Former Stones Throw artist and chart-topper Aloe Blacc recently announced that he has only earned $4,000 from Pandora streams of his monster hit Wake Me Up (with Avicii), despite clocking up an incredible 168 million plays in the US.
A shocking revelation, but is anyone really that surprised? The game changed beyond all recognition years ago, and the plates have shifted again several times since, each time leaving the artist with little to show for their efforts.
Gone are the days when a musician could sell millions of CDs and make big bucks. Save for the occasional exception, like Taylor Swift, who recently shipped well over a million copies of her latest album 1989, sales ain’t what they used to be.
What’s interesting in relation to hip-hop is how all that big talk about sales figures that dominated headlines a few years ago has all but disappeared.
As a music built upon bragging rites and proving you are the best, there was a time when commercial artists like 50 Cent were obsessed with sales numbers, making them as much of a badge of honor as the amount of times he’d been shot.
If a big release didn’t ship more than a good few hundred thousand right away you were done, and your rivals would tell you so. Nowadays though, no one is moving units, not even Em, Pimp Juice or Rocafella, as Jay-Z once famously said (sort of).
Everyone knows the big money is now to be made from touring, where eye-watering prices can be charged for a show that, lets be honest, usually sucks.
But it would be hard for a rapper to deny that still being able to make big money from sales would be nice, especially when facing the necessary tough grind that comes with traveling around the world on tour.
New ways of getting music to us are appearing all the time, and as always hip-hop is at the cutting edge. From the biggest albums to the humblest of indy material, most work is now available for stream before release. Run the Jewels even gave away RTJ2 for free, following in the footsteps of U2 and others.
It remains to be seen if the industry will ever find a way to get those sales revenues back up, but whats certain is that a rapper will need to be pretty damn successful to get anywhere even close to that Taylor Swift money.
The new episode of Mass Appeal’s brilliant Rhythm Roulette series features one of our favorite producers, Oh No. Although sometimes lost under the huge shadow of his brother Madlib, Oh has proved himself to be one of the most consistent beat makers of the past decade, crafting incredible sounds for his own albums, and on classics by Mos Def, Guilty Simpson, Murs, Talib Kweli, MED and many others.
