This past year many professional musicians have been harping on the dismal royalties paid out by music popular streaming services such as Spotify, Rhapsody, and Pandora. As yet most are unavailable to Canadians, but they are coming.
Guelph Ontario born cellist, Zoë Keating, who self-releases her music rather than work with a label, has made a habit of sharing details of her earnings online. Today Keating released her 2013 payments on her popular twitter page, which boosts a humongous audience of 1.21 million subscribers:
You can access the document here.
It shows Keating, earned $75,341.90 from sales of singles and albums, mostly by download from iTunes, Bandcamp and Amazon.
This seems like a handsome sum, but when you look at her streaming revenues, they show a very different story: $6,380.82, with $1,764.18 coming from Spotify. This makes Keating’s per-stream payout from Spotify a dismal $0.0044.
The number seems to contradict those officially quoted by Spotify in December, who state that artists were paid between 0.006 and 0.0084. These numbers included payouts to publishers, labels and independent artists like Zoë Keating.
In an article published last year, Keating explained that though the income of a niche artist is a patchwork, streaming is not yet a replacement for digital sales, and to compare the two is a mistake. She adds, “I do not see streaming as a threat to my income… If people really like my music, I still believe they’ll support it somewhere, somehow.”
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Besides making waves on twitter, Keating recently gave a controversial interview in the January 2014 issue of The Strad, which explains her experience as a young rebellious classical cellist and why she has felt the need to play music on her own terms. Unfortunately the article is not online.
Michael Vincent
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