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Why Streaming Is Detrimental To An Artist’s Health
Lets say a person listens to music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week between the age of 10 and 70. That’s for 60 years.
Total hours = 60 * 52 * 7 * 24 = 524,160 hours
Imagine that a typical track lasts 5 minutes. (Bear with me - this is just some rough stuff).
So our hypothetical ‘always on’ song listener can consume roughly 524,160*12 tracks in their life time - or 6.289920 Million tracks
Ok - now lets be serious - nobody is going to listen 24*7 for 60 years - lets say it averages out to a third of that - I mean - you do sleep, sometimes you will be watching the telly, sitting in silence - all that kind of stuff … so now the number of takes reduces to 2.96640 Million tracks.
Spotify Model : $10 per month, $120 per year, or $7,200 for a life time of listening.
Vinyl, CD, Cassette, Download model - lets be generous - 50 cents a track ? To buy that would cost you just shy of $1.5 million. (Assuming that you only ever listen to a single track once - and never again.
More realistically ? Well - how about me ?
In my life time I have bought around 2,000 albums. My vinyl collection alone hit 800 in the mid 80s - and my CD collection is possibly twice that - so maybe 2,400 for safe keeping ? At $15 per album ?
All in - what $36,000 over my life time acquiring music ? Or five times what I could pay Spotify ?
And we wonder why people are flocking to Spotify ?
And I wonder how why artists think they will make money out of recording their music. Time for them to look at the recording as their marketing costs - and make their money through other routes, or we ramp up Spotify fees based on how much you use the service.