So? Spotify pays $5,210 per million streams [1]. It would take an individual artist about 8 million streams to make a mere $40,000. A band of 5 artists would require 40 million streams for each person in the band to make a $40,000 salary.
That's jack shit. It's not enough to be a meaningful revenue stream for any artist at any level. It's not enough to help, support, or incubate indies. It's not enough be a drop in the bucket for a mega star.
Those numbers seem fairly comparable to CD's to me.
Let's run some numbers. After subtracting manufacturing, shipping & retailer cuts, a label makes about $3-5 from a record, and sends about $1 of that to the artist. So for the sake of argument, let's say you need to sell a thousand CDs to make the same revenue as a million Spotify streams. Given ~10 tracks per album, that means that the crossover point is 100 album plays. IOW, if I play an album on Spotify more than 100 times, I give the recording company more money than I would if I bought the CD.
That seems like totally fair pricing. I have no idea how many times the average CD is listened to but I bet it's above 100. The median would be below 100, but the mean above. The albums that are listened to 10's of thousands of times would really skew the average.
And yet Taylor swift received 500.000 USD for the last single month she was on Spotify.
Looking at price per stream does not make sense. Looking at average consumption does. Spotify is way above average album consumption per person and it (or similar services) has the potential to cover a very large part of the population.
That's jack shit. It's not enough to be a meaningful revenue stream for any artist at any level. It's not enough to help, support, or incubate indies. It's not enough be a drop in the bucket for a mega star.
[1] http://thetrichordist.com/2014/11/12/the-streaming-price-bib...