In the middle of talks about artists’ rights in the streaming services, Phil Collins’ son, Nic, mentioned the financial challenges of living as a musician in a recent chat with Tom Cridland.
The drummer, who wrapped up a Spring tour with Mike + The Mechanics a few months ago, said that artists started to make albums to ‘promote their tours’ instead of the opposite and explained:
“Back then, you could make money from the record sales. Now, you’re putting out a record so that people have new music to listen to so that they want to come to your show, and the shows are what you need to make money on. Even still, it’s become way harder now to make money as an artist, which is pretty sad.”
High Recognition, Low Income?
Nic admitted that music platforms helped artists get more recognition. Giving the Australian band Karnivool, whose latest album went gold in their homeland, as an example, he mentioned:
“Like I said, you know, you’ve got bands who are now getting fans. For example, [we] talked about the band Karnivool. They’re an Australian band. If this was twenty years ago, I may have never heard of them. [Their record] is not a pop album. It’s not like something that’s going to be on mainstream radio. So, it would’ve been harder to find those things.”
In contrast to his father’s reportedly $350 million net worth, Nic argued that easy access to music didn’t mean good payment by saying:
“So, when you’re able to kind of have access to things, it is nice. It’s nice as a band that more people can listen to your music. It’s just a shame that that doesn’t really translate to anything really. You have 10,000 streams, 10 million streams; you can’t just live off that. That doesn’t really mean much.”
The Contrast Between Streaming And Payment
Streaming services like Spotify usually keep about 70% of the revenue, leaving the artists roughly $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream. That’s why the drummer’s words about these platforms’ payment policies went on:
“That’s the other thing. It’s kind of skewed the numbers. At least for us, it’s like, I realized, when we first started putting up, the numbers that you really need are pretty massive. We’ve had numbers where it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty good.’ And it’s like not really in terms of Spotify. If you were selling 30,000 CDs for 10 bucks a piece, you’re making good money by the end of it. But that doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
Criticism Against Streaming Services
While especially indie artists have reported getting low payouts compared to their stream numbers, some known names in the industry also expressed their distastes with online music services’ payment structures. Snoop Dogg openly criticized the platforms during a panel discussion in August by saying:
“It’s an exciting time, but streaming got to get their s**t together ’cause I don’t understand how you get paid off of that s**t. Can someone explain to me how you can get a billion streams and not get a million dollars? That s**t don’t make sense to me.”
Journey’s Neal Schon showed his support for the rapper’s words back then on X and wrote:
“Snoop is right. Another analogy is why do we still get paid for vinyl the same? Oh, because they can’t stream it. It’s majorly f**ked up.”
You can listen to Nic Collins’ full interview below.
https://youtu.be/EkRlUfqts2o
