It's hard to remember what day it is in the shapeless, liminal space of the time between Christmas and New Year's — let alone ghosts of internet eras past.
T-Pain is interrupting our scrolling daze by bestowing some time-traveling knowledge upon us: not only does Napster still exist, but according to the rapper (via a chart he got from Reddit, anyway), it has a higher payout for artists than any other major streaming platform.
While he's hardly the first musician to bemoan the abysmal streaming payment structure, the AutoTune aficionado's take on the issue proved a fascinating reminder. Napster? We haven't heard that name in ages.
On Tuesday (December 28), T-Pain shared an infographic chart, with one column showing the names of eight streaming services and the other counting the streams needed for an artist to make $1 (USD, we presume).
T-Pain is interrupting our scrolling daze by bestowing some time-traveling knowledge upon us: not only does Napster still exist, but according to the rapper (via a chart he got from Reddit, anyway), it has a higher payout for artists than any other major streaming platform.
While he's hardly the first musician to bemoan the abysmal streaming payment structure, the AutoTune aficionado's take on the issue proved a fascinating reminder. Napster? We haven't heard that name in ages.
On Tuesday (December 28), T-Pain shared an infographic chart, with one column showing the names of eight streaming services and the other counting the streams needed for an artist to make $1 (USD, we presume).
As one would expect, the statistics are not exactly heartening: according to the Reddit-sourced data, musicians need to accumulate anywhere from 53 to 1,250 streams to pocket a single dollar.
YouTube music is listed as the worst offender, but the platform offering the highest payouts for artists is shown to be Napster — the pre-Y2K, Sean Parker-founded peer-to-peer file-sharing software initially launched in 1999.
Napster lost a bunch of lawsuits in 2001 and had to file for bankruptcy by 2002, but later re-emerged as an online music store. Best Buy purchased the service and merged it with its Rhapsody (the first on-demand streaming subscription service to offer unlimited access to a wide library of digital music) brand in 2011.
It appears that T-Pain's championing of a Napster renaissance isn't exactly that, though; it's more of an inadvertent off-shoot of the point he was trying to make about how hard it is for artists to earn money through streaming.
"I see a lot of 'well I guess I'll use the best one' and not 'we gotta make our own,'" the mogul clarified in a follow-up tweet yesterday (December 29). "[K]eep in mind, most artists don't even get the whole $1. I'm just letting the up and coming know what the real is. I worked for mine and there are tons of ways around this if you move right."
Earlier this year, T-Pain accused Kanye West of stealing one of his "corny lines" after finally discovering his Instagram DM request folder; 2021's been a big learning curve for us all.
