Some numbers have been bandied about up here, and I want to provide perspective on those.
A million streams on Spotify generates in the United States—and this is somewhat commensurate in Canada—somewhere in the neighbourhood of $200. That does not make a living.
What's interesting is the value of getting a million streams. It means you probably have at least 100,000 people streaming your music. How much would you pay as a technology company to hire someone to bring you 100,000 users? What is the financial value of that to an investor or an IPO?
This is unfortunately where we have a diverging of interests. Pandora has never made money. Spotify, with market capital over $25 billion, has never made money. YouTube, before it was acquired for $1 billion, never made money. The value of those entities was predicated on their market share. It's the musicians' music that attracted the users to utilize the technology, which was rewarded by finance and Wall Street in the form of IPOs and sales, and there's nothing wrong with that.
What I do have an issue with is when I hear these companies getting upwards of a trillion-dollar market cap, or a half-trillion-dollar market cap, who have aggregated the world under the umbrellas that we're sitting with here. Facebook Google, Spotify—all wonderful companies—have hundreds of millions, billions, of users aggregated under those umbrellas with market caps up in the tens or hundreds of billions, yet they're turning around and giving someone—this is a real royalty rate in the United States—$0.0001 U.S. per stream on their ad-supported platform. Something's not right.