It seems that Geoff Barrow of Portishead is a straightforward type of guy, and his last tweets just demonstrated this again. On Monday, the musicians just revealed his income from streaming services:
‘34,000,000 streams
Income After tax = £1700
Thank U @apple @YouTube @Spotify
especially @UMG_News for selling our music so cheaply.’
And this sums up today’s situation in a very few words: 34 millions of streams is not nothing and this had made him earn only £1700 (about $2,500). Geoff seems to imply that the sum includes all services combined, although Apple doesn’t have its streaming service running yet. And last but not least, Geoff points the finger to the record label, Universal Music Group, which determines what part of the money to keep and what part goes to the streaming service… So streaming services are not really the source of the problem, the labels are responsible of this mess. Barrow confirmed it in his next tweet:
‘I’ve got nothing against streaming a record
But I’ve got a lot against people giving my work away for free’
And this is ridiculous, when is this bad joke going to end? When are the labels going to recognize that the insane amount of money they keep is totally unfair? The problem in the story is that we never know how much the labels get from streamed music of a specific artist, so we have no benchmarks. Why aren’t labels releasing the numbers? Because they are ashamed of them… If artists aren’t making money, Spotify isn’t still making any money, someone has to make a fortune. According to Spotify Lamar probably made between $921,600 and $1,290,240 in twenty-four hours after the release of his new album ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’, which is an insane amount of money. Now imagine how much his label earned from this!