If, like me, you don’t actually deal with the selling of music, and always wondered what the economics of digital music were, you might find this interesting.
French indie band, Uniform Motion, took to their blog a few weeks back on the release day of their latest record to tell you just what happens for them now that the record is out.
Some interesting points are made about streaming platforms and digital shops:
With Spotify, we’ll get 0.003 EUR/play.
If you listen to the album all the way through, we’ll get 0.029 EUR.
If you listen to the album 10 times on Spotify, we’ll get 0.29 EUR
If you listen to it a hundred times, we’ll get 2.94 EUR
If you listen to the album 1,000 times (once a day for 3 years!) we’ll get 29.47 EUR!
If you use the free version of Spotify, it won’t cost you anything. Spotify will make money from ads. If you use any of the paid versions, we have no idea how they carve up the money. They only disclose this information to the Major record labels…
The album will cost you 8.91 EUR to buy from Apple.
There’s a 70-30% split there too, so we will keep 6.28 EUR/album.
That being said, it costs us 35 EUR/year to keep an album on iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon (105 EUR per year for all 3 of our albums!) so we don’t make any money until 24 people have bought a digital copy of the album on iTunes, or 150 single songs, or if we get tens of thousands of listens on Spotify! In most cases, it’s actually more economically viable not to sell the music at all.
Away from all the rules, Uniform Motion allow you to pay what you wish for their album over at Bandcamp, so go and stream it and support these indie kids if you like it.
