All up, it looks like she made about $85,000 from October of 2011 to March of 2012. That's antihistamine money, especially for someone not making pop music. This appears to be unambiguously good news for independent artists.
Proclaiming 2 quarters' income figures from one single player as unambigiously good news for a huge diverse market is a bit hyperbolic, don't you think?
It's like saying a $1M exit for a random startup is unambigiously good news for all startups. What if the startup took an investment of $2M? What if the founders lost money and are now stuck in a low paying job? What looks good on the surface could very well be bad news if you know all the facts.
The most interesting point is that most of this isn't from Spotify or any other streaming service.
People use these services the same they would as if they owned the music. It is possible that total lifetime revenue from these services could be higher, but I doubt it.
In the future I think this is going to have to play out the way it has been for Netflix: As streaming services disrupt other revenue models, content producers will begin charging streaming providers more money.
Right now, though, it's still easy to think of Spotify in the way Keating suggests: As a form of advertising first and foremost.
Just wanted to say thanks for this link - I'm not interested in her numbers, but to stumble across this on HN, and head off and listen to her music, awesome. I really love the sound of the cello, and discovered another cellist, Philip Sheppard, in a similar way.
I discovered her music a few months back when i walked past her concert venue (a theater by the Univ of Washington) and thinking it was the Laurie Anderson/Phillip Glass crowd. I don't know a lot about cello (yet) but her left hand technique seems unorthodox.
I saw this 6 string violin player last weekend, doing rockier stuff with similar tools (looper and typical rock guitar pedalboard: wah, chorus, delay, reverb, envelope filter and Tube Screamer, I think
Yup, same here. I've never heard of her before, but thanks to this link I went to her site, listened to the album and picked up a copy. Great programming music.
32,000 plays and only $132. That seems really bad, if music does start to move more towards streaming than purchasing artists are screwed. It would take nearly 300,000 plays at this rate for someone living in an average city apartment to make rent.
The internet and technology in general have done some great things for music but making money is harder than ever.
How many people listen to a song, how often, and at what licensing rate?
Clearchannel radio claims their network reaches 237 Million listeners a month [1]. If they managed to hit one play for every listener they reach at $132/32,000 that is $977,592 per month.
Yes, its hard to get between 'starting' and 'living large.' And no, not everyone will go there, but the numbers here aren't "really bad" they are in fact pretty good.
One business which is an analog to the current music 'label' business will be similar to what search engine optimizers do, they will contract with a promising artist and say "I'll pay you $x up front, and in exchange for that you will sign over all the income from this song for the next 'n' years to me." Then the muscian gets paid up front, the music distributor/marketer has a chance to make some money, and everyone 'wins.' Once the contract expires all the rights revert back to the artist.
The artist is making a bet that they will get more money for the first 'n' years of the song this way, and the distributor is betting they can make more than that on the song.
'reaching' 237 million people is a lot different than 237 million people actually listening to your song. Old media like radio have a long history of making these stats as inflated as possible to keep ad rates high. Things change drastically when you can accurately count exactly how many people are tuned in at any given moment.
Listeners, like web site visitors, can only be reasoned about statistically. This is even more true in this century than it was in the last century. If a service (say Spotify or Pandora or whatever) has a population P then the probability that they request a performance of a given piece might be f(P). Popularity might be measured by the number of unique people who request a performance g(P) and quality might be measured as the mode of the number of times a unique person requested a performance.
The remuneration rate, like the 'average selling price' for a commodity, is the median price of the performance across all requests.
My original point is that the 'size' of the music market, in terms of the number of times a song is played, is very very large. There are probably close to a billion 'plays' of songs on any given day in the US. I'm sure Pete Warden could come up with a way to figure out an exact number, I base that guess on half the population, 150M people, and 6 songs per person per day median, so 900M plays.
If the ASP, to artists, is $132/32000 (not saying it is, just its the only real number we've got in this discussion) that would make a daily sweep of like $3.7M. So if, as an artist you were the top song that day you might take home 1% of that or $37,000.
My overall point is that the music industry that is being birthed out of the ashes of the old one, looks a lot different. It's more 'on demand', it's more relational, and it's less understood. Consequently there are a lot of people trying to mold it to something they can control and get the money out of, and that reality distortion makes seeing the real forces driving it harder.
