"All About That Bass" songwriter earns $90 per one million streams

24 September 2015, 09:16 | Written by Lauren Campbell

(News)

Meghan Trainor's "All About That Bass" is an award-winning phenomenon, regardless of its quality of lack thereof - so why does its co-writer only earn 0.00009 cents per stream?

Kevin Kadish claims he has earned just $5679 from 178 million streams of the track across the world.

Kadish co-wrote the chart-topping track with Trainor, who eventually kickstarted her career with it - she was the first ever artist to enter the U.K. Top 40 purely on streaming data.

Speaking at a meeting about music copyright hosted by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee while in Tennessee, Kadish said that a lot of songwriters are up against similar issues when it comes to digital services like Spotify and Apple Music.

The Tennessean quote Kadish as saying: "I've never heard a songwriter complain about radio royalties as much as streaming royalties. That was the real issue for us, like one million streams equals $90*. For a song like 'All About That Bass,' that I wrote, which had 178 million streams. I mean $5679? That's my share. That's as big a song as a songwriter can have in their career and No. 1 in 78 countries. But you're making $5600. How do you feed your family?"

Currently, members of the U.S. Congress are looking into laws surrounding music copyright in regards to current technological advances.

Georgian District Representative Doug Collins, a Republican, is the lead sponsor on the proposed Songwriter Equality Act, which is aimed at improving royalty fees for songwriters and publishers who work behind the scenes. Speaking to the Tennessean, Collins explained that the results of the meeting were positive: "There is common ground on a number of issues, and the [agreement was that] there is inequity at this point - how you solve that inequity there may be some disagreement. But we're moving to some ideas that would remove the governmental barriers. Almost everyone said, except for the ones who want status quo, that the government part of it is something that could be removed, and there's a better way to fix that."

Streaming has risen to comprise one-third of music industry revenue in the U.S. recently.

*It should be noted that for 178 million streams, at the quoted $90 per one million streams, equals $16,020; that still feels disproportionately low, however, given the song's success.