How Do Music Artists Make Money?

For my strong history in marketing and systems for businesses I wanted to take on a new path and try music.

Why?

With the music industry retaking shape and mega corps in the music space now battling DMCA and trying to get their little grubby hands on every cent they possibly can I feel like music is one of the keys to changing the way business, content creators and crypto/web3 all come together.

It's not something that will happen over night and honestly I use a blend of the two. Some old school web2 platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter as well as streaming platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Amazon etc. While taking one web 3 elements such as NFTs, artwork and now blogging here on Hive.

We are not at the point where web2 can't be used but they are part of the transition phase into a more decentralized way of making money as music artist or in general content creators.

With that marketing background and applying things I have to say I actully surprised myself as I realized it has only been two months since I started this project. Now with just 8 tracks released I pushed my first ever 1,000 plays in a day on Spotify.

How Much Do Music Artists Make

Ever wonder what music artists make per stream?
Well it ain't much lol
It's always changing so right now as of this month a rough calculation is as follows. Remember these are rough estimates and they constantly change (mainly lower)

So from those 1,000 streams on Spotify which was a new milestone reached for me that means I made roughly $3.03 yesterday from my music from Spotify alone.

Now of course you can combine all of the streaming platforms together but what we are left with really are that Spotify and Youtube are the primary methods people use followed up with Apple and Amazon but they dwarf in comparison to those two major platforms.

That means to really make a stable income (I'll mark that at $32,000/year) from streaming alone a music artist would need to have to have nearly 12 Millions streams of their music across all platforms for the year. That's no easy task and comes down to 32,000 plays daily. 1,000 plays on Spotify at least starts to put me on that track but there's also expenses, time commitments etc with music. Thus artists need to find other ways to produce income from their work.

In the past that came from concerts (which all but have vanished), merch sales which mainly happened during events/concerts, signed albums and so forth. Much of that has gone out the window however and instead now a drastic shift is happening where many of those things are now taking shape in the form of NFTs.

It's going to be interesting to watch this shift take place but what's even cooler is being in the trenches and a part of that shift!