Sean Kinney from Alice in Chains: streaming is a rip-off for musicians

So far 2014 - aside from the YouTube/indies standoff - has seen a much lower incidence of musicians complaining about streaming royalty incomes than 2013. Artists are starting to catch-on to the fact that a big part of the problem are not the royalties coming from the likes of Spotify, but the amounts that actually go back to their pockets from the labels.

Alice In Chains drummer Sean Kinney though stirred the pot again during an interview with classic rock station The Fox reported by Digital Music News.

The musician, talking about Spotify and Pandora, stated: “…That’s great for the consumer, but for every person who’s ever recorded music it’s a f-ing ripoff [...] you get 10 million plays of your song and you get a check for $111.”

In the interview, he goes on to say that musicians have to hope that they are able to tour and perhaps make a bit of money from that, but that a time may come when musicians will not be able to afford to go places anymore.

The interview reiterates a common worry amongst musicians that with recorded music revenues being eroded by streaming services and with tours being profitable only for a tiny proportion of artists who can draw thousands of paying customers to each gig, in the long term they may not be able to carry on making music or touring the way they used to.

That said, if indeed Sean Kinney only received $111 for 10 million plays there must be a reason rooted in the contracts that he signed, since both Spotify and Pandora would have paid considerably more.

Pandora has been shown to pay around $1370 per million play, where the performer and the record label get 40% each and the rest is split between collection societies (for the publishing), session musicians plus SoundExchanges’ 5% fee.

This means that even if the 10 million plays were just coming from Pandora (which pays a much lower rate than Spotify) they would have generated around $5480 just for the performers and a similar amount for the record label, indicating that Sean Kinney should have received more than $111 unless his deal terms are truly awful.

Either way, this goes to show that even among successful musicians there’s still a lot of confusion around streaming, and a lot of work needs to go into explaining the money flow from these services and into enabling musicians to take action if they feel that the amount that makes it back into their wallets does not appear to reflect what they should have gotten.


(Andrea Leonelli)