We all know (or remember) that going to Best Buy and buying a new released CD on Tuesdays used to cost around $10-14...and it probably still does. But after listening to loads of albums worth of music this past month for only $10, I started wondering how the hell can these artists be making legitimate money today? With 4G LTE and wireless networks being available almost everywhere we spend most of our time throughout or days, streaming music has become a completely OK alternative to downloading songs and loading them on your phone or iPod's hard drive.
Behind every artist, there are producers, promoters, label personnel, etc. - all of who are given a slice of the profits that come in. After searching around, I came across this great infographic that summarizes how many CDs or streams an artist would need to have sold or played in order to meet the monthly minimum wage of $1,160.00. Pretty interesting:
Purchasing an album ($10 CD)
Independent recording artist - ~$8 goes to the artist (need to sell around 150 CDs)
High end record deal, retail artist - ~$1 goes to the artist (need to sell around 1160 CDs)
Low end record deal, retail artist - ~$0.30 goes to the artist (need to sell around 3871 CDs)
iTunes ($10 Album download)
$0.94 goes to the artist (need to sell 1229 CDs)
Amazon/iTunes Track Download ($0.99 Song)
$0.09 goes to the artist (need to sell 12,399 songs)
Rhapsody Stream (Fixed rate)
$0.0022 goes to the artist per stream (need to stream 849,817 times/month)
Spotify (Fixed rate)
$0.00029 goes to the artist per stream (need to stream 4,053,110 times/month!)
An immediate reaction to this might be that oh, the artists are getting shafted! But there are just a lot of different things that seem to come into play when making, distributing, and legalizing/copyrighting a product, and a lot of people behind each of those various steps who need to be paid. Lesson learned from this though is that if there's an independent artist you really like, go to a show and buy their CD if you really want to support them directly!
