How do artists get paid for their work?

Rocker

A confusing title but somewhat inspired to the 'liking old music' thread.

Supposing, and this is unlikely to happen, a friend of mine and I record some songs and release them [where??], how do we get paid for our work?  In the old days, we would release an album, on vinyl or CD, and get some payment for each copy sold.  And something for each time one of our songs gets played on the radio.  And probably similar for discos.  My question is how do we track downloads or online plays of our material and who pays us for the downloads and plays?

Thanks.  This is not going to happen but I wonder anyway.

roberty

There are services that put your music on various streaming and downloading platforms. They aggregate the streaming and download revenue and give it to you

BillDL

Do a Google search for "CD Baby".  It will give you a link to the CD Baby website, but it will also give you links to "CD baby vs <other company>" and others like "Still using CD Baby? Try <this> instead".  I used CD Baby once back when it actually was CDs (they have evolved) and I am now totally out of touch with streamed options, but hopefully you will be able to glean enough information from some searches to see how they work in general and thereafter make some comparisons.

DavidR

My belief was that performing, and especially concerts, had moved up the list for the top professional performers 'cos the interweb/streaming/facetwit generations were no longer keen on forking out their hard-earned dosh on physical media. Fair enough. I am the same and I'm old. But I still buy vinyl if I come across good music. 

Things change. But, if we don't pay musicians, we get bad music. Rap anyone?! ;-)

Grangousier

I'm a very lax, un- and non-professional composer and musician who's done a few uploads over the years. I suspect I'm not alone on the forum in that. My experience runs roughly thus:

There are royalties from the streamer - this is usually dealt with by the aggregator (like CD Baby or RouteNote, which all have slightly different payment structures and fees). From the big streamers it works out at about half a US cent per stream, often less, sometimes more. From the myriad of streamers you've never heard of this will probably be a figure so small they literally don't have enough decimal places to accurately record it. CD Baby, at least, also deal with licensing (which includes when a track is used on Facebook or TIkTok). These have to be reported in from the different streamers and they take about six months to appear. In about five years I'll have earned enough that they send me a payment. 

There are also performance royalties for the writer of the material (so this wouldn't include covers) - this includes streams (a separate, smaller payment from the above), YouTube, TV and radio (yes, well, but should include local/internet radio as well, which the likes of us might actually do), and actual live performances (though you need to tell them where and when particular songs were performed). I started doing this about ten years ago using a company called Sentric: I'm not very good at forms and so forth, and it seemed like the most straightforward way of going about it at the time. I was mostly interested in having a place where I could put the songs I played at particular venues. This takes considerably longer to arrive, but over the years I've had several modest dinners out of it. 

In terms of performances, the actual amount depends on the size of the venue, the time of day (I think) and other factors that imply a certain size of audience. 

And there are also payments to the musicians who performed the music, but at this level they'll be even smaller than the tiny stream payments listed above. This depends on PRS having a record of the performers who played on the track and those performers being in a position to collect (the Musician's Union occasionally do a push to get people to claim). I think most of these lie dormant for years until they bundle up all the uncollected money and give it to Ed Sheeran like they do the bulk of the other payments. 

On the other hand, there's Bandcamp, which is easy to use and upload to, but it depends on people actually wanting to download tracks. It is a useful way for people to just give you money if they want to, though.

You can sell merchandise through Bandcamp and (at least recently) Spotify, if you want. Probably other places too, but I don't really sell merchandise, so I wouldn't know.  

Hopefully there'll be someone along with actual industry experience who can point out the flaws and fantasy in the above. 

lustycourtier

DavidR said:

My belief was that performing, and especially concerts, had moved up the list for the top professional performers 'cos the interweb/streaming/facetwit generations were no longer keen on forking out their hard-earned dosh on physical media. Fair enough. I am the same and I'm old. But I still buy vinyl if I come across good music. 

Things change. But, if we don't pay musicians, we get bad music. Rap anyone?! ;-)

Rap has been around since the 1970s, and takes as much musicianship and production as any other genre. 

fretmeister

Good old Spotify.

They pay $0.00437 per stream.

And about 75% of that goes to the record label and not the artist. So it needs about 300 million streams to gross a million dollars (not happening), and then the label takes most of it.


But yeah - you record it. You upload it to an aggregator. You can pay someone to do the boring bits like register it with the various royalty collecting bodies or you can do that yourself.

The aggregator places it on iTunes / Amazon Music / Tidal etc etc and make it available to buy. Each layer takes a cut before it gets back to you.

You are then running a business and pay tax on it. Unless the cost of making it was more than the income. Which is very likely.

Grangousier

Hmm. I just wrote this reply, as I seem to be avoiding work. It seems quite coherent, but like I'm trying too hard to be hard-headed:

The problem is that if you take the amount of money set aside for payments by a company like Spotify and divide it by the number of plays just under half a cent isn't an unreasonable amount. Spotify have something of tremendous value - the infrastructure necessary to allow  global music streaming - and they can charge at both the provider and consumer ends for access to it.  They're not doing nothing for the money - they built and maintain the infrastructure that makes worldwide, virtually frictionless distribution possible. And, yes, they give more money to the major record companies, but those companies' involvement is what allows that infrastructure to exist - the purpose of the app is to let people listen to Ed Sheeran (as a synecdoche for the handful of mega-successful artists who make up the vast bulk of plays), and a side-effect is the fact that someone in Ulan-Bator can listen to your album. Although, they most likely won't. 

The question "How do artists get paid for their work" seems perfectly rational while you're asking it, but to anyone who has experience of the system (not so much me, as people I know) it makes as much sense as the question "How do I get elves to do the washing up?" It was always like that, though, it's not as if record companies have just started to take most of the money.

It probably makes more sense to ask the question "How can I engage with this system to get money out of it?" The answer is probably still "You can't", but at least it's not on the elves-and-unicorns level of plausibility. 

There are all those sources of income, and if you want to do all the work to gather up all those payments you can get the money for it. It makes more sense for most people to allow other people to do that work, but it's still work you're hiring them to do. 

It's kind of like the question "how do I get lots of gigs and get paid for them?" Well, you learn a lot of popular covers and play them in a way that punters recognise and enjoy. Then you perform them as a backdrop to beer-fuelled conversation. If you want to play whispy, melancholy ballads to pin-drop silence, that's fine, but at that point the gig is of more value to you than it is the venues, so you should expect to be paid nothing or, indeed, to pay for the opportunity. Most of us pay in the currency of bringing to the venue people who will buy beer. If you manage to accumulate enough beer-drinking people who want to sit in pin-drop silence to listen to your whispy ballads that you can fill the Union Chapel then you'll get paid. 

What the industry does is gather up all those audience members, but that requires a lot of labour that also needs to be paid for - marketing, photographers, promoters, agents, advertising, etc, etc, etc. The musician is one of those people who is doing work, but the problem is that their specialist skill is probably more easily replaceable than a lot of the other ones. 

Value follows scarcity. 

DavidR

lustycourtier said:

DavidR said:

My belief was that performing, and especially concerts, had moved up the list for the top professional performers 'cos the interweb/streaming/facetwit generations were no longer keen on forking out their hard-earned dosh on physical media. Fair enough. I am the same and I'm old. But I still buy vinyl if I come across good music. 

Things change. But, if we don't pay musicians, we get bad music. Rap anyone?! ;-)

Rap has been around since the 1970s, and takes as much musicianship and production as any other genre. 

Really? Is it compulsory to slouch, wear baggy clothes and have weird hand movements? When will it change? 1970's a long time fo'shizzle.  :-)