I was introduced, about a month ago, to the streaming music program Spotify. It’s an interesting little program that allows you to pick out songs from the company’s online library. Their library is severely lacking in several places, but it’s usually got something that I’m willing to listen to, and for someone like me who’s more often than not working from a friend’s computer, where I have no music stored, it’s a nice to have at one’s disposal.
Spotify pays for itself with advertising (though users can upgrade from the free service, for a price). One of the advertisements for Spotify, that they play on Spotify, reminds users that Spotify is a free way to listen to music that also pays artists. This seemed to good to be true, and indeed the amount artists make from Spotify isn’t staggering, as this graph shows. It would take a little of 3,494 plays of a song on Spotify for an artist to see a dollar from it.
The truth is, nobody is getting any money off music in the digital age, and most never were making any. Musicians have almost always struggled to make ends meet in the recording industry, and while it’s too bad, I can only feel so much pity for them. When you are doing for a job something that a lot of people do for fun, do you really need to make tons of money as well? Of course, in professional sports, another career that most people do for fun, athletes often make a killing. It’s a tricky situation. I’m not sure what’s fair, and it’s discouraging that things are so convoluted. Perhaps I’ll write more on this later.