How much do session musicians earn from streaming?
Back in March, Spotify announced it paid out $10 billion in streaming royalties to the music industry in 2024. It branded the news as the most “any single company has ever contributed in one year”, giving itself a self-righteous pat on the back.
But the announcement failed to quieten the fact that artists are still not getting their fair share, if any, from streaming, something that the Musicians’ Union (MU) has been fighting for since streaming first came to prominence. The MU recently released a video with over 1.6million views on Instagram that showed something more disturbing about the reality of the payout musicians receive, particularly for those known as a “non-featured artist”. Simply put, these are session musicians who are brought in to perform music for the featured artist.
These musicians are just as important, even if they are not the ones in the limelight, and they have made famous contributions over time. Would George Michael’s ‘Careless Whisper’ be as iconic without Steve Gregory purring the saxophone for the distinctive solo that introduces the sultry pop classic? Or take backing vocalist Merry Clayton’s contribution to The Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’. She turned up to the studio in the middle of the night while pregnant and sung the lyrics “rape, murder/It’s just a shot away” with her voice cracking notably that ended up in the final recording.
The MU’s video features Rachel Bolt, a professional viola player who has played with Adele, Robbie Williams and Amy Winehouse, among many other famed artists. The tracks she has played on have billions of streams, yet she reveals she has received £0 from any streams of songs on which she’s a non-featured artist. Pre-streaming, session musicians received royalties from radio broadcasts when songs they played on were broadcast, and this is protected by law. This still happens now, but no such royalties exist for digital streaming or on-demand radio.
Where does the money go?
While Bolt says, “Non-featured artists add a great deal of value to a song,” in the digital era, non-featured artists are simply not being rewarded for their skills and contributions. When she recorded her part for Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back to Black’ in 2006, the one-off session fee of £40 she was paid was probably offset by the income she would have got from traditional radio airplay at the time to boost her earnings.
But the MU breaks down how much that song may have generated from Spotify alone. It has over 1.2billion streams on Spotify, and the MU showed how the lowest end of the average Spotify payout per stream—a quarter of a pence—would have generated nearly £2.9million from Spotify for Amy Winehouse. It’s hard to imagine any one of us who is paying only £11.99 per month to the app to access all recorded music in history that some of our subscription, as well as the income from that one track alone, should go to the session musicians who have helped make it what it is.
So, where do streaming revenues go? “Most of the money ends up with people who neither created or performed the music,” says Bolt, “Not a single penny ends up with non-featured artists like myself.” The MU says streaming platforms retain around 30% of a song’s revenue and payout the rest to rights holders. That’s broken down to 55% going to the record label, which pays the featured artist a royalty as per their contract with the artist. And the remaining 15% is split between the music publisher and the songwriters.
In all of this, nothing reaches the non-featured artist. And work to improve their session fees, which are lower than industry standards, too—a three-hour recording session will be paid at £180—has only pushed them up £60 since 2013. This barely covers someone’s labour, let alone the costs involved with having an instrument in terms of insurance and its upkeep.
Therefore, it begs the question for session musicians who don’t have clients of the same superstar calibre as Rachel Bolt—how do you make a living in this career? It seems unfair that so much income is going to record labels, who have this constant tap of revenue attached to streaming that is off-limits to the session musicians.
The MU is negotiating with major labels to try to fix the glaringly obvious disparity in equitable payment to non-featured artists. It started its Fix Streaming campaign in 2020 to highlight the need for better royalties for musicians so they can continue to earn a living. The independent label Beggars Group—home of labels such as 4AD, Matador Records, Rough Trade Records and XL Recordings—offers a minimum digital royalty rate to featured artists and writes off unrecouped balances after 20 years, something which the MU believes should be industry-standard.
But ultimately, the difficulty lies in changing the hegemony of the major record labels, which hold more power and are less inclined to let go of their portion of profits. They have shareholders to please, and appeasing them at the expense of investing in their creatives and boosting the latter’s revenues is so hard-wired that it’s no surprise the change is happening so slowly.
