The Creative's Dividend

The Creative’s Dividend

Late last year, recording artist Zōe Keating shared how her songs were streamed 206,011 times on Spotify. The total earnings from those streams was $753 dollars. She asked her listeners to play her music another 48,000 times, noting that if they did, her total Spotify earnings that month would be enough to cover her family’s monthly health insurance premium.

Spotify uses the same algorithm to pay artists big and small. The result of this system is a “Winner’s Take All” of eye-opening proportions. If services like Spotify and YouTube were countries, we would be outraged at their levels of economic inequality. As one example, 90% of YouTube’s billions of dollars in payouts go to less than three percent of channel owners. Back over in Spotify-land, Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” has more than 2.5 billion listens which means that song alone has generated a payout of more than $9 million dollars. 

Successful artists deserve to be rewarded. What feels exciting is the opportunity to spread those rewards to a broader community of performing artists. If you set aside just 10% of the revenues from one of Sheeran’s songs, it would be enough to double a year’s worth of earnings for more than 100 additional wonderful artists who, like Zöe, have their songs streamed around 200,000 times in a month.

Zöe isn’t the only one who has told her story about what Spotify stream earnings look like. There are all sorts of musicians on the cusp of being able to make a living through platform revenues. Artists like Steve Benjamins have written about how without being a part of a label he was able to leverage Spotify to grow his music-based income from $400 to $800 dollars per month.

I’m interested in creating a platform where mega artists from Ed Sheeran to Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift all of whom have more than 40 million monthly listeners join with extraordinary musicians like Zöe, Steve, and The War and Treaty all of whom have hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners to lift up musicians who are on the cusp without tearing down the artists who have made it to the top. 

Here’s how this “Creative’s Dividend” would work:

• 1) The Creative’s Dividend is an opt-in only platform. Individual artists choose whether to join.
• 2) Each artist who does join agrees to share 10% of their monthly streaming proceeds with the community of artists who are a part of The Creative’s Dividend
• 3) More specifically, 1% of that revenue goes to build, maintain, market, and serve the platform and its users and an additional 9% is distributed equally across all artists on the platform

That’s the thrust of it. 

A few more elements help make it workable:

• 4) To join, musicians must earn a minimum of $10 per month (~2,700 streams per month). This will prevent the platform from crumbling under the weight of transaction fees.
• 5) To remain, musicians must ensure that they don’t stay below $5 per month (~1,350 streams per month) for more than 3 consecutive months (or they may be removed)

Below is a brief table summarizing what this would look like in practice for a sample of songs pulled from the global weekly charts available at kworb.net

In this table you can see the full set of results for how top performing songs would still provide artists with 90% of their original revenues, while simultaneously enabling the artists producing mid-range performing songs to see 20%+ increases in revenue and relatively less well performing songs seeing a more than 4,000% increase in revenue.

There are challenges, there always are. The majority of artists will not join - certainly not at first. It will be harder to attract the attention and altruism of top-earning artists. It will be exhausting to navigate the contracts and relationships between artists, labels, producers, and more. 

Acknowledging all of that, the premise of the Creative’s Dividend is that musicians care about building a strong community and a supportive environment for their fellow performers to be able to follow their passion and produce their craft. Platforms like Spotify will say they are doing everything they can to support their artists within the constraints of their businesses performance. Whether or not that is true is largely besides the point - artists themselves have the ability to strengthen their community. To signal that they care to give back. To attract more fans and listeners by signaling their commitment to the community. To level the playing field. 

If you are a musician whose music is on Spotify, or you work at a label, or you are a part of the broader music industry and have an interest in designing, launching, or scaling this in a way that is supportive and effective for artists, I’d love to help. Reach out at evangreenlowe@gmail.com