Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about the success of Adele’s latest album, “25.” Among other accomplishments, it’s just completed the most successful week of any album in recorded history, according to Nielsen Music. The musician’s success is shared by many, but among those left out is a huge player in the industry: music streaming companies.

Aside from her single, “Hello,” the singer has taken a stand against streaming services for not limiting her music to paid subscribers. While this clearly hasn’t hurt the musician, and her ability to choose where she wants her music to be played is a luxury many can’t afford, it has the potential to spark a revolutionary change in the music streaming industry.

Here’s a quick debrief on how the industry works using Spotify. The company has a free subscription service and a paid one, and it distributes royalties to its musicians through advertisements on the former and the user’s monthly payment of $9.99 on the latter.

In total, the company pays artists between $.0006 and $.0084 per stream, with the amount being paid out having to do with a number of factors, including which country the song is streamed in and what the artist’s “royalty rate” is. There are a few other criteria as well, which can be found on Spotify’s website, but that’s the gist of it.

With that established, it’s time to bring up the obvious: Spotify doesn’t even pay the artists a penny per song stream. The company acts like this isn’t a big deal because they “pay out nearly 70 percent” of their total revenue to rights holders. That may sound like a lot, but clearly, it isn’t. Instead of receiving a measly sum for what could have been hundreds of millions of song streams, Adele said, “No thanks.”

Despite all this, it’s still commonly thought that one or two artists can’t shake up the way the music streaming industry currently works. Rather, they are simply outliers who have leverage that few musicians do.

This is true, but it doesn’t take into account what steaming service could do if it changed its model and had every artist available for users. That’s more attractive to a potential user than a service that has many artists, except for one of the most popular ones in the world.

For streaming companies, Adele is essentially a free agent right now. While she’s not interested in joining any of them, she could be persuaded if they ponied up and paid her something similar to what she receives from a physical purchase of her album. While this opens up a whole can of worms in terms of which artists should get a larger piece of the pie than others, it may be a legitimate way to get a leg up on the competition.

What I just don’t believe, however, is that Adele’s absence from Spotify and Apple Music doesn’t hurt those companies. If Adele was the only artist who did this, then maybe, but she’s not: Taylor Swift did the same thing for her latest album, “1989.”

This shows a trend is developing. It may only be amongst the stars who have enough sway that people will find a way to listen to their music no matter what, but that may be even worse. No one cares if some no-name band isn’t on their favorite streaming service, but they will care if their favorite band isn’t. At that point, what are they paying $9.99 a month for?

If more artists like Adele and Taylor Swift exercise their power to withhold their music from music streaming services, something will change. Money is the main point of contention for both sides, but what these streaming services can’t afford is to keep losing out on the most popular releases of the year.

Paul Sarconi is a junior broadcast and digital journalism major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at pjsarcon@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @paulsarconi.

Published on December 2, 2015 at 12:44 am