Trent being totally disingenuous. It's not youtubes fault artist get sweet fa it's the record companies. Even using Apples service will still mean the vast majority of artists still get next to nothing. Only the biggest stars make money from these plans and they are the ones that need the money the least.
Given these low rates, another thing music providers could do is have a topup for people who don't want an ongoing streaming subscription. If you put $5 into a topup and the rates are 0.4c per listen, you'd get 1250 plays (~60 hours of music). They'd retain the playlists in the cloud permanently and you'd just be paying when you listen to tracks. That would be more cost-effective for people who listen to music less often.
I quite like this idea as an alternative, but I imagine part of the streaming services' business model involves the less frequent listeners subsidizing the more frequency listeners, in terms of the proportional cost overheads of infrastructure and bandwidth. Take out the less frequent listeners from the subscription package and the whole service might slip into the red.
With all due respect, artist payout is so close to zero, streaming on Apple Music is basically free. Only mainstream hit makers can see anything substantial when the payout is .0013 cents per song streamed. An artist would have to reach 23 million streams to make $30,000
Apple isn't paying per stream, they are paying based on a percentage of the subscription revenue they stream. If I was to pay my $10 per month for Apple Music and I only streamed 1 song, 1 time for the month that would mean $7 went towards the rights owners (Label, artist etc...) of that single stream of that 1 song.
I really hope this isn't true. This would reward artists with fans that barely play any music. These artists tend to be not very good, in my opinion. It makes me think of someone in particular in my Apple Music family membership, who used our $14.99/mo. membership to stream their 2 favorite songs, and barely at all.
The way I always thought streaming services should do it is add up all their subscription fee profits for the month, then divide that by how many songs were streamed. That's the "rate" for a stream for that particular month. Say they made $80 million in profit one month with 15 million users, and people streamed an average of 150 songs that month. That's 2.25 billion streams (15 million x 150). Now I have no idea if that's more or less than what they would typically see, but since they made 80 million in profit, they'd divide that by the number of streams, and that's how much they'd pay rights holders for each stream. The final per-stream number in this example would be ~$0.035555556. So if I got 50,000 streams as a little indie artist, I would have made a cool $1,777.78 that month (50,000 x 0.035555556). Some months artists may get more, some months they may get less. But that seems to be the most fair thing to do.
Is my math or thinking wrong on this?
These Artists put up their Music Video's onto youtuve. They're promotional things. Then they come back and complain people are watching them for free. I really don't get it. Tell me how this is different from say MTV back in the day. I didn't pay a penny to watch non-stop music video's. I know MTV for a number of years now is pretty much nothing but Reality TV garbage, but it was cool way back in the day.
Same goes tuning into FM/AM Radio. That's FREE streaming Music!!!! With ad's. How is that any different then streaming on the internet with Ad's??? These streaming services already pay out a huge chunk of money to these company's, but it's never enough. They can't seem to even turn a profit. Spotify, Pandora, etc keep on losing money. What I don't get is, if these company's think they don't make enough money from Spotify and Youtube, etc, Why not create their own service and pay themselves 100% of the money they make? Really, all this crap complaining about got getting enough has been really just turning me off more and more to music. I turn into more talk type shows. Tech blogs and other type of things, other then music. What little music I tune into is from Amazon Prime and the fraction of music they have compared to everyone else. That's more then good enough for me.
These Artists put up their Music Video's onto youtuve. They're promotional things. Then they come back and complain people are watching them for free. I really don't get it. Tell me how this is different from say MTV back in the day. I didn't pay a penny to watch non-stop music video's. I know MTV for a number of years now is pretty much nothing but Reality TV garbage, but it was cool way back in the day.
Same goes tuning into FM/AM Radio. That's FREE streaming Music!!!! With ad's. How is that any different then streaming on the internet with Ad's?
The difference is that all of that 'Free' listening in the old days was based on the expectation that the promotion would lead to tangible album sales of which the artist got a much bigger piece than they get for streaming today. Today's youth have completely different listening habits so those old models are not relevant any longer. When I was younger I regularly bought albums on CD and before that on vinyl. Back then albums had cover art and the songs connected and flowed together as a complete work. We listened to a new album while reading the liner notes and replayed it over and over. That is just not the way it works these days.
I do think that these free streaming services are making it impossible for artists to be fairly compensated for their work, and I also originally thought that any idiot could upload anything to YouTube, including copyrighted work that they didn't own, but that's actually not the case.
