Good news, digital crate diggers! For $5.99, you can own your very own digital version of Childish Gambino’s Because The Internet, as well as a bunch of other discounted Hip Hop albums that are part of iTunes’ latest sale.
Although the bigger news here may be that people are still willing to shell out even $5.99 for ONE album … well, because the internet.
The digital downloading of music has been giving way to the rise of streaming for several years now, and the price of two discounted albums is actually more than the monthly cost of premium access to most streaming services like Spotify, Tidal, Google Play Music, Deezer and even Apple’s own music service. All of those provide you with more music than you could ever listen to in a lifetime, never mind a month.
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Paying for digital music on an individual album basis may already feel like somewhat of a relic to users who have bought into the current era of streaming, but only a few years ago, platforms like iTunes offered a convenient and legal way to support artists as an alternative to torrenting albums.
A 2015 graphic from Information Is Beautiful (via The Guardian) shows that a $9.99 iTunes album purchase generated about $2.30 to an average artist signed to a label, with 30 per cent of the total price going to iTunes, 47 per cent going to the label and 23 per cent going to the artist.
Independent artists made even more selling music through the service, netting $5.99 per $9.99 sale, with 30 per cent of the total going to iTunes, 10 per cent going to the distributor and 60 per cent going to the artist.
Compare that to Spotify, for example, which pays a “per stream” rate of between $0.006 and $0.0084 to a song’s rights holders, according to their website. (The actual math is more complicated than that though, and depends in part on monthly revenue.)
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According to that same 2015 graphic, the average signed artist would need to sell 547 album downloads on iTunes to make the average U.S. monthly minimum wage of $1,260. To make the same amount with Spotify, they’d need more than 1.1 million streams.
To put that in context a bit, Drake (Spotify’s most-streamed artist) recently surpassed a billion on-demand streams in the U.S. for songs from Views.
Streaming is getting bigger and bigger, with 2015 being the first year where revenue from digital music consumption surpassed physical sales (45 per cent to 39 per cent), according to a report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.
The report also found a 3.2 per cent increase in global music revenues, which rose to $15 billion thanks in part to a 45.2 per cent increase in money brought in by streaming.
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Despite that increase — the first significant year-over-year rise in almost two decades — the report warned of the unsustainability of a “value gap” where artists aren’t properly compensated for their music, even with a drastic growth in consumption.
The topic came up in HipHopDX’s recent conversation with The Foreign Exchange producer Nicolay, who said that he’d seen the transition from downloads to streaming first-hand.
“Streaming has actually taken over from downloads,” he said of the band’s listeners, adding that live shows and hand-to-hand album sales are still the most direct way to support artists.
“The CD becomes something people buy to remember us by, not necessarily to play it. It’s no longer a music delivery system — it’s more like a postcard or a fridge magnet that just happens to have music on it,” he explained.
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Read more of the conversation here.
