But Billboard? The Bible of the Music Business? You got to wonder. Ever wonder why? In the case of the mainstream press they may have innocently missed this subtlety. Wait! This isn’t the way the mainstream press and Billboard first reported it? That’s right. Largely unreported was the fact that Swift wasn’t making an anti-streaming statement, indeed she left key parts of her catalogue on the premium Rdio service. As a result Swift’s new album did not appear on these two streaming services at all. Both YouTube and Spotify refused to do this. Or in other words she tried to withhold her full album from the free tier of the streaming services. What happened at the end of October/ beginning of November? Taylor Swift released an album that she tried to place only on the paid or premium tiers of the streaming services. Objectively we can conclude that in terms of revenue both YouTube streams and Spotify free plays are vastly overweighted compared to sales.

So on Spotify free platform the revenue equivalent of an album sale would require more like 8000 streams and on YouTube more like 4300 streams. By our calculation YouTube pays $0.00175 to all rights holders per spin (including video!). YouTube generates a similarly low amount per 1500 spins.

So 1500 plays on the Spotify free service really only generates $1.35. Our examination of the revenue generated by a moderately sized indie catalogue shows that in the US Spotify free tier generates $0.0009 per spin. This was clearly part of the logic of the change.īut since that time we have discovered that Spotify free tier does not pay anything close to that. Ed Christman detailed and previewed these changes last fall in Billboard before they were formally implemented. At $0.005 a spin to rights holders the $7.50 generated by 1500 spins is close to the $7.00- 9.00 rights holders net on an iTunes album sale. The 1500 streams were supposedly based on the approximate rate that streaming services pay per spin. While I welcome the addition of a streaming component to the charts, I believe that Billboard may be overweighting free streams in order to help streaming services keep artists on the free tiers of streaming services. The publication once hailed as “The Bible of the Music Business” last year announced that it would count 1500 streams as the equivalent of an album sale. December of last year Billboard changed the way it calculates it’s album charts.

How are spotify charts calculated