The King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard New Profit Model

The band just dropped their entire catalogue for “pay what you want” pricing.

So I just paid 2 AUD each for 20 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard albums. That is a little over £20 for most of their gigantic discography. Sounds like a great deal for me, right? Almost like I ripped them off? But compared to Spotify streams, that is actually a great deal for the band too. So why does it feel like such a win, and why do not more bands do this?

For reference, £20 is approx 27 USD. Using Spotify’s payout of 0.003 to 0.005 USD per stream, that is the equivalent of 9,000 to 5,400 streams. With Gizz songs generally being on the longer side (say around 4.5 minutes each), that adds up to between 24,300 and 40,500 minutes of listening. My Spotify Wrapped last year said I clocked 34,364 minutes in total. Since that is across hundreds of artists as well as podcasts and audiobooks, I am guessing I just gave the Gizz boys the equivalent of about a century’s worth of streaming revenue they would have got from me.

So if 2 AUD is actually a great deal for a band compared to Spotify, why are artists still charging around 10 USD for digital albums? On Bandcamp they keep about 80 percent of sales, so would it not make more sense to lower the price and sell more?

So if I used my current Spotify budget of £12 per month (£144 a year) to buy albums at 10 USD each, I would get around 19 albums per year (which is okay). But if artists priced digital albums at say 4 USD, I could grab 50 albums a year for the same as my subscription, and be enough to have most of the music I need. That would let me build a proper library I actually own, while artists and labels still take home most of the money, and listeners are not at the mercy of algorithms or filler tracks.

What am I missing?