The reality of Spotify for artists: there’s no money in streaming music unless you’re A-list stars like Taylor Swift or BTS
- Spotify’s mission includes ‘giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art’, but US and Hong Kong artists earn peanuts from its streams
- Spotify says it hit the market when the recording industry was ‘ravaged by piracy’, and that it’s helped the music industry recover
Gabriel Teodros started selling CDs of his hip-hop music when he was 18, but the amount of money he makes from recorded music, which he puts on the music streaming platform Spotify, has plummeted since the CD era.
In December 2021, when Teodros shared his 2021 Spotify Wrapped on social media, he got lots of congratulatory messages. People thought since he got 80,000 streams for one of his songs, he must be making a lot of money. In response, Teodros wrote an article on his e-newsletter: There’s no money in streaming.
“I just mean to really expose what these numbers mean and what they don’t mean,” Teodros says. After splitting the revenue with a collaborator, those 80,000 streams only made him around US$90, just over US$0.001 per stream.
When he looked through his 2021 “Spotify Wrapped”, the company’s end-of-year marketing campaign that compiles listening data for creators and listeners into shareable infographics, he found he’d only made US$150.
Teodros’ story sounds all too familiar to The Paisley Daze, a new age hip-hop duo featuring two brothers with Hong Kong roots. Their experience shows that aspiring musicians in the city won’t find much support for their craft from streaming services like Spotify.
Peefs and Kish Daze have been playing music since they were kids, beating on drums around the house before taking up guitars and performing at talent shows. They started producing and releasing music in 2016 and first uploaded to Spotify and other streaming services at around the same time.