Along with the growth of advanced technology, music industry has shifted from the physical music formats to cloud-based and subscription services. On-demand streaming music services have vastly expanded in the last few years. Spotify, Pandora and other music services are generally considered to become the dominant means of future’s mass music consumption and have been important factors in helping recording industries in some countries for preventing the long-term decline. However, with the emergence of such music services, controversies like the low levels of royalty payments, have been publicly criticized by both major stars and smaller independent artists. Music streaming services are now widely regarded as a cashless loss-leader for artists …show more content…
Along with the growth of the streaming platforms, the royalties of streaming music are up for debate. While the industry of streaming music is a profitable business and has been made considerable revenues, the royalties paid out by streaming services remain extremely low (Marshall 2015). In reality, the amounts these services pay for a stream is negligible, their idea is that if there are enough people to use the service, those tiny sand will pile up, and it is the reasonable that domination and ubiquity of streaming services has been encouraged (Byrne 2013). For example, the royalty rate of the dominant platform, Spotify, is an average of $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream, but after the label’s share, a signed artist can only receive the payment from the label portion of that is $0.001128 (University Wire 2017). Moreover, Damon Krukowski (Damon & Naomi, Galaxie 500) has reported abysmal data on revenues from Pandora and Spotify for his song “Tugboat” and Lowery even wrote a piece entitled “My Song Got Played on Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89, Less Than What I Make from a Single T-shirt Sale!” For a four-member band that makes a 15% royalty from Spotify streams, it will take 236,549,020 streams for each member to acquire a minimum annual wage of $15,080 (Byrne 2013). Daft Punks also hold the same perspective. One of Daft Punk’s song named “Get Lucky” had reached 104,760,000 streams on Spotify by the end of August, Daft Punk’s two guys adhere to make somewhere around $13,000 each. Yet this price is just for a song which had spent a lengthy recording and took lots of time and money to develop. It is definitely not enough to pay their bills if it is the main source of income, also it would be worse for those artists who do not have massive international summer hits. In the future, if artists have