Streaming services: piracy-lite?

It’s hard to say what deals the major labels get (they won’t tell), but I don’t see a huge benefit beyond piracy besides giving people a legal way to freely listen to your music. Digital music news says:

If Spotify, Rhapsody, or other streaming services won’t answer the question, maybe indie labels and artists will. These figures are from an independent catalog of 87 albums and 1,280 songs, as posted on The Trichordist. On Spotify, they seem consistent with reports of per-song payouts of roughly one-third to one-half of a penny

Either they see it as free marketing to out music on these services (probably) or they’re just really nice guys.

Author: Will Kuhn

I teach music technology to high schoolers. I do some other stuff too. @willkuhn on Twitter.

2 thoughts on “Streaming services: piracy-lite?”

    1. I can’t find the figures right now, but I’m pretty sure artists still get a bigger share of radio royalties than they do streaming services. Either way, the point is that subscription services like Spotify (often called The Future or “iTunes killers”) are not a healthy replacement for regular downloads from the artist’s point of view.

      P.S. good to hear from you!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: