![]() Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You has been streamed more than 2bn times, which would be worth $8.74m at current rates. However, a song that gets 10m streams will earn $43,700, and big hits can earn a lot. That isn’t a lot of money for most of the artists with music on Spotify, because 10,000 plays only pays $43.70. Spotify is now, it seems, somewhere in the middle ground, paying about $0.00437 per stream. YouTube pays the lowest rate of only $0.00069 per stream. According to its analysis, Napster pays the highest rate at $0.019 per stream, followed by Jay-Z’s Tidal at $0.0125 and Apple at $0.00735 per stream. It’s a numbers game, and smaller rivals don’t have Spotify’s economies of scale.ĭigital Music News has tried to establish how much various music services pay for streaming. However, it’s predicting an operating loss of €31-€131m for the next quarter, despite growing its number of monthly active users by 30% in the past year to 191 million. Spotify was launched in Sweden in 2008 and made its first quarterly profits this year. Even Spotify, the biggest and richest service with 80 million paying subscribers, would struggle to pay significantly more. However, all the major services have been losing money, and most probably still are. Whether the payments are good or bad depends to some extent on how you look at it: they are not good if they are replacing download sales, but not so bad if they’re replacing radio plays. Streaming music services are notorious for paying minuscule amounts for playing songs, and several major artists have not joined or removed their music in protest. Spotify is the biggest streaming service, but others are available. In theory, specialised playlists can do the job, but finding them can feel like more work than it’s worth. That leaves a hole that streaming services could fill, if only they were as good as Pandora. Today’s mainstream radio stations are deliberately bad at music discovery, because they know listeners will switch over if they don’t keep hearing the same familiar stuff. For those fully on-board with Spotify, its algorithmic Discover Weekly playlist can be a source of similar inspiration for both new and old music, but it requires you listen to everything through the service and invest time in liking or disliking songs to teach it what you want. I had a William Orbit station, and Pandora’s algorithms surfaced all sorts of fascinating stuff by musicians I had (mostly) never heard before. Pandora lets you create your own radio station by seeding it with something you like. Having said that, I did like Pandora’s streaming music service, and would still use had it not been withdrawn from the UK market. As far as I can tell, streaming music services just don’t care about this kind of thing, except when someone like Ed Sheeran releases half a dozen different versions of the same song. ![]() It’s the same for versions of The Messiah, Bach’s St Matthew Passion and any opera you can think of. Simon Rattle’s set with the Vienna Philharmonic is even more different. That’s me.įor example, Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic recorded Beethoven’s nine symphonies four times and they are different, even though they sometimes have the same soloists in the ninth. Streaming music services may have limited appeal for classical music or jazz fans who are album or even box set oriented, and who care deeply about knowing who is playing what, when and how. Apart from Today’s Top Hits on Spotify, there are playlists of happy songs to wake up to, relaxing music to unwind to, party music to dance to, music to go with various types of exercise, music to fall asleep to plus any number of genre-specific playlists. Most people don’t.) They also provide playlists that are much like thematic replacements for live radio or, as we used to call it, background music. Streaming music services are very good for people who like popular music and are singles-oriented. These include the kinds of music you enjoy, how you listen to it, and why you listen to it. As always, there is no universal answer because it depends on all sorts of factors.
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