Does Apple pay artists better than other music streamers?

Artist of the Year: Lil Baby

Apple Music is not the world’s biggest music streaming service in terms of users or the number of tracks it serves up, but seems to pay millions more in royalties than any other service.

Pay the artists

This is the suggestion on news that the Mechanical Licensing Collective recently received $424.38 million in accrued historical unmatched royalty payments for publishers and songwriters.

The cash comes from twenty music streaming services, including Apple Music, Amazon Music, Google, Pandora and Spotify. It’s an instrument designed to support blanket compulsory music licenses for use of music by those music services.

Streaming constitutes about 80.0% of the Music Streaming Services industry’s revenue.

Who is paying what?

What’s interesting is who is paying. Here’s the breakdown:

• Apple Music, $163.34 million
• Spotify, $153.23 million.
• Amazon Music, $42.74 million,
• Google, $32.86 million,
• Pandora, $12.36 million,
• Soundcloud, $10.17 million,
• Tidal, $6.8 million.
• iHeartRadio, $1.34 million.
• Deezer SA $998,338,
• AudioMack $490,1243,
• LiveXLive $400,000,
• Hoopla $278,991,
• Qobuz $106,893,
• GTL $98,345,
• Wolfgang’s $18,409,
• Mixcloud $13,650,
• WeavRun $12,711,
• FanLabel $4,748,
• Karaoke Version $2,087
• Pacemaker $278.

The new Music app on a Mac

Strange anomalies here

The thing is, while lots of those smaller services you may never have heard of, when you consider 2019 data of global streaming service market share, (which is what I could get hold of fast and if you have more recent data please send it to me).

• Spotify has 36% of the market
• Apple Music 18%
• Amazon 13%
• Google 5%

With others and internationals not included in the MLC list.

But what we are seeing here is that Spotify, a company with twice the reach of Apple’s in this segment of the service, seems to be paying artists less. Surely it should be paying twice as much? No wonder some governments are exploring the business plans for these services to ensure they are fair to artists.

Which, to my mind, is a good reason to dump Spotify and take Apple. Particularly now artists are more dependent on streaming royalty income than ever before, because COVID-19 has wiped out live event income.

Because this data really suggests Apple pays artists better than any other music streaming service manages to do, at least in terms of the biggest services.

Milanese artist L I M shares her music in the first performance at Apple Piazza Liberty.

What NMPA said

“This significant amount proves just how broken the system was, how much the MMA was needed, and how much songwriters have to benefit from the protections it has put in place,” said NMPA president/CEO David Israelite in a press release.

“At long last, that money can make its way to its rightful owners. This is a massive win for music creators and the streaming services themselves. The Mechanical Licensing Collective obtaining this historically unmatched money, doing the research to find its owners, and giving copyright owners a transparent process to claim what is theirs is exciting progress that paves the way for the future growth of streaming that will benefit the entire industry.”

Going forward, The MLC will provide additional information about historical unmatched royalties on a newly-created page on its website entitled “Historical Unmatched Royalties.”

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