Busta Rhymes says streaming pays rappers in a currency that does not exist

Busta Rhymes has taken the streaming payout argument somewhere more specific than most artists bother to. Speaking to Yahoo Finance while promoting Dillagence II, he pointed out that the unit artists are paid in has no name, because it is not a unit: "They don't even have a name for the currency that is called fractions of a penny," he said, and a currency that does not exist cannot be audited, banked or turned into anything durable.

That is a sharper complaint than the usual one about rates being too low. His question back to the industry was whether anybody would accept a conversation in which they were told, respectfully, that their compensation would be a fraction of a penny, and whether that conversation could be had without the listener feeling their intelligence was being insulted.

His own answer has been to stop relying on it. Dillagence II has gone out on vinyl, CDs, cassettes and merchandise, formats where a sale is a sale and the money arrives whole. The vinyl market's recovery over the last decade has made that a real option again rather than a gesture, and it is the same move a growing number of established rappers have been making.

AllHipHop lines the remarks up with three other artists who have said versions of the same thing. T-Pain has described the shift from selling a song for a dollar to earning a fraction of a cent per play, a figure the outlet puts at roughly 0.003 cents. T.I. has argued the platforms watered the whole business down, with something like 150,000 songs uploaded daily putting artists who spent years on their craft in the same queue as anyone who can get a login.

Snoop Dogg has supplied the hardest number in the set, saying he earned less than $45,000 from a billion Spotify streams and that he has moved to the blockchain-based platform Tune.FM instead. His question, how you get a billion streams and not a million dollars, is the version of this argument that travels furthest outside the industry.

What is missing from all of it is a reply. No streaming service has responded in the report, no rate is attributed to a named platform by the company that sets it, and the piece is one artist's argument rather than a disclosed figure. The hip-hop end of this fight has mostly been conducted in interviews rather than in court, though not always: the rapper RBX has refiled a lawsuit accusing Spotify of ignoring streaming fraud. Busta Rhymes released Dillagence II, built on unheard J Dilla beats, earlier this month.