The “chameleon” of human emotions. The ability to “feel” what others feel.

With empathy, just like any emotion, some are more capable than others.
ANGER: some of us fly into blind rages while others seethe.
HAPPINESS: one 8-year old who screams as she unwraps the gift she’s asked for all year, another silently fights back a tear of gratitude,
SADNESS: Some collapse into tears while others internalize their grief.

Empathy operates the same way: there are some who cannot help but feel the loss of others, almost as if it were their own, and there are some who can somehow internally justify the pulling of a trigger or the pushing of a button.

Me? I found my empathy taking a weird form yesterday and today.

There was the predictable: putting myself in the place of a victim, a first responder (“I would have done that“), someone fleeing from the scene (“I would have done that“) a family member of an 8-year-old boy whose life ended because he was at the finish line to hug his dad.

The Dad.

The Good Guys.

But I also, against my own will, began to attempt to put myself in the place of someone who triggered the bomb.

My empathy paints in dark colors sometimes.

It’s all projecting. It all is. It would be offensive to say that I am capable of manufacturing anything close to what the victims lost, just as it would be offensive to say that I can understand what would cause someone to follow through with detonating a bomb or pulling a trigger.

But I can speak to what resonates in me to mirror those emotions: loss, grief, disconnect, the desire to be a part of something bigger.

The anger that can be so easily misdirected at predetermined enemies in the aftermath.

I don’t have any answers. I have vague guesses, the same as anyone. Whether the bomber was an angry white “Patriot” or an angry brown Muslim, or an angry green teenager, I imagine that they thought they were doing something bigger, something more important than the lives that would be lost in the process.

That generally seems to be the way.

It’s the same thought, by the way, that sends young men into wars, drops bombs on civilians, fires rockets into neighboring countries, and considers “bombs” over “families” as the most powerful suffix of “Nuclear”.

I’m not here to cast a blanket statement that all such causes are wrong. I’m aware that it’s a sliding scale; all wars are hell, but some wars are just.
Some are for the purpose of preventing more things like what we saw in Boston yesterday.

(I’m also not here to definitively say what percentage of those wars accomplish their stated goal, though I am also aware that “I’m not here to…” comes loaded with implications.)

But I do suspect that if the bomber had spent a week in Dorchester living with the Richard family, he could never have detonated the bomb, knowing that instead of “*AN* 8-year-old boy” who died, it would be Martin. And it wouldn’t be “*A* 5-year old” who lost a leg, it would be Jane.

As best I can assume empathy for those devoid of it, I just can’t imagine things would have turned out the same.

So now the onus falls on us.

To have empathy where a lack of it has ruptured the lives of so many.

I’m not reminding you to swear and punch a wall like I did yesterday when I heard about Martin Richard. That visceral reaction is easy to have. I’m asking you to do something much more difficult: I’m asking you to temper your initial reaction with Empathy.

I’ll tell you what that initial reaction will be.

If he or she claims to uphold beliefs that you have, you will internally distance yourself from them. “they got it wrong”, “they don’t represent me”.

If he or she claims to uphold beliefs that you don’t have, it’s going to be easy to decry everyone in that group as evil.

Muslim brotherhood, Tea Party, Anarchists, Palestinians, Israelis, Russian Drug-lords, Siths, Donkey Kong…

But I’m asking you to imagine if it was your own brother or husband or child who did this. Imagine what circumstances took place to put them in a position to believe the deception that whatever cause they were championing was worth this loss of life. Imagine the disconnect they began to feel in the months and years leading up to this. Imagine the guilt, watching the news and seeing the faces of the victims. Alternately, imagine the darkness of living in a mind who felt no guilt when they saw those faces.

I’m not asking to you justify this horrific action. I’m not even asking you to Not Be Angry. Of course we’re angry. We should be angry.

But in addition, I’m asking you to have empathy for the bad guys.

Because that’s what keeps you from becoming one of them.

“Intelligent yet accessible singer-songwriter Levi Weaver loves his fans, and his brand new covers EP Antipodes is plenty of proof: the daring indie set runs from contemporary folk to grungy-and-grandiose alt-pop, though there’s a good acoustic underpinning on every track, and though the overall set ends up quite diverse for a 5-song collection, his love for his contemporary influences shimmers throughout every beat and pick.”

PART FOUR – SPOTIFY

I get asked this question a lot: “How much do you make from Spotify?” It’s a fair question: Spotify launched, and suddenly we had (practically) the ENTIRE HISTORY OF RECORDED MUSIC! For free (with commercials) or $9.99/month!!

“HOW DID THEY MAKE IT LEGAL?!”, we rejoiced.
“I DON’T EVEN CARE, LET’S LISTEN TO VANILLA ICE ON REPEAT!!”, we decided.

Then came the backlash:

“Spotify is detrimental to music buying.”

Musicians started sweating.
Listeners shrugged, mostly. (Word to your mother.)

Lady Gaga got paid $167.00 for over a million streams.
Or not.

Musicians  did what we only do when we are significantly spooked: we looked at our books.

Some pulled their music out. Some tweeted, blogged, and gave interviews. (note: if I’d just posted this last week I might have made it into this article which includes a lot more talk from artists about Spotify.)

You can read how much I get paid from other streaming services here, but the more research I did, the more I realized that Spotify was going to have to be its own article. So here goes: (Spoiler: #5 is the most interesting point)

1. IT ACTUALLY PAYS OKAY, COMPARED TO RADIO

As a musician, when you’re used to selling things for $10/album or $0.99/song, it’s a splash of cold water to see a number like $0.005205/play.

I don’t come to all the same conclusions as Kieron Donoghue, but he brings up a good point when he says, in response to @John_Hopkins_:

“…his mistake is to compare a Spotify play against a Radio 1 play. Radio 1 has approx 11,000,000 listeners so if you do the maths that’s 0.0000045p per listener.”

