elisha wiesner wrote: Can you give me the gist? I don't feel like paying to read an article about streaming.
Oh crap, usually one can read a couple of things as a free trial after registering for said trial.
The article is titled "How Streaming Saved the Music Industry".
Okay: The big labels are making lots of money from streaming however the artists are not.
There are some interesting breakdowns of the number of streams required from various platforms before the "content owner" (the label, not the songwriter/artist)) makes one dollar. It is a graph, so these number will be off slightly, but:
Apple: 75
Spotify paid: 130
Spotify free: 590
Pandora paid: 380
Pandora free: 490
Youtube Red: 150
Youtube free: 980
Now, roughly 58% of all revenue from Spotify and Apple Music goes directly to the record labels. 25% is kept by the streaming services, with the rest, around 15% give or take, split between publishers and songwriters. This buries, deliberately, the fact that many songwriters, the actual creators of the content, do not own the publishing rights. So the actual figure for songwriters alone would be much, much smaller than this.
It ends with a positive spin with regard to Soundcloud, insofar as the artists controlling their content is concerned.