Is music streaming destined to fail?

Everybody loves music streaming… but is it destined to fail? By George Letheren Smith

It was only a year ago that Spotify became a public trading company, suggesting that finally music streaming is making profits.

However, as revenue for artists themselves is decreasing, wouldn’t it be more beneficial for artists to just promote music themselves?

The music industry now has so many different people involved that need money, it is a concern of how artists can actually make cash.

Spotify for example, pays up to £0.0064 for one stream on the platform. As the stream volume goes up, the money is then given to the artist. This is then split with artists, labels, agents, songwriters and even promoters of the song.

An average of 46.4 million people paid for music subscriptions in the first half of 2017 (Wix)

After everyone has their fair share of the money, there simply just isn’t very much left for the artist them self.

If a song does 3.5 million streams for example, that’s just over £22,000. I bet you thought artists would be earning a lot more than that for songs.

This is why it suggests to me that music streaming services should not only act to promote the artist through streaming, but they should just create a record label to act for the artists as well.

Apple Music are the closest to this concept, but still do not directly own the rights to songs. The music industry has evolved so much in the 21st Century already, it is hard to endeavour what could happen next.

Breaking an artist into a major market can cost up to £1.5 million (Wix)

However, if there are so many hands looking to take a piece, what is the artist and the songwriter, who has done most of the hard work, actually left with?

If these streaming services took the risk of starting record labels, it would surely pay off. Costs would be reduced and natural music talent would finally be rewarded again.

Berklee Online, a digital music educational service, explain in this video how music streaming services like Spotify and Tidal make revenue.