I guarantee you, I know not a single musician that would be upset about getting a song played on BBC Radio One.

In fact, we even seem excited about getting on the radio here in the U.S. Care to take a guess how much your band (not the writer) will get paid in Public Performance Fees for one play on KISS-FM in Los Angeles or Z100 in New York City?

I’ll give you a hint, it starts with zero.

(it also ends with zero.)

(okay, it’s zero.)

2. IT ACTUALLY PAYS OKAY, COMPARED TO OTHER STREAMING SITES

I posted this on the last blog, but here are the numbers again:

Average Payment (To Me) Per Stream

Deezer: $0.0219
XBox Music: $0.01473
MediaNet: $0.009972
*Rhapsody: $0.0091
Spotify: $0.005205
iTunes Match (Aus): $0.002926
iTunes Match (Can): $0.002837
iTunes Match (EU): $0.002832
iTunes Match (US): $0.002457
Rhapsody Mechanicals: $0.002228
iTunes Match (UK): $0.002139
MySpace Music: $0.002043
Last.fm: $0.00055968

Here’s another bit of fun math. Daniel Ek (CEO of Spotify) has claimed that 200 streams will earn you about the same amount as one download.

Let’s test that using my numbers: I was paid $0.005205/play in 2012. Multiply that by 200, and you get $1.041.

Well, that’s actually more than I make from an iTunes download.

I’d actually only have to hit the mark of 123 streams to match the $0.637 I make from an iTunes sale.

This sounds encouraging, but let’s apply a bit of practicality to this math: check your iTunes play counts. How many songs have you listened to 123 times or more? (I have 9, out of 15,412 songs)

3. IT PAYS A HECK OF A LOT BETTER THAN YOUTUBE.

4. IT’S NOT MEANT TO BE MY ONLY SOURCE OF INCOME …YET.

Full disclosure: I had 31,400 streams from Spotify in 2012, and I made $112.52 (after CDBaby’s 9%). Considering the fact that I paid them $120 to subscribe to their service, I basically just got a really nice employee discount.

I would never make a living from people listening to my music on Spotify at this rate. To earn $40,000 a year (I could pay rent and other bills, feed my family, pay for health insurance, and never ever record another album or buy another pair of socks), I would need 7,686,395 streams on Spotify. But that’s missing the point. Spotify is not the only revenue stream for me or any other artist. At least not yet.

5. SPOTIFY IS *WILDLY* INCONSISTENT WITH THEIR PER-STREAM PAYMENTS

The lowest rate I was payed for a single play was $0.00026547. That’s two and a half hundreths-of-a-cent.

But the highest rate I got from them? $.03395283.

In a world of “point-zero-zero-zero…” payments, three cents for one play is astronomical. I was curious, So I dug deeper. 
..

The $.03 payment rate happened in August of 2012, and it was for a handful of tracks (154 total plays at this rate, for a payout of about $5.23). The three most-played songs were I am Certain I am a Train and Dark Clay (11 streams each for a total of $.3735 each) and Drink (Drink, Drink) (9 streams for a total of $0.3055)

How is this possible? Maybe everyone took a break from listening to music except for my fans?

No.

You see, in the same reporting period of August 2012, one column reports “We’re Tornadoes When We Dance” being played 180 times, for which I was only paid .00171/play (that’s a total of $0.3095
, or almost-the-same-amount-I-was-paid-for-9-plays-of-Drink).

Well, that’s weird.

But this is weirder:

As I dug a little further, I discovered that in the SAME REPORTING PERIOD, 11 other columns appear for Drink (Drink, Drink). They report totals of 2, 49, 49, 62, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 1 times played that month, with a payment-per-play ranging from $0.00050669 to $0.01027848. In fact, as I arrange by song, within the month of August 2012 alone, there are as many as 21 different reports (We’re Tornadoes When We Dance, total plays now up to 427) to as few as 4 (a half-dozen titles) for any given song. Most had around 10 different reports for that same month, and the payment per play varied widely.

As to why there was such a huge variation: I have …guesses?

Maybe each of the reports was from a different country. I’m sure some of these listens were from paid subscribers, and some from free listeners. Maybe commercials pay more during peak listening hours?

Probably, Sure, and Maybe.

But the fact is, I don’t know. Nobody does. And Spotify refuses to give any further details (citing “strict confidentiality requirements”), other than to acknowledge that major label artists do, in fact, get paid more than indies per play (68th paragraph on that article, about 2/3 down).

Look, I know I’m a tiny fish in this very deep pond. But as far as I know, no one outside the 4 major labels signed that confidentiality agreement, so even if they don’t tell YOU why I’m getting paid what I’m getting paid, and even if they can’t tell me how much more (than me) major label artists are getting paid, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to ask how I’M getting paid what I’m getting paid.

“But we do tell you”, says Spotify. “In fact, we released an official statment about how artists get paid.” they say.

To quote: “…Spotify pays royalties in relation to an artist’s popularity on the service. For example, we will pay out approximately 2% of our gross royalties for an artist whose music represents approximately 2% of what our users stream.“)

“Approximately”.

Big word, bigger meaning.

Based on my numbers, “approximate” either means false or, at best, incomplete.

6. IT GETS BETTER (MAYBE?)

There is evidence, based on Spotify’s history in Sweden, that the longer the service is in place, the more people will become paid subscribers, and the bigger that “70% of the income” pool for artists will get.

I will say that I wildly disagree with the part of Spotify’s official statement that states “if the 40M paying downloaders in the US became Spotify subscribers, artists would earn twice as much for their music than they currently do.” (Typing this statement without so much as a “The Onion reports” or  “LOL HAHAHAHA JUST KIDDING” at the end is the written equivalent of Jimmy Kimmel Math.)

But for now, I’m content to weather the initial storm and see what happens. I would love to get to the point where 30-50 plays meant I was making as much as I would from a download. That seems fair. However…

7. IT ALSO GETS WORSE.

Ultimately if Spotify doesn’t ever get any better for us indies, it won’t be because of us angrily tweeting about it, or getting all rage-faced about wanting to know if our streams came from Texas or Italy or New Zealand, or why we get paid such wildly varying numbers.

If Spotify fails us, it will be for these four reasons:

Universal Music Group
Sony BMG Music Entertainment
EMI Group
Warner Music Group.

Here’s why.

(Even if you don’t click on any of the other links in this article, click that one.)

This also means that even if you have striven to avoid major labels, they are still, on some level, determining your paycheck.

If Spotify does ultimately succeed? Well then, the bigger it gets, the more the “Big Four” will control your income, even if you’re not signed to them.

Not much makes me want to quit making music. But this is close.

(News room is silent, I solemnly tap papers on the news desk. No music as we cut to commercial.)

Next up: Profit Margins on physical merchandise.

-Levi Weaver
Facebook / Twitter

I am still writing entries for this “What Does an Indie Get Paid” series, but the fact is, the articles are getting a little bit more complicated as they go, so I want to make sure I’m getting my numbers right.

In the meantime, I got this comment on article #1 today, clarifying some of the numbers, and thought I should post it here for all to see:

“Hey Levi,

Just wanted to mention that the 63 cents per song (or $6.37 for album sales) is AFTER CD Baby’s 9% cut. iTunes keeps 30%; then we take 9% of the net — paying you the rest. So what shows up on your accounting report from us is the actual amount we’re paying you after iTunes and CD Baby take their/our cuts.

Taxes! Frustrating. But thanks for writing an entertaining article about something so perennially awful, and for mentioning CD Baby as a great option for indie artists.

I hope the new math simplifies the process somewhat for you.

best,

Chris Robley from CD Baby”

This is further evidence of what I mean when I say that CDBaby.com is made up of real people. It means a lot to me that he would take the time to clarify this. Unfortunately, it also means that in addition to writing the remaining articles, I’m going to have to go back and make some edits to the three existing ones.

Also, this is silly, but I feel the need to defend my methods — I did actually call CDBaby when I was researching the article, and the guy I talked to on the phone told me that their 9% was factored “After the number you see in the report”, not the way that Chris explains here. It’s not a huge deal, but that’s where the error came from.

I’m not upset, and I wouldn’t even mention it, except that I HATE HATE HATE getting math wrong, so I feel some sort of illogical need to tell you all why this error wasn’t my fault.

I’ll edit the existing articles and re-post them today or tomorrow, and then get back to work on #4: Spotify.

PART THREE: STREAMING

I started writing today with the intention of titling this “STREAMING/SPOTIFY”, but the longer I wrote, the more I came to the conclusion that Spotify is going to get its own entry tomorrow.

Let me give you the one simple reason why:

Spotify accounted for 85.89% of all my streaming traffic in 2012. So I have a lot more to say about it.

This does not count listens on Bandcamp, which I do not get paid for, because bandcamp serves as my store, so it fits more into article #2. The websites I’m talking about here today are those whose primary business plan is to stream music for profit, both to them and (ideally) to the artists.

I’ll be honest: as a listener, I love these services. I love that when I hear about a new band, I can go listen to them and decide if I want to be a fan or not. I love that if when I’m in a waiting room and Tim McGraw’s version of “Stars Go Blue” comes on, I can pull up the original Ryan Adams version and point my phone speaker at the ceiling accusingly. (true story.)

But as an artist, the jury is still out. On one hand, you’ve heard the complaints…. tens of thousands of plays, three figures of payment. We’re not used to such paltry sums for such seemingly impressive numbers! $500 for 100,000 listens? If we played 10 songs for 10,000 people, the check would be …at least three times bigger than this!

On the other hand, I like someone can hear my name and immediately listen to my music for free instead of just thinking in the back of their mind “ok, I’ll keep an ear open for him on the radio” until they forget my name and have to be told again.

Either way, streaming is here. It’s the future, and there’s no going back now. So rather than complain about it, let’s endeavor to understand it, and then figure out how to make a living anyway.

-SO-

how do artists get paid for streaming services?

Unfortunately, There’s no set answer for that. It varies by service, varies within each service, and varies AGAIN, depending on how the listener uses each particular service. I’ll endeavor to give an overview, and then explain a few differences I discovered between them, but If music law is your preferred method of self-flaggelation, you can easily find about 100 million articles about the litigation and economics surrounding music on the internet.

THE BASICS:
Most services function roughly like this… they take the pool of money that comes in from subscribers, and assign a percentage that gets paid to the artists. Of that remaining pool, the amount the artist gets depends (theoretically) on what percentage-of-the-total-plays their songs get.

For example: Let’s say I built a streaming website. If there was a total of one subscriber who paid $10 to stream music from my hypothetical (and highly unsuccessful, apparently) website, a percentage of that $10 (something like $7 of it),would go to the artists.

Now let’s say my one subscriber played your song 10 times out of 100 total plays, you would get $.70, or $.07/play.

It seems like a somewhat simple process, right? Hahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa……..

THE NOT-SO-BASICS:
The complication arises in the realization that there are multiple revenue streams, and each of them pays differently. The sites make money from the subscribers, but are also paid money from the advertisers that play commercials to the free users. Currently, by law, they only have to give 10.5% of the commercial income to the artists (and publishers, etc.)

When your computer technically makes a copy of a song (i.e. spotify’s “make available offline” option for a playlist), that’s called a “mechanical” royalty, and it is charged slightly differently than if the file is not copied and stays on the original server. But even this definition only applies to websites where you can choose a song, and “control” the listening experience, say by picking a song you like, or listening to it on repeat.

That definition is why Pandora is another thing entirely (article #5?). Pandora functions as radio, and pays their royalties to Soundexchange, who then pay the artists, labels, and publishers. This is why you can’t repeat songs, or pick a particular song on Pandora.

If that’s not complicated enough, iTunes has something called “Match”, another animal altogether… subscribers pay $25/year, and iTunes will scan their library to determine how many of their songs have a match on the iTunes store. Subscribers will then have access to those songs in a “cloud”-based storage system. Any songs that they have that aren’t on the store, they can upload.

The artist then gets paid a mechanical royalty when that song is played from the cloud,
since the version on the store is technically a different digital file than the one on your computer. (Artists don’t get paid when you listen to the same song from your hard drive, because part of the sale price you paid went to cover the mechanical license to “copy” that song from the store onto your hard drive.)

ADDITIONALLY, if you have a low-quality version of a song (that you ripped from a CD, say) you can download a higher-quality version from the cloud to replace it. There’s probably some kind of mechanical license paid there as well. Frankly, this is getting exhausting.

The main idea of Match is that I don’t have to store all 20,000 of my songs on my iPhone; as long as I have internet access, I can listen to my entire library. (The benefit: it’s cheaper than Spotify, by nearly $100. The downside: You can only listen to music you already own; nothing new.)

I’ll be honest: as an artist, I don’t care how low this rate is. You already paid to download the music; if I get paid additionally for you to listen to it? Sweet deal, iTunes Match.

RIGHT, SO. WHO’S THE BEST?

The answer, of course, is no less complicated than the questions that begat it. But here is the first piece of information:

Average Payment (To Me) Per Stream

Deezer: $0.0219
XBox Music: $0.01473
MediaNet: $0.009972
*Rhapsody: $0.0091
Spotify: $0.005205
iTunes Match (Aus): $0.002926
iTunes Match (Can): $0.002837
iTunes Match (EU): $0.002832
iTunes Match (US): $0.002457
Rhapsody Mechanicals: $0.002228
iTunes Match (UK): $0.002139
MySpace Music: $0.002043
Last.fm: $0.00055968

But those are the averages. The amount I was payed per stream varied wildly among them. Here are two more lists (feel free to skip them and go straight to the analysis at the end.)

Highest Single Payment For Any One Stream (after CDBaby’s 9%)

XBox Music: $0.0607188
Deezer: $0.04334521
Spotify: $0.03395283
MediaNet: $0.01130025
Rhapsody: $0.0091
MySpace Music: $0.00598052
iTunes Match (EU): $0.00437582
iTunes Match (US): $0.00357868
iTunes Match (Aus): $0.00352867
iTunes Match (Can): $0.00334042
iTunes Match (UK): $0.00319291
Rhapsody Mechanical: $0.00290109
Last.fm: $0.00107766

Lowest Single Payment For Any One Stream (After CDBaby.com’s 9%)

MediaNet: $0.00943722
Rhapsody: $0.0091
XBox Music: $0.0039997
Rhapsody Mechanical: $0.001729
iTunes Match (Aus): $0.00164075
iTunes Match (Can): $0.00145374
iTunes Match (EU): $0.00137403
iTunes Match (UK): $0.00124882
Deezer: $0.0008154
MySpace Music: $0.00071012
Last.fm: $0.000455
Spotify: $0.00026547
iTunes Match (US): $0.00011618

ANALYSIS, HURRAH!

As I said earlier,I’m focusing on everything BUT Spotify right now; they will get their own article tomorrow. As for the rest, here are five things that caught my eye.

1. iTunes Match is Getting Better.

I dug into the numbers a little bit, and noticed that my per-play price consistently increased as the year went on. This leads me to believe that there are simply more people subscribing, and those people happen to be listening to me. And like I said; these are tracks they already bought, so: bonus money!

2. Rhapsody Pays a Flat Rate:

Not on their mechanicals, but on their regular streams, the price per stream is always $0.0091. Incidentally, the mechanical rate to reproduce another person’s work is $0.091/copy (I paid Radiohead’s publishers $91.00 to print 1,000 copies of my cover of “Idioteque”), so I suspect this rate has something to do with that.

3. Rhapsody’s Mechanical Royalties Can Pay Fractions. I got paid for 450.8 mechanical streams in 2012. I have no idea.

4. iTunes separated UK and Europe for these reports, even though they combined the two regions for my downloads report. Interesting to note; I made more per stream from the US version than I did the UK or Australia, even though subscribers in both regions pay more per year (after conversion rates)  for the service.

5. Deezer and XBox Music are great! Check out those average per-play rates. Alternately, Last.fm is the worst. Not only do they have the lowest average payment per stream, but the *most* they ever paid me was $0.00107766. Meaning for me to make one dollar on Last.fm, I would have to get 928 plays.

To put it another way, here’s a fun conversion rate: If my only means of food were you listening to my songs, non-stop, on repeat on last.fm, I would be able to order a value menu order of french fries every 2.9 days.

Alright, that’s all for today.

Tomorrow: Spotify.

-Levi Weaver
leviweaver.com
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Also, this post has been edited to reflect some clarification that Chris from CDBaby.com gave me on how their percentages work. The basics are the same, but the numbers are now slightly different.

Disclaimer: I didn’t finish college.

It’s probably important to admit that, because I’m about to get waist-deep in statistical analysis, and I feel I should let you know that the highlight of my math career was proving to my college algebra teacher (in front of the whole class) that the Gauss-Jordan elimination method for matrices was incredibly inefficient.

That’s cool, I guess. But I don’t have a degree.

And that’s probably important.

Right, then. Let’s get started.

It’s important to know HOW my music got on all these sites. There are a few ways to go about getting your music distributed all over the internet, but I chose CDBaby.com. A lot of my friends have used Tunecore, which does not take a percentage of your sales, but charges you a flat yearly fee. I guess it depends on how much business you expect to be doing?

I recommend shopping around and figuring out which one works for you, but unless you’re signed to a label, you’re going to have to pick one, because it’s nearly impossible to put your music on iTunes without one of these services.

CDBaby takes 9% of whatever comes to me after the dealer takes their cut. I’m okay with that, because 91% of the income from hundreds of digital outlets is better than 100% of the income from none of them. I went with CDBaby because their customer service is great, and I can usually resolve any problem over the course of one phone call. That’s worth something, and I’ll explain why in a future blog.

Anyway, yesterday, I focused on what percentage iTunes pays me. I specify “me”, because I don’t know what (if any) agreements Apple has in place with major labels. The conclusion was that each dollar that is spent on my music in the US iTunes store gets split up (roughly) like this:

iTunes: ¢29.2929292865656
CDBaby ¢06.3636363642091
Me: ¢64.3434343434344

But that’s the U.S Store… how does this work in other markets?

iTunes has a lot of stores, but I only sold music in 5 of them last year:  U.S, Canada, Europe, United Kingdom, Australia. Unfortunately (for some unexplained reason) they combined my Europe report with my UK report, so I have no way of differentiating between them. Super frustrating, especially when you consider that there are at least two currencies at play (British Pounds and Euros).

Here are the percentages that I keep of each dollar spent on my music in those countries (after CDBaby’s 9%-of-whatever-the-dealer-doesn’t-take cut)

US – 64.34%
Canada – 62.77%
Europe / UK – 58.83%
Australia – 48.56%

Uhhh… whoa, Australia.

I did a little digging, and apparently I’m not the only one who is upset about the way iTunes works in Australia. Not only do artists get a smaller percentage per sale, but Australians pay more per song than the US and UK. (But still less than Switzerland, the highest in the world.)

Because of the higher prices, I still made more per song from Australia ($.85/song) than from the U.S / Canada ($.64) or Europe, barely ($.83).

If you want to know how thorough (nerdy) I am, please note that I grouped each country’s sales by month, then went and checked the exchange rate for that country during the month of those sales. (And honestly, let’s just go ahead and throw out the £ /€ combination “Europe” because I did those exchanges in Euro before I realized that the two were combined.)

So, how do the other sites stack up? Using the same analysis, here’s how the other online services ranked. I covered some of these yesterday, but I’m including them again for the sake of comparison.

Please note, this is for downloads ONLY. I’ll be talking about streaming services soon.

How Much Do They Keep?

CDBaby.com (Digital): 9%
Bandcamp.com: 15%
EMusic: 22.05%
Amazon: 28.54%
iTunes (CAN): 31.02%
Rhapsody: 29.29%
iTunes (US): 29.29%
iTunes (EU/UK): 35.35%
Amazon UK: 42.89%
iTunes (AUS): 46.63%
XBox Music: 81.37%*
Nokia: 81.69%**

There are other places to download music, but I’ll be honest; Either I’m not on them, or I didn’t sell even a single download on them in 2012.

Next up: Streaming Services!

*XBox Music
It took me a long time to figure out how downloads worked on XBox, so it’s possible that these numbers may be skewed. I don’t have an XBox, but my friend Brian Burgess (thanks, Brian) checked with customer service, and here are the basics:

- you can’t download music from XBox Music on an XBox
- you CAN download music from XBox Music on another device through the XBox Music app.
- you don’t pay money for the downloads, you pay points. one song costs 79 MSP (or about 99 cents) and an album costs 800MSP (About $10).
- Adding to the confusion, you can also buy a “Music Pass” for $9.99/mo, which gets you unlimited downloads. I suspect this is why I was only paid $2.07 for an album download, and an average of 13-14 cents per song.

**Nokia
I did some research, and the only place I could find a Nokia music store was in the UK. They currently charge £.79/song, which, at the time of the sales, was $1.20 in U.S. Dollars. I received $0.20.

If that’s the actual pricing, and percentage, that’s awful. I’ll keep an eye on future reports to see, and take steps to have it removed, if so. But I won’t rule out that they may have been having a sale, or there may be some kind of “unlimited download” thing happening there as well. If you’re in the UK, and purchase music from Nokia, get in touch and let me know if you have any information?

If it helps you maintain my “image”, imagine I’m A.) really sad about it, philosophically pondering how Western Civilization and Capitalism got to the point that I, one whose job it is to write poems and sing them so that we can momentarily forget about these things, am sitting at a computer figuring up royalties to the .000000000000001th decimal point. (this part is actually true.) and B.) Not wearing glasses and my hair looks super cool. (this part is not true.)

I know a lot of you are also hoping that one day, you’ll be able to pay your bills making music. (Hallelujah.) So over the next few weeks,  I’m going to try to help, by filling you in on the Top 10 “interesting” (ha) things I discovered while doing my taxes. Even if you make enough money that you can pay an accountant to do these things, I feel like it’s important to know what’s going on with your money, so you don’t get Leonard Cohen’d.

NUMBER ONE: iTUNES

If you put your music on iTunes via CDBaby, as I’ve done in the past, your accounting doesn’t tell you how much the websites charged for your music. You need to know that number, because the difference between that number and the amount you got paid is a fee. You are paying a store to sell your music, so it’s a tax deduction.

Now hang on, because this is going to get SUPER NUMBERS-Y, HERE.

(Edit: This section was originally wrong. I had called CDBaby.com to get some details on how the math was figured, and the guy on the phone told me wrong. Below, you can see the comment that Chris from CDBaby left to clarify. SO: the numbers have been edited to accurately reflect this.)

