[Undertoad]

You will find the artists who had hits before the Internet are whining hard. But it was the previous system that was broken, not this one. The previous system led to all music for the millennial generation being pirated, and nobody getting paid. Metallica whined about that because they were big winners under that system. You might remember it as the time when we paid $15.99 for a single album. Fuck that shit.

http://business.time.com/2013/12/03/...ng-on-spotify/

Spotify doesn’t pay on a “per song stream” model, exactly: the total royalty pie is split among all rights holders based on the percentage of total Spotify streams their songs garner. But the company estimates that the average song generates between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream in royalties. This may seem like a pittance, but Spotify’s data shows that the numbers add up, at least for big artists. The company says the biggest album on the service each month typically generates more than $400,000 in royalties. A “current global star,” who Spotify chose not to disclose, generated more than $3 million in royalty payments between August 2012 and July 2013. Spotify expects these figures to increase dramatically as its revenue increases but the number of artists splitting the money remains more or less the same.

Some back-of-the-napkin math using Spotify’s listenership data and these royalty figures provides a sense for how much money the hottest songs in music are making for artists and labels right now. Here are the 10 most popular songs on Spotify the week before Thanksgiving, with an estimate of how much money they’ve generated in royalties since they were released:

1. The Monster / Eminem / 35.1 million streams / $210,000 – $294,000

2. Timber / Pitbull / 32.0 million streams / $192,000 – $269,000

3. Lorde / Royals / 65.3 million streams / $392,000 – $549,000

4. OneRepublic / Counting Stars / 57.7 million streams / $346,000 – $484,000

5. Avicii / Hey Brother / 46.5 million streams / $279,000 – $391,000

6. Miley Cyrus / Wrecking Ball / 60.4 million streams / $363,000 – $508,000

7. Katy Perry / Roar / 64.6 million streams / $388,000 – $543,000

8. Avicii / Wake Me Up / 152.1 million streams / $913,000 – $1.3 million

9. Drake / Hold On, We’re Going Home /47.1 million streams / $283,000 – $396,000

10. Ellie Goulding / Burn / 53.8 million streams / $323,000 – $452,000