Who should pay for the Scottish music you listen to, if you are not?

By Stephen McCall

Most people who pay for music do not pay the musicians they listen to. They believe they do. The system is built so we cannot easily tell.

Start with the figure a new artist sees. On Spotify, a track earns nothing until it has been streamed a thousand times in a single year. Below that line the payment is not a fraction of a penny. It is zero. And the line catches almost everyone: of all the tracks uploaded to streaming services in 2025, eighty-eight per cent were played a thousand times or fewer. Clear it, and a thousand streams is worth a few pounds. An artist can be heard by real people, week after week, and be paid in coins. That is where most new Scottish musicians sit, and a fair number of established ones besides.

Most people already know about the amount per stream. Few are told where their subscription actually goes. Your £12.99 monthly payment is not divided among the artists you listened to. Spotify pools subscription and advertising revenue within each national market, then distributes recording royalties according to each rightsholder’s share of all streams in that market. Your money does not follow your listening. It follows the chart.

So if you spend a month listening only to a Scottish band with a few hundred listeners, almost none of your money reaches them. It goes instead to the most-streamed artists on earth, and to the companies that own their recordings. This is not a quirk at the bottom of the market. Constant Follower has made three albums, reached the charts, been nominated three times for the Scottish Album of the Year. When you listen to us on Spotify, little of your subscription reaches us. For a new artist it is nothing. The link you assume exists between your payment and the people you are paying for is not there.

And that is the position of the people who pay. Most do not. More than half of Spotify’s listeners use the free, advertising-funded tier, which generates much less revenue per listener. Many who do pay are on a student rate, or a quarter of a family plan. The thing we still call buying music has quietly become something much thinner, and the change has gone largely unremarked.

None of this is the whole picture. A great many people who love music still pay artists directly, as they always have: through Bandcamp, through tickets, through the merch table at the back of the venue. That money arrives where it should. I spend more than is sensible on records, gigs and merchandise, and support the musicians around me in less visible ways too. Yet I also listen to a great deal of music I have not paid for in any real sense. A link arrives and I follow it. I play a record I do not own through the same app. I subscribe, so it feels like paying. It mostly is not. I love music, and I do not pay for most of the music I love. Neither do you. The machinery is designed so that we need never notice.

This matters because of who is left able to do the work. Making a living from music is harder than at any point since I began, and those who manage it are increasingly those who could always afford to. Research using Office for National Statistics data found that the proportion of creative workers from working-class backgrounds has roughly halved across four generations: from 16.4 per cent among those born between 1953 and 1962 to 7.9 per cent among those born four decades later. This is not a complaint about taste or fashion. It is a measurable tightening of who gets to make the culture our country hears.

There is a working answer to this, and it has been running for three years in Ireland. In 2022 the Irish government began paying two thousand artists a basic income of three hundred and twenty-five euro a week, for three years, with no condition beyond continuing to work as an artist. The two thousand were chosen by lottery from the many thousands who applied, and measured against a control group who received nothing. That design is the reason the results can be trusted.

The results are not ambiguous. For every euro invested, an independent assessment calculated €1.39 in social and economic value. Higher tax receipts and lower welfare spending reduced the estimated net fiscal cost from €105 million to under €72 million. The recipients made more work and finished more of it. And the largest single benefit was not financial at all. It was health. Those receiving the income were markedly less likely to be depressed or anxious than the control group. I understand exactly why. It is hard to convey what a decade of never quite having enough does to a person, and to the work they are trying to make. Earlier this year, on that evidence, Ireland made the scheme permanent. It is the first country in the world to have done so.

It is not a perfect policy, and artists on the scheme have said as much. What makes it affordable is also its limit: it is a lottery. Two thousand were funded, while thousands more received nothing and some were tracked, unpaid, only to provide the data. The right response is not to abandon the idea but to widen it.

There is a familiar objection at this point: that artists should not be paid for nothing. But most of the artists I know who would qualify already receive Universal Credit. The state is already paying them, but through a system organised around the search for other work, which is precisely what prevents them making anything. It keeps them in second and third jobs, away from the work itself. One of the campaign groups in Glasgow has put the point well: any scheme should be unconditional, not a capped piece of administration bolted onto the benefits system.

And this was promised here, not only in Ireland. Both the SNP and Scottish Labour went into May’s election committed to a version of it. The SNP’s was the more substantial: a minimum income for artists modelled directly on Ireland’s, two thousand places, just under fifteen thousand pounds a year, a thirty-million-pound pilot. A campaign, Basic Income for Artists Scotland, had pressed for it. More than three hundred people signed an open letter. The unions backed it. It was not a fringe proposal. It was written into a manifesto and put before voters.

Then the election was held. The SNP returned to government, but as a minority. The next step is to turn the artists’ minimum income from a manifesto commitment into a working policy. Its funding and eligibility have still to be settled, as has when it will begin. That gives government and artists the chance to build it properly together, using the Irish evidence rather than starting from scratch.

Màiri McAllan, the new Cabinet Secretary for Education, Culture and Gaelic, comes to the brief with an unusual advantage. Ireland has already tested the policy at scale against a control group. Scotland does not have to argue from hope alone. The SNP manifesto also committed to a £200 culture pass for those turning eighteen and a National Performing Company for Traditional Music. Taken together, these could mark the beginning of a more confident settlement for culture in Scotland, with artists helping to build it.

All of this is happening as BBC Radio Scotland withdraws from the task of helping new music find an audience [Cultural Vandalism and the Crisis of Public Broadcasting]. I have spent much of the past year campaigning against its decision to close almost all of its specialist late-night music programmes, where new Scottish music was first heard. Seventy-four per cent of the artists who signed our open letter received their first radio play on one of those programmes. They are now gone. I made my own first record only because of a late-night play, so I do not pretend to be neutral, but the figure speaks without me. The door a great many of us came through has been quietly closed.

So, who pays for the Scottish music you listen to, if you do not? At present the answer is almost no one, or the wrong people, and the musicians themselves are meeting the cost, in money and in health. The music will go on being made for a while yet, by musicians quietly paying to make it. Then, for most of them, it will stop.

Ireland decided that was unacceptable and acted. Scotland now has both the evidence and the commitment. If artists are part of the design from the beginning, the question changes. Not how long they can afford to keep going, but what they will be able to make. 

Photo by Fath on Unsplash