Record labels ate flush with cash from streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and more.

Covid-19 may have wreaked havoc on several industries worldwide, but the US music industry has hit an all time high of $12.2bn revenues in 2020.

A whopping 83 per cent of that revenue has come from streaming. There are now more than 50m tracks available on Spotify alone and over 40,000 new tracks uploaded daily.

But for many artists streaming has not been nearly so lucrative. In fact, Covid-19 is making the music biz unsustainable for all but the most successful artists.

Let’s say you are an up and coming artist who got 23,000 streams on Spotify of one song in the third quarter of 2020. Payment for those streams would come in at $72 which works out at 0.27 cents per stream.  At this rate you would earn New York City’s minimum wage of  $15 an hour  or $31,200 a year after you had received 13 million plays across various streaming services.

With Covid-19 also hampering live music, it is hard to see how a music artist that achieves only moderate success can survive.

Unsurprisingly, many artists are seeking out new routes to sustainability.

Independent artist represent the fastest growing sector in the globally recorded music industry. Artists direct grew by over 34 per cent during the pandemic, brining in $1.2billion in revenues, growing their share by over a point to 5.1 per cent.

Exploitation has always been a part of the music industry, but streaming makes the music industry unsustainable.

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