UK music stars young and old - including Paul McCartney, Kate Bush, Robert Plant, Stevie Nicks, Sting, Roger Daltrey, Chris Martin, Kano, Noel Gallagher, Mike Skinner, Damon Albarn, Wolf Alice, and around 150 others - have called on the UK government to reform the way musicians are paid when their songs are streamed online, NME reports. They point out that "songwriters earn 50% of radio revenues, but only 15% in streaming". On streaming services, labels retain the majority of the money - with the artist receiving about 13% on average, and session musicians receiving nothing.

Apple Music has published last week that their average per play rate is $0.01, which is roughly double what Spotify pays the artists. But it's not that simple - MBW and Trapital explain Apple Music's and Spotify's models, their reach, the number of users, and how much exactly they pay to the labels (not directly to the artists, actually). Variety also points out, with word of an unnamed executive, that the best option is "a lot of users streaming a lot of music”, which would in return mean a lower per-stream rate. For example, if one artist were racking up a high percentage of streams on a less-popular streaming service, their per-stream rate would be quite high — but they’d actually have fewer streams than they would on a site with more users. Spotify has an industry-leading 155 million paying subscribers and 345 million active users, according to its most recent report, while Apple last reported more than 60 million Music subscribers in June 2019.

Apple Music told artists and labels it pays a penny per stream, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apple's penny-per-stream payment structure is roughly double what Spotify, the world's largest music-streaming service, pays music-rights holders per stream. Spotify pays an average of about one-third to one-half penny per stream. However, Spotify's larger user base generates many more streams.

The staff of The Verge recommend their favorite music straming services:

Radio Dismuke, a little-known streaming service with a constant diet of pop and jazz from the early part of the last century

Soma FM - has tons of different genre stations

YouTube Music - incomparable catalog

8tracks - lets users upload playlists of at least eight songs, possible to get three skips per playlist per hour

KEXP - consistently excellent music selection by the public radio station based in Seattle

Aux Live - a music-focused service with a range of live concerts and documentaries

Qobuz - a place with higher-resolution music

Spotify - a nice user interface and compatibility with almost every piece of streaming hardware on the market

Apple Music - does a great job of syncing all of the music across devices

Live Music Archive - over 200,000 concerts in lossless audio quality for free

"I love streaming. I stream a lot of music myself. The access we have to all kinds of music from all over the world is incredible. But I believe streaming must be fixed" - Nadine Shah tells the Guardian about the issue ahead of a publication of the UK parliamentary report about it. She and other artists, such as Nile Rodgers, Ed O’Brien of Radiohead, as well as songwriters for stars such as Kylie Minogue, have hit out at an “archaic” streaming model that allows major labels to maximise their revenue while some musicians struggle to make minimum wage.

Catalytic Sound, a cooperative organization comprising 30 avant-garde instrumentalists and composers, launched their own streaming platform Catalytic Soundstream. It charges listeners $10 per month for between 100 and 150 albums available at any given time and new ones swapped in and out every day, including records by out-jazz and free improv luminaries live Joe McPhee, Tomeka Reid, Tashi Dorji, Ikue Mori, claire rousay, Chris Corsano, and Luke Stewart. The majority of the albums include a note from one of the partners, Pitchfork reports.

The European independent music companies’ association proposed a 10-point plan to reform the streaming economy. IMPALA has some good ideas: higher payouts for longer songs; higher payouts for tracks that users specifically search for (as opposed to encountering them via playlists or radio); assuring there will be no features that recreate elements of payola; boost local repertoire and languages.

Routenote brings the numbers in - lists the ten largest music streaming services by number of tracks in their catalogue. The undisputable No. 1 is SoundCloud with 200 million songs, Deezer follows with 72 million songs, while the next five - Apple Music, Tidal, Spotify, Amazon, Qobuz - host around 70 million songs each. Napster follows with 60 million, while YouTube Music and KKBOX round up the Top 10 with 50 million songs each.

Music streaming increased 13.4% in 2020 in the US compared to 2019, generating $10.1 billion last year compared to $8.9 billion in 2019, according to RIAA. Music streaming is accounting for 83% of the total revenue of the industry now. Vinyl sales have increased a whopping 29.2% to $619.6 million, compared to $479.5 million in 2019. Streaming has driven the industry to grow for the fifth consecutive year, with revenues increasing 9.2% in 2020, generating $12.2 billion in total.

Performers and songwriters "make all this stuff and we are last in the chain when it comes to remuneration", Blur drummer David Rowntree - now a city councillor - told BBC about unfair music streaming payments to songwriters and artists. "If something isn't done about it, that is terminal for the music industry" he said - "bands like mine will be fine, but the next generation of bands will be hit - bands living hand-to-mouth like we did for the first 10 years".

