[HN Gopher] Justice at Spotify
___________________________________________________________________
Justice at Spotify
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 179 points
Date : 2021-03-16 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.unionofmusicians.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.unionofmusicians.org)
| z5h wrote:
| I'll make a track 1 second long, post to Spotify, and with my
| Spotify account I'll listen to it non stop. I'll earn
| $26000/month. I see no problem here.
| joeblau wrote:
| I was just listening to a podcast and the CEO was talking about
| how he wants 1 million artists to be able to live off Spotify[1].
| I always find it interesting how far the company implementation
| of the vision diverges from what the founder says the vision is.
| This was also something that I saw with Uber. A question i have
| is what leads to this disconnect?
|
| [1] - https://castro.fm/episode/I2SAkl#47:19
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| You willingly handed over your work to Spotify, you signed the
| contracts, now you're unhappy with the deal.
|
| Spotify is a recent creation and it was nothing without musicians
| yet they willingly went forward with it even though it was
| obvious what would happen and now the obvious has happened they
| want a better deal.
|
| It's hard for me to muster up sympathy, they could have
| collectively stopped Spotify from happening but they willingly
| became part of it.
| Kuinox wrote:
| I'm happy to not pay 200EUR of Spotify per year:
| https://www.last.fm/user/Kuinox/listening-report/year
| frabjoused wrote:
| Would it really be the end to ask consumers for 50% more Spotify
| Premium to solve the problem? I would personally be willing to
| pay more and feel music is undervalued. I can't imagine they
| would lose 50% of their subscription base.
| aksss wrote:
| I've said before that I'd give up Netflix before Spotify, so
| yeah maybe. But something would have to give out of principle.
| I think the better solution in this musician/label/distributor
| mess is the label takes less. That has costs and would change
| how discovery works, but frankly maybe for the better.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| How much of that 50% would go to the record labels? We'd pay
| 50% more and the artist would probably get 5% more. That
| doesn't seem like a good ROI.
|
| While no party is without concern, I don't think either
| Spotify, the artist or the consumer is the problem here.
| There's a 800lb gorilla standing over there.
| aetherane wrote:
| The proposed Singapore protest is illegal in Singapore (protests
| are limited to Hong Lim park with permission from government). I
| hope people participating realize this and don't get arrested.
| andreshb wrote:
| They should protest the record labels, they are the rente seeker
| monopolists extracting the lion share of the value from both
| sides
| SpeakForMyself wrote:
| What I see is bunch of greedy people whining for more.
|
| Have this people ever considered the need of user of Spotify? I
| doubt it.
|
| Subscription to Spotify can be a lot to some people already, now
| with these greedy, self-involved and small-minded drama bunches,
| I just afraid the fee will go higher...
|
| Why these people can be so shameless to blame on others for their
| very own problem that their work sucks?
|
| So laughable.
|
| As this is the typical liberal mindset that blame the whole world
| for your own problem.
|
| LOSERS!
| AbraKdabra wrote:
| People acting on emotions rather than actually doing the math and
| seeing that one penny per stream will make Spotify prices
| skyrocket and if no one uses Spotify, well, they will be in a
| worse situation.
| hellbanTHIS wrote:
| Hell they might already be paying a penny per stream to some
| major labels, and everybody else takes whatever's left over, we
| have no idea.
|
| Maybe Drake's label demands a penny per stream for his new album
| or they pull it. And then somebody else who's on a tiny label
| gets 0.00000000001 cent per stream because that's all that's
| left.
|
| They really need transparency, the labels will never be
| transparent so Spotify has to be. If nobody's transparent about
| these deals then there probably needs to be legislation.
|
| That would be obvious anti-competitive behavior on the part of
| music labels if that's what's going on, and knowing them it
| probably is.
| RHSman2 wrote:
| It's just crazy. Musicians are getting the equivalent of an ad
| per stream. As a musician/composer that does it for the love I
| put it many, many hours on each song. Its frickin' outrageous
| that people get as good as nothing and it seems as the more
| successful you are the better the deal you get #pyramid Also, the
| CEO of spotify is just horrible.
| jgeada wrote:
| The "work" that the artist did _once_ is producing a lifetime
| of revenue by taxing _everyone_ else 's work. The artist isn't
| lifting a finger in the work that Spotify (or any other music
| platform) is doing. Why are they expecting to get more?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Musicians are getting the equivalent of an ad per stream.
|
| Except when I listen to an album, I'm often listening to 15
| "ads" (tracks) in a row so I'm not really seeing the
| equivalence. Especially when there are albums I listen to in
| their entirety multiple times a month.
|
| At least I use Tidal, which may have its faults but has
| historically paid out the most to artists.
| pgodzin wrote:
| Is there a reason Spotify is uniquely targeted here? What rates
| do artists get on Apple Music/YouTube/Tidal/etc?