The report I get only tells me how much I ended up with ($0.637/song, after CDBaby’s 9% fee, if you’re wondering). I tried to come up with the simplest equation to figure out exactly how much was taken by each party. I ended up with a few that worked, but here was the simplest one:

p = original price on the store (in this case, 99.9 cents)
s = amount kept by the merchant (in this case, iTunes)
c = amount paid to CDBaby.com percentage (9% of the “post-s” total)
x = actual money that came to me ($0.637)

Since we know a few of these factors, the equation looks like this:
.999 – s – c = .637
-or-
.999 – s – (.09(.999*s)) = .637

I’ll spare you all the steps because you either don’t care, or you already know how to do this, and skip straight to the answer:

p = $0.999
s = $0.292929292865656
c = $0.063636363642091
x = $0.643434343434344

Chris from CDBaby says that iTunes takes 30%; I have it at 29.3%.
I don’t know if 30% is an estimation, or if their price is closer to 99.999999999999 cents. Either way, it’s probably not important unless you care about millionths of a cent. (Which I do, because I’m an independent musician. )

29.3% to the store feels like a high percentage, but you have to consider that most large venues take somewhere from 10 to 25% of the artist’s physical merch sales at any concert. After an album is recorded, mixed, and mastered (which, let’s not forget, costs tens of thousands of dollars) it costs me approximately $1.50 to print up a CD, and $4.50 to print up a vinyl record. It costs me approximately $0.00 to print up more iTunes copies.

What I’m saying is that 29% feels like a rip-off, but not as big a rip off as 15% of my physical merch feels. (I’ll go into profit margins of physical merch in a later entry.)

—–coffee break—–

I want to go back and revisit something. I set the price of a track in iTunes to 99.9 cents a minute ago. That’s because I noticed that I was being paid $0.637 for a 99-cent song, and $6.37 for a $9.99 album. There were only two possibilities:

Scenario #1: iTunes was employing the old gasoline-prices trick and actually charging 99.9 cents per song,

OR

(Scenario #2) they were charging the artists a higher percentage to sell an albums than a single.

Scenario #1 made more sense to me, AND, when filtered through the equation, left their percentage closer to the 30% that Chris told me they took.

In case you’re curious, I ran the numbers on Amazon while I was at it, and they charge almost exactly the same. I have them at 28.5%. The biggest difference is that they sell my album for $1 less, so I make $5.92 per album instead of $6.37.

If you’re willing to shop outside the “usual” places, you’ll find stores that give artists a bigger cut. CDBaby recently dropped to a 9% charge for digital if you buy straight from their site. Bandcamp takes 15%. But some people will only buy music from iTunes or Amazon, so taking it down from there would mean a net loss, even though it feels like a lot of money to pay for the privilege of being there.

(DEEP BREATH)

Those of you that have never seen Office Space are probably wondering why I would be digging in to figure out discrepancies that amount to $0.009/album.

And you might have a point. It’s probably curiosity more than anything. It’s not going to be the difference between forced retirement and buying a house; but it’s important for me (and you) to know that for every $1,000 that ends up in my pocket from sales on iTunes, you guys were charged APPROXIMATELY …..$1,554.1603198653830

Think about that for a sec. When you buy music on iTunes, even for artist not dealing with the various legalities/expenses of being on a label, iTunes gets more than half as much as the artist.

If you’re asking me where to buy music (You’re not, I know.) I’d first say buy my music however you like. I’m just happy you’re still buying songs. (THANK YOU.)

But if it’s important to you that the artist get the biggest percentage of the price, CDBaby.com takes the lowest amount at 9%. Those links are all here.

Later this week, we’ll look at Spotify, Tour Income, Cost of Merch, Profit Margins, How to Budget a tour, and whatever else pops up.

If you are still reading at this point, I wonder what went so right in your life. I’m proud of you. YAY MATH.

Should we only write when we feel like we have stumbled upon some great truth about music or writing or touring and feel that we have something of use to share? Or when we’re on tour and we want to show off pictures of all the cool places we’ve been? What about the times when we have a week where we e-mail our trusted friends and say “I don’t think I have anything left to say. To anyone. I can’t write anything worth listening to.”

Should we blog those moments? I’m not sure.

On one hand, I don’t ever want to be passive-aggressive and fish for compliments. If you find yourself wanting to reply something like “YOUR MUSIC IS SO IMPORTANT TO ME I LOVE YOU PLEASE NEVER QUIT”… By all means, absolutely leave that comment. Accidentally post it twice! But that’s not why I’m writing this.

It’s the other hand that sits me in this chair. The hand that says “Wouldn’t it help you to know that you’re not the only one? That just before (x favorite song) was written by (x favorite writer) he or she was ready to give up and quit?”

I think so.

I’ve written 15 full songs, 5 nearly-songs, and 11 “pieces-of-songs”. I don’t yet have an album worth of what I feel are great songs. I wanted to have 40 full songs written by the first of October, so I’m not even close. I’m still not sure how I’m going to afford to pay to record the songs, and I worry that the longer it takes, the more momentum I’ll lose from the 200 shows I did in 11 months.

I’m worried, just like every time I hit this part of the cycle, that these songs aren’t good enough, that I’ve run out of original things to say, and that I’ve spent ten years chasing this career that will one day be taken away from me, leaving me with a skill set that I’m not sure translates to any other career.

My capability to imagine the worst-case scenario (somehow it always involves me starving to death with a massive beard, holding a cardboard sign that says “Another Musician”) is staggering.

But I’m also learning to recognize that I’ve always felt this way. And someday it will happen. (not the beard and cardboard part, but…) I’ve resigned myself to that. It happens to everyone unless you’re the Rolling Stones or Neil Young. But that’s no excuse to dwell on it. All I can do is keep working until the buzzer sounds and someone yells “TOOLS UP” and then that will be the sum total of my music career.

I’m discouraged this week because I want that sum total to be better than it is. And I don’t know how much time is left on the clock. So every time I write a song that isn’t great, it feels like wasted time.

I just thought you should know.

Soon, I will post another blog telling you how pleased I am with the results, and I’ll be touring again to play them for you live.

I hope.

But for now, back to work.

-Levi

In case you can’t access the playlist at the moment – you can see what I put on it below. Listen and if you like the songs, support the artists by sharing their music and going to shows.

