Streaming can help indie musicians
Growth of playlists, social media can turn obscure songs to hits.
Early last year, Perrin Lamb, a singer-songwriter in Nashville, Tenn., who is not signed to a record label, started to receive all kinds of strange Twitter messages. Fans he never knew he had, writing sometimes in languages he couldn’t understand, were saying that they loved his song “Everyone’s Got Something” on Spotify.
Lamb — who did not use Spotify — quickly learned that “Everyone’s Got Something” was on a popular playlist on the service, and racking up streams by the million. By the end of the year, the song had been listened to some 10 million times, earning Lamb more than $40,000.
“Whoa,” he recalled thinking. “I should really get a Spotify account.”
Spotify and other streaming services like Pandora are frequently under attack from artists and their advocates over what they contend are unfairly low royalties or failure to pay. This week Spotify removed thousands of songs from the punk label Victory Records after accusations that it had not paid songwriting royalties.
But Lamb, 39, is an example of a growing class of musicians who are far from superstars — he still has a day job — yet can reap sometimes substantial wages from streaming.
The growth of playlists and social media means that an unfamiliar song can pop into a listener’s feed and be heard, saved and shared. Each listen generates a fraction of a penny.
The financial viability of streaming is still under constant debate in music circles, especially as streaming begins to replace more lucrative CD and download sales.
“Thinking that $40,000 is
sufficient compensation for 10 million streams is just absolutely tragic,” said Mike Doughty, a singer-songwriter and the former leader of the band Soul Coughing, who has been a frequent commentator on the problems of the music industry in the digital age.
Lamb benefits from a business infrastructure that lets independent musicians operate outside the standard label system.
His music is released through CD Baby, a distributor that charges its customers $49 to carry an album, as well as a 9 percent cut of digital income from stores like iTunes, Spotify and Rhapsody. That arrangement gives musicians a much higher percentage than they would earn through a typical record label contract.
Tracy Maddux, chief executive of CD Baby, said that last year the company paid its artists $55 million for digital uses of their music, and that Lamb’s story was not unusual.
“We have hundreds of clients that make that kind of money in a year,” Maddux said.
“There is a whole ecosystem of independent artists that are rethinking the way the business is done,” Lamb added. “I have friends who make a ton of money off YouTube, and vinyl sales and house shows. There are so many ways to make it work beyond the traditional model.”