If you are like me, you may be a bit confused by the amount of bad press that Spotify receives… the streaming service is the bad guy, taking all the money, robbing the artist, this is what we were supposed to understand from the Taylor Swift story right? Well, we are totally wrong.
According to this new wide-ranging study of the music market conducted by Ernst & Young on behalf of the French music trade organization SNEP (which includes Warner, Sony and Universal) the bad guys are definitively the labels. The study analyzed where the money from a €9.99 music subscription goes, and established that ‘€4.56 of it goes to record labels, €2.08 goes to the platform, €1.67 goes to tax, €1 goes to publishers and songwriters, and €0.68 goes to artists.’ It is as simple as this and now that we have the numbers it is clear that the streaming services (which in Europe are Spotify and Deezer) are not the ones eating the largest slice of the pie…
As Music Business Worldwide points out, if you remove the platform and tax fees, the €6.24 left are in fact the royalties, and the labels are taking €4.56 of it, that is 73%! Seen like this, it’s an enormous part
And don’t believe it is any different in the US, the contracts are about the same worldwide… so you have it, the labels are screwing the artists twice as much as Spotify does… Stop blaming streaming services for the sins of the labels. So, in a logical world, shouldn’t Taylor Swift get rid of her label rather than removing her albums from Spotify?