1. Forest Whitaker by Bad Books
2. Look What You’ve Done to Me by Iko
3. Pa Pa Power by Dead Man’s Bones
4. Sunlight by Gary Nock
5. Models/Dancers by Harper Blynn
6. Holland by Cold Specks
7. Full Circle by Half Moon Run
8. Danny, Dakota & the Wishing Well by A Silent Film
9. Love You Now by Madi Diaz
10. Fox’s Dream of the Log Flume by MeWithoutYou
11. When I Write My Master’s Thesis by John K. Samson
12. Come Home by Chappo
13. Eager for Your Love by Tristen
14. Names and Races by Foreign Fields
15. Cadillac, Saskatchewan by Erika Werry

“Alright. Write this down.” I thought. I remembered the instructions. For a second, it crossed my mind to add “Thanks for locking me in a head with another me; this doesn’t work like you thought it would”.

“Don’t write that.”

If Dr. Jameson knew the project had holes, it would change how the research went. It might take longer. I might not end up on the chair. I might end up stuck here, unable to get back to my life. Forever trapped as a passenger in my old life. A sentient conscience.

We wrote the note as planned, and mailed it.

I set my mind to trying not to think about my life as I knew it. I’d already spilled a lot in those waking moments. 2002-Me now knew who I would marry, almost five years ahead of schedule. He (I will refer to 2002-Me as “He” from now on, for the purpose of literary clarity) saw a snapshot of a life that he now may or may not live, depending on the consequences of this shared headspace.

I always believed that the reason we can’t see the future is we’ll try to take shortcuts to get there and manage to screw it up royally.

At least I thought I had always believed that. The evidence pointed to the contrary: he was full of questions.

It’s easy to keep your mouth shut when someone asks you a question you know better than to answer, but it’s impossible not to think about the answers. (“Right now, you’re thinking of a pink elephant” he or I remembered a professor saying in college.) I remembered it as some kind of unavoidable proof that I was going to lose this argument. He remembered it like a wrestler remembers a submission move.

The usage of new technology, world events… They might not become part of his memory, but surely he would remember them like conversations, a thought he’d had once. Five thousand dollars for this mess.

He called in sick to work. We agreed that this was a perfectly valid excuse. It was weird to hear my 22-year-old voice from within the confines of my head. My inner monologue was lower than his, to match the sound of a voice abused from years of singing and travel.

I couldn’t remember what he would be missing that day, and I hoped it wasn’t anything important. As it turned out, I quickly regretted the decision. We should have been doing something, anything to distract him. Calling in sick meant he could hold me hostage, lying in bed all day asking questions that I couldn’t stop myself from answering. They started predictably: Yes, the Texas Rangers would go to the World Series in my lifetime, but no, it wouldn’t end well. Start hating the Cardinals now. Yes, all my immediate family is still alive, but Grandpa passed away in 2012. My brother has two kids.

Then it got more specific.

“Yes, I’m a musician. No, none of the songs you’ve written so far are any good. Well, Del Cielo is okay, you still play that one once in awhile, but a lot of them come from getting your heart broken. No, not by Heather. You haven’t met this one yet. No, don’t… I can’t tell you whether to avoid her or not, you got some great songs out of it. Well, yeah, if it was me, I would avoid her. But I have a wife.”

It didn’t take long before he became shockingly skilled at asking a question in a manner that would bring the answer immediately. For what seemed like hours, he pried every detail out of me, like I was being mined for information against my will. Information that might change everything. I had no idea what I would be going back to. “Scars? Yeah I have a pretty sweet one on my left thumb. I severed my extensor tendon getting orange juice one morning in England, I had to have surgery to rebuild it. Yeah I can still play guitar. I sawed my own cast off before a show two weeks later because the thing was cumbersome.”

He looked at the clock: 10:15am. “Already?!” and “It’s only 10:15?!” ran through our mind simultaneously.

My entire life before lunch.

“Take some Nyquil and go to sleep” I tried to command. “Respect your elders.”

He flatly refused.

By noon, he knew everything. We went over World Series winners, elections, addresses, friends, finances, theology, philosophy, regrets… He picked up a guitar and harvested lyrics and melodies. He wrote them down in detail.

“You know” he thought. “I have the songs now. We don’t have to go to that concert and meet that girl and purchase these with a broken heart. It wouldn’t be the same anyway. You were heartbroken because you believed at the time that she was the one. I already know she’s not. It wouldn’t be the same anyway.”

I had to agree.

“Can you please go to sleep now. I just want to go back.” I tried to yell.

“What if you didn’t?” he replied. “You know what you would avoid if you could do it all over. What if you stayed here?” “I’m not living in a brain with myself, I do that already, and one me is plenty, thanks.” “No, I mean – what if you stayed, and I went back?”

I hadn’t considered it. (Technically, “I” had, but it was him.) What would happen when the tone sounded to call me back? How would it know which me to take back?

I swore (much to his surprise). “Well… We might not have any say in the matter.” I said. (Did you know your inner monologue can speak in a shaky voice?) If the frequency tone did take him instead of me, he knew enough to get by. He would at least recognize everyone he was supposed to know. But this brought up a whole new set of questions.

One: If he went back, would I be able to control the body? Inexplicable comatose paralysis would DEFINITELY make a difference.

Two: Had I left anything out?

I immediately shifted gears from trying to protect my memories to foisting them upon him. I forced him to listen to me think about where I’d parked my car at the clinic. Phone numbers, passwords, “STOP WRITING THIS DOWN, THE PAPER IS STAYING HERE. JUST PAY ATTENTION.” Anniversaries. Upcoming shows. Band members. Heather’s likes and dislikes.

