Is this the future of music? We continue to look at artist revenue streams.

Now that we’ve been blessed with a few data sets we’re going to be digging deeper into cross referencing them in the hopes of building a much better overall view of the marketplace for independent musicians. This is especially true in the area of music streaming rates and royalties.

We hoping to provide as much open and transparent information as we can get on artists revenue streams. Through the release of these posts offering per play rates, relative market share of these companies, and the distribution tiers at different unit thresholds we hope artists will use these tools to model a better understanding of their revenue potential on digital platforms.

* These YouTube numbers are not directly comparable to the rest of the numbers as the information comes from a different data set of considerably less titles than the larger data set.

That being said there are still a few important take-a-ways in looking at this data even on a percentage of market share basis. If we doubled the amount of YouTube Streams to match the amount of Spotify streams (48% YouTube Streams and 47% Spotify Streams) the revenue disparity still places Spotify 3x’s higher at 62% of overall revenue market share versus YouTube’s only 21% of market share revenue. Simply said, you have to stream at least 3x’s more on YouTube to equal the same amount of revenue generated from YouTube.

Our conclusion is that this is a very compelling reason to remove as much of your music from YouTube as you possibly can and redirect streaming music consumers to Spotify where you will earn at least 3x’s more for the same amount of streams.

Of course, creators and musicians are not given this type of consent over the use of their music on YouTube and the new CMS Services like Audiam exist only to monetize illegal and unlicensed user generated content (UGC) uploads to YouTube, and at significantly lower per play rates than the ones we’ve been tracking that pay 100% of earned revenue.

This just confirms what we’ve known all along. Google not only profits greatly from the illegal and unlicensed uploads of an artists work to YouTube, but artists are more and more powerless over having their work exploited against their will.

Here are some compelling stats on the break down of what percentage of videos on YouTube actually achieve breaking the 1 million play threshold, only 0.33%

CHART OF THE DAY: Half Of YouTube Videos Get Fewer Than 500 Views | Business Insider

Some 53% of YouTube’s videos have fewer than 500 views, says TubeMogul. About 30% have less than 100 views. Meanwhile, just 0.33% have more than 1 million views.

That’s not a huge surprise. But it highlights some of the struggles Google could have selling ads around all those unpopular videos, despite the money it has to spend to store them.

Why does this just feel like just so much more extortion and exploitation?