Spotify has opened up a little bit with regards to the continuing argument between the service, musicians and the music industry, but don't look for the squalor to die down anytime soon. The music streaming site has launched a new Spotify Artists website to detail how much musicians can expect to earn from the average song-stream.
Spotify suggests that the average amount paid to those who own the rights to songs is somewhere between 0.6 and 0.84 cents per stream. That total is generally split between the musicians, songwriters and performers themselves. To make that number more relevant for you, that means Spotify pays out roughly $3,000 to $6,400 per million streams of a song. Based on numbers released this week, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis could be able to buy a new car (not too pricey) with that kind of money, but the average level performer won't get much help.
The service maintains that it's not seeing a huge amount of profit from its service either, estimating that nearly 70 percent of its revenues go to paying off royalties. Spotify reports that it's paid more than $500 million in royalty charges during 2013, and more than $1 billion since it began during 2008.
The obvious argument from critics such as Thom Yorke is that musicians aren't getting relative jack for their efforts. Spotify argues that new music formats will always include a period of confusion, and that the service's value to musicians can't be viewed in strict terms of royalty fees. Nielsen Soundscan suggested recently that streaming may actually increase album sales; The firm's study suggested that those who used services such as Spotify were 54 percent more likely to purchase an album later.
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