A Different View with Dave O’Connell

By any yardstick, the owner of Spotify, Daniel Ek, enjoyed a fairly good year in 2024 as his personal wealth reached $6.8 billion. And this is achieved by simply getting the public to play other people’s music; he himself didn’t have to sing as much as a note for his very sumptuous supper.

Steve Wall – actor and frontman of the Stunning – would be one of the many artists to contribute to this mindboggling fortune, but his own financial returns from music streaming for December wouldn’t have earned him the price of a budget meal in a burger joint.

He published his payments from streaming services on social media to underline how the actual artists are being driven into the ground by people who were smart enough to invent a new vehicle that didn’t require any imagination beyond that.

Streaming of his music via Apple for December earned him fifteen cent and twenty cent in the UK – not to mention two cent in Denmark.

Streaming on Google brought in €1.75 in Ireland; forty cent from the UK, nine cent from Germany and a combined thirteen cent from the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Portugal and South Africa.

Tidal Music, another streaming platform, earned him a further 38 cent in Ireland.

And that’s just a snapshot because as Steve says there are pages of tiny payments.

“This is the reality of the streaming model,” he says. “The EU needs to do something for creators while tech companies make millions.”

We, as consumers, can also do something – by buying music, either physically in the form of a CD or vinyl record or as a digital download.

Because the figures show that, conservatively, buying one CD earns more for an artist that 200 hours of streaming – or to put it another way, one album sale earns about the same as the royalties paid on 5,000 track streams.

There’s no denying that Spotify or Tidal or YouTube or any streaming service you care to mention are phenomenal products from a consumer’s perspective – the world of music there for you at the click of a button.