It sure is nice sitting at the top of the food chain watching musician slaves create new content so a platform can print subscription cash while pennies and dimes get paid back to artists in royalties. It’s not much different then the subscription models in the music licensing business. I’d like to see the tech execs and subscription bean counters wear the other hat for a year and create some tunes. Daniel Ek has a net worth of 6 Billlion while streaming royalties are paid out at a rate of .00004 cents a stream.
In our business, Subscriptions royalties pay $2 a download on average. How do governments and music creators allow this shat to happen? It just sickens me every day, and there is not a day that goes by that I do not think about this.
One off Sync Licensing is still alive, but I sill wonder when that will cave. One thing is for sure, if it does cave, those at the top of the food chain will not lose one bit of income.
He says, “make an album more often, work harder”…easy to say when you are sitting on $5 Billion and paying fractions of pennies back to artists. News Flash…it’s happening right here on elements too. Same concept.
By The way 2 Million spotify, apple, amazon, google music, youtube streams paid me $77 in a recent statement. Pretty laughable!
The average salary paid to Spotify employees is $113,000. Now we really know where the subscription revenue is going. It certainly is NOT the artists creating the music content.
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He has the face of someone who is vile and greedy that’s for sure. Read the tweet David Crosby wrote in this link too.
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Interesting reading. Musicians have been getting shat on from a great height throughout all of the history of music. Even back before recording was possible, the sheet music publishers were shafting the writers who were lucky to make 10% on a sale. With the advent of recording technology and in turn, mechanical copyright (brought in to protect the music publishers, not the authors) came a new way for men in suits to shaft the music writers right, left and centre with awful recording deals and exploitative management.
So Daniel Ek is just the latest in a long line of business minds, who’s intent is to profit at the expense of the people who create the very thing they sell. Now there is competition for who takes the biggest cut between streaming sites and the major publishers, and at the bottom of the pile is the music writer who feels forced to sign away even more of their livelihood in some crazy 360 record deals so that the major labels can recoup some of their losses.
The same is true in the stock music market. Along came Youtube, demanding vast quantities of ‘sync music on the cheap’ and with that, unscrupulous businesses who are willing to provide it, though not only to the smalltime Youtuber with shallow pockets, but also to the corporations who gain unimaginable benefits from the same price, which is a fraction of pocket change.
Alongside that, came inexpensive methods for creating decent quality music, opening up the doors to amateur musicians who aren’t aware of their rights or the true value of their product and wouldn’t know an exploitative deal if it bent them over a table.
All this got me wondering, why is it that the people who make the art are often the ones who profit the least? My thinking is that, as a generalisation, artists are naive, and find business and legal stuff boring and don’t look very deeply into it. And whenever there is money to be made, there are always people who are learned in the methods of accumulating it who are ready to exploit the talents of others.
Naive artists need to arm themselves with the knowledge of what they are signing up to, because their choice to accept a bad deal effects the whole market and makes a penny per song the new normal.
There always is a consistent pattern too, coming from the owners of companies like Spotify and Envato, They always site the rare “success story” …the 3 or 4 authors who earn $20,000 to $25,000 a month all while they personally earn $1,000,000 a month. In Daniel EK’s case, he is probably earning $50,000,000 a month from the musicians of the world. He then makes these erroneous statements like " The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans.”
No it’s not, it’s all about giving some artists prime shelf space on the platform so their tracks get played more often
then he adds:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single artist saying, “I’m happy with all the money I’m getting from streaming.” In private they have done that many times, but in public they have no incentive to do it. But unequivocally, from the data, there are more and more artists that are able to live off streaming income in itself.
Who can live solely off of streaming or subscription models? Taylor Swift? Beyonce? Led Zeppelin? The Rolling Stones? The Beatles?
Envato can not even share download data with their artists. They have too much “undesirable news” to hide. Other platforms do share the number of downloads each month and the facts are in: an Artist earns around $2 per download from the subscription model whereas, we earn $10 to $50 typically from the one off sync license model. I have stated many times that subscription will devalue production music by 90% to 95%. That is now a fact. So I continue to ask all participants to really look in the mirror. If your monthly revenue has declined and you trade your music using elements, who is to blame? You? Or Envato?