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Making a Buck in the Band Music streaming gives artists exposure but not much else By Kendall Polidori
M
usic streaming gives relatively unknown artists a bigger microphone but a smaller paycheck. The mic’s larger in the sense that musicians reach a sizeable audience more quickly than ever before, but the resulting royalties won’t cover the bills unless a performer is approaching the popularity of Taylor Swift, Amazon Music’s Top Artist for 2020. Those trends matter because the pandemic has given streaming services a boost as fans seek music to fill their lonely hours of isolation. Before COVID-19, platforms like Amazon Music, Spotify and Apple Music were already gaining market share at the expense of radio and live shows, and now they’re more quickly crowding out older ways of listening. But is the convenience of listening to the latest Dua Lipa track with the simple tap of a finger worth making up-and-coming musicians struggle to make ends meet? “There’s no reason you should be working day shifts at McDonald’s if your band is raking in 100 million streams a week,” said Nick Bilski, a Chicago musician in the band SŌK. To stay afloat, he works at Guitar Center and teaches music lessons. “The losers are the 99% of artists who aren’t at Beyoncé’s level of fame,” said Ben Sisario in a New York Times article. “And they’re angry about not sharing in the music industry’s success.” But streaming has its advantages for some denizens of the music business.
Platforms profit Streaming services generate 83% of global music industry revenue and provide something the industry never had before: regular monthly revenue, Sisario said in The Times article. “To oversimplify, the big winners are the streaming services and the large record companies,” he noted. And the winners have a mountain of cash to divvy up. Streaming revenue in the United States amounted to $10.1 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Streaming services “pay out roughly 60% to 70% of their annual revenue to ‘rightsholders,’ a group that includes musicians, record labels, songwriters, publishers— anyone who has a financial stake in the sales of a given record,” according to a Pitchfork article. But at least artists have an easier time getting their music onto digital distribution platforms like DistroKid, cdbaby, tunecore, Record Union and Reverb Nation than they did in the days of having to convince a record label to release their songs. Musicians choose which streaming distributor they want based on benefits and features. Vivian McConnell, a Chicago musician who goes by the stage name of V.V. Lightbody, has been on streaming platforms for the past 10 years. Today, listeners can find her recordings on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora Premium, Deezer and TIDAL, but the money is not what keeps the lights on. She would prefer not to think about how often she’s
June/July 2021 | Luckbox
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