Sevdaliza could have more than a million monthly listeners SpotifyBut that doesn’t mean much about meeting the two ends. The Iranian artist-Loxed made waves in the electronic-pop sphere with his experimental music, but this apparently represents a drop in the bucket with regard to his bank account.
“I have been an independent artist for 12 years by freeing music, I have built everything, including a base of fans without majors, and I still cannot allow myself to take a week off”, ” tweeted Sevdaliza, adding that on average, one million flows are equivalent to an artist paid $ 2,500. “Deduce taxes, management and cost of the product. How should we make music sustainable? ” wondered the artist who collaborated once with Grimes.
Sevdaliza’s message was a response to a viral position from another artist, James Blake, concerning the streaming system.
“If we want quality music, someone will have to pay for that”, he saidexplaining the decreasing options to earn money. “The streaming services do not pay properly, the labels want a greater cut than ever and you sit down and wait for you to become viral, Tiktok does not pay properly, and the tours become prohibitively for most artists.”
How much is Spotify by flow?
Indeed, Streaming has exceeded The music industry –Spotify reported record growthAdding 31 million premium subscribers last year. A bit like how royalties Because the actors are thinner for a Netflix Show as a cable, the payments of these music streaming services do not have the same impact as physical albums have done in the past. The artist Zoë Keating shared with Initiate of Business In 2020 that for her, a single flow of Apple Music represented $ 0.012; On Spotify, it would only receive $ 0.003 after the distributor costs.
No one said that doing it was easy, but it seems all the more impossible these days so that independent artists take a break. The era of streaming has made the process all the more exhausting while independent artists have trouble living in a particularly volatile economy.
“If we received a significant streaming income, it could be a weekly grocery store; this could contribute to your rent or your mortgage when you need it most,” said artist Nadine Shah New York Times. “This is why I felt obliged to talk about it. I saw so many artists struggling.” Of course, the creators’ economy can make it even more difficult to become a star among all short forms competition over there.
Responding to James Blake’s post, Lauren Jauregui (who has become famous as a member of Fifth Harmony) said That among his artist friends, “everyone has the impression that we do not have the right to be paid for our work.” Saying that music is the only industry that looks like that, Jaucregui adds that people “confuse popularity or competition with” success “with” success ” [so] They cannot conceptualize how extractive and abusive these systems are for us. In response, Sevdaliza said she was trying to fight farm by “starting a musical artist union, who only pleads for the rights of musicians”.
How much do the independent artists gain on Spotify?
Spotify said Fortune that independent artists represented the almost half of what the whole industry generated on the platform for the first time in 2023. The many independent musicians have almost done $ 4.5 billion Last year, according to a spokesperson.
As it stands, being an artist is not tenable, as Sevdaliza describes it. “I have to sacrifice my health and I cannot be a current mother, because of our business model,” explains the artist. “The fact is that if you want to do it in music, you cannot stop. I love music so much, and I never want to give up but we are not paid for our art. It makes no sense.”
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com March 6, 2024.
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This story was initially presented on Fortune.com
