I love Spotify. Not only does it give me one (if not the) biggest library of music to enjoy, but also gives me some absolution for habitually torrenting albums for about ten years of my life by actually paying the artist. However, they famously don’t pay them all that much.
Back in 2009, Spotify made headlines when it was revealed that over a million streams of Lady GaGa’s music had only earned the weird warbler a grand total of £108. Figures showed that artists are payed as little as 0.004p per stream, meaning that you have to be a seriously big hitter to make any money off the service whatsoever, and even then it’s not been enough for the likes of Taylor Swift and Thom Yorke who have pulled their catalogues from Spotify altogether.
When you compare this to radio plays, the numbers are even more startling. The average payout amounts to £59.73 for a three minute song on Radio 2 and you can double that if the artist is also the songwriter. In theory, a band can earn their yearly income from Spotify in just two plays on radio.
Noticing that there’s a bit of a gulf in fair payment, a website has been created to fight the good fight by the name of Eternify.
Spotify’s payment settings only dole out the dollar when you listen for in excess of thirty seconds, which is a bit cheeky in of itself. With Eternify, you can infinitely listen to your favourite band or album in the background on mute in thirty second loops as you go about your day and still earn them deserved coin.
The idea came from indie band Ohm and Sport who have been very vocal in the media about this probably doomed project:
We’re launching Eternify in the wake of numerous false promises of a better future for streaming: not a single one of these announcements or apparent victories have had any meaningful impact on the vast number of small artists on whom these services depend.
If you want to earn your favourite artist some pocket money, you should probably get on Eternify as soon as you can as it’s likely not to last. When indie rockers Vulfpeck released a completely silent album back in 2014, they managed to earn $20,000 from the exploit to fund their tour before it was eventually pulled by Spotify.
I earned We Were Promised Jetpacks $0.22 as I was putting this piece together. Not bad going.
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