Guitar Gear Forum

This is real... 794,144 album downloads = €2.37

Don't spend it all in one place!
Serioulsy.... why would anyone want to learn how to play an instrument, join a band, write and record songs???

This is written in Portuguese so I can read it. It says 0 album downloads and 794k track downloads ("faixas") , which doesn't make any sense. How can someone have so many tracks downloaded and absolutely zero downloads for the album.

Also downloads are scarce these days, most people stream/play tracks.


This forum has an average of 100kpage views/month and brings a lot more than $2.37. Not enough that I could even be close to living off of it - which was neve my plan anyway - but it's not 2 bucks either.

Track plays pays considerably more than page views.

The average pay rate for track plays across all platforms is around $3.5k per million plays. This sounds low at first but it's not. An artist with a fan base of say 200k- which is not a lot for a big artist - just needs each fan to play 5 tracks every day to reach 1 million plays a day which is 100k/month.

If you're fan base is in the millions then you're probably reaching several millions/ day.

The idea that famous musicians are suffering from online listening was true in the 00s and maybe part of the 10s but not so much anymore.
Small musicians are struggling but those would be in debt to record labels under the old format.

Check this calculator for some more accurate figures:

https://streamingcalculator.com/

Thanks for the info, Billy. The guy, who posted that chart, obviously doesn't read Portuguese!
The only explanation for his low pay is that, he's getting ripped off. I doubt he has the resources to hire attorneys, etc.

My band is averaging 600 streams a month on Spotify and a bit more on iTunes. Hopefully, I'll be able to retire soon!!!

My guess is this guy tried to milk the system by asking a small group of friends to keep downloading a track.

Platforms have safeguards for that by recognizing multiple accounts from the same IP address/device.


His stats don't make any sense.

Translating his chart from Portuguese, he has 2 albums in this chart:

Album 1 downloads: 0
Album 2 downloads: 0

Dowloaded tracks from Album 1: 17
Dowloaded tracks from Album 2: 784144 (yeah right)

Streamed tracks from Album 1: 7

Streamed tracks from Album 2: 2


So that 784k number is clearly artificially inflated, since every other stat in his chart is extremely low. The algorithm caught it and that's why he didn't get paid shit.

Now apparently he's going on social media posting how badly he was ripped off, when is abundantly clear he is the one who was trying to milk the system.

While I get why these "music industry is greedy and screws artists" stories are popular, all I read about is bands that lacked a solid business plan screwing themselves and blaming it on others.

Then again, if their complaining goes viral, maybe they'll make more off YouTube than their last album/tour did.

There's a scam for everything! Amazing!

ajaxlepinski wrote:This is real... 794,144 album downloads = €2.37

Don't spend it all in one place!
Serioulsy.... why would anyone want to learn how to play an instrument, join a band, write and record songs???

To get girls? To piss off your parents? To be cool? Nothing else to do?