If you found out that you had gotten over 72K plays in a 3 month period for music you had released 7 years ago, you'd think that was pretty good, right?
I'm going to do this from time to time just so people can see what streaming music pays the songwriters. Here is one section of our first quarter royalty statement from 2014, it covers 3 months. Based on this section of the statement, 72,098 plays paid $4.82*. That is .00006685 cents PER PLAY.
In full disclosure, we got this amount again on our personal statement, this is for our publishing company. So... you can double the $.09 for the 1,644 plays. Woo!
Here's my idea, and some people might hate it, but hear me out. What if music streaming services charged $1 a day only on the days you listen to music? So if you have a Spotify account or a Pandora account, you have a payment method set up, and if you only log in 3 days in a week, you only pay $3. [Now, some people are thinking "but I listen to music ALL day EVERY day... I don't want to pay $30 a month for music!" OK, imagine working, driving, running, peeing in silence. How does your life feel? How much did you spend on your coffee this morning? You pony up for the Starbucks because you can't live without the caffeine... Can you live without the music? Back to the original topic...]
How many songs can a person listen to in a day? Say someone listens to 5 hours of music a day, that would be 300 minutes and for the sake of easy math, let's say each song is 3 minutes. That would be 100 songs in 5 hours. What if each stream of a song got just one penny? If that was the case, our 72K+ plays would have made $720 instead of $4.82.
Now I realize that Pandora and Spotify have overhead, they've got bills to pay. What if we split that? What if we got half a penny? We would have made $360 instead of $4.82. "A half a penny is TOO MUCH!" the evil lords say... What if we just got 1/10 of a penny per play?? We would have made $72 instead of $4.82. So... if we, the songwriters, only got 1/10 of a penny per play, we would be making almost FIFTEEN TIMES MORE than we currently are.
How much is music worth?
