Spotify rule change

[PaulWarning]

apparently songs now have to have a least a 1000 Spotify streams in the last 12 months to qualify for any payment, so small artists like ourselves will go from getting a pittance to getting nothing.

[BigRedX]

This has been known about for almost a year.

 

TBH unless you have a lot of songs all getting just under 1000 streams a year it isn't really going to make a lot of difference to most people's Spotify income. Since the payment pot for Spotify is fixed each year and distributed according to the percentage each song receives from the total number of streams of everything, it should mean that payments for those songs which do reach the 1000 streams in a year threshold will go up. 

 

Time to get promoting your Spotify catalogue and get some songs onto popular playlists. We've put a lot more effort into Spotify promotion in the last 12 months and it has most definitely paid off. Our most popular song gets at least 20 streams a day and the last two releases have already reached the 1000 stream threshold. 

[PaulWarning]

19 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

This has been known about for almost a year.

 

TBH unless you have a lot of songs all getting just under 1000 streams a year it isn't really going to make a lot of difference to most people's Spotify income. Since the payment pot for Spotify is fixed each year and distributed according to the percentage each song receives from the total number of streams of everything, it should mean that payments for those songs which do reach the 1000 streams in a year threshold will go up. 

 

Time to get promoting your Spotify catalogue and get some songs onto popular playlists. We've put a lot more effort into Spotify promotion in the last 12 months and it has most definitely paid off. Our most popular song gets at least 20 streams a day and the last two releases have already reached the 1000 stream threshold. 

it's just filtered through to our Soundrop statement, we've got over 6000 streams for our most popular song, but that counts for nothing now because that's over a period of years.

How do you get on popular playlists?

edit, just found a blog on how to get on playlists

Edited August 15 by PaulWarning

[BigRedX]

I think we got on our most popular playlist because the person who runs it also moves in the same social media circles as us, and we happened to see when they posted asking for submissions. To give you an idea of how good one of these playlists can be, or most popular song will probably hit 20,000 streams before the end of this year at which point it will have been available for 5 years. About half of those streams will have been from 2024. And this is just for a niche Goth playlist.

 

Also having done some more reading on the subject it appears that most of the songs affected by this Spotify policy haven't been paying any money to the artists involved because they have yet to reach the payout threshold for their aggregator service. The payout for 1000 streams according to 2023 figures is roughly 60¢. With most aggregators setting the payment threshold at $10 it would to take at least 17 years to reach that if the song was getting just under 1000 streams a year. And those with low Spotify streams but who are reaching their payment thresholds will probably never notice those few missing ¢s.

 

As I said in my previous post the only artists who are going to be noticeably affected are those with lots of songs that are all getting slightly less than 1000 streams a year.

[Cliff Edge]

1 hour ago, BigRedX said:

 

Also having done some more reading on the subject it appears that most of the songs affected by this Spotify policy haven't been paying any money to the artists involved because they have yet to reach the payout threshold for their aggregator service. The payout for 1000 streams according to 2023 figures is roughly 60¢. With most aggregators setting the payment threshold at $10 it would to take at least 17 years to reach that if the song was getting just under 1000 streams a year. And those with low Spotify streams but who are reaching their payment thresholds will probably never notice those few missing ¢s.

 

As I said in my previous post the only artists who are going to be noticeably affected are those with lots of songs that are all getting slightly less than 1000 streams a year.

Reading this thread makes me ask, is it even worth the effort putting stuff on a streaming platform? And how do the returns compare to selling cd’s at gigs? The last time I was involved in that we made a significant profit off 2 albums and generated a lot of gigs. 

[BigRedX]

At the moment for my bands streaming isn't really an income source, but a form of advertising that just so happens to pay us, even if it is only a small amount.

 

Only one of the recordings I've made available for downloads and streaming has made back what it cost to put it out via an aggregator so far. But that's not what streaming is for IMO. Looking at my band's Spotify statistics there is nearly always a noticeable upswing in streams just before any of our gigs, especially when we are playing "festivals", so people going to these events are using the streaming services to decide if my band is worth turning up early for. Hopefully they decide we are, and they'll buy something from the merch stand afterwards, and come to see us play next time we're in the area. Also it's an easy way for promoters to check out the music when they are considering booking us for a gig.

 

Over the past 15 years by far the biggest source of profit for my bands has been T-shirt sales, followed by PRS songwriting royalties. Sales of CDs and records at gigs comes next but only because the production costs, recording, printing and pressing tend to be a lot higher per unit than a T-shirt. Payments from download sales and streaming are a very distant 4th.

 

For me on-line, physical media and other merchandise items all form different but equally essential functions. You need all of them and can't replace one with another.

Edited August 15 by BigRedX

[neepheid]

All I can say is thank feck I've got a day job.

[PaulWarning]

28 minutes ago, Cliff Edge said:

Reading this thread makes me ask, is it even worth the effort putting stuff on a streaming platform? And how do the returns compare to selling cd’s at gigs? The last time I was involved in that we made a significant profit off 2 albums and generated a lot of gigs. 

as a way of getting your music out there, yes, as a revenue raiser, no. Trouble is CD sales have fallen off a cliff in recent years, most people stream these days, for small bands the chances of getting back recording and production costs have severely diminished.

We don't make a lot through merch but most of it is T shirt sales.

