{"id":129501,"date":"2022-04-26T16:34:25","date_gmt":"2022-04-26T15:34:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/?p=129501"},"modified":"2022-04-26T21:42:47","modified_gmt":"2022-04-26T20:42:47","slug":"135000-artists-are-now-getting-paid-through-soundclouds-fan-powered-royalties-platform1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/135000-artists-are-now-getting-paid-through-soundclouds-fan-powered-royalties-platform1\/","title":{"rendered":"135,000 artists are now getting paid through SoundCloud’s Fan-Powered Royalties platform"},"content":{"rendered":"

In April 2021, SoundCloud launched<\/a> its industry-first ‘Fan-Powered Royalties’ platform \u2013 its own branding of the user-centric streaming payment model.<\/p>\n

This method of monetization sees royalties from each individual subscriber’s monthly payment distributed only amongst the artists they listen to.<\/p>\n

That’s opposed to the more typical ‘big pot’ or ‘pro rata’ streaming royalties model – adopted by the likes of Spotify – which sees all royalty revenue paid\/generated by users centrally pooled by a service, before being shared on the basis of artist market share across an entire platform.<\/p>\n

It’s now a year on from SoundCloud’s Fan-Powered Royalties were made available to independent artists who upload\/monetize their music direct via SoundCloud. And today (April 26), SoundCloud has revealed a series of updated stats about its payout system’s progress.<\/p>\n

<\/div>
<\/div>
<\/div> <\/div> <\/p>\n

These stats include the fact that 135,000<\/strong> independent artists are now getting paid through Fan-Powered Royalties (FPR). This marks a 30% growth in the volume of artists who have signed up to monetize their music via FPR on the platform since March 2021.<\/p>\n

SoundCloud also claims that, on average, independent artists are now earning 60%<\/strong> more through Fan-Powered Royalties than they would have been had they stuck with the traditional pro-rata model.<\/p>\n

<\/div> <\/div> <\/p>\n

As mentioned, the pro-rata model sees royalties paid to recorded music rights-holders based on their respective market shares of total plays across the music streaming service.<\/p>\n

SoundCloud claims that this system sees “megastars make the most”.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/a><\/i><\/a><\/figure>\n
\n

SoundCloud also reports that, since March 2021, there has been a 97%<\/strong> growth\u00a0in the\u00a0number of fans on SoundCloud who have individually contributed more than $5 to “a single artist they love” via Fan-Powered Royalties.<\/p>\n

<\/div> <\/div> \n

Artists eligible for Fan-Powered Royalties are those indie artists who monetize directly with SoundCloud, including Pro Unlimited subscribers in the Premier Program<\/a>,\u00a0Repost by SoundCloud<\/a>\u00a0subscribers and members of Repost Select.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/a><\/i><\/a><\/figure>\n
\n

To celebrate one full year of operating its Fan-Powered Royalties platform, SoundCloud is launching what it calls, \u2018Fan-Powered Friday\u2019, this coming Friday (April 29).<\/p>\n

On that day, SoundCloud says that it “invites fans to stream music from their favorite independent artists all day long”. In turn, SoundCloud pledges to double those artists’ royalty payouts – matching 100% of their revenue earned that day.<\/p>\n

\n

SoundCloud has previously cited two independent artists as successful case studies for its Fan-Powered royalties system.<\/p>\n

By switching those artists, Chevy and Vincent, to a \u201cfan powered\u201d model and away from \u2018pro rata\u2019, based on their playcounts at the time, the service estimated that Chevy\u2019s monthly royalties would grow 217%, while Vincent\u2019s would multiply by five, up from $120 to $600.<\/p>\n

In July, Influential British band Portishead released their cover of ABBA\u2019s SOS<\/em>\u00a0exclusively on\u00a0SoundCloud,<\/a> citing the fan-powered payout model as the reason behind their decision to release exclusively on SoundCloud.<\/p>\n

The release marked the first time the track was made commercially available on a major streaming platform (apart from YouTube<\/a>, where the video currently has over 3.5m views).<\/p>\n

SoundCloud said later in the year<\/a> that the song was earning 500% more under the fan-powered payout model than it would have under the pro-rate model.<\/p>\n

“The model\u2019s working. artists with authentic and loyal fan bases are being rewarded — and it\u2019s just the first step.”<\/p>\n

SoundCloud<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a statement announcing the new stats, SoundCloud, said: “The model\u2019s working. Artists with authentic and loyal fan bases are being rewarded — and it\u2019s just the first step.<\/p>\n

“Fan-Powered Royalties is powering a fan economy where there\u2019s opportunity for more engagement between artists and their fans; driving the creation of an innovative, integrated ecosystem to promote the artist-fan relationship across multiple touchpoints on SoundCloud.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Platform pledges to match 100% of revenue earned by independent artists on Friday, April 29<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":129505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}