| pwinnski wrote:
| Spotify is the largest player, by far, and pays the least per
| customer.
|
| The "average observed per-stream payout on Apple Music is
| $0.00551 vs. $0.00318 for Spotify."[0] That said, a lot of that
| is because Spotify has free users, while Apple does not.
|
| 0. https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-
| payouts#a...
| IndySun wrote:
| Just wondering if there are any developers on this post working
| with or defending the use of decentralised, music sharing,
| copyleft, anti-royalty, software? And if so, do you see the
| irony?
|
| I sincerely hope people take my question at face value, I am
| aware it's a big world.
| paxys wrote:
| Those are a lot of words to describe Napster
| punnerud wrote:
| This point is illegal in Norway, because you can't make noise
| without applying for it first: "At the action:
|
| DO make noise. We are musicians after all."
|
| Recommending people to do something illegal is also illegal, so
| it seems that the creators of this webpage is already breaking
| Norwegian law.
|
| And Tordenskioldsgate 2 in Oslo/Norway is just a coworking space,
| so you only find employees from Spotify there a couple of times a
| year on events or meetings.
| cratermoon wrote:
| 'You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to
| break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern.... One may
| well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying
| others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types
| of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate
| obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral
| responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral
| responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St.
| Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."'
| dandare wrote:
| They mention "user-centric model" three times without explaining
| it at all :(
| kpmcc wrote:
| There are some folks trying to build an alternative that is
| better for musicians. https://resonate.is/ Last time I checked it
| was still pretty niche but the idea (graduated pricing to stream
| to own) is solid.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd call it solid, but it's an interesting take.
| However, I believe there's a very good reason that the various
| markets have went to the subscription model- there's a
| difference _mentally_ between paying to stream all you want for
| a month and paying for each song, even when its fractions of a
| penny. Whenever a song you don 't like starts playing on your
| stream, you realize you just paid for it. That's a negative
| experience, and those stack up.
|
| It doesn't matter if it can save you money in the long run.
| Remember, we're dealing with the masses here- the same lowest
| common denominator that caused A&W's 1/3lb hamburger to fail
| because people thought it was _smaller_ than McDonald 's 1/4lb
| hamburger.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| As a creator, relying on these platforms is problematic because
| they are the #1 target for Government taxation. Depending on the
| country, 20% of customer spend is swallowed up immediately by
| sales taxes. Another 30% is potentially swallowed up by Google
| and Apple.
|
| The solution is really to go direct-to-consumer, through things
| like Crowdfunding (unfortunately Patreon now charges VAT). Though
| of course this adds a lot of overhead.
|
| Alternatively, petition Governments to be leaner, and to increase
| retirement ages to 70 (pensions are the single major and fastest
| increasing Government expense), and to lower taxes (including
| sales taxes) with the savings.
|
| Pressure on Google and Apple (via regulation) to reduce
| commissions is another avenue.
| glatteis wrote:
| is that really the problem here??? i would think spotify uses
| its market dominance to drive down what they give back to the
| artists. also, evading tax is not a good idea. it's there for a
| reason.
| epse wrote:
| Working till 70? Gosh I don't think that's realistic
| yunohn wrote:
| This is already the case in some countries. For eg, the
| Netherlands revises the retirement age every year, and is
| currently at 68yrs.
|
| The public suspicion is that they do this to avoid paying
| pension, most of which has been squandered by the government.
| Milner08 wrote:
| Thats the stupidest idea ever. No thank you. I do not want to
| work till 70 and I am sure no one else does either.
|
| VAT is there for everyone, you can't avoid it because you are a
| 'creator' thats insane.
| eertami wrote:
| Going after the pensions is probably the single quickest way to
| find yourself unelected. Old people vote, and there are a lot
| of them.
|
| Also direct-to-consumer hardly absolves you from following tax
| law. I agree that sales tax is bad, but only because it is
| regressive and disproportionately taxes the poor. Raise income
| taxes and abolish sales tax.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _The solution is really to go direct-to-consumer_
|
| How do you go direct to consumer without collecting VAT (while
| not breaking tax laws)?
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| International sales are counted as exports (not subject to
| VAT) and domestic sales thresholds for VAT are typically
| $80,000+/year
|
| Of course, this varies by country, but its possible to
| incorporate your business in a country where this is the
| case.
| Hamuko wrote:
| The thing about exports is that they're also imports - and
| imports are subject to VAT. So if I buy something
| internationally, I need to declare it and then pay VAT on
| it.
| simion314 wrote:
| I was thinking that musicians could create a platform
| themselves and avoid the parasites but at this moment you still
| have the mobile store parasites that will tax you even more for
| each sale so before musicians can do soemthing about it we need
| to fix the mobