music thoughts.

Musicians need to work. They need to get paid and tipped generously. People need to buy albums, download files, buy merchandise and otherwise put money into the hands of the musicians they love. They need to go to live shows. And venues, large and small need to pay for the entertainment.

Streaming services need to pay more too. Amazon, for example, pays $0.009 for a stream of one song. That means an artist has to have one song stream 111 times to make one dollar. Other streaming services like Spotify, Youtube, Google, Apple, and others pay even less.

It’s not just an American problem. It's endemic throughout the music industry. It's also endemic throughout the book publishing world. My wife has sold hundred, if not thousands, of her book on teaching music. Once or twice a year she gets a royalties check from the publisher. It is the publisher that gets the lion's share of that sale by far. That business model is more profitable for the purveyor of the art, not the creators of it.

That's why it's essential for music lovers to buy more directly from the artists. Buy from websites, from merch tables. Sure use Amazon to stream, Itunes, but actually buy the songs to put on your phone and players.

Look at the UK pay scale. Imagine the artist having to sing that one song that many times to make minimum wage. In the U.S. it's $7.25.  That's over 800 streams to make one hour's worth of pay from Amazon.  If fans would be one copy of the entire album on which the song appears, the artist would get more.

This is not the fault of fans. This is the greed of the system that has made this happen.

In these days of venues being closed, online performances are what most musicians have been reduced to doing to try to make ends meet. For the most part those performances are offered free, with maybe an online tip jar. I'm not sure that that is a good business model for artists either.