The advent of music streaming was one of the most revolutionary changes to the music industry in the last decade. As we covered yesterday, during a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney of The Black Keys broke down how album bundling is a sham, but they also broke down how artists are getting screwed over by streaming services.
When music streaming first started, Auerbach sat down with Daniel Ek, the owner of Spotify. “We had lunch together and he’s a fucking cool guy, nice guy, very intelligent, and I really saw his side of it for the first time. He basically, without explaining it directly, was like, he’s paying our label to get our music. What they do with the money, he can’t control. At that moment, I realized there’s some stock being floated to these companies, which there was, billions of dollars of stock.” He continues, “They gave us a couple of hundred thousand out of the billion because they pay it as an artist royalty and they take all these deductions off and it was a made-up number.”
He also adds on by mentions another issue with payouts from streams. All streams pay out the exact same; therefore, if someone spends their $10 per month fee listening to only a few songs, the streaming service keeps the majority of that $10 and the artists still only get less than a penny per stream. Listen to the full explanation of the issue below.