How Sia Lost Millions to Spotify With One Stupid Decision

Sia Furler is one of those artists with a heartwarming success story. You can’t help but root for her! But Sia’s ‘overnight success’ actually involved more than two decades of struggle, and dedicated fans have known about her long before she broke into the mainstream.

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Actually, there are platforms that pay even worse than Spotify (assuming Spotify pays). That list includes YouTube, which is barely better than that other low-paying ‘platform,’BitTorrent piracy. SoundCloud is probably somewhere in-between. But if YouTube is abysmal when it comes to royalty payments, at least YouTube is creating more than 1.5 billion sales opportunities for this artist.

So why is Sia squandering every single one of those opportunities, and capturing only a fraction of the real revenue potential?

What could Sia be doing differently?

Here are some better-paying formats and opportunities that need to be prioritized, from best-paying to worst:

(1) In-person ‘Experiences’: Tickets to shows, high-priced appearances, etc.

(2) Merchandise.

(3) Physical formats: Vinyl and CDs.

(4) Downloads: (a) powered by yourself, Bandcamp, CD Baby, etc., then (b) stores like iTunes and Amazon.

…and don’t forget:

(5) Wildcards: Crowdfunding campaigns, diversified products, etc.

(6) Sponsorship opportunities: If I’m a Nike executive looking for a brand ambassador, who should I contact to start that discussion? There’s ample room to place that information, even if it’s just an agency name.

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But this gets even worse. Sadly, Sia is not only pointing fans to Spotify, but re-circulating traffic back into YouTube (just look below the ‘Chandelier’ video). Effectively, this artist is helping to promote large amounts of revenue and growth for these tech giants (and their executives and investors), while gaining very little for herself.

That’s absolutely not the attitude of another YouTube billion-plus artist, Adele, who is constantly prioritizing platforms that pay better.

So, let’s review: if you’re lucky enough to be getting tons of attention on a streaming platform like YouTube, work very, very hard to migrate those fans to better-paying platforms and experiences.

And please do NOT recirculate those fans to platforms that pay horribly, especially when you have fans that are more than willing to give you real money.

see full article on Digitalmusicnews

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