In the age of internet downloads, when will musicians leave record labels behind, asks Joe Miller.
Who'd be a musician in the internet age? First, piracy threatened to corrode their livelihoods, then pay-to-download services like iTunes permanently reduced the price one could expect to fetch for an album, and now online streaming services, from YouTube and Spotify to Vevo and Beats Music, have demolished the traditional revenue models of performing artists.
Understandably, many old timers have refused to go down without a fight. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke famously called Spotify "the last desperate fart of a dying corpse", the near-deceased being the record industry.
Patrick Carney of the Black Keys initially kept the band's music off similar services because he felt it was not feasible for the duo to make a living from the meagre royalties.
At first glance, it's easy to see where they, and many others, are coming from. The Swedish streaming site pays an average of between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream - out of which record companies take their share too, leaving anyone other than the most successful of artists with an even punier sum. Keep reading on the BBC
Who'd be a musician in the internet age? First, piracy threatened to corrode their livelihoods, then pay-to-download services like iTunes permanently reduced the price one could expect to fetch for an album, and now online streaming services, from YouTube and Spotify to Vevo and Beats Music, have demolished the traditional revenue models of performing artists.
Understandably, many old timers have refused to go down without a fight. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke famously called Spotify "the last desperate fart of a dying corpse", the near-deceased being the record industry.
Patrick Carney of the Black Keys initially kept the band's music off similar services because he felt it was not feasible for the duo to make a living from the meagre royalties.
At first glance, it's easy to see where they, and many others, are coming from. The Swedish streaming site pays an average of between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream - out of which record companies take their share too, leaving anyone other than the most successful of artists with an even punier sum. Keep reading on the BBC