How are musicians supposed to survive on $0.00173 per stream?

‘Congress needs to step in and make streaming work also for those who create the music that we all need.’

Many of the younger musicians I know – musicians in the full flush of their career – don’t see a path forward toward making a living. These aren’t artists failing to connect with a public; on the contrary, they are releasing widely reviewed albums, going on tours and communicating (constantly) with their fans via social media. But this work is not paying them enough to manage without second jobs or side hustles.

That’s a broken system. It’s not just broken for individual artists, it’s broken for our society as a whole. We all benefit from music. And I believe we as a society want that music to come from as wide and deep and rich and varied sources as exist. How could we not?

Yet that’s not what is paramount for those holding the finances of recorded music in their hands. In the platform era, the income for recording artists depends on a handful of massively capitalized corporations: Spotify, Apple, Amazon and Google dominate streaming, and streaming now accounts for 84% of all recorded music revenue in the US. There’s almost nothing left for recorded music outside that system.

What that system is paying for content is an average, across these platforms, of approximately $0.00173 per stream. And that meager amount, believe it or not, doesn’t even go directly to the artist. It goes to the rights holder for the master recording, which is usually a record label – which then splits this income with artists according to individual contracts, with a typical artist share somewhere between 15% and 50%.

The math, at this point, is beyond ridiculous. Which is why so many younger artists I know simply don’t see a path forward in recorded music. What’s more, this crisis has come to a head just as AI enters the scene, threatening to do away with much original recorded music altogether.

What to do? We need to rethink the finances of streaming. We need to let artists have a say in how the money from this new technology – and there is a lot of it, it’s 84% of the entire recorded music industry after all – is shared. To date, artists have had no seat at the table as streaming platforms and the three major labels – Universal, Warner and Sony – decided how the revenue from this medium would flow.

A new bill being introduced to Congress by the representatives Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman – from two of the powerhouse music districts in the country, Detroit and the Bronx – would do much to correct this problem. The Living Wage for Musicians Act would bring more money for artists into the system, and for the first time create a direct pathway for that money to flow from streaming platforms directly to recording musicians.

The Living Wage for Musicians Act proposes a straightforward mechanism: an additional subscription fee, earmarked for artists, plus a percentage of platforms’ non-subscription revenue to cover ad-supported (free) streaming, is paid into an Artist Compensation Royalty Fund. That fund, administered by a non-profit, would then distribute money directly to artists according to their monthly share of streams. A maximum cap on earnings per track per month would insure a more progressive distribution of this new royalty, to help create more sustainable careers in more genres and in more diverse communities of music.

This direct payment is not a new idea for recorded music, or for Congress. When satellite and internet radio first came online in the 1990s, Congress passed a law creating a pathway for payments from these new platforms straight to musicians. A non-profit was established to collect the revenue and distribute it – SoundExchange – and has been doing so efficiently since the early 2000s. The administrative apparatus for this already exists.

However, when streaming emerged it – like so many other “disruptive” tech businesses – dodged existing regulations and has to date avoided any direct payments to recording artists. The platforms and the major labels have had a more or less free hand to develop this technology and its payment systems for over a decade, and they have failed artists as they did. Congress needs to step in and make streaming work also for those who create the music that we all – I mean, all of us, musicians and listeners – need.

Damon Krukowski is an American musician, poet and writer. He is an organizer for United Musicians and Allied Workers