How Much Can You Really Earn From Spotify Or Is It A Dying Trend?

My band has used streaming platforms for several years and have 5 albums and several pro video’s for the single releases on them. We used to use Routenote to publish our tracks but moved to Distrokid a few years back as they seemed more flexible and had a few more services for us to use. We spend in the region of £500 a year to promote our tracks and have them online, but only see a return of around £120 a year, so we loose £380 a year!

Artists make an estimated $0.003-$0.005 per stream, so after your costs including recording and using a 3rd party to put your music online you would need around 3 million plays to cover your losses which is not something most artists get anywhere near. To add insult to injury the distributors only pay you when you have a large amount in your revenue pot, meaning most of the time your money is not available to you to record new tracks and reinvest in gear. The distributors earn interest from your earnings which is another way you are ripped off.

By going back to selling CD’s or USB sticks we can sell them at £10 an album (cheaper than the average price of a CD) and make some good money. Every CD or USB stick we sell nets a profit of around £4:50, so we have decided to pull our songs off of all streaming platforms and sell them as an actual item rather than a stream.

We sell around 3 CD’s online per week and around 5 at an average gig. Doing 50 gigs a year, gives us an extra profit of £1,125 from gig sales and £1,053 from online sales.

The maths is quite simple – online sales cost us £380 a year where as CD’s nets a profit of around £2,178.

We spent a lot of time and money to record our last album, bringing in a pro engineer and producer, but haven’t seen a return on this as yet. We do everything we can to get plays from Spotify, like set up a ‘play each others songs’ community, but we still loose money.

We know most people use Spotify, Itunes, Deezer or YouTube Music to play their tracks, but until the vast majority of artists making the music get some payment in return we feel that this will dry up soon and streaming music could be a thing of the past in the next 10 years. The streaming platforms need to start paying artist and stop brainwashing them to think its the only way to get listened to.

My band are seriously looking to walk away from all online delivery owned by the big streaming platforms and if lot of other artists do the same this will certainly make streaming platforms realise that they need the musicians to make the music and pay us a fair cut.