YouTube detects copyrighted work. I put up a highly edited video of a family member dancing at a recital with recorded music in the background that was being played to accompany the dancers at the event. In at least one case, the recorded music in the background was highly obscure. And yet every time I've done this and in spite of the fact that the video (and therefore the music) was highly cut up and also subject to the room acoustics and audience noise, YouTube indicated that the video contained copyrighted content and they placed advertising on it, even though I make these videos "unlisted" (so you can't find them via a YouTube search - you have to know the URL).
When they place advertising on it, they supposedly share that revenue with the copyright owner. The amount they share may be unfair, but they're sharing something. So as far as I can tell, it's not accurate to say that YouTube is filled with copyrighted content used without permission. They apparently have made deals with the labels and other copyright owners. The shock is that they seem to be doing it with permission.
In spite of that, what especially annoys me are people who take some hit song and make a video of the record playing or put up some stills of the performers and post it as if there was no copyright on that music whatsoever. I really don't understand why the labels continue to allow this. Even though downloads sales are in decline, the fractions of pennies that they probably get from YouTube even for a greater number of streams has to be far less than what they earn from a far lesser number of downloads.
As I've posted many times before, the music business is in severe decline. In the U.S., adjusted for inflation, the total music business (including streams, downloads, licensing, etc.) is only one third of its former peak size. In 2015, Digital units (downloads) constituted 34% of the business, streaming was 34.3% and physical units were down to 28.8%. On-demand ad supported streaming contributed little to the industry: only $385 million. Even LP's, which only sold 16.9 million units, generated $416.2 million (at list prices).
I remember the days when people listened to a thing called radio to hear music. This might sound unfair to the whiney Reznor, but listeners didn't pay to hear the music being played then either. The radio stations paid a small royalty to the music companies, which passed on almost none of those fees to the artists, who then, as now, made most of their money from live performances. These days the radio station is called Youtube and it pays royalties to the record companies, again, most artists would sell very little of that.
Not much has really changed, except back in the days of radio, artist would generally do anything and everything in order to get their music played by radio stations and so be heard by the public. Publicity was all and they would destroy and vandalise hotel rooms, drive cars into swimming pools, have affairs with supermodels and conspicuously consume drugs in order to garner publicity. I never once heard of artists asking for their works to be taken off radio and to not be played.
I don't think Youtube is stopping any artists from making a good living if they are producing works the public likes.
Nonsense. Yes, we have access to general broadcast radio for free, but the advantage to the artist was historically free sampling which drove album sales. And successful artists and song writers did in fact make lots of money on album sales. The difference with radio play is that the consumer has no control over when or how frequently to hear the song, which is a distinct difference with youtube posts. Why do you need to buy when you can listen any time you want for free?
He's absolutely correct. And Google is being deceitful when they say they have signed agreements with publishers. Because of how the DMCA works, in order for an artist to get a song removed from YouTube that a "fan" has uploaded they have to send a take-down request. Content is uploaded so quickly to YouTube that this becomes an impossible task. As soon as you take down one song, 10 more have popped up. So the publishers have signed an agreement with a gun pointed at their heads because they know they will never be able to remove content from YouTube. Meanwhile, Google rakes in billions in revenue from ads presented along with all this stolen content.
Google has an automatic music detection system when you upload videos with music to Youtube. The algorithm isn't perfect but from the 20 or so uploads I did, Google only missed one. In case that Google find out you have copyrighted music in your upload, Google immediately informs you that there are copyrights on that video and that it will put ads on the video to compensate the owner. Bear in mind that Youtube is an international service, where 80% of the uploads and the views are not covered by DCMA So your comment is not fully correct.
I remember the days when people listened to a thing called radio to hear music. This might sound unfair to the whiney Reznor, but listeners didn't pay to hear the music being played then either. The radio stations paid a small royalty to the music companies, which passed on almost none of those fees to the artists, who then, as now, made most of their money from live performances. These days the radio station is called Youtube and it pays royalties to the record companies, again, most artists would sell very little of that.
Not much has really changed, except back in the days of radio, artist would generally do anything and everything in order to get their music played by radio stations and so be heard by the public. Publicity was all and they would destroy and vandalise hotel rooms, drive cars into swimming pools, have affairs with supermodels and conspicuously consume drugs in order to garner publicity. I never once heard of artists asking for their works to be taken off radio and to not be played.
I don't think Youtube is stopping any artists from making a good living if they are producing works the public likes.
Nonsense. Yes, we have access to general broadcast radio for free, but the advantage to the artist was historically free sampling which drove album sales. And successful artists and song writers did in fact make lots of money on album sales. The difference with radio play is that the consumer has no control over when or how frequently to hear the song, which is a distinct difference with youtube posts. Why do you need to buy when you can listen any time you want for free?
