We dug through the archives to find an old article. Streaming sucks. Here's why.
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:
Video courtesy of Vanna.
And if you missed the news earlier this year, Apple is planning to remove downloads from iTunes and force users to stream their music. We aren't joking, either. Read it here.