• tal@lemmy.today
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    11 months ago

    If you want to do the maths, the maximum one can possibly earn in Spotify royalties is $0.003 a stream. It doesn’t add up to a living wage for most artists.

    And now, to make matters far worse, starting in 2024 Spotify will stop paying anything at all for roughly two-thirds of tracks on the platform. That is any track receiving fewer than 1,000 streams over the period of a year.

    Honestly, does the 1k floor matter much? Based on the above text, the most that such a track can possibly make is $3/year. It’s a safe bet that most aren’t sitting right at 999 views and the maximum revenue per track; most are probably well below that. I have a hard time seeing someone caring much about that.

    I’m not saying that there isn’t possibly some kind of business model for which a track making $1/year or something this might make sense (massive numbers of cheap machine-generated tracks targeting very specific tastes, that all get a few views each). But for conventionally-produced music, I think that if you’re making a song that’s generating 50 cents or 10 cents a year or something, it’s basically not on your radar financially.

    • scrchngwsl@feddit.uk
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      11 months ago

      There’s bands I listen to that have <10 monthly listeners. They still deserve their $3 a year IMO.