The music industry is constantly developing, and therefore the incomes of leading musical artists are growing. Billboard’s annual report on money shows that the collective remuneration of the most popular artists increased by 12.9% to almost $1961 million in 2020, compared with $951 million the previous year.
Earnings on music streaming became especially relevant in 2020, when the world plunged into quarantine restrictions, and the music industry suffered huge losses due to strict restrictions and the impossibility of holding live concerts. But it was they, according to statistics, who gave up to 80% of the profit to music industry figures.
Streaming music is a great option for consumers. It is also a fairly profitable business model for labels, although not necessarily for the artists themselves, who will receive margin bets for their works.
Apple Music recently wrote to independent musicians. In it, the service claims to pay an average of one cent for each drying. The service pays 52% of subscription revenue to copyright holders. If you believe this information, then the payments of the brainchild of the corporation from Cupertino are twice the payments from the popular Swedish streaming service Spotify, which is the main competitor, although it still occupies a leading position in the world of musical trimming.
In this case, it is easy to calculate that the service will pay 10 thousand US dollars for a million auditions. Of course, if you believe the information in the letter, the copyright holder will get only $5,200, which is 52% of this amount.
Musicians do not receive payments directly – first they are transferred to record companies, which then give the musicians income minus the commission.
Large labels consider the average number of monthly listeners per user to be the best way to measure the economics of streaming, and the growing number of listeners is assessed as an occasion to increase the income of musicians. According to them, Apple is considered a thousand auditions per user per month, unless, of course, we are talking about a world-famous hit.
Service payments are ambiguous. Their size largely depends on the country in which the track was played and the cost of subscribing to it for the service itself. After all, Apple Music takes a flexible approach to subscription costs. For example, in Bangladesh, a paid subscription will cost several times less than in the United States of America. Accordingly, the revenues of the service itself will be as much lower. As a result, the same level of payments will be for music rights holders.
