An Artists Choice: Art or Eat

The 2017 RIAA report released last week showed the world that the music business is booming. So, why are artists so concerned?

The US music industry achieved double digit growth for the second year in a row, with most of the growth coming from paid streaming subscriptions, in which Spotify dominates. More people listening. Increasing revenues from plays. It all sounds great, but with the shift to streaming, artists simply aren’t making what they used to from physical sales and digital downloads from services like eMusic. How bad is it? That can be difficult to tease out, due to variation in label agreements, royalties’ management, legal fees, what type of fan is listening (free or paid) etc. So, let’s take a closer look…

Out in the Storm was one of the top selling albums of 2017 on the eMusic platform. Released on July 14, 2017 by Merge Records, it is the fourth studio album by Katie Crutchfield’s band Waxahatchee, and was voted one of the 50 Best Albums of 2017 by the Rolling Stone. “Never Been Wrong,” one of the most popular tracks on the album, has received 141K streams on Youtube and 1.39M streams on Spotify. Applying the average artists payouts of those streaming services (source: Information is Beautiful) we can calculate the estimated payout to the artist since this critically acclaimed work was released.

It’s $6,253. Divide this by 4 band members (we won’t count other contributors for this exercise) and you get $1,563. Assuming all ten tracks on the album get the same streams (they don’t) you get $15,614 for millions of fans streaming your album. Did you know the US Poverty Line is $13,860? Why is it that so many artists struggle to make even minimum wage?

How many streams do you think it takes to make the same as a Starbucks Barista ($1,750/month)?

At eMusic, we don’t want to change how fans experience the music - the more platforms trying to provide the perfect customer experience the better. But we’ve got to raise the bar in the industry as a whole - providing the artists, that are the very heart of a fast-growing $17B dollar industry, their fair share, and closing the gap between artists and compensation.

Join us as we become the first major music company to embrace Blockchain to do just that. Visit token.emusic.com to learn more, or follow us via Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit.