Buy Music to Support Musicians. BUT WHY?
I like DRM-free music. All the DRM-free music I purchased go on my Nextcloud server and become available on all my devices. It is a neat system, having streaming service of my own. I was not always into listening to music though. It is an interest developed in last 3 to 4 years.
One streaming service was enough to access all the music I could listen to. Then I noticed that some tracks in my favourites were grayed out. They were no longer selectable. It turns out, some musicians weren’t happy with their contract with the streaming service, so they pulled the plug, thus those tracks became unavailable. That is when I fully recognised what subscription meant. I was only granted limited listening right as long as musician was happy with someone else’s rules. If I wanted uninterupted enjoymant from something, I had to purchase DRM-free copies.
I have been purchasing tracks ever since (for last 3 years or so). I am not a big spender and decided on a monthly budget. 10$ was my budget. Any money left after paying for a streaming service plan (roughly 5$) goes to purchasing tracks. Some months I decide to buy entire albums which wouldn’t fit into my budget, so I combine 2 months’ budgets and purchase that album. Result is a collection of just over 200 DRM-free tracks available to me at all times.
There often are 3 places I look to purchase a track or album:
- Band’s or composer’s official website and/or online store
- Bandcamp
- 7Digital (have different stores for each country. Go to [2letter country code].7digital.com for your country, examples: uk.7digital.com for UK and ca.7digital.com for Canada)
Another thing I noticed is that very few people actually do have a digital collection of music they listen to. Almost everybody migrated to streaming only. Given that artists don’t encourage people to purchase their tracks, I started to wonder whether people like me purchasing their music was less profitable for them than streaming. I came up with below napkin math. I am not a musician and have no clue how much musiciand pay to what to be frank, but this is a napkin math, not a university thesis.
I imagine musicians have to pay at least 2 things from their income: income tax to government and publishing fee to their publishers. I will assume that average income tax rate as 10% and publishing fee is another 10%. This means 20% of what I pay for doesn’t go to artists.
For sake of argument, I will assume everybody pays for Spotify’s 10$/month Premium Individual plan and that Spotify is keeping 30% of each payment just like every other tech company, leaving 7$ from 10$ for artists to share. This should paint the most optimistic picture for the artists.
Let’s say that average music listener listens to music for 1 hour everyday. Assuming each track is exactly 4 minutes long, you would listen to 20 tracks everyday. This makes 600 tracks monthly.
7$/600 tracks = 1.1667 cents per track
When we remove 20 percent fees and tax from that 1.1667 cents, we should be left with whatever much artist would get everytime some listens to one of artist’s track.
0.8 * 1.667 cents = 0.9334 cents (almost 1 cent)
Assuming that each track is 4 minutes long, everybody pays for the most expensive plan of Spotify and publishers are not sucking artists’ blood, artists should earn just shy of 1 cent each time you listen to one of their track once.
Now let’s assume that you purchased a track from band’s official website for 1$ each. Even if we assume that payment provider charges 10% per transaction, government ask for 10% income tax and publisher ask for another 10%. Artist would be paying 30% of this 1$ transaction and get to keep 70 cents from each purchase. This is an optimistic picture as well. But at least I won’t need to pay for the most expensive plan and listen to same track 70 times to get artist compansated the same amount.
Even if artists don’t have their own site or official online stores to sell from, selling DRM-free tracks on Bandcamp is the smarter choise than streaming. Even when we add 15% cut of Bandcamp in to the mix, artists would still get 55 cents per dollar spent on Bandcamp.
I wanted to see if my assumptions were close to real life and did some digging. I am not sure why, maybe it is in artists’ contract with their publishers, but it is almost impossible to see how much streaming services and DRM-free music stores pay to musicians per track played, minute listened or tracks sold.
Fortunately, independent musicians Che Chen shared details of her band’s earnings from streaming services and from Bandcamp with Pitchfork. According to Pitchfork’s article, an artist can expect to earn 20 cents for 500 listens. This means actually 40 listens on Spotify make 1 cents in royalties. My “1 cent royalty per listen” napkin math was way off, or generous.
We might make $100 a year from streaming. On a recent statement of mine, the royalties for one track that had 580 plays on Spotify was zero dollars and 20 cents.
Che Chen said to Pitchfork
Now let’s assume that income tax is actually 20% and publishers charge 15% instead of 10%. Bandcamp also announced that they charge between 10-15% for their service, so let’s take 15%. I still believe 10% transaction fee is much larger than how much PayPal or Stripe would actually charge, so let’s keep it as it is. This means 60% cut rathar than 45% in my previous assumption. In other words, 40 cents from each dollar you spent actually reaching to artists. According to Chen’s interview with Pitchfork, you would need to listen to same track 1000 (this is a thousand, not a hundred) times to support an artist 40 cents for that track.
Even if we assume that an artist is charging 50 cents (thus earning 20 cents per track) rather than 1$ price tag per track, selling DRM-free album or individual tracks is much more sustainable for musicians rather than streaming income alone.
I must be doing the right thing by purchasing DRM-free track from the musician rather than End of napkin math.
Dear musicians,
Please make DRM-free versions of your tracks available for purchase on your official sites. This is the best way I can think of to support you. I understand that you might be seeing DRM-free as that evil thing that allows people to pirate and share your work without any limitation. The fact is that, people who want to pirate find a way to do it. Do you really think it is impossible to pirate Ed Sheeran’s hits thanks to DRM. If not from sketchy sites, people can download them from YouTube and watch or listen over and over again without any advert, thus any income to musician. It is us, the people who respect and value your work who are left out.
I also don’t see Patreon as the most sustainable way to support artists for every artists. Some artists may see this as a way to motivate themselves, which is great. But some artists may find it causing stress, therefore affecting quality of their work. DRM-free track stores continue selling even when artists completely stop. Erutan has stopped singing due to health issues but her album still sells on Bandcamp.
Here are some bands, singers and composers who have their tracks available for purchase DRM-free either on their official stores or on Bandcamp:
- Cog is Dead: Steampunk themed rock
- Lucky Chops: Instrumental “brassy funk”
- Erutan: Folk music singer, unfortunately stopped due to health issues.
- Joey Pecoraro: Lo-Fi and background music composer
- Peppsen: Video game soundtrack composer, famous for his work on RimWorld.
- The Longest Johns: Maritime themed stories
- Bruno Mars: Yes, same Bruno Mars who released “Just The Way You Are” and “When I Was Your Man” also sells DRM-free albums on his store page on Warner Music Group. Store is not on same domain as his site but it is ihis official store and sells DRM-free albums.
I encourage musicians who are suffering from such limiting binding agreements to talk to a news agency in exchange of your anonymity. I strongly believe that getting the word out there will either encourage other musicians to speak up as well, thus forcing streaming services to reslice their pie or make listeners purchase DRM-free versions of the music they like. Either way, it would be great for the musicians.