I think you are on the money. The article doesn’t say why he got paid so little and just repeats the same non info and says streaming services should pay more. But like you said, they do pay far more than what he got so the money is going somewhere else and isn’t the fault of the streaming services.

There are apparently labels which do nothing but help you get in to the streaming services and charge next to no fee but then you lose out on the services they provide.

My partner and I recorded a Christmas album in our basement and put it on Bandcamp for "pay what you want including $0". We made over $400, but as of today, it's only been downloaded/streamed 500 times.

I'm sure if Gary asked around his friends and family what they'd like to hear on his next album, he could probably make more money.

That kind of suggests an interesting tradeoff: do I want the bandcamp money from more dedicated fans, or the convenience and discoverability of streaming services?

Admittedly, I may be making a false dichotomy there.

I've chosen the path that I hoped would make as many people as possible able to listen to my music. That includes not only Spotify, but also YouTube "videos" and free downloads from my website. The Spotify income covers my own Spotify subscription, which is nice, but I didn't make the music for money's sake. :)

And I realize the above may come off as judgemental, but that's not my intent. I hope it can be understood as an observation and an anecdote, not an argument about what others should do.

We didn't make the music for money's sake either, it was a happy surprise to wake up the next morning to find that many members of our community liked it enough to buy it (it's pretty clear that it can be streamed and downloaded for free, so my assumption is that the purchase was willful, with most people paying $15-$20). Reading this bit about Gary definitely made me wonder about the tradeoffs you describe.

The experience also has me strategizing on our next move. I'm applying the Lean mindset and focusing on the feedback we got from paying customers: "longer and more songs", "loved the clear crisp audio", "you played X, it's my favourite". We're doing a St. Patrick's day album next which is focusing on those pillars. I also may have splurged and commissioned an album cover off Fiverr.

What is the function of a middleman between musicians and streaming services?

Traditional record labels do a fair bit of legwork -- maybe not enough to justify the very high take they get, but I do at least know about the promotion, marketing, production, distribution, and other services they provide.

What is your middleman doing for 15%? I'd have (naively) expected that you would work directly with the streamer: "here is my audio file, send the money to XXX".

That's what I expected as well, before I tried. I assume Spotify just prefers to make a few big deals instead of lots of small deals. It saves them from having to manage all the individual payments, and probably the whole "is this really your music?" thing.

So the aggregator's fee is simply an entry fee. As you can see from my numbers above, it's not a lot of money. :)

To be fair, the aggregator I use offers a choice between 15% of the revenue, or a fixed yearly cost of $9.99 per release (first year may be slightly more expensive, depending on release size). Since I used to release a trickle of singles as I finished them, the per-release pricing definitely made no sense for me; the 15% thing was the best deal I could find when I started uploading in 2009-2010. Also, back then (not sure about now), some aggregators' terms actually demanded exclusive digital distribution rights, which was a complete non-starter for me: I wanted to put stuff on YouTube and free downloads on my website too.

That makes a ton of sense. Thank you.

I am wondering if Artist get paid less if the Stream was from smaller group of users?

i.e If one user decide to Repeat One Song a million times.

I don't know.

They can't allow obvious fraud, or there'd be money to gain in spinning up lots of VMs to inflate your stream count (and thereby your share of the total pie).

But people must be trying, I assume. Some will fall more or less clearly on the fraudulent side, and some are probably technically ok, just a little annoying or deceptive. Like duplicating popular playlists and adding your song to it: https://celebrityaccess.com/2020/01/08/the-dark-arts-of-spot...

Oh, and I assume that the big labels have better deals with Spotify than my small aggregator does -- earning a better per-stream rate.