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Everyone pay attention! Thunder Club is here to talk about how streaming music has changed the music industry. It’s a blessing and a curse.
Please welcome Thunder Club to the blog!
Just to give you fair warning before reading this, this is our two cents on where the music industry is right now. Maybe it’s super obvious, or maybe it’s something new to you. Either way, we hope you find it worth your while and if you agree, that’s great, if you don’t, no big deal, we’re all ears to what you might think about our opinions. Also, if we are wrong about something, please feel free to correct us. Also, you should listen to our band, Thunder Club, whenever you get a chance.
The music industry is a very interesting place to be right now. It’s kind of like the wild west in a way thanks to the internet. Streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud and Pandora (to name a few) have changed everything.
Life now is all about having things instantaneously, right at the touch of a button. We can order just about whatever we want, whenever we want. In music, your favorite artist could surprise you with a full-length LP tomorrow, and you would have never heard, or seen any marketing for it. Part of that is good, and some is bad. The part that’s favorable, at least for the artist, is that releasing music this way takes away the ability for people to leak their music to the masses. One of the unfortunate pieces of this puzzle is the amount in which artists get paid out by these massive streaming services.
According to CNBC, “Spotify pays about $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream to the holder of music rights.” That payout is bonkers when you think about it. Each artist, songwriter, producer, manager, whoever puts in tons of hours honing their craft and making sure each song is up to their standard. After putting it out into the world, they see FRACTIONS OF PENNIES. It’s frustrating and can be a hard pill to swallow when you are working on all of this independently and see little to no return on all of your hard work.
The benefit to all of this is that your audience is absolutely massive! Basically, anyone who has an internet connection is able to consume your music, which includes label execs and other music big whigs. This way you don’t have to spend your money elsewhere on printing physical copies of your music.
All in all, this industry is grueling, it’s tough, it’s expensive, but fun, exhilarating and super rewarding all at the same time. We have an incredible time in our band grinding to make a presence on social media and getting as much attention as possible on streaming service. I think that there needs to be either a new model of payment from streaming services. What is it? I’m not really sure, but these huge companies wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for us. Consider this, if all artists boycotted putting their music on these platforms, what would happen? Would they go under and people would start buying physical records again? Who knows, but it’s definitely something worth thinking about.
THUNDER CLUB IS:
GARRETT CUSACK: LEAD VOCALS
DENNIS CHEN: GUITAR, VOCALS
PETE BURKHARDT: GUITAR, VOCALS
CONOR JOHNSTON: BASS, VOCALS
JOHN BURKHARDT: DRUMS/PERCUSSION
