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Music
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Weekly updates


Grammy-nominated composer, keyboardist and recording artist Armen Chakmakian took to the Internet in full disclosure of how much he makes from royalties. It certainly makes you second think when you’re downloading and streaming music for free. Most popular there’s Pandora and Spotify but music streaming has been a ‘thing’ to say the least for a while now. Chakmakian published a screen capture of his quarterly royal statement of a whole $4.20.

That’s $4.20 of 14,277 performances of music wherein almost every track was 100% owned by him. In Melbourne that wouldn’t even buy him a large soy latte. For that one month period, his songs were played at an average of 475 plays a day – some might argue that that’s great exposure in itself, but let’s be real, exposure doesn’t pay the bills and neither does a total of $30.89 from SoundExchange.

“Someone’s making money, and in true fashion, with the music industry, it’s not the artists”, he says.

Though I guess it’s no surprise that the actual artists behind the craft come out worse than the bigshots behind the labels, the truth sure hits hard.