John Harris writes:

[P]ublic performances of any kind have all been cancelled, and the hiatus could conceivably last well into next year. Festival season seems to be a write-off. And in the fine details of research about how the virus spreads, there are actually suggestions that the participatory aspects of music have been in part responsible for Covid-19’s transmission: witness a senior German virologist’s claim that over the last weeks and months, “wherever there was singing and dancing, the virus spread more rapidly”.

As with the rest of the economy, over about the last 20 years the business of music has seen a polarisation between a handful of huge entities at the top – your Ed Sheerans, Taylor Swifts and Beyoncés – and everyone else. For the latter group, all the main sources of substantial income are suddenly either shut down or under threat. The temporary halt to playing live removes the one dependable way musicians can make money. Royalties from music being played in pubs, clubs and shops are suddenly in jeopardy, and with advertising revenues down, the fees paid to music publishers by broadcasters may be cut. Given the long-term decline of physical sales, that only leaves streaming – at which point, let us remind ourselves that YouTube’s average per-stream rate has been put at a princely 0.13p, and that Spotify is reckoned to pay artists an average of 0.26p per listen.

Last week I spoke to a musician I have extensively written about for music magazines and watched play to a festival crowd of 4,000. As he explained, the realities of being in a critically acclaimed band that is run – very tightly – as a small business, many things became even clearer. “I don’t think there are many bands who make a significant income from their recorded music,” he said. Instead, an annual or biannual run around venues here and abroad will bring in up to two-thirds of an act’s turnover, and the summer is often the basis of whole livelihoods: the cancellation of festivals, he said, had spelled the disappearance of “all the money we’d be expecting to make this year”. Payments from Spotify arrive every six months: the band has some songs that have amassed close to a million plays each, but their last payment was for about £600. [Continue reading…]