The Ever Shifting Music Business

​Written by Mitch Santell
Producer & Co-Founder

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​Written by Mitch Santell
Producer & Co-Founder

The music business is in constant change. Do you feel it like I do? For us oldies out there (born before 2000), we remember a time where the only way to obtain an artist's music was to purchase an album.

Now I see and sense more and more Reggae Artists stepping up to organize and create their record label. It is the ultimate brand, and that brand is you as a singer or as a group.

Over past few weeks, I have been receiving a lot of emails and calls in regards to royalties, various forms of music income and how to promote your music out there.

During my attendance at the "I Create Music" conference presented by ASCAP in Hollywood last year, the issues of streaming Royalties was the number one issue among songwriters. 

Look at what Paul Resnikoff discovered and wrote about on May 26th of last year:

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Looks like things are going well for these guys.  The group just signed an independent record deal and keep getting attention (and you’ve probably heard of this label).

And with that, here are this group’s Spotify royalties.  We’re missing that last few months, based reporting lag (and maybe their recent signing), but we’ve straight line estimated those based on the previous data (which goes back to October of 2013).

Total number of streams: 1,023,501
Total revenue: $4,955.90

Specific time period accounted: 10/15/2013 – 2/15/2013
(March, April, May periods not yet reported; estimated)

Average per-stream payout: $0.004891And, for those who want to take the plunge, here’s the entire royalty breakdown.  If enough people want to play with the data itself, we’ll put a shared spreadsheet up on Gdrive or something (just let us know in comments).

Here is the entire article with the spread sheets: ​http://bit.ly/2eX89AU

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Paul Williams (President, ASCAP) and Mitch Santell (April 2016).

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Paul Williams and his team at ASCAP have a lot of work ahead of them as ASCAP-like many other performance rights organisations continue to push the U.S. Congress to shift our laws to accommodate the new "streaming economy." 

Parting shot: ASCAP's I Create Music Happened in April of 2017. Were you there? If you get a chance, go next year, it's the best deal in town. I've been writing about this event for years. Don't believe me? Here is the first time I wrote about it:

http://bit.ly/2pYC2rq

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Mitch Santell & Seth McFarland Meet at ASCAP's I Create Music in 2007.

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You have to make a decision for yourself. The decision is: Am I going to take my music career seriously or is it just a hobby?

Once you answer that question, you will know what to do!

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#ascap #paulwilliams #bigreggaemix #streaming #spotify #pandora