an absolute game changer, a revolutionary product, and the fact that it has the support of
the recording industry means it will be around for a long time. But it’s a young product
and a young company, and Spotify’s claims regarding the revenue being generated for
artists deserve thorough scrutiny. Does listening to music on Spotify really support the
artists you listen to? Is it really better for rightsholders than piracy?
The short answer: Not really, at least not yet.
Since my band doesn’t have a record label or any other stakeholder taking a cut of the
revenue, we receive the entire payout from each service:
[
- iTunes (UK/EU) ~$1.22 / sale
- iTunes (US) ~$.76 / sale
- eMusic $.40 / sale
- Rhapsody $.01 / stream
- Spotify $.00378 / stream
So if you lived in the US and purchased a copy of Friend in the Head on iTunes for
99 cents, we would have received about 77% of the sale. This could add up pretty
quickly; had we sold 9,900 copies of our song over that six-month period, we would have
received a check for about $7600 from iTunes.”
Dan continued, “Spotify has a completely different business model than iTunes in that
it is a streaming music service, not an online store. Each time someone streamed the song
from Spotify instead of purchasing it outright, we received a little less than four tenths of
one cent. That means someone would have to stream our song two hundred times in order