So when you reason about the music business and someone says "Gee the artist only sees one tenth of a cent each time spotify plays their song.", that sounds horrible! A song, for only 0.1 cent? Gee I'd have to listen to the same song all day just so they could buy a cup of coffee at Peet's. But if that song is reasonably popular and it's being played 10 million times a day, that means the artist is making $10,000 a DAY on just one song. That sounds awesome! The difference between these two is all that probability / market size reasoning that is sometimes glossed over.
If the average listener listens to 10 songs from an artist per month that only takes 3200 listeners to "make rent". 3200 listeners is a very small amount when you consider a) how little commitment there is to listening to music b) how easy it is to distribute music.
> The internet and technology in general have done some great things for music but making money is harder than ever.
I think the amount you can make per listener has decreased but the amount of listeners and reach has increased exponentially. For evidence of this check out all the independent Youtube musicians, there are quite a few securing millions of video views per month, that alone is enough to fund a good life, then if you add in sales, streams (via Spotify etc) they make excellent incomes that they couldn't have got 10 years ago.
Sorry, I think you math is broken here. 32,000 listens in a month at even a half cent per stream (More than ms. Keating is making) equals $160 a month. Try paying your rent with that!
Maybe you missed a decimal point? She would need 320,000 listens from 32,000 extremely dedicated fans each month, which is unlikely to happen. If we got this rate up to a full 2 cents (more than quadruple what it is now)your 32,000 plays would still gross her only $640. Not even half the cost of a 1 bedroom's rent in any metropolitan area that I'm aware of.
interestingly, with spotify and last.fm, artists get a higher proportion of the total money (15.3% and 15.8%, respectively) than they do with amazon/itunes (14.5%). it's surprising to me that it's so low for the artist in these cases.
There are several things misrepresented by that well-meaning graph, and if it leads you to believe that musicians make more money from Spotify and Last.fm than form Amazon and iTunes, that really should be corrected for, because that is absolutely not the case in my experience, and Zoe Keating's numbers seem to echo what I've seen in the field.
The info graphic cites, among other things, 'industry sources.' Zoe Keating, on the other hand, is a completely transparent actual industry source. Don't be surprised that artists exposing their revenue information make less than you think, be surprised that in 2012 people still buy the garbage statistics handed out by unnamed 'industry sources'
i think you might have misunderstood what i wrote. i didn't say artists make more money from spotify/last.fm. i said they got a higher proportion of what was paid.
either way, it sounds like there are just anecdotes on both sides, so there's no actual information either way.
"The internet and technology in general have done some great things for music but making money is harder than ever."
I don't think we can conclude that at all, especially in this case.
In the pre-Internet era, the niche for modernist cello music would have been an incredibly small set. If she were supremely lucky, she'd make it to Carnegie Hall every few years, and maybe sell a couple hundred CDs at a given performance there. Her radio airplay would have been limited to NPR, and perhaps a smattering of tiny classical stations. She'd have been touring pretty much 24/7, mostly to small venues, and basically hustling albums out of the back of her van.
The internet has expanded niches, blurred genre lines, eased access, increased distribution, and basically enlarged the footprint that someone like Zoe Keating can make on the world. She might be getting a smaller slice of the pie, but her pie is undoubtedly much, much bigger than it would have been 20 or 30 years ago.
If anyone opened this spreadsheet expecting to see a glamorous story about how Zoe made $3 million in 2 days, I would suggest they reexamine their expectations for the size of the experimental cello music market. She's doing respectably well, given her niche. I would also assume she has supplemental income streams from concert appearances, which have historically been the bread and butter of classical musicians. (Which is not a lot of bread and butter, to be clear, but it pays the bills).
A more interesting discussion, IMO, would be a breakdown of how Spotify, iTunes, et al. have had disparate impacts on different types, flavors, and "sizes" of musicians. For instance, how has the Internet treated the Zoe Keatings of the world, vs. the Beyonces of the world, vs. the Bjorks of the world, vs. the Lil' Waynes of the world, and so forth.
I'm curious about your use of the terms 'modernist' and 'experimental' (plus the site's own strap line 'Avant Cello').
I've listened to a couple of pieces and while, nice, they sound pretty conventional tonally, rhythmically and structurally. I was expecting something a bit more unconventional.
A lot of her work incorporates electronics. She uses her laptop to sample, loop, and layer her tracks while playing.
