Streaming turned massive profits for labels in 2019 - but artists are still being paid a pittance
It may have taken the music industry a while to get to grips with streaming, but it seems that they now have it sussed. At least, one element of it does.
The decline of the physical product has meant major changes for the industry as people consume their music differently. Chart rules have changed to incorporate streams and downloads and companies like Spotify and Apple Music continue to dominate the market.
And in 2019, streaming accounted for 80% of the overall profit made by the music industry, generating a figure of $8.8 billion. That's more than digital downloads, physical sales, and synch licensing made, combined. And amazingly, it's more than the total combined figure (streaming, digital downloads, physical sales, etc.) made from recorded music in 2017.
A new report goes as far to suggest that - based on those figures - major labels are making a whopping $1 million (€914,000) per HOUR from streaming alone.
One of the reasons given for streaming's jump in profits has been the fact that people are now more willing to shell out for subscriptions for the likes of Spotify and Apple Music; last year, subscriptions increased by a huge 25%.
There's one negative to this whole boom in streaming figures, however: those huge numbers are necessarily trickling down to the people who make the music. Artists are still only being paid a reported $0.012 per song stream on Apple Music, or $0.003 per song stream on Spotify - which essentially means that artists need to be pulling in streaming figures of more than 1 million to make any sort of decent money.
Clearly this isn't very fair, but it remains to be seen how it will pan out - or whether artists will be able to someone wrestle back control of their income and get their fair share of the pie.