Spotify is overpaying Thom Yorke and The Bleaters
THE latest is the row about how the royalty streams from Spotify are too low turns up in The Guardian. As you might expect from that paper there’s a great deal of indignation and not a lot of light and sense.
As background, Thom Yorke has demanded that Spotify no longer play his songs as he thinks they offer a really bad deal to musicians. So, The G went out and found someone who agreed:
To give you an example, 4,685 Spotify plays of my last solo album equated to £19.22 (that’s 0.004p per album stream). The equivalent to me selling two albums at a show. I think it’s fair to say that at least two of those almost 5,000 listeners would have bought the album from me if they knew the financial disparity from streaming.
Well, actually, that’s not a bad amount of money to be honest. A Spotify stream is not akin to the sale of an album, it’s akin to the playing of a song upon the radio. So how much would that get?
Radio: A play for a three-minute song on Radio 2 generates £59.73 (collected by PRS for Music) for the songwriters, and a similar figure (collected by PPL) is split between the label and the performing artists.
5,000 streams is just the same as one radio play of a song that goes to 5,000 people. The average listener base at Radio 2 is a couple of hundred thousand at any one time. So, £120 for 200,000 people listening or Spotify paying £20 for 5,000 listens?
Sounds like Spotify is overpaying really.
Posted: 17th, July 2013 | In: Money, Music Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