You may notice that some of her works sound like they feature multiple cellists. That's actually one cello, her own, being sampled and layered in real time.
Structurally, tonally, and rhythmically, the pieces tend to vary. But I would agree on some level with your observation; it's not like she's delving too deeply into Philip Glass territory or anything.
Yeah, that was my initial thought. A single play on radio in a big market could easily reach well over 32,000 people. The revenue model for streaming seems to be based on the payout systems that are used for radio. Unfortunately for artists, streaming services like Pandora and Spotify tend to compete against their iTunes and album sales, at least much more so than radio ever did. (in fact radio airtime was mostly considered to be promotional back in the day, very few artists made money from it, and there were a number of scandals were labels payed radio stations to play their music).
Revenue models are all actually different, and kind of messy. In the US, radio pays out royalties for publishing but not for performance/mechanical. That means the rightsholder for publishing gets paid, but not the performer of the piece. (Aretha Franklin gets nothing from radio plays.) It's an antiquated law based on the idea that radio is doing promotional work for the artist (most other countries pay both.)
Pandora pays a compulsory streaming rate. Similar to radio they're allowed to play what they like as long as it's not on-demand. Hence you can only skip so many times, and you can't request a specific song. They pay both publishing and performance royalties so rightsholders for the publishing and recording get paid.
Spotify, as an on-demand streaming service, has to negotiate direct deals with rightsholders to use the music. So when you see them paying out a lower rate than Pandora it's because they've traded equity to major labels in exchange for better rates — a very clever way for majors to get money directly from subscribers without needing to distribute it to artists. Independent labels and musicians also need to authorize Spotify, but have less negotiating power so they don't get ownership stakes and have to choose to be completely absent from the system or take the rate offered them.
She opened for California Guitar Trio in 2006 in San Diego. It was a tiny venue (an old church) and it was spectacular. I was maybe 15 feet away from her, and the acoustics were fantastic; she just kept layering things over and over. She played with CGT as well, at the end; never heard anything like it. One of the best shows I've ever seen in my life.
Agreed. Totally awesome cellist. Fantastic use of looping to create 16-32 part cello pieces live, on stage, as a one woman show. And yes, she's hot, in a way that's at once kind of manly and very feminine. I don't know quite how to describe it.
This was linked from some Twitter posts from cellist Zoe Keating, who makes some interesting modern music. I'm impressed that she's making here numbers public.
The music industry has negotiated really hard with Pandora over the years and came close to killing them off a few times by raising the rates to more than Pandora could pay. At this point the music industry is basically taking all of Pandora's profits leaving them razor thin margins. I don't know why Spotify has gotten such a better deal except maybe through the influence of Kleiner Perkins.
What I find most interesting is someone with 1.3m Twitter followers is having so little of her music streamed, I assume that this is because the majority of her fans purchase her music? I notice she has a Bandcamp account. I think it would be great to see her Bandcamp sales figures too as a point of reference, and ideally an explanation of how being available on Spotify / Pandora affected her sales figures.
$80,000 (net after fees) of downloads/physical sales in six months (without label support, which is pretty impressive to me) - that's presumably something like $120K gross sales (before iTunes/Amazon's 30% cut and credit card fees).
If you attribute _all_ of that to twitter (big assumption!), then it values her twitter followers at ~$0.18/year. I wonder how many twitterers beat that?
Also, there are tabs at the bottom to view different pages of the spreadsheet. (Sorry if I'm saying something obvious; I didn't catch it at first myself.)
FWIW, I've got both her albums and her EP on CD, one of those albums on vinyl as well, and an iTunes copy of the other album (since the CD didn't arrive quickly enough).
She's a bit of a geek/hacker too - she runs a laptop with Ableton Live, sooperlooper, and a bunch of custom applescripts (which don't always play nice when the laptop sleeps, she sometimes needs to reboot on stage), and she was talking about building some custom microcontroller hardware to give her easier/different control compared to the midi footpedal she's using.
Different payout rates for free versus paid users, which also varies from country to country based on negotiated royalty rates. I'd also assume exchange rates come into play.
My best guess is that payment is based on some sort of revenue sharing agreement. So Spotify takes a portion of it's revenue for a certain time period and divides it equally among the artists based on the number of times their songs were played.
