Terrestrial or Streaming?

 Recently, I’ve been streaming music rather than listening to terrestrial radio, which is a big change for me. I’ve always been of the mindset that streaming services don’t pay artists enough for their music, but after looking at it, radio pays them much, much less (if anything at all). I’ll get to that later.

For years, terrestrial radio has been a wasteland of songs repeated daily, if not hourly, in some cases. In my Washington, DC, market, we don’t have a station like WXPN out of Philadelphia, where the music is much more diverse. So we are stuck with formatted stations that follow an algorithm, which makes for a predictable and boring playlist.

But after discovering new music playlists in various genres and sub-genres on Spotify, I’ve come to change my attitude towards streaming. These curated playlists open me up to new music and artists with whom I am unfamiliar. This had led to me purchasing CDs (yes, I still enjoy physical media) direct from the artist, as well as concert tickets, which leads to more revenue for the artist.

And that leads to artist pay. Streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music pay artists around $0.004 per play, which means it takes about 250 plays to make just one dollar. But compared to terrestrial radio, that’s raking in the bucks. Artists in most cases are not paid for radio airplay unless they are also the songwriter. And songwriters are only paid about 1/36 of what streaming services pay (after everyone takes their cut, of course)!

So for me, I’ve come around to streaming (playlists), while buying physical media (CDs) directly from the artist. In some cases, I will buy digital albums, using the Bandcamp website, which gives artists about 80% of the price of a purchased album. And on the first Friday of each month (since mid-2020), they give artists 100% of revenue generated in sales that day.

I am all about supporting artists and helping them earn as much money as possible. I’m comfortable now doing it this way.