In the last 20 years, streaming music has gained popularity for its ease of access to almost every artist’s discography. With services like Spotify offering free entry to music streaming, anyone with a device is able to listen to whatever, whenever they want. With everyone using these services, you would think that the streams contribute to a good income for the artist, but this is not true.

Many of the artists on Spotify do not cross the 50 million monthly listener mark and do not continuously and consistently gain more streams on their songs. Why is this important? As long as you have over a thousand streams on a song, Spotify will pay you $0.003 per stream. This is insanely low for any artist to even make minimum wage in America. According to Venice Music, around 60 artists only passed 10 million dollars in revenue from Spotify. 

I believe that all professional musicians should be able to receive a fair amount of money for their work. Before streaming services held music, a large amount of a musician’s income came from their vinyl and CD sales. Statista shows that sales of vinyls have gone down by hundreds of millions compared to the 80s and 90s. With little sales in this category, musicians rely on a job while playing small gigs on the side or constantly touring just to try and get by.

There is another option for income, though. Since there is little to no money coming in from music streams unless you are constantly on the Billboard Top 40, smaller musicians have decided to start up businesses of their own to create a sustainable income while still staying dedicated to their craft. We are in the digital age of music production. This means these musicians’ companies can manufacture virtual products that benefit a community of creators while making an income to not only get by for their needs in life, but to be able to create.

The amount of dedication artists have to their craft is inspiring, especially when everything (streaming services) is against them. Support artists by not just streaming their music, but also supporting their work outside of it.