Some people say that if I was on a record label, I'd have a larger reach and therefore would be making more money. To this I'd like to point out that I make instrumental cello music.
My initial impression: if you like the Journey soundtrack or soundtracks by Clint Mansell, you'll like this. Had no idea who this was until this article, but I'm buying her album after listening to the tracks on her website.
No mention of Grooveshark revenue (I mention it because I like to use it). After reading some stuff online including [1], I'm going to guess it is zero.
"I thought it might be helpful for interested parties to see what a DIY artist receives for plays of their music on Spotify and elsewhere."
and
"My financial picture would be worse if I was on a record label. Some people say that if I was on a record label, I'd have a larger reach and therefore would be making more money. To this I'd like to point out that I make instrumental cello music. There is about as much chance of my music becoming mainstream as there is of me being elected President of the USA (hint: not possible, I was born in Canada and there are naked pictures of me at Burning Man). While it is probably true that the right label could help with the reach part, I don't think they could help me enough to offset their cut, and you know what….no label has ever approached me and the ones I've approached said no, so I'm guessing they think the same thing."
As best I can tell, she is someone without a record deal who made it. And I don't think shes's even relatively big but she seems to do OK for herself.
You're implying that this is the picture someone (companies? media? society?) has painted for "purely" digital artists. It is a silly position to look at this document and say, "See! ~40,000 and only ~$100 for their efforts! Haha!". If you think about how many people use Spotify, then remember how many listen to songs repeatedly, and then also remember how many listen to songs and then leave the room because someone rung the door bell, that's a shit ton of plays. So 40,000 plays doesn't take long to accumulate and if you only acquire this amount you're not good, niche genre, etc.
We don't hold this same criticism to pure e-commerce startups. If an internet startup fails it's likely because they had a boring product and/or marketed themselves poorly, or some other reason.
The barrier to entry for someone to create music these days is very low. Software is cheap, talent is cheap, and distribution (digital) is very cheap. So why would an artist expect to make more money making a song that took maybe 100 hours to make than a person who works 40 hours a week every week?
My wife is a composer - currently attending UPenn getting her PhD in music composition. She does not typically perform her music herself. In 2009, her concert opera concerning the senate judiciary hearings on former attorney general Alberto Gonzales. We recorded a performance of "The Gonzales Cantata" and posted on Bandcamp, iTunes, and Amazon in anticipation of a series of live performances done at that year's Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
The recording earned a little over $1000 (half that from Bandcamp alone). The live performances earned several times that, enough that we could pay each of the over 30 performers involved at least three figures.
$1000 might not sound like much, but put it into perspective, it was her first recorded piece, and it's probably earned her more than what her professors have made with releases they've done. (Well, not necessarily her Penn professors) Had she released through a label? She was approached by one of the more well known 'classical' labels about doing a studio recording and 'label' release. The deal basically would have been that she'd have paid thousands of dollars, and gotten a box of CDs and miniscule residual income when all was said and done.. and this is how a lot of people in the classical world do things. The money may come from grants or patrons, but it's generally wasted.
$1000 for a single recording is not enough to live off, but $1000 for your first release, particularly a fairly obscure release, is incredibly encouraging. As a composer, she has other sources of income to chase down, whether it's commissions, or sheet music, performances, licensing, etc. I would not be surprised if after graduating, she is able to sustain a living composing music. If that doesn't work out, she can make plenty of money in private lessons.
We haven't done any 'big' recordings since then. Last year we recorded a piano-vocal piece, "Tesla's Pigeon", and commissioned a visual artist to do the cover art. We Kickstarted asking for $550 and raised $787, and while it's up on Bandcamp and iTunes, we haven't gone promotion crazy about it like we did for The Gonzales Cantata, so it's only made a couple hundred dollars, mostly through physical sales at concert performances - which themselves have brought in enough money that again, we were able to pay the performers well and have a nice amount leftover for ourselves.
I think it's a good start, and I think it's far better than she would have been able to do if she were born twenty years sooner than she had been.
These Here is her summary on the final sheet. I will try to format it as much as possible:
What is this?
This accounting data is payment for plays of my "One Cello x 16" recordings from Spotify. The payments are minus the 9% taken off the top by CDBaby.
Why did I post it?
