Spotify had 30 million monthly customers in March 2016 and most recent numbers show Apple Music with 13 million subscribers as of August of this year. A basic monthly subscription is $10.00 which comes to about $300 million each month for Spotify ($3,600,000,000/year) and $130 million each month for Apple Music ($1,560,000,000/year). The average pay out is per stream is estimated around $0.0084 per play. (Less than $0.01, can you believe that shit?) I've always sucked at math but I'll give it a shot. To make it easy we will say the average number of songs on a record is 10 tracks. Assuming the average length of a song is three minutes the album is thirty minutes long, you would have to listen to one album nearly 1,190 times before paying the average $10 for the album. To put that in perspective listening to that album 1,190 times comes out to a total of 35,700 minutes, which means you would have to listen to the album on repeat for 25 consecutive days for the band to earn your $10. Moral of the story? Buy physical music. Buy digital albums. Go to shows. Record companies don't give a damn about streams, they care about actual album sales, most importantly first week album sales.

Listen to Davey of Vanna talk about the subject:

And if you missed the news earlier this year, Apple is planning to remove downloads from iTunes and force users to stream their music. Read it all here.