Economics of Being a Musician
You and a buddy, or maybe you and your lover, want to be professional musicians. You're not being unreasonable...you're not looking to become Lady Gaga. You just want to be able to make a decent living by performing and recording music. Ok. So your goal is to net $100k a year, each. Which is an above average income, but not crazy high. What does it take to get there? It will be a mix between live performance, streaming, and merchandise sales. Something like... Spotify pays around $0.004 per stream, so 1M plays of anything you record will net you about $4000. This is net to you as an artist. If you have a management company managing that relationship for you, Spotify will pay ~50% more, but that will go to your manager. So...how much streaming can you get? Picking an example from my currently playlist...Japanese Breakfast Over their four year career, to date, they're generated about 70M streaming plays at Spotify Spotify is about one third the global streaming ...