An article got passed around the other day with the main quote being…
“For a song like All About That Bass, that I wrote, which had 178 million streams. I mean $5,679? That’s my share…That’s as big a song as a songwriter can have in their career and number one in 78 countries. But you’re making $5,600…How do you feed your family?”
I agree, this isn’t enough money for the streaming success of the song.
But I want to show you that the main problem isn’t with the streaming services.
Follow me…
Take a fictitious independent band, lets call them The Fun Boys. The Fun Boys distributed music through a digital distributor called TuneCore…they get it on Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Google Play, etc.
TuneCore takes 30% off the top, deposits the rest into your artist account, and then you or your business manager disburses the funds as pertaining to who owns what percentage of each song.
Based on actual TuneCore data that I have seen with my own eyes, over the course of the last 4 or 5 years, a band like The Fun Boys will NET .4 cents (or $0.004) per stream.
So if The Fun Boys had a song that garnered 178,000,000 streams (multiply that by $0.004)…that would net them $712,000 after TuneCore takes their cut.
Keep in mind, The Fun Boys are independent, so they don’t have a label (who would likely be taking the common 50%) and they don’t have a publisher (who would likely be taking 25%).
So in order to get to more common ground with All About That Bass, lets say they did.
With the label taking 50% and the publisher taking 25%, that leaves 25% left for the writers of the song…which equals out to be $178,000.
If there are two writers in The Fun Boys (like there are for AATB), they would split that chunk, each getting $89,000.
So in our example, if the two writers in The Fun Boys had written All About That Bass independent of label and publisher, they would have received $356,000 each…or if both a label and publisher were involved, they would each receive $89,000
So why is Kevin Kadish only receiving $5600??? I have no idea.
It’s not because the song isn’t generating way more than that. Maybe he signed some bad deals along the way. Maybe he signed some good deals but there are just too many hands in the pot. Maybe he’s looking at back-end mechanical royalties (which are far far far less on streaming) instead of the actual streaming royalty rate.
My point is this: Streaming is paying.
Maybe $89,000 still isn’t enough per the above example. But streaming is paying. And it’s paying much more than the numbers touted in the Kevin Kadish article.
I hope Mr. Kadish makes a lot of money from writing that song. He should.
But writers getting paid vs. the amount streaming services are paying out appear time and time again to be two completely separate problems.
p.s. You need to know exactly where every micro penny of your revenue is going so that when one of your songs gets 178 million streams there aren’t any surprises.
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I’m always interested in your perspective, whether affirming or dissenting. Continue the conversation anytime: gabethebassplayer@gmail.com