> Any artist that's been around before and after streaming will tell you that they make far less money, now, than they did when they were selling records,

I read this all the time, and I don't dispute it's true. But I also don't understand the math. Spotify claims to have paid out $7 billion to artists this year. Let's assume that only a quarter of that went to North America, which is the approximate proportion of the North American Spotify market vis a vis the world.[0] So that's $1.75 billion. In the year 2000, which was the top year for CDs, 985 million CDs were moved.[1] Artists would get paid like $1.50 per CD. [2] That was $1.48 billion. Accounting for inflation that comes to $2.43 billion.[3] OK, $2.43 billion > $1.75 billion, so bang, artists made more in the before times. Except, Spotify is just one service. Amazon, iTunes, Tidal, YouTube, Deezer, Pandora, etc. are also paying artists. I don't have the numbers for all those services, but collectively they comprise 2/3 of the streaming market. Assuming their payouts are comparable to Spotify's, the total annual North American streaming payout isn't $1.75 billion but $5.25 billion. And $5.25 billion is a lot more than $2.43 billion.

All of these numbers are very back-of-the-envelope, but even so, I'm not seeing why the artists are getting a bad deal in comparison to the way it was before. Certainly the argument can be made that objectively they were getting an extremely crappy deal before, and now it's graduated to "merely" crappy. But just on the numbers, I'm confused how it can amount to far less money, especially as the payouts keep growing.

I have a couple of hypotheses as to why it might seem worse. (TLDR is that the artists who benefit from the Spotify arrangement aren't talking, but the ones suffering are.)

First of all, popular musicians over time tend to peak at some point and then make less money, simply because their time in the sun has passed. The overwhelming majority of artists with lucrative careers in 2000 don't have lucrative careers now. They got less popular but also coincidentally streaming happened. Might as well blame streaming. Meanwhile, the artists popular in 2022 were in grade school or younger in 2000 are making vastly more money now than they were then, simply because they weren't in the industry yet. Mega-stars like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo weren't even born. They're silent about those days because they didn't experience them. But a fair accounting has to take the Spotify winners into account, not just the people who are suffering now.

Second, I think that a lot of streaming dollars are going toward that long tail, in rather negligible amounts individually but amounting to a good sum collectively. Assume the top tier musicians in the streaming era are losing out compared to their potential income in a physical media dominated regime. But, meanwhile there are tens of thousands of older artists who have weird, obscure tracks that nobody would physically buy on a whim -- and probably wouldn't even be in stock in a physical store -- but their tracks end up getting played occasionally on streaming for a variety of reasons: They were excerpted in a film, TV show, article, or other song, which causes people to look them up, their title or lyrics cause them to pop up on keyword searches, they end up on a shared playlist, etc. Here's a concrete example. I like the Dua Lipa song "Love Again," the one that that has the chorus with the Darth Vader theme done in old-timey style. Except, it turns out it's not the Imperial March at all. It's a sample from an actual old-timey 1932 song, "My Woman." [4] When I found this out, I added this 90 year old song to my playlist, and probably played it a dozen times. That meant the current rights holders got paid about $3.50 on my account. But there's no way I would've paid for a CD, so they would've made zero off me without streaming. Multiply that same story by many others. How many? In my case, Last.fm says I listened to about 6300 new tracks in 2021. In the physical media era I would've had to buy a CD every single day to equal that. In my peak purchasing heyday, probably around 2000, I only bought approximately one CD a week, a lot more than average, but even so that only comes to about 1000 tracks a year. So thanks to streaming services, I helped 5300 more tracks generate revenue that otherwise would not have done. Or to put it another way, Last.fm says I listened to about 3000 different artists (~1500 artists for the first time) who all got paid some small amount, whereas in the time of CDs all that money would've been spent on the few (40-50) artists who I liked well enough to buy a whole CD/CD-single. The losers are the popular newer artists who were deprived of my CD royalties, but of the winners, many are dead or no longer in the industry, so their positive perspectives aren't being heard.

[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/#Spot...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/186772/album-shipments-i...

[2] https://www.indiemusicacademy.com/blog/music-royalties-expla...

[3] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2000?amount=148

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Again_(Dua_Lipa_song)