How do musicians get paid?

How do musicians get paid? My name is Piece Wise, and I am an electronic music producer. Here is everything you need to know about artist royalties.

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First of all, what are royalties? “Music royalties are payments that go to recording artists, songwriters, composers, publishers, and other copyright holders for the right to use their intellectual property” (PQ, 2019). Music royalties are not only used to just simply pay everyone involved within the music industry, but they are also used to pay for different types of licenses in order to use music in different ways. Music royalties are one of the most important factors when it comes to music production. Without artists getting paid for their music, the world we live in today would be much different. There are many different types of royalties within the music industry; I will be naming a few within this article.

Synchronization royalties allow content creators to use copyrighted music in movies, television, commercials, video games & online streaming, basically any type of visual media. This is mostly arranged through the record label that released the music & the creative consumer who wants to use the song. We also have print music royalties, which is a less common form of music royalties. Print music royalties apply to copyrighted music which is used for sheet music, which is then also distributed.

There are a lot of different roles to take into account while working on a record. First of all, you have songwriters, the talents that both write & produce the music for a song. Songwriters receive both performance & sync royalties, depending on how their music is used. Publishers are the people/companies who are responsible for paying the artists/composers. Publishers also assign licenses for the music being used, which means also collecting royalties & taking care of paying the creative minds behind the music. Then we have record labels. Record labels are in charge of marketing and distributing music. Before this process happens, a contract is formed which consists of information such as how the music is allowed to be used, what the artist royalty percentages are & what types of marketing/promotion will be achieved. In general, record labels also take care of royalties which they pay to the creative minds. One of the biggest royalty incomes comes is from Spotify, which music consumers such as you & I use on a daily basis.

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Spotify is a music streaming platform with over 217,000,000+ users. This means that Spotify is one of the biggest sources of income for a music producer, and a strong marketing campaign or pitch towards Spotify can mean a big amount of revenue. Since Spotify is always looking for upcoming music talents, they have introduced their feature where any artist with a “Spotify for Artists” account is able to submit their unreleased music to their playlists. This is a totally free feature, and it allows artists to be exposed to the world. The submission tool is simple. Once an artist has a new song ready for release, it is crucial to plan it a few weeks ahead of time. This means that the artist is able to submit their new music to the Spotify editorial playlists. Spotify usually prefers a few weeks' time before the actual release date in order to listen to the track, and decide whether or not to support the song in their editorial playlist(s).

This is one of the biggest advantages for upcoming music producers who are just getting started. As for my music, Spotify has already given me a huge amount of support on my singles. This allowed me to get discovered by people from over 65 different countries! Of course, I have been working closely with record labels to market my music, which can also be a huge advantage since record labels have a lot of connections within the music industry.

To conclude this article, artist royalties are everything. The main goal of music production is to express emotions, and there is no discussion about that. In order to enhance our music distribution, artist royalties are very easily paid out to music artists. This allows them to earn money, and keep making music. If you are interested in listening to my latest single “Voyage”, be sure to click on the link below! The record is released on the record label Loudkult. In just a few weeks' time of being released, it is about to hit 100,000 streams on Spotify alone! Take a listen, I’m sure you will enjoy.

Listen to Voyage: fanlink.to/PieceWise_Voyage

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