Apart from the biggest streaming services like Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, classical music can be found on other services, in high audio quality. Qobuz hosts all genres, many albums are available in a better-than-CD quality, it features plenty of editorial material; it goes for a 50% higher price than Spotify. Idagio is classical music only, with the flexibility of their search and the richness with which the results are presented unrivaled by others; it’s supplemented by an excellent range of editorial material. Primephonic also hosts exclusively classical music, in high audio quality. Bach Track presents them all.

Paying more for the streaming of music could have a“potentially devastating” effect on the income of artists and songwriters - YouTube has warned the UK music industry following their efforts to force the video streaming giant to raise the amount it pays, Guardian reports. The Charlatans‘ Tim Burgess has written a piece in the Guardian as well speaking out against purported inequalities in streaming payments: "I’m not averse to the idea of a musical reset: using the pandemic as an opportunity to look again at how things are working in the industry. To take this moment and this strange landscape we find ourselves in, and just switch things off and back on again".

San Francisco-based start-up Audius has raised $8,6m from Silicon Valley investors for a blockchain-based digital streaming network that connects fans directly with artists and exclusive new releases, Music Business Worldwide reports. The platform aims to allow artists to set the rate for their own work and capitalise on data that shows them who their superfans are. Audius will keep 10% of revenue and the rightsholder will keep 90%. Audius launched in 2019, it has reached 1.3m users listening every month, over 50k people have uploaded content, and the platform hosts around 200k tracks.

"I had a statement a while back and one of my songs had had over a million plays, million streams, and it was £37. I got £37 from a million streams" - English singer Gary Numan told Sky News. He put out another example - "I printed out, I think it was about a year ago, a statement - my streaming statement came in and I didn't look at it, I just put it to print, and I looked over about half an hour later, it was still printing. It was hundreds and hundreds of pages. And the end of it was, like, £112. It was barely worth the [paper] it was printed on". "The solution's simple," he told Sky - "the streaming companies should pay more money. They're getting it for nothing".

Emerging artists are facing “massive competition” from classic acts such as Queen and the Beatles on streaming services - the UK MPs from Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee inquiry into the economics of music streaming have been told. Peter Leathem, the CEO of music copyright collective PPL, said that musicians at the start of their careers have “got the last 50 years of the music industry to compete with” on digital platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music, BBC reports.

The current average per-stream rate for artists across Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer is around £0.004, but there are several streaming startups offering more generous propositions. Guardian presents three of them: pay-as-you-go platform SonStream charges listeners around 3.3p per play of a track, with 2.5p going directly to the rights holder; Berlin-based co-operative Resonate is pioneering a “stream-to-own” model - it charges listeners for the first nine plays of one song, the cost amounting to the average price of a download, and after that, users own the track and have unlimited plays; Audius in San Francisco is developing a system that allows artists to set a per-stream rate or monthly subscription - 10% would go to the Audius network, and the rights holder would keep the rest.

Playboy explores the possibilities for artists to earn money from streaming their music or videos online. Some artists managed to reach millions of streams if they obey one basic principle - "You just have to be on your phone all the fucking time" - as 32-year-old New York-based electronic musician Marc Rebillet said. Also, it doesn't take much - Cookiee Kawaii kick-started her career thank's to 'Vibe', an 83-second burst of murky R&B and trap beats. Music Business Worldwide emphasizes the importance of fans' diverting to different ways of listening to music - "full-fledged consumer embrace of streaming helped avert a total collapse of the music business".

The British listened to 139bn audio streams last year, up from 114bn in 2019, with streaming accounting for more than 80% of overall music consumption in the UK in 2020, Guardian reports. The top 10 streaming artists in 2020 each achieved more than half a billion streams in the UK, while 8,000 different acts totaled 1m streams annually. Lewis Capaldi's 'Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent' was the most-streamed album for a second successive year in the UK, while The Weeknd’s 'Blinding Lights' was the most-streamed single. CD sales slumped a further 31% to 16m units in the UK, while sales of vinyl records increased for the 13th consecutive year, by 11.5% to 4.8m copies purchased.

The US Congress included a provision to the latest COVID-19 relief package that makes illegal streaming a felony, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The “Felony Streaming” copyright proposal attaches felony penalties to commercial platforms that are dedicated exclusively to streaming unlicensed works. If found guilty of such actions, operators of these platforms could face up to 10 years in prison.

