Jay Z’s Tidal service promised a revolution in streaming. But on its release, all we got was a parade of 16 millionaire musicians telling us that music is awesome, because Nietzsche and Jimi Hendrix said so. Since then, there has been little meaningful discussion of how independent artists will benefit from Tidal’s revolution. The backlash against the service’s 1%-focused rollout has been resounding. Few critics have put the situation into simpler and more eloquent terms than Death Cab for Cutie’s frontman Ben Gibbard.
Jay Z’s newly launched Tidal music service has reignited the debate about the economics of music in an era where streaming services like Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube reign supreme. In hopes of adding to that discussion, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow recently took to Twitter to share exactly how much money the band actually earned from its 34 million streams last year. His estimate: After taxes he was left with £1,700, or around $2,511, according to Consequence Of Sound.