and the money comes from the streaming company’s coffers. And figuring out exactly how much it is gets very complicated.
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