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Balbina has been releasing music for over a decade, one of her most successful songs currently has 904,150 streams on Spotify and on May 16, she released her fifth album Infinity Tunes – and yet in 2024 she earned only 343.36 euros through the streaming service.
Spotify pays Balbina 94 cents per day
In an interview with “Zeit”, the artist talked about a topic that you would otherwise like to say “that you don’t talk about it” – about money. She revealed that she would earn about 94 cents a day through the streaming service Spotify.
In 2024, a total of 343.36 euros were paid to her. You can’t pay many bills, and as she said herself: “I make music to survive. But I don’t survive because I make music.” But that was not always the case. She explained that ten years ago, when her music was mainly sold through CDs, she was able to live well from it.
Balbina: “Music professionals should be paid fairly”
Balbina does not draw attention to the first time that most major streaming providers like Spotify pay many artists: only pay very low inside. Again and again she spoke about the topic in various interviews and several posts can be found on her Instagram profile. She often used hashtags like “Cancelspotify”. As can be seen from a contribution from 2024, she also worked with Niklas Nienass, a member of the European Parliament. The demand was clear: “Music professionals should be paid fairly.”
Many streaming services are repeatedly criticized to pay a large part of the artists: to pay unfairly on the inside. Certain practices, such as the Discovery Mode deals, are always an issue. In this case, artists should do without part of their income in order to be preferred by the algorithms of the platform. Herbert Grönemeyer also called the current model for the payment of musicians: inside a “criminal system”.
Where does the money in the music industry go?
Lucrative shops are done with music: As “Spiegel” reported, sales with music in Germany in 2024 was a total of 2.38 billion euros – more than ever before. Streaming platforms have the largest proportion of this with 78.1 percent. Nevertheless, the artists are often only a fraction of this sum inside, for different reasons.
There are also some musicians: tied to outdated contracts that are not tailored to the reality of streaming. In addition, the overall music industry is considered to be less transparent – often it remains unclear where the money actually flows.