The United Musicians and Allied Workers Union (UMAW) have started a new campaign titled ‘Justice at Spotify’ which, among other goals, is demanding that the platform raise its average streaming royalty from $.0038 USD to a penny per stream for all artists.
“One of Spotify’s core goals is to give ‘a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art’. Yet, to generate a single dollar on the platform, a song needs to be streamed 263 times,” organisers explained on the campaign’s website.
“To put that in perspective, it would take 786 streams to generate enough revenue to buy an average cup of coffee. To pay the median American monthly rent ($1,078) an artist needs to generate 283,684 recurring streams monthly. And to earn $15/hr each month working full time, it would take 657,895 streams per band member.”