Bonnie Tyler slams streaming platforms for not paying artists enough for hit songs

She is reportedly worth £8million thanks to her catchy 80s’ pop singles.

But Bonnie Tyler has hit out at today’s lack of royalties for artists due to streaming platforms and said: ‘I’ll be lucky if I get 10 pence.’

Her most famous track, Total Eclipse of the Heart, reached one billion streams on YouTube in September and briefly returned to number one last month during the solar eclipse in North America.

Ms Tyler said: ‘But you get pennies for streaming, it’s just not fair. It’s not actually records the fans are buying.

‘I was selling 50,000 a day when the records sold but now fans are streaming everything and I’ll be lucky if I get 10 pence.’

The Welsh singer has referred to herself as a ‘working-class girl who never stopped working,’ and started her career by singing in local pubs and clubs around South Wales.

She was later discovered in 1974 by talent scout, Roger Bell, when he heard her performing with the band Imagination.

But the Holding Out for a Hero singer, 77, told the Hay Literary Festival: ‘The music industry has already changed out of all recognition. In the seventies, records used to be sold in the shops and live music was better.

‘There were lots of clubs where up-and-coming singers could learn their craft as residents which gave me, personally, grounding and I actually learned how to do stage presentation.’

Ms Tyler is not the first star to call out the inequalities in artists’ royalties.

Paul McCartney, Kate Bush, Robert Plant and Stevie Nicks joined 150 artists in 2021 who called on then-prime minister Boris Johnson to pass new legislation to protect artists.

They pointed out that songwriters earn 50 per cent of radio revenues, but only 15 per cent in streaming and argued that a change in legislation would ‘put the value of music back where it belongs – in the hands of music makers’.

Copyright legislation, which came into force almost two decades before the birth of streaming platform Spotify, has ‘not kept up with the pace of technological change’.

On streaming services, labels retain the majority of the money – with the artist receiving about 13 per cent on average.

It is estimated that Spotify pays £0.0031 per stream which means an artist would need roughly 366,000 streams on a track just to make minimum wage.