While streaming is often slammed for how little money it brings in, it turns out that this is more an issue for the artists, and the major companies behind the music like Sony and Universal are pulling down plenty of cash from streaming.
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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0
The naysayers have always been so negative on the fraction of a cent payout that comes from a music stream, but it’s never been so evident that those small bits add up to something huge. Music Business Worldwide did the math after looking at both Sony Music and Universal Music Group’s financials for the beginning of this year and found that between the two they were making more than a half-million dollars per hour!
Universal brought in just over $1.44 billion from music streaming, while Sony Music generated $943.7 million in the same six month period. This amounted to an increase off around 34% for Universal and 39% for Sony over the same period last year. To say that streaming revenue is growing is an understatement!
Add that up and it comes to $2.38 billion, which breaks down to:
• $92 million per week
• $13 million a day
• and $550,000 an hour for the two companies just from streaming.
If you combine all the revenue that the labels are taking in, the figures go higher. UMG and Sony turned over $4.5 billion in the first 6 months of 2018. This breaks down to:
• $173m a week
• $25m a day and…
• a little over $1 million per hour.
No matter what anyone tells you, there’s a lot of dough in music.
How much of that trickles down to artists? Despite all the recent articles about the Citigroup study (which is done very well, by the way) that found that artists only make 12% of all music revenue, streaming deals are far more generous on a label level. A new act usually gets 20% of streaming revenue while a superstar might get as high as 50%. Of course, the artist still has to pay a manager, maybe an attorney and a business manager, so a good chunk of it goes right off the top to professional fees.
That said, the music business is finally healthy and looks like it will get even healthier for a few more years.