How do artists make money? Royalties vs subscriptions
*rolls up sleeves* on monetizing your art and why artists are struggling with streamers and big publishers
I’ve been fascinated by Lily Allen’s honesty on her podcast Miss Me?, which she hosts alongside her best pal Miquita Oliver. The pair of them are no-holds-barred around many things (sex, love, relationships) and I think it lends itself to the 30 minute podcast format. (The High Low walked so these new duo shows could run!) As a former podcaster myself, I’ve always found the medium allows for more nuance and openness. It’s as though you’re one-on-one with the listener.
Recently, I’ve been amazed by Allen’s openness around the music industry in particular. I’ve always admired her; I love a woman with strong opinions. I read her memoir last year My Thoughts Exactly — she is like a cat with nine lives. I admire anyone who makes it through such tough times, who continues to reinvent themselves and puts a middle finger up to the British tabloid press.
I often associate Allen with Christmas. After all she sang the viral cover tune ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ on the 2013 John Lewis advert “The Bear and the Hare” which to date has 57 million streams on YouTube. On this week’s podcast she tells listeners she didn’t earn any money from doing the advert and that her managers pushed her into it. Of course Keane (who wrote the original song) benefited financially — but I think Allen’s point was that ‘eyeballs’ doesn’t always equate to ‘money’.1
It reminds me of the ‘TLC Forever’ documentary on Netflix, I was stunned at the admission of how much money they ended up making (or not making). The band filed for bankruptcy in the 90s. According to band member T-Boz, the CrazySexyCool record made $75m for their record company but the bandmates were paid only $50,000 each.
Musicians have always struggled to make money it seems, unless you’re a huge star, and people have been speaking out about the shocking truth of how little money the average musician makes on tour. On an episode of Sidetracked (another duo podcast that unpicks the music industry hosted by Nick Grimshaw and Annie Macmanus) the musical guest CMAT said that many musicians have to fund their tours themselves. So how does a musician go about funding their career?
(There are so many parallels here with publishing — many authors I know are having to fund their own book tours. This Guardian piece is interesting regarding more and more authors footing the marketing/publicity costs themselves.)
Allen has also spoken recently about how she earns more money from posting pictures of her feet on OnlyFans than her music streams on Spotify (she currently gets around 8 million streams a month.) It looks like artists earn around $0.003-$0.005 per Spotify stream. Another source told me that it also depends on who you are and how much clout you have — i.e. Beyonce is probably on a better deal than that.
I’m writing about this now because Kate Nash has hit the news after announcing that she’s funding an upcoming music tour via OnlyFans. (This has had a big mixed reaction, some people congratulating her for making it work, others concerned at this ‘cheapening’ her work. Her response: ‘aren’t you sad that music has little to no value?’ Interesting to note that 70% of the creators on OnlyFans are women.
Musician James Blake is trying out a new platform called Vault that allows artists to make music directly for his fans, after many artists realised that distributers like Ticketmaster own literally all the data.
Like Allen, my set-up is similar. I make hardly any money from book royalties (the books I work so so hard on) and these days earn much more from Substack (a subscription-platform.) It’s not a bad set-up for me personally, but it just begs the question why these larger systems are failing many authors and musicians I speak to. The people sitting at the top of the big pyramid are presumably making tons of money — and yet the the average author makes £7k a year and half of UK musicians earn less than £14k a year. Plus — the way people consume ‘content’ (shudder) has changed enormously so things aren’t selling in the same way/format as they used to.
What about podcasting? Having done that for six years, I can break down how it worked for me.
On the podcast platform Acast you earn money per download when you run a podcast — a bit like Spotify. And therefore it only works well if you’re able to pull in a large-ish number of downloads.
At the time of podcasting, I earned around £25/40 ‘per mille’ i.e. a fancy way to say the ‘cost per thousand impressions’ of your listeners. So if I got 20,000 downloads that’s only £500. At the height of the podcast, I was getting around 250,000 downloads a month, so it became a good salary. (It took three or four years to reach that milestone, so I technically worked for free on the side to build it up. Then, ironically, when it started doing really well, I got burned out and shut it down. Lol.)
But the fundamental difference is that podcasters read out adverts, whereas music streamers probably won’t ever work like that. (Plus, most musicians would probably rather die than read a scripted advert for a new brand of toilet roll before you get to listen to their beautiful song.)
This is why subscriptions are working for people currently, because you only need 1,000 true fans, or less, to make a great income stream. You can handle it all yourself, you’re directly paid, it’s empowering. The other parts of the industry are burning so many artists out. I do not judge anyone from using subscription platforms in a way that suits them. The problem is, the issue still remains: it’s easier to gather subscriptions if you already have a bigger audience.
I don’t know what the answer is. Will making art mostly always have to be a side-hustle? Will other artists/musicians/authors speak up about this? Will Substack or Patreon or OnlyFans or Vault continue to grow and succeed — for those who can make it work? I don’t know.
Either way, directly supporting your favourite creators of music/words/art has never been more crucial. So, thank you. <3 I love writing here.
I’ll leave you on a quote by Incubus leader singer
(who I had a major crush on when I was fourteen):“You know, being in a band is not unlike being an author, except in our case we have been writing the book for 33 years now. Some of the chapters have been triumphant, some of them stupid, some tragic, some odd and some surprising, as any book worth reading has.”
If you’d like to gift a subscription to The Hyphen to someone you love for Christmas, click below! A Substack subscription is the perfect gift for the reader in your life who already has all the stuff, imo!
A BBC article from 10 years ago says she made ‘probably’ £8k.
This is such a heartbreaking topic -- so glad you're shining a light on it. I'm perpetually mystified by how much the arts are needed, in tough times more than ever, and yet neither society wants to pay for all that hard work. Maybe it's more fun to write or make music than it is to work in an office full-time (I can vouch for this directly) but NOTHING is fun when you're scared about paying the bills.
As you say, we've created a system where people have been trained not to pay for art and to expect everything for free. I'm so grateful for substack as a place where people can support creatives directly. I wouldn't be able to spend as much time writing without it.
This summer I read a few articles about Olympic athletes admitting they were on Only Fans as well as they hardly got much of an income in their disciplines to sustain their career and I found it both shocking and understandable.
Shocking that people at that level of excellence can't afford to focus on training alone because they don't have any financial stability as apparently depending on the sport you're in and how well-known you are the way to make money is via sponsorhip deals with brands, which admittedly most athletes don't have until they win something and are put on the spotlight somewhow. So therefore it is understandable they try to sustain their sporting career by finding alternative ways of making money that don't require too much effort.
The fact that artists also are going down that path as their art alone doesn't suffice is not surprising but it is as worrying as the fact athletes have to do it. The question is what kind of future we are building when there is no certainty at all that your work (whether you're an athlete or a creator or a doctor) is going to be enough to pay the bills unless you are exceptionally successful and can secure alternative streams of income. I'm worried we're headed towards a system where everyone is expected to find additional ways to monetise themselves in order to make a decent (not even luxurious) living.