Elon Musk and the music industry: What he got wrong
Elon “Tony Stark” Musk has an opinion on all areas of tech and culture. He has had something to say about how the music industry is structured when it comes to streaming. This is from VentureBeat.com:
This week, Elon Musk weighed in on a much debated question: Are artists getting ripped off by big streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music? He says yes. Musk’s opinions are kind of inherently interesting, but this one is especially intriguing since we know that — at least at one point — Tesla has considered creating its own music streaming service. I’m here to argue that he’s wrong on this question, though. As I’ll try to show, artists’ meager pay is not a result of them being “robbed” by streaming services.
As an example, let’s look at Elon’s new girlfriend. Grimes. Grimes is a Canadian musician with an impressive following. Her song “Kill V. Maim” has generated 21.5 million streams on Spotify since its release in November 2015. As Musk points out, Grimes and her label only got $0.00397 each time her song was streamed (the label and the artist usually share 50-50). That’s $85,000 in total for a period of almost three years. Sure, that’s not a lot of money. But is Spotify to blame for it?
