If you want artists to get paid, you need to pay them more directly.
The highest margin for most is probably merch purchased at venues, including physical media. After that it’s probably the merch store on the artist’s website. They make money off of ticket sales for shows too, but there’s a lot of middle-men and actual costs to shows so there’s a wide variance in profit margin. Even local acts at bars: sometimes it’s a pay-to-play scheme where the band could be losing money, sometimes they’re making a few hundred bucks for a night.
Streaming on Spotify or an ad-sponsored platform like YouTube is going to give small fractions of a penny per-stream to the artist. There’s plenty of artists out there who have opened their books and shown they make more from releasing music as pay-what-you-want than from Spotify.
Ah damn, thanks for the correction. It seems like every few years the industry changes.
Heck even Patreon was a good way to support artists for a while, but it seems like they might be starting to succumb to the enshittification of venture capital. Bandcamp has been sold twice in the last 2 years.
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If you want artists to get paid, you need to pay them more directly.
The highest margin for most is probably merch purchased at venues, including physical media. After that it’s probably the merch store on the artist’s website. They make money off of ticket sales for shows too, but there’s a lot of middle-men and actual costs to shows so there’s a wide variance in profit margin. Even local acts at bars: sometimes it’s a pay-to-play scheme where the band could be losing money, sometimes they’re making a few hundred bucks for a night.
Streaming on Spotify or an ad-sponsored platform like YouTube is going to give small fractions of a penny per-stream to the artist. There’s plenty of artists out there who have opened their books and shown they make more from releasing music as pay-what-you-want than from Spotify.
This is no longer the case since venues started taking a cut of merch sales
Ah damn, thanks for the correction. It seems like every few years the industry changes.
Heck even Patreon was a good way to support artists for a while, but it seems like they might be starting to succumb to the enshittification of venture capital. Bandcamp has been sold twice in the last 2 years.