"What matters is how much of that spending is making it back to the rights holders."
Rights holders or artists? It's not like the artists receive a lot for each CD sale.
I'm not saying the music industry can't provide a valuable service, but if there where any real competition they would be out of business a long time ago. IMHO, it might be better for "music" if they all went bust.
Keep in mind that comparisons like this don't take into account that streaming services like Spotify attract a lot of users who would not have spent a dime on music distributed in any other way, so they are effectively useless to compare revenue streams. They are a bit like equating every pirated song to a lost sale.
Myself, I'm just like the guy above me, I literally spent $0 on music for over a decade, until I got a Spotify Premium account about a year ago. I think there are many others like me.
Services like Spotify and Netflix are marginal cost services. Their intent is to monetize the previously non-paying customers like yourself at unheard of low prices.
However, it's not all gravy. Marginal cost services cannibalize a portion of the existing market. The degree to which this happens depends on the popularity of the service. It may a small percentage or in the extreme, every customer.
If Spotify remains relatively small and is kept in check, then it will likely be a net benefit to artists and labels as it costs them little to participate.
However, it's also a disruptive innovation at a radically lower price point. If the lion's share of the music market were to switch to Spotify or a similar service, the drop in revenues would not sustain the market since great content is labour intensive and expensive.
My understanding is that it pays a similar amount to airplay - and that if I want a band to make the same amount they would have made from me buying their album then I need to listen to it about 100 times.
Which, for albums I love, tends to happen. Rubbish albums full of fillers, on the other hand...
It all depends on how big a label they're with and so what terms they get from spotify but it looks more like 2000 (track) plays = ~200 full plays of an album in the best case scenario and perhaps as bad as 100,000 track plays in the worst case.Part of the problem is that its essentially impossible to tell from the outside which is which.
“Streaming services are very “long tail”. It takes time for consumers to discover your music, add it to playlists, favourite it, and share it with friends. The longer a label is on a streaming platform, the more established they become, and the more time users will have had to
discover their music. Users need to dig deep and it also helps if labels market their playlists.”
