As the year comes to a close, you may start seeing a lot of Instagram stories, tweets, and Facebook updates showcasing people’s end-of-the-year music statistics. These compilations, which music streaming giants Spotify and Apple Music create using unique algorithms, typically show a user’s top artists, songs, and genres from the past year. The services also release the biggest artists of the year: Post Malone, Billie Eilish, and Ariana Grande each racked up around or over six billion streams on Spotify.
With so much attention and income being generated by these services, it’s easy to ignore their biggest pitfall: that they treat their artists worse than you would think.
I personally enjoy looking at my “Wrapped” statistics and those of others. Music plays a huge role in my daily life, and in the lives of many of my friends and family members, so being able to see which music shapes them is of interest to me. I also like to see how my music taste has changed and developed throughout the year.
In my opinion, there is no denying that Spotify is the superior music streaming platform. Its aesthetics are of higher quality and the organization is more user-friendly; not to mention, as well, the many personalized playlists to which I have access.
I love the plethora of “Daily Mix” playlists, which are custom playlists made just for me that change literally every day. Plus, my “Discover Weekly” playlist always helps me find new music. Another fun feature I recently discovered is that playlists such as “All Out 10s” and “Rock Classics” are not so much genre-or-artist-specific as they are tailored to each user’s individual listening patterns.
In a December 2018 article, Digital Music News reported the per-stream rates of numerous big-name streaming services.
YouTube is notoriously the worst; it pays its artists $0.00069 per stream. That means an artist would have to get 2,133,333 streams to acquire the United States monthly minimum wage of $1,472.
Tidal, Apple Music, and Spotify have better per-stream rates, but are still nowhere near perfect: these streaming giants each pay their artists $0.0125, $0.00735, and $0.00473 per stream, respectively. In turn, artists would need 117,760 plays, 200,272 plays, and 336,842 plays per month (respectively) in order to be paid the national monthly minimum wage.
This data, to say the least, is concerning. The per-stream rates work for established artists such as Malone, who received $30,745,000 this year from Spotify alone, but a smaller, independent artist who chooses to share their music on one of these major streaming platforms most likely cannot earn even the minimum wage in a month.
These extremely low per-stream rates also promote a negative idea of who should and shouldn’t be able to create and share artistic content; these statistics suggest that only the most popular artists, who have the money and resources to expand their popularity and reach, can make it in the music world.
It can only dissuade up-and-coming artists to share their content, knowing they’re going to have to do a lot more to receive even a sliver of the amount that Malone and other big-name artists earn per month.
For the amount of users that Spotify and Apple Music have together, it would only make sense for the services to treat their contributing artists a little better. As of February 2019, the two streaming giants had a combined 54 million subscribers.
All 54 million of these users, and the other countless million people who either use other platforms or none at all, should be aware of how they may contribute (or, in many cases, do not contribute) to the monthly salaries of their favorite artists.