Music Streaming: What You Need To Know

These days almost everyone accesses their music via the internet. Whether it's from Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, iTunes or other music radio/streaming sites, music has become more easily available than ever. Here we explore how this effects the music industry, the artist and the consumer.

To understand the effects of music streaming, it would be wise to survey the past and how music was created and distributed. From the late 90s and before most music was recorded in a studio, and then cut to vinyl or CD for the consumer to buy in the store. On a $10 CD the artist on average made about $1, which was fairly reasonable. The rest of the money went to producers, engineers, songwriters, other performers and the record label. The album would be released to radio stations to be played, and each time a song was played the artist would be paid (these are known as royalties). A lot of radio plays resulted in a lot money. On top of this, if the artist went on tour they could make money on ticket sales and selling merchandise (clothing, stickers, etc.)

Nowadays, all but the very popular artists get radio play on the major radio stations. On top of this, CD and vinyl sales are eclipsed by streaming music. The advantage of streaming music is you pay one (usually cheap) monthly fee and have access to a huge amount of songs. The drawback is usually twofold; one is that the artist gets cheated out of a HUGE sum of money. The other is that streaming audio is usually of lesser quality than CD or vinyl. To put it in perspective, on Spotify an artist will get paid about $6,000 for one million plays... in other words, this is not a lot. To offer even more perspective, here is a chart that shows what and artist would have to do to make monthly minimum wage: www.thissongslaps.com

The facts are frightening and results in artists not making much money from albums they've worked so hard to produce. There only way of making real sustainable money is to tour, which is very hard to do successfully over and over. So while music streaming has is ups, always remember how the downs can effect the industry for the worse!