When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
As far as I know, it’s $0.025 per stream. Spotify’s rate is $0.003. Pretty substantial difference. TIDAL has the highest rate in the streaming industry.
EDIT: If you really want to support artists, go to Qobuz and buy albums. I’m planning to get a Sublime subscription so I can own my music and support artists even more (while not missing out on freedom to play what I want on demand).
Also, fixed the decimals and changed TIDAL to a more accurate average.
I think that you are off by about an order of magnitude. Spotify pays $0.003 per stream, and title apparently pays $0.01 -0.05.
I think this is correct. In cents, this is 0.3¢ and 1-5¢ respectively. Zeroes are too hard for my mushy brain…