This is gonna be another post about how much musicians receive from their music. Numbers are important, and with the growing numbers of ways to distribute, download, and stream music, comparisons are keys. I got these figures from The Cynical Musician.
Regarding MP3 downloads, depending on the distributor (Amazon, iTunes,…) musicians get around 64 cents per track, a full album downloaded from CD Baby will bring exactly $7.49 in the artist’s pocket.
Now, if you consider streamed music, Rhapsody or Spotify will generate under a cent (0.91 cents for Rhapsody and 0.33 cents for Spotify) per play, and Last.fm 0.015 cents per play!
If we consider the Federal minimum wage rate in the US (about $1,160 a month or $13,920 yearly), a musician has to sell 1,813 tracks per month or 21,750 per year on Amazon or iTunes to reach this number! I wonder how many achieve this.
Of course, with streamed music, this becomes totally unachievable for most of them, since they would need 127,473 streams a month or 1,529,670 a year on Rhapsody, and they can simply forget about it with Last.fm, since they would need 7,733,333 plays monthly or 92,800,000 plays a year.
I remember the old times, before the digital age, when buying an album cost about $18-20, these times are definitively over, there are more and more music available and it is almost free. How can’t you be depressed if you are a musician and not Coldplay, Lady Gaga or Adele?