How does that affect your wallet?
Song downloads are on a steep slide that shows no sign of easing up. Meanwhile, streaming figures just keep rising. So, if you’re an artist or a songwriter, it’s no big deal if streaming is picking up the slack from downloads, right? Uh, not really. Raw figures don’t tell the full story as far as your potential income is concerned.
First the figures from Nielsen Music: During the first half of 2018, song download sales were down 27.4% to 223.1 million from 307.2 million for the first half of 2017. Album downloads also fell 21.7% to 27.5 million units, down from 35.1 for the same period last year.
Meanwhile, streams jumped 41.6% to 403.4 billion, January-June 2018, a gain of 118.6 billion (a half-year record) compared with the first half of 2017. As Digital Music News pointed out in a story posted July 10, 2018, not so long ago, paid downloads were greater than one billion annually. Now, Drake’s album ‘Scorpion’ chalked up more than one billion streams in a single week.
So Drake probably doesn’t need to be too worried about the decline of downloads. But for artists who are not up in the same stratosphere as Drake, this is not good news as revenue from streams is nowhere near that of downloads. And even that isn’t very much. Single track downloads that cost 99c earn the artist around 11c on iTunes, Google Play and Amazon.
‘Fractions of one cent’
When it comes to getting paid for streaming, you receive mere fractions of one cent per stream from the major streaming services. These include Napster, YouTube, Pandora, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Play, Deezer and Spotify. In July 2017, Digital Music News posted a report titled ‘What Streaming Music Services Pay,’ available here. (Note: these figures may have changed since that report was posted.)
See the Digital Music News report for full details, but they note that Napster tops the pay-per-stream list with $0.0167 per stream for unsigned artists. Signed artists received $0.0190. In comparison, Apple Music pays unsigned artists $0.0064 per stream and signed artists $0.0073 per stream.
Meanwhile, YouTube is still the lowest payer and not improving. In 2015, an unsigned artist would earn $1,260.00 after 70,000 plays. In 2017, that artist would need to score 2.4 mullion plays to earn the same amount. However, YouTube should be seen by an artist as a promotional and marketing tool, rather than a revenue stream. (See previous post here at Nashville Music Line: ‘How to build community with YouTube.’) Continue reading “Song downloads plunge, streaming rockets”