The rise of streaming platforms and those looking to rip a little extra access is likely to become a new frontier in the cat and mouse game of (illegal) copying of music - Hollywood Reporter writes anticipating a new wave of "piracy wars". The subject of the latest and still developing battle is youtube-dl, a third-party software tool that enables its users to rip videos and songs from the Google-owned platform.

Some of UK's most successful songwriters "are driving Ubers" to make ends meet - songwriter Fiona Bevan told UK MPs giving evidence to digital, media, culture and sport committee inquiry into the future of music streaming, Bevan, who has written songs for One Direction, Steps and Lewis Capaldi, said many writers were struggling because of the way streaming services pay royalties, revealing she had earned just £100 for co-writing a track on Kylie Minogue's number one album, 'Disco'. "The most successful songwriters in the world can't pay their rent", she added. Chic's Nile Rodgers said - "every single time I've audited my partners, I find money. Every single time. And sometimes, it's staggering, the amount of money".

"For an independent artist with a dedicated audience, the [streaming] system doesn’t work. And neither does it work for loyal fans. If you are a dance fan, jazz fan, or metal fan, the artists you love and listen to are unlikely to see a penny of your subscription. Streaming is the future, but to deliver a rich and culturally diverse musical future, non-mainstream music needs to be able to keep its head above water... Now we’re asking the government to intervene and... grant musicians rights to income from streaming, so they can earn a percentage from every stream regardless of the system" - Nadine Shah, who had to move back to her parents, writes in the Guardian about a broken system.

"£10 a month for access to all music is too little" - Elbow's Guy Garvey told the Guardian, suggesting music fans should pay more, otherwise we face a risk of losing the next generation of bands. "It’s not sustainable and the emergency is we’re losing artists because they’re demoralised and they can’t afford to live" - Garvey said. Elbow frontman is pushing for equitable remuneration in which streams are split 50/50 between labels and groups.

The current system of payment for music streaming is threatening the future of music in the UK - Elbow’s Guy Garvey said in front of the UK parliament committee on the first day of an inquiry into the impact of streaming on the music industry. Garvey, and musicians such as O’Brien of Radiohead, Tom Gray of Gomez, and Nadine Shah have put forward equitable remuneration, increased transparency and user-centric streaming models as ways in which the industry could be reformed and made fairer for artists.

The UK government is to launch an investigation on whether the artists are paid fairly by streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, BBC reports. Music streaming in the UK brings in more than £1bn a year in revenue, however, artists can be paid as little as 13% of the income generated. Spotify is thought to pay between £0.002 and £0.0038 per stream, Apple Music pays about £0.0059, with YouTube paying the least - about £0.00052 per stream.

In 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a 194 million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions - some 40 million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000 - author Kyle Devine says in his recent book 'Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music'. Given the special circumstances the figure for 2020 will be much greater. Devine Devine incorporates his ecology of music into a more comprehensive vision of anthropogenic crisis, the cost of having all the music at the touch of a finger, New Yorker reports.

Livestreaming platforms of the future need to offer these three features, Cherie Hu argues: high production quality, close intimacy or proximity with artists and fans and/or frequent and consistent output. It's kinda obvious, but Hu emphasizes that in general the future of music livestreaming platforms must match the kind of livestreaming content musicians love to make, and that their fans love to watch and are willing to pay for.

Music streaming generated $10.3 billion in revenue in the US in 2019, US households had 87.2 million subscription accounts, which, through family plans and similar packages, covered 99 million people, according to the new report by Digital Media Association (represents Amazon, Apple, Google, Pandora, Spotify, YouTube). American music fans racked up an unprecedented one trillion streams in 2019. The report predicts that U.S. music revenue will finally topple its heights-of-the-CD-empire record of $14.6 billion by 2025. Yahoo reports.

"The first thing you have to know about listening to music on an iPod is that your primary action is always listening to music...  Unlike my phone, I didn’t feel the need to bounce from song to podcast to YouTube video to NBA highlights on Twitter" - GQ writer says in favor of buying a digital player, well, an iPod preferably. It's the attitude towards music that changes with owning a player, rather than streaming it from somewhere - "it feels good to purchase music... and it also makes you feel more connected to your purchase. I was far less likely to bounce off an album after buying it... I’d rather have a collection of music that I feel connected to than all the music in the world".

God is in the TV presents two viable and fairer alternative platforms to Spotify - Sonstream and Resonate. Sonstream is streaming start-up offering an alternative user-centric and musician focused model with a basic set up and a pretty simple site. Resonate is a streaming service cooperative owned by the people that use it – musicians, indie labels, fans and developers.