You've probably heard a lot of discussion on how musicians should be compensated for their work: There have been numerous articles on the subject; We know how the big players in the industry: - labels, digital retailers, streaming companies, etc - make money; We get reports on the industry-wide sales figures. But all the way at the bottom of the food-chain, how does a recording artist make a living? How much cold cash does an unsigned DIY artist make from a stream or a sale? These figures are surprisingly hard to come by, which is why the Future of Music Coalition has been surveying musicians on how they make a living (really worth reading: http://money.futureofmusic.org/).
I thought it might be helpful for interested parties to see what a DIY artist receives for plays of their music on Spotify. But I admit I have grander designs: if we are going to discuss the ideal structure of the new music industry, we need to know how recording artists make a living today or we're just spouting hyperbole. So, in the interest of evolving the discussion, I am making myself into a data point. I encourage other artists, if they are able, to do the same.
What is in the data?
Again, this is what I received from Spotify for plays of a portion of my catalog. One of my albums is not on Spotify however because I don't have a digital distributor for it (I sell it on my own website, on Bandcamp and through my own label account with iTunes)
Since I posted this info I've gotten a lot of questions about my music sales income for comparison, so I added a snapshot of iTunes, Bandcamp and Amazon and accounting from Soundexchange (i.e. Pandora) and ASCAP (i.e. Radio)
Why aren't all my albums on Spotify?
When I started releasing music in 2005 I used CDBaby since at the time it was the only way into iTunes for DIY'er. Years later, I got a label account with iTunes so I could release "Into The Trees" to them directly, without a service in the middle. This year I took my "One Cello x 16" recordings out of CDBaby and re-uploaded them into iTunes through my label account (losing all my rankings and reviews in the process, which is why I put if off for so long).
Spotify does not work directly with artists, so to get my music in there I have to use an aggregator like CDBaby, TuneCore or Orchard. I've yet to find a digital distributor who will take my recordings without also having a piece of iTunes....and so that is why "Into The Trees" is not on Spotify yet.
Bonus, Deep Thoughts!
I think Spotify is awesome as a listening platform. In my opinion artists should view it as a discovery service rather than a source of income.
The income of a non-mainstream artist like me is a patchwork quilt and streaming is currently one tiny square in that quilt. Streaming is not yet a replacement for digital sales, and to conflate the two is a mistake. I do not see streaming as a threat to my income, just like I've never regarded file-sharing as a threat but as a convenient way to hear music. If people really like my music, I still believe they'll support it somewhere, somehow. Casual listeners won't, but they never did anyway. I don't buy ALL the music I listen to either, I never did, so why should I expect every single listener to make a purchase? I think that a subset of my listeners pay for my music, and that is a-ok because...and this is the key.....there are few middlemen between us.
My financial picture would be worse if I was on a record label. Some people say that if I was on a record label, I'd have a larger reach and therefore would be making more money. To this I'd like to point out that I make instrumental cello music. There is about as much chance of my music becoming mainstream as there is of me being elected President of the USA (hint: not possible, I was born in Canada and there are naked pictures of me at Burning Man). While it is probably true that the right label could help with the reach part, I don't think they could help me enough to offset their cut, and you know what….no label has ever approached me and the ones I've approached said no, so I'm guessing they think the same thing.
I've said multiple times what my issue with Spotify is: fairness. I care about making the playing field level for all recording artists: signed or unsigned. Let it be a meritocracy. Also, I wish Spotify would do more to facilitate the connection between listeners and artists - i.e show that the artist is playing nearby, or add links to buy music. It's early days, so maybe this will happen eventually.
p.s. What did I make on iTunes during the same period?
I also sell digital and physical copies on iTunes, Bandcamp, Amazon and at concerts.
It's comparing apple to oranges, but I for the same time period (Oct 2011 to March 2012), I received, net (i.e. after fees):
- $46477.77 from iTunes
- $25,000 from Bandcamp
- $8352.45 for physical sales on Amazon
- $2821 from Amazon MP3
p.p.s. I'd like to be known for my music more than my tendency to stir up controversy, so I probably won't say much more on the subject because I have some music to make….;-)
A bunch of numbers showing what she made off her music from various sources, such as Spotify, Soundcloud, NPR (that surprised me), Pandora, Bandcamp, others.
Hard for me to summarize the meaning of all this, the comprative values, unexpected results, and so on, but I think the other comments here cover that.
