The infographic below from Information is Beautiful, while over a year old now, is still startling in its highlighting of how much money music artists don’t earn from online music streaming sites, such as Spotify and Last.fm.
The original post references the blog The Cynical Musician and a post called The Paradise That Should Have Been that looks at the state of digital royalties. He references the $8.12 margin on a CD sale as a benchmark and says:
To earn the same amount as you did on that one CD sale you’d need:
- 1.08 full-album sales through CD Baby,
- 12.7 single-track downloads from Amazon or iTunes,
- 23.7 single-track downloads from eMusic,
- 892.3 streams from Rhapsody, or
- a whopping 54,133.3 plays on Last.fm.
These numbers should serve to illustrate that whatever benefits “music 2.0″ may have, it’s certainly done nothing for the recording artist, save make her noticeably worse off than she was in the old CD-based market.
The full of data including sources is available at: http://bit.ly/DigitalRoyalty
(via Information is Beautiful)
Infographics