[meterman]

The only music I have on Spotify or any of the streaming platforms has had about 80,000 streams from an album and a couple of EPs. And that was only because a couple of tunes got used in US tv programmes. 
 

The licensing payouts for the TV shows was thousands, whereas the payouts for the streams more or less paid for a pint and a packet of posh crisps. 
 

I have a non-streaming clause in anything I license out to labels now. It’s not worth me giving away my music for free, as it’s my only source of income so I’d rather take the actual record and CD sales, and the money from the licensing agreements. 
 

But I’m sure it works for others, just not me. 

[BigRedX]

5 minutes ago, PaulWarning said:

Trouble is CD sales have fallen off a cliff in recent years, most people stream these days, for small bands the chances of getting back recording and production costs have severely diminished.

 

I think this very much depends on the genre of music. CDs still appear to be selling at all the gigs I go to both as a band member and as a punter.

 

Apart from our first single which also came out on CD, one of my bands has only only made our music available as single releases on-line. However we have had so my people asking when we will have an album on CD available for sale, that we are now in the middle of recording new material for it.

 

The other band I am in has almost completely sold out of all our physical product (3 albums all on CD). There will probably be a discussion soon about whether we are going to do a new production run of any of them, or simply wait until the album we're currently working on is ready to release.

[Woodwind]

My last two albums have been put out by small tape labels.

Both have sold out from the label and I sold my quota of each in a couple of shows (I would have sold more if I had them).

 

I can't say for sure if I would have sold the same amount of CDs at my shows instead of tapes, but that speaks for the genre I occupy, then venues I perform in and the audience I get.

 

Neither of the two labels put their music on Spotify. It's all Bandcamp.

 

 

My biggest earner by a very long way was when some of my music was used in a film soundtrack back in 2021.

The payment for that saved me in the midst of a very bleak year and the PRS payments that have come off the back of it are a great bonus.

 

Similarly when my tracks have been played on Radio 3 in the past,  the PRS payments have dwarfed anything I ever would have earned on streaming.

 

As @BigRedX says having music on Spotify should be regarded as promotion for something else not as an earner in and of itself (although in my case my music would not fare well on Spotify - with minimum of 6 minutes a track, which makes up part of a longer form piece.)

[lowdown]

I have never placed any music up on the streaming sites.

However, various Library companies I have music placed with, quite often include some of my tracks on taster compilation albums.

 

Any payments I get are via the library company, and of course, that comes after their commission payments, or whatever deal I am on with them. Payments aren't that great. Laughable really at times.

On three occasions in the past five years, three particular tracks were followed back to one of my library companies which resulted in a sale and sync licences for TV & Radio. (2 TV & 1 Radio)

The actual sales and then the broadcast royalty payments from PRS/MCPS were quite good. If it wasn't for Spotify and Apple Music, I probably would not have had those sales.

 

Library company income and sometimes the follow-on royalties for me, far, far outweigh what I could ever get on streaming platforms.

But even that has generated less as each year goes by. That's probably because I don't regularly put music up anymore, meaning I drop down the rotating playlist on the library sites. 

 

I'm not at all precious about my music/tracks/cues, it's all about financial return for me. So as far as I'm concerned, the music can just sit there in the hope it eventually gets picked up for something.

And that's what library music is all about and definitely not for everybody. There are ways of increasing chances of sales though.

One is: Putting up various time lengths of a track when possible - Full track plus 15/30/00:60 seconds versions etc. More often than not (in my case), the shorter versions have been the sellers.

 

At times I'm surprised where it ends up and what it is used for. Also, more and more Library companies have compilation albums out in just about every commercial organisation you can think of.

Virtually everyone is trying to be as proactive as they can and are thinking outside of the box when it comes to getting music out there. That includes anyone who is promoting/pushing your music on your behalf.

I suppose at the end of the day, it depends on how much control you want over your own material.

 

 

 

 

[BigRedX]

To back up what I said in my previous post at yesterday's gig we completely sold out of CD copies of our "Lucid" single which means that we'll probably have to think about doing a limited issue run of something else to tide us over until the album is finished. In fact all 5 of the bands who played did well on CD sales. 

[BigRedX]

15 hours ago, Woodwind said:

As @BigRedX says having music on Spotify should be regarded as promotion for something else not as an earner in and of itself (although in my case my music would not fare well on Spotify - with minimum of 6 minutes a track, which makes up part of a longer form piece.)

 

Our best performing song on Spotify is over 5 minutes long, and a good minute and a half longer than the next 2-3 most popular ones.

 

We also have a song that is over 7 minutes long which got picked up for a popular Spotify new releases playlist and racked up a couple of thousand streams in its first month of release. 

 

IME song length is no barrier to the number of streams it will attract.

 

 

[Woodwind]

35 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

 

Our best performing song on Spotify is over 5 minutes long, and a good minute and a half longer than the next 2-3 most popular ones.

 

We also have a song that is over 7 minutes long which got picked up for a popular Spotify new releases playlist and racked up a couple of thousand streams in its first month of release. 

 

IME song length is no barrier to the number of streams it will attract.

 

 

 

 

Thanks for that BigRedX, that's very encouraging to read.

 

My main experience of Spotify is from my day job - it's on in the workshop all day.

I don't use it so rely on my colleagues' taste and playlists.

They all seem to get twitchy if tracks go on too long 🤣

 

For my next album, which I'll be self releasing next year, I may well get some tracks up on Spotify.

Edited August 18 by Woodwind