“If you stay here, you can–” “SILVER. NOT GOLD. BE CLEVER, NOT SARCASTIC. SHOW HER PICTURES OF HERSELF BEFORE YOU POST THEM ANYWHERE. DON’T CLICK ON ANY LINKS IN TWITTER DMs– ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION?” “What’s a twitter?” “UGH.” I tried to think of each step to explain what “a twitter” was.

He occasionally stopped me to ask clarifying questions, but I was in charge now. This might be irresponsible, leaving him here with all this information. But if I sent him to 2012 without it, it would be a disaster. I recited my driver’s license number, visualized where I kept my passport, which key opened which door, my social security number. “I know that one already” “Right, sorry.” “How will I find my house?” I flashed an image of the house, but instead of directions, I thought of each step for using the maps on my iPhone.

For all the inner conflict I had experienced in my life, I was pleasantly surprised to find that communication is remarkably easy when you’re reading your own mind. Just as he could steal the answers to questions I’d tried to ignore, I could now feed him information at the speed of thought. I tried to take inventory of everything I’d learned in the last decade.

He looked at the clock again: 5:32pm. “Already?!” This time in unison.

By 7:00, we were exhausted and realized that we hadn’t eaten. “Do you have any of those tamales that the little Mexican boy used to bring, door to door?” I asked. I hadn’t tasted any like that since I moved out of that house. He did, and we ate.

Eating is a weird experience when you don’t control your own body. You still experience the taste (those tamales… “I wish I could take some back with me” I tried to think over the sound of chewing) but with no control over the motor skills employed for chewing or swallowing, you have to enjoy it while it’s there. You also feel the pain when you bite your tongue from eating too fast. “Slow down, dude. I haven’t had one of these in a decade, do you mind? Can we not injure us?”

By 6:00, the tamales were gone, and so was our energy. We had nothing left to think. We sat down and watched a television, the clarity of whose picture seemed antique.

By 8:00, we were back in bed. He fought to stay awake. “What does she love more than anything?” he asked. I listed things that I knew she liked. Back rubs, not having to do the dishes, “oh… don’t roll your socks up in a little ball when you take them off” I added.

“Yeah, but… what makes her the happiest?”

We laid there in silence for a bit.

“Hello?”
“I’m still here.”
“Well?”

“Look. You’re not…” I tried not to place blame before it was fair. “I mean I’m not the best husband in the world. I mean well, but I screw up more than I get it right. I married out of my league. THE Heather Chapman, you know? She’s amazing. She’s better than you even think, and you already know she’s out of your league. You got… I got lucky.”

“You don’t even know what makes her happiest?”

“Lincoln makes her happy. He means everything to me, too. You’re going to love him, tomorrow morning or in 7 years, whenever that might be. But you’ve… I’ve spent a lot of time on the road. A lot of time apart.”

“Why would I ever–”

“I don’t know. I can’t make sense of it now. At the time… I mean, I still… just don’t do that to her, okay? I’m not supposed to tell you what to do, but — find a different way.”

“Okay.”

More silence.

“Hey…”

He was asleep.

I rolled over.

I stood up.

Ha. I can control myself when I’m not awake.

The body was clunky and heavy from sleep, like trying to control a robot with dying batteries. I set the alarm for 7:30am; a half-hour before I was supposed to be called back. I laid back down and tried to consider all the ramifications of the day, but almost immediately switched to trying to avoid considering any of the ramifications of the day.

I should have visited Grandpa…

I fell asleep.

—————————–

*REEEEE, REEEEEE, REEEEEEE, REEEEEE* “THIS IS IT. CRAP I’M STILL HERE HOLY CRAP THIS IS IT.” He bolted upright.

“No, is’nnot it.” I mumbled. My inner monologue mumbles, just like my real mouth mumbles when I first wake up.

He was panicked. I was groggy.

“I set th’larm. Issfine.”

He hit the button and sat down on the bed, taking a few deep breaths to slow our heart rate. “What if we both go?” “I dunno. My guess would be that if we’re lucky, we probably wake up in a hospice care somewhere; Mom and Dad calling it a miracle I’m back. But I don’t think we have — are we on their health insurance?” “I don’t know.” “So maybe they run out of money and we have 25 minutes to live.”

“Why did you do this?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“Thirty pieces of silver.”

“That… that doesn’t really apply, but I get what you’re saying.”

“…Do you want breakfast?”

“Yeah, do you still have fruity pebbles?”

“Psh. Of course.”

We ate mostly in silence. “If I do go back, I’m going to make the future a better place so when you get there, it’ll be a better then.” he said. I hadn’t considered that possibility. I always assumed you’d have to change it from the past, moving forward. Whoever went ahead might be able to sort of pave a better 2012 for the 2002 survivor to inhabit? Who even knows how this works.

“Okay, well… me too.”

“And hey. Try not to change too much if you do stay here.” I said. “At least get the basics right. For Lincoln.” “Can I at least not cut my thumb?” “Good call, yes. Avoid that.”

More silence as we finished the bowl of cereal.

“For what it’s worth… if I’m stuck here, I’ll try too.” “Okay.”

“Can whoever goes back leave notes for whoever stays?” “I don’t think so. Maybe. How would whoever’s left know where to go to find them? I don’t know. Whoever stays can probably leave notes for whoever goes back, I’d assume, but what would be the point?”

Who even knows how this works.

“It’s almost time.”

“I know.”

We laid back down.

“Whoever goes back, we should tell Dr. Jameson we were stuck together. It’ll bring up a lot of questions, but they should know that this is a bad idea.”

“Yeah. If it’s you, maybe don’t tell him we switched.”

“Yeah. Too many questions.”

“Will it hurt?”

“No.”

Silence.

Deep breaths.

“It might. I don’t know.”

I looked at the clock.

8:02. We were two minutes past.

“It was supposed to happen at eight.” I thought.

Silence.

“Hey. It was supposed to happen at eight.” I repeated. “Is the clock fast?”

Silence.

“LEVI.” I heard myself say aloud…