Policy by the Numbers: Artist revenue streams: Measuring musicians’ money

Artist revenue streams: Measuring musicians’ money

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Despite the notion that in many ways the digital age has been detrimental to singers and songwriters, the truth is that more musicians are creating more music and distributing it in more ways than ever before. There are also more opportunities to make money, but how precisely are artists taking advantage of them? There are traditional metrics to measure the state of the music industry, like number of albums sold or number of spins on the radio, but they’re ill-suited for the digital age. They don’t help us understand whether emerging digital technologies are helping artists take home more money.

The Future of Music Coalition’s (FMC) latest research project, Artist Revenue Streams, begins to tackle this challenge by exploring the ways that new technologies, like digital music stores and streaming services, impact US-based musicians’ careers and changed musicians’ earning capacities over time. They plan to release a dozen white papers that explore the specific outcomes from the data they collected via surveys, interviews and financial snapshots.

As in any business and as always in the arts, musicians face challenges in making a profit. At the same time, the report counts 40 different revenue streams that artists can harness, and artists can tailor these to fit their own work. Of the 5,000 artists surveyed by FMC, 42% earned all of their personal annual income from music. The breakdown of this data will ultimately allow artists to assess the value of both traditional and digital technologies and services that contribute to total income for musicians. As both new and established artists plot their course for taking advantage of the increase in digital revenues, understanding which slice of the pie to invest time, energy and money into is an important, strategic move.For example, the first round of FMC’s data explores the changing relationship between artists, brands and earnings, making it clear that musicians’ decisions about a wide range of factors, from merchandising deals to corporate support, have an impact on their artistic reputation with fans, brands and funders. Policymakers can learn a lot from this data, too. Artists and entrepreneurs are creating fantastic new content, products and services online, and existing copyright laws both support and encourage this creativity by protecting artists from infringement and helping them secure fair compensation for their work. The Artist Revenue Streams project specifically has cross-genre and geographic layers of data that enables policymakers to see where laws and the market are already working well—as well as where targeted, narrowly-tailored solutions can help support artists.You can read more about the FMC project here, stay tuned for more findings. Posted by Brittany Smith, Policy Associate at Google

Policy by the Numbers

Artist revenue streams: Measuring musicians’ money

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