why i think taylor swift needs to calm down about spotify

If you're not familiar with Taylor Swift's battles against free streaming services here's a quick recap before I get started. The pop-singer recently took all of her music off of Spotify and was applauded for her angry letter to Apple Music. She even deleted every Vine that used her music without compensation. Many people were excited about her stance against people stealing music from worthy artists.

Expectedly, she has been receiving some backlash. An image comparing Miley Cyrus's views on streaming services and Swift's has recently gone viral.

Cyrus:

Swift:

This comparison is in no way intended to pit these two women against each other, but is a healthy comparison to see what artists of similar success levels think about the issue.

This is when people started to ask questions. If Swift is already one of the richest people on Earth, why is she being such a penny pincher? Zayn Malik even retweeted a graphic with the Cyrus and Swift comparison, causing major drama between Calvin Harris, Swift's boyfriend and the former One Direction star. Harris defended his girlfriend by claiming that she did it to protect independent artists who struggle to make minimum wage.  You can read the tweets in context here.

But I'm not here to rehash celebrity beef. I want to clear some things up about how I see this situation. I want to quickly say that I'm not involved in the music industry, nor have I ever been. Obviously my insight on this topic is limited to what other sources tell me. If anyone wants to correct me, I'm more than willing to listen. That being said, it's rant time.

First order of business, how much money to artists actually make off of Spotify? Not surprisingly, very little. Artists who are signed with a label only get around 20% of the revenue made off of the song. The rest of the dough is split between the label and the streaming service. This means that signed artists on Spotify make around $0.0011 per play, and unsigned artists at $0.007. Depending on how many people listen to your music, that is barely any money. iTunes, on the other hand, pays signed artists $0.23 and unsigned artists $0.69 per song download. We can see where Swift is coming from here. I highly recommend you take a look at the whole infographic where I got these statistics by clicking here. 

Even $0.23 isn't a very large amount of money. An artist like Taylor Swift, however, can still make a ton of cash given her popularity. A lot of artists, especially unsigned artists, can't make their living off of record sales. So how do musicians pay rent?

Gigs! Unlike record sales, where the artist only takes around 20% of the revenue, an artist takes on average 74% of the revenue made off of concert ticket sales. Here is a great infographic letting you know where your money goes when you buy a concert ticket. (source for stats & graphic)

At shows, artists can sell t-shirts and merch, another great source of revenue for talent according to Rolling Stone. 

A lot of music lovers simply can't afford to spend $0.99 on a song download. While it doesn't seem like a lot of money, it adds up. If you think about it, an entire music library of 300 songs can cost $300 dollars. With free streaming services like Spotify and Pandora, a consumer doesn't have to pay to listen to their favorite music. This way, more people can discover more songs and bands that they like without having to risk a dollar on a song they may not even enjoy. These services are a great way to reach a huge amount of people to get to know and love an artist. Not to mention free streaming probably prevents pirating. I don't have any hard facts on this, but logically it makes sense. If people can listen to their favorite music for free, why would they need to steal it? In this scenario the artist still gets paid. $0.0011 is better than nothing!

Let's connect this back to where we started, Taylor Swift. Since Swift had taken all of her music off of the streaming services that I love, I couldn't listen to her highly anticipated album, 1989. I wasn't about to shell out $10+ dollars for an album that I wasn't sure I would like. It's like test driving a car. I want to know what I'm paying for. To this day, I haven't heard the full 1989 album. I don't believe in pirating music and none of my friends could afford the price of the album, so I was physically unable to hear her music without buying it. Taylor Swift is coming to my city in a couple of months on her tour and I couldn't even consider buying a ticket. I hadn't heard the album! I didn't even know if I would like it! In a crazy ploy to get me to buy her album, where she would make only $2.30, Swift convinced me NOT to buy her $100 concert ticket, a $74 dollar payday.

I know what you're thinking: "If you can't pay $10 for an album, how the hell are you going to pay $100 for a concert ticket?" I know that I would much rather splurge on a great concert than buy a bunch of albums that I'm not that into. If I happened to fall in love with an artist, it makes more sense for me to spend my money on seeing them live rather than listen to a recording. The money that I'm saving by listening to Spotify is money that I'm spending on concert tickets. In my mind, that is much better for the artist than paying their label by downloading the songs. With Spotify, I've been able to discover so many artists that I wouldn't have heard of without it. An artist should want as many as ears as possible on their music. The more people who've heard it, the more people who will like it, and the more concert tickets that a band can sell, and the more money they make.

As many of my readers know, I work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia). The wonderful part about Mia is that it is completely free. While the art has an "inherent value" like Taylor preaches about, everyone is able to appreciate the art. I think that that is the best way to distribute art.

To summarize, musicians make the best money off of concert tickets. Concert tickets sell when more people listen to the music. More people listen to music when it's free, and Spotify is free. In short, based on my research, Spotify is good for artists. As for smaller independent acts, it is much easier to play their music on Spotify or Soundcloud than get their music on the radio if they're not backed by a label. While I like Taylor Swift and agree with most of her views, this is something that I can't wrap my head around. Swift says that she's looking out for the little guy, but it sounds to me like she just wants record sales.

Thanks for reading! Please tweet me @theonechameleon or comment below if there is anything you want to tell me/yell at me about.

Until next time,
Camille

P.S. I'm listening to Spotify while writing this. Irony?