General bashing of streaming platforms – think twice!
I cannot join the bandwagon of bashing the streaming platforms too much. Yes, the money that stems from releasing music to such platforms is not big. But let’s evaluate who actually is in a position to complain at all. Let’s go back in time by 40 years and let’s figure what options an artist had to get his music out in the open.1. An artist could sign a record deal with a label. Those who were around in the 80s and 90s period will remember how tedious this was. A&R managers at record companies received boxes full of demo tapes and CDs, they were not even able to listen to everything, so they did a first filtering by the cover or by the name, or just arbitrarily. Then if you didn’t convince them to listen more within say 15 seconds, that was it. So all in all, the chances that you convinced an A&R to give you a deal was minimal. Let’s not even start into the issue about how much control over your product you would actually have to sacrifice eventually. So a question you need to ask yourself as an artist: how big is the chance that I indeed would have gotten a record deal 40 years ago with the material I am considering to release on streaming platforms now? And even if you were in the club of the lucky ones, how many albums would you have sold? 1000? 2000? 20000? The latter in my country is already double-gold and would possibly qualify as a rather successful release.
Alternatively if you were not able to get a deal, you could produce a record yourself and try to sell it. Mind you this was before Internet and social media so the outreach to advertise your product was newspapers, radio stations and your gigs. Furthermore this was before DAWs and home recording. So you would have to shoulder studio costs and production costs. Again, ask yourself the question how many copies you might have sold in such circumstances? Would you recover the investment at all?
In that light, is it not a huge improvement that you can get a digital distributor for a fee and release your music to the world without some A&R telling you it’s not good enough or people would not want to hear this right now etc.? Today you can produce at reduced costs in home studios, you can release whatever you want on streaming platforms and potentially reach a large audience. You can use social media to spread the word. These are conditions we would have dreamed of in the 80s. Indeed, there is not much money in streaming at all. But for an unknown artist, was there ever much money in record sales?
The artists that can actually complain are not the unknown ones that get an opportunity with streaming they never had in the past. But let’s look at a true case that I know, without mentioning names. A band I know sold 250’000 albums of their debut, over 150’000 of the second and same amount of the third. There were also singles and DVDs that were sold. I know that the 5-piece band had a deal to get 5 CHF per sold record and distributed that equally among the members. So just from the album sales alone, each band member made over half a million CHF. In today’s environment with digital streams, there is no way they would sell that amount of physical records. Of course there would be more streams but reaching the same income today would not be realistic. So like all the acts they would have to generate their income with touring.
Here as well, an unknown act was not able to make loads of money touring in the 80s or 90s and still isn’t today. An unknown act was not able to spread his music worldwide, so an unknown act today doesn’t really have a reason to complain about the streaming services not paying enough. Get me right, I am not saying they pay handsomely, I am just saying that we should focus on FACTS. And those are that you have opportunities to spread your music today and potentially reach a large audience, which you never had in the past. The ones that can really complain about the reduced pay that stems from streaming are artists that used to sell a significant number of physical albums and made some good money from it that they do not anymore.
Open for discussion, stick to facts and be polite!