Times have changed. Everyone has to adapt. I doubt as many people are buying DVDs or Bluray anymore, right?
Me too. Unless they've recently changed the rules, the artist gets nothing when a song is played on the radio.
In the UK it can be up to £15/minute plus £35/play on a top radio station like Radio 1. Less mainstream stations pay less.
The artist may see half of that depending on their publishing deal.
So... Spotify's microcents per stream are a joke.
Around 80% of Spotify revenue goes to rights holders - i.e. a handful of big record companies.
Around 10% of that 80% goes to artists. [1]
The record labels keep the rest.
[1] The exact accounting details are byzantine, especially in their creative use of expenses which diminish apparent revenue. They also vary from artist to artist. Top artists get a much bigger cut than newly signed artists. But no one gets much from Spotify plays when compared to radio payments.
If you treat it as analogous, sure, but it's not.
Airplay is finite in a way that streams are not. There is also a greater cost to get in to that airspace. So it's not surprising those costs cascade down.
People frame streaming like this all the time. Streams versus CD sales versus radio play. They're incomparable ecosystems, though. Costs, mechanisms, value ... none of it is 1:1 with the old world.
Trying to stuff the new-world of streaming into the old-world boxes of CD or Radio just doesn't work. the world changed.
I wonder if Spotify also pays different depending on whether people choose a song or whether it was autplayed because of some public playlist or radio-feed (does spootify have something like that?).
The biggest radio channels in the US have a few million listeners each. Let's say your record does ok, and gets airtime on a few second-tier radio stations. For easy math, let's do 20 plays * 50,000 listeners per play. This also gives you a total of one million listens.
I would be _extremely_ surprised if they would net much more than $5000 from these radio listens.