The Undiscovered & Music Streaming
I read an article the other day about it to learn more about artists on music streaming services, because that's something that interests me because of my own artist promotion website, The Undiscovered. David McCandless, the journalist and designer of 'Information Is Beautiful,' created an infographic about music streaming services in the year 2015. This infographic illustrates the amount of money artists get paid from the variety of digital services offered around the world. According to this infographic, an unsigned artist that releases a single track on iTunes acquires 69 cents very time the song is bought or listened to. Candles also stated in this infographic that those unsigned artists on iTunes need to have a volume of 1,826 streams or downloads a month to make it equivalent to minimum wage. Now, for Spotify, an unsigned artists earns seven-tenths of a penny for every stream. For an unsigned artist to make minimum wage on Spotify, it would take around 192,000 streams per month. With these numbers, unsigned artists get more of a deal compared to signed artists, but it doesn't make too much of a difference unless the signed artist makes it on the global charts.
It's so hard to find the money and everything to start up on these kinds of music streaming services. I have a friend, Dane Page, that could only afford to have content on Spotify for a month. It was too expensive for him to keep paying fees as well as to get people to start listening to his music. With that being said, some of the artists featured on The Undiscovered's Singer/Songwriter page already have content on Spotify, and have for a while. Even though some of these artists have had content on Spotify for a decent amount of time, doesn't mean that they are reaching their monthly goal of minimum wage. To help these artists reach the numbers they need to earn minimum wage, please go to Spotify and give them a listen!
