If you have not heard Pharrell William's song "Happy" at some point in 2014, you were likely living under a rock. The album G I R L that "Happy" is on, has sold over ten million copies worldwide. The album has been nominated for Album of the Year and Best Urban Contemporary Album. The track "Happy" was nominated for Best Pop Solo Performance and Best Music Video. On top of all of that "Happy" has been streamed over 43 million times on Pandora. Guess how much Mr. Williams and Sony made off of those 43 million streams? Are you thinking in the neighborhood of $1,000,000? If you were, you would be wrong. Sony and Mr. Williams made $2,700 on song royalties for 43 million plays.
Williams and Sony have other revenue streams other than Pandora; however, not all artists have that revenue stream. This pay rate works out to $60 per every one million streams. If you are an independent artist, or a newer artist trying to make it big you could not rely on income from streaming music to even pay for more than a cup of coffee, if you were lucky. If an artist with the backing of a major corporation and one of the most popular songs of the year only makes enough to purchase a used car of questionable quality then what chance does someone with no backing have to make a living off their work?
Music is work; no one walks into a music career off the street and has a multimillion dollar contract. There are years of learning your craft, practicing for hours on end, purchasing instruments and equipment. It takes time, sweat, tears, and money to even get noticed—and that still does not guarantee success in the music industry. Paying $60 for every million streams does not even come close to paying a musician what they have put into writing, performing, and recording a song.
Musicians are not the only ones being paid token wages for their work. Recently Amazon started offering a subscription service for Kindle that provides subscribers with access to over 700,000 written works for about $10 a month. Prior to this program many self-published authors were able to make a decent living through Amazon's self-publishing program.
Holly Ward, who writes romances under the name H.M. Ward, has much the same complaint about Kindle Unlimited. After two months in the program, she said, her income dropped 75 percent. “I couldn’t wait and watch things plummet further,” she said on a Kindle discussion board. She immediately left the program. Kindle Unlimited is not mandatory, but writers fear that if they do not participate, their books will not be promoted.
For self-published authors not participating in the Kindle unlimited plan, Amazon pays 70 percent of what the book sells for, which is a decent rate of pay; however, for those participating in the program they only earn $1.39 for a digital borrow. On the upside, the authors are making more than the musicians, but neither is being fairly compensated for their work.
Art, in this case books and music, enrich our lives. The people who create this art should be fairly compensated for their work. The interconnected world we live in today has given artists more ways to get their work out into the world. The costs of producing these works has gone down considerably; however, the people creating them are not being compensated fairly.
If you work on Wall Street you will likely make millions, but what do you add to the world? What value do you provide? Artists add beauty, they enrich our lives—but our society values the financier more than the artist. That tells me that our values are misplaced in our society.