Songsmiths’ revenue soaring
Streaming services boost artists’ earnings
We’re paying a lot more people, probably, less money. Anthony Healey, pictured, APRA
New figures from APRA AMCOS — t he Australasian music licensing business — reveal a big rise in revenue as composers take advantage of booming demand for onscreen music and the rapid growth in streaming services.
Total music licensing revenue for Australasia from APRA AMCOS was up 11 per cent to $355 million in the year to June 30.
Of that, some $315m was paid to songwriters and publishers — up 14 per cent on a year earlier.
Streaming revenue — from services like Spotify — was up 140 per cent to $29 million.
New Zealand accounted for just $43m of the total revenue paid to artists but growth figures were broadly in line with those for the total.
It has been well publicised that streaming services are putting the squeeze on music sales revenue. So what’s going on? Are songwriters really making more money than ever?
More likely the answer is that there are more songwriters than ever.
In fact, APRA notes that globally it now makes licensing payments to more than 248,000 songwriters who generated more than one million pieces of income-generating content for the first time last year.
“We’ve become a data company where we are now forced to process and consume so much data from companies like Spotify and Apple Music and we’re slicing that pie into increasing infinitesimal slices,” said APRA head of New Zealand operations Anthony Healey.
“So we’re paying a lot more people, probably, less money.”
It would be wrong to assume that there was an earnings boom for the average songwriter, he said.
But demand for content was higher than ever and there was growing opportunity for those creating music to license it commercially around the world.
“A large proportion of the higherearning APRA members are those writers that make music for the screen, whether that be in film, television, online formats or even gaming.”
While it was good news to see the growth in demand and global reach for local music composers it was important to recognise that it was still a tough job, Healey said.
“It is by no means an easy career choice for anyone to make and it still involves an enormous amount of risk.”
In New Zealand about 10,000 songwriters were paid by the music l i censing business f or their work in the past year.