How Many Streams Does it Take to Make $1?

How many streams does it take to make a buck?. I'll tell you right now.

What's up, everybody? I'm Jacob Deaton. Make yourself at home. We're all here together, hanging out, having a good time, and we're glad you're here if this channel, we talk about everything from finance and business and music and guitar lessons and all kinds of things in between for you every Monday and Thursday.

But before we do, we always highlight our artist a day because I'm all about promoting other people's music as well as my own. So let's get to it! Today, I wanna talk about a band called the Battlefield Collective, they are an acoustic duo group based in the Marietta, Georgia area, and they are some of my favorite people. Stephanie and Evan are not only Life Partners, but they are awesome. Together as musicians, and Stephanie has probably one of my favorite voices that I've ever seen or heard in my life, they are constantly doing live streams from their Facebook feed as well as other places. They're so, so great and they're honestly some of the best people I know. So check them out.

And now for the topic, we're all been waiting for, how much are we getting ripped off?

The Music Modernization Act back in 2018 really did some amazing things for the industry, it really locked in people getting paid that was back owed money from agencies and record labels for a very long time, and it's totally worth a read, but now we're two years later, and I'm just wondering, is anybody else still feeling screwed? Thank you, I'm so glad I'm not the only one. I feel like with the way the world is going and how fast technology is moving and how fast the industry is changing faster than it's ever changed before, I can imagine how hard it is for lawmakers to keep up with this. So let's play a game. I'm gonna say How many streams it takes to make a dollar, and you're gonna try and guess which streaming service it is.

Let's start with the worst performing one of all time, coming in at 1,449 streams to make a single dollar...

Your answer... Well, I can't hear you, but the answer is YouTube, YouTube is by far the worst. So why am I here? That's right, because YouTube is one of the most dominant places for people to find out about music and music videos and stuff, in fact, YouTube's Top 10 Most performing videos are all music videos.

Did you know that in coming in next at 752 streams before you make a dollar is...

Yeah, Pandora. Can you believe it? People still listen to Pandora on one point of time, I had a channel on Pandora, and I think it's still there, somebody put my album up there and you can stream it, Jacob Deaton, if you've searched for that... I don't know. Anyway, horrible payouts per dollar.

So the last two are by far the worst, and all the rest of them that I'm gonna mention now are platforms that are a lot closer in intervals, so here we go, at 249 streams.

Who do you think it is? The correct answer is Amazon. Come on Bezos. You already have enough money. What are you doing here? Amazon just made a huge jump recently in upping their quality of stream to where they're basically just under title as far as the type of quality you can experience from streaming, they're also doing it in half the price, which is obviously a real job at titles margin, which is usually right around 30 for their premium service, in summary, Amazon offers the second best quality of streaming, I think that's available currently on the market today, behind title, but they cost half as much because they're Amazon and they're massive, and they can do that. Anyway, let's keep going on.

Next up at 229 streams.

Who is it? It's the evil company, Spotify, from all the press they get and all the negative press they get at that you think they'd be at the worst, but they're actually not... Amazon, Pandora and YouTube are all worse. Significantly with Pandora and YouTube. Anyway, I'm tired of talking about Spotify. What about you? Great, let's move on.

And coming in at 147 streams, Google Play Music.

So Google Play has been in the game for a while. A lot of people use them. A lot of people like them. But that is where they stand. They stand at 147, it's not a bad number comparatively to their competitors, but who is better than Google Play? Who's left the suspense grows. Move on.

And coming in with the bronze medal here at a super cool and smooth 136 streams.

Who do you think it is? That's right, you probably guessed at Apple Music, remember when Apple was like, We're paying more than everybody else, isn't this great... Shouldn't you want to be with us because we're paying the artist more, You're still charging like 136 streams before you give anybody a buck... Well, significantly better than a lot of the other people, like YouTube and Pandora. It's still a lot. So let's talk about this. We've already mentioned YouTube, Pandora, Spotify, Apple music, Google Play. Who else is left?

Well, I'm so glad you asked. Coming in at 80 streams, and personally, my music streaming provider Title

Have you heard of Title? Jay-Z owns it. It's pretty cool. Pretty awesome, they offer the highest available streaming quality that's on the market today that I know of, but it does cost a premium... Their streaming service is $30 a month. And while I realize that's probably a lot for most people, I really enjoy listening to the masters of these files. For example, I was listening to wish you were here from Pink for the other day, and I literally jumped out of my chair when I had headphones on. At the beginning, when you heard the guitar player just come in with that real famous lick. So literally in preparation for that guitar like to be played, he goes, and it literally scared the crap out of me, but I've never heard that before in my life until I had super high quality audio and headphones, and it was an amazing thing to just hear something that obviously left in the track that should have been taken out probably... Anyway, the point is, Title is really awesome, and it's not Amazon, or it's not Google, or it's not Pandora or YouTube, and they actually end up paying more than a cent per plate to musicians, which by far is a better situation for musicians... That's it. Title is an amazing company, and I think that you should really check them out, and they're a little bit more expensive, I know, but the listening experience for you audio files out there is far greater and you'll be surprised when you have on headphones, what you'll hear, even still title is still not the highest paying streaming service.

Napster.

Like the one that Metallica hated and made a big deal about and said They're ruining everything, even though they're kind of... Right, that they did in some kind of ways that is it... Napster actually pays the most out of everybody, they pay 1 per 53 streams, so if your music is not on Napster and you believe in streaming, you better get to it, I don't know what their user base is compared to the other platforms, which... That's actually probably a really good video I should do in... Napster definitely pays the most per stream, and for that, we thank you, Napster.

So there you have it, folks. The mystery has been revealed!

So until next time, I'm Sweet Deat!

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