I don't think you have used Youtube very much. Autoplay is the default so If you play a track it will follow it with something else, usually related in style/genre. I have discovered quite a bit of stuff this way. As pointed out by zoetmb, if you do play a track multiple times, multiple royalty payments will ensue. I don't think the user being able to choose really is financially deleterious to artists. Back in the day, I would drive to a music store and request to listen to and preview a CD if I heard a track on the radio I liked. These days if I come across something I will do the same using Youtube, and it's better for the environment if you buy into that CO2 thing.
Youtube is a great way to find and listen to new music. I think it generates sales. I am about to purchase something I discovered on Youtube yesterday, as it happens.
I remember the days when people listened to a thing called radio to hear music. This might sound unfair to the whiney Reznor, but listeners didn't pay to hear the music being played then either. The radio stations paid a small royalty to the music companies, which passed on almost none of those fees to the artists, who then, as now, made most of their money from live performances. These days the radio station is called Youtube and it pays royalties to the record companies, again, most artists would sell very little of that.
Not much has really changed, except back in the days of radio, artist would generally do anything and everything in order to get their music played by radio stations and so be heard by the public. Publicity was all and they would destroy and vandalise hotel rooms, drive cars into swimming pools, have affairs with supermodels and conspicuously consume drugs in order to garner publicity. I never once heard of artists asking for their works to be taken off radio and to not be played.
I don't think Youtube is stopping any artists from making a good living if they are producing works the public likes.
You can't be serious. With radio, you didn't have on-demand access to every song you wanted, therefore most people who wanted that went out and purchased the album, thereby paying the artist. With YouTube, you simply do not need to purchase the album, hence the artist makes squat.
I remember the days when people listened to a thing called radio to hear music. This might sound unfair to the whiney Reznor, but listeners didn't pay to hear the music being played then either. The radio stations paid a small royalty to the music companies, which passed on almost none of those fees to the artists, who then, as now, made most of their money from live performances. These days the radio station is called Youtube and it pays royalties to the record companies, again, most artists would sell very little of that.
Not much has really changed, except back in the days of radio, artist would generally do anything and everything in order to get their music played by radio stations and so be heard by the public. Publicity was all and they would destroy and vandalise hotel rooms, drive cars into swimming pools, have affairs with supermodels and conspicuously consume drugs in order to garner publicity. I never once heard of artists asking for their works to be taken off radio and to not be played.
I don't think Youtube is stopping any artists from making a good living if they are producing works the public likes.
You can't be serious. With radio, you didn't have on-demand access to every song you wanted, therefore most people who wanted that went out and purchased the album, thereby paying the artist. With YouTube, you simply do not need to purchase the album, hence the artist makes squat.
Besides that, radio stations had to pay royalties to play music. Which they were compensated for with selling ads.
Comments
YouTube detects copyrighted work. I put up a highly edited video of a family member dancing at a recital with recorded music in the background that was being played to accompany the dancers at the event. In at least one case, the recorded music in the background was highly obscure. And yet every time I've done this and in spite of the fact that the video (and therefore the music) was highly cut up and also subject to the room acoustics and audience noise, YouTube indicated that the video contained copyrighted content and they placed advertising on it, even though I make these videos "unlisted" (so you can't find them via a YouTube search - you have to know the URL).
When they place advertising on it, they supposedly share that revenue with the copyright owner. The amount they share may be unfair, but they're sharing something. So as far as I can tell, it's not accurate to say that YouTube is filled with copyrighted content used without permission. They apparently have made deals with the labels and other copyright owners. The shock is that they seem to be doing it with permission.
In spite of that, what especially annoys me are people who take some hit song and make a video of the record playing or put up some stills of the performers and post it as if there was no copyright on that music whatsoever. I really don't understand why the labels continue to allow this. Even though downloads sales are in decline, the fractions of pennies that they probably get from YouTube even for a greater number of streams has to be far less than what they earn from a far lesser number of downloads.
As I've posted many times before, the music business is in severe decline. In the U.S., adjusted for inflation, the total music business (including streams, downloads, licensing, etc.) is only one third of its former peak size. In 2015, Digital units (downloads) constituted 34% of the business, streaming was 34.3% and physical units were down to 28.8%. On-demand ad supported streaming contributed little to the industry: only $385 million. Even LP's, which only sold 16.9 million units, generated $416.2 million (at list prices).
So your comment is not fully correct.
Youtube is a great way to find and listen to new music. I think it generates sales. I am about to purchase something I discovered on Youtube yesterday, as it happens.