Just yesterday we spoke about Gotye has not received a single cent in YouTube royalties, due to his decision not to monetise his channel, but now it’s been revealed just how much one of music’s biggest names is giving up by keeping their music off of Spotify.
Jay-Z’s most recent record, 4:44, was released at the end of June, and like the rest of his catalogue, is exclusively available on Tidal, the streaming service that he co-owns. While many could only speculate just how much money Jay-Z is forgoing due to his refusal to put his music up on other services such as Spotify, it’s coming to light just the sort of payout he’s missing out on.
As Billboard reports, some industry analysts have speculated that Jay-Z would have been able to rake in up to USD$1 million per week in the week’s since the album’s released, based on the likely payouts of other similar artists.
This is, of course, merely guess-work, as evidenced by the fact that another industry analyst has predicted that Jay-Z’s record would net him approximately USD$250,000 per week. This figure is based on the assumption that the whole record would have seen as many streams in one week as Spotify’s most-played track on the service.
As Billboard notes, Drake’s 2016 record Views was streamed 250 million times in its first week, after being released exclusively on Apple Music. Upon the record’s release on Spotify, those numbers climbed exponentially to the point where Drake generated close to an estimated USD$20 million in royalties.
Again, this is merely guesswork, and the only concrete way of finding out what sort of money Jay-Z would be commanding would be if he were to actually release the record on Spotify. At this point, that doesn’t seem likely, but for a man whose net worth is estimated at north of USD$800 million, it seems as though a loss of between USD$250,000 to a million is nothing but a drop in the bucket.
This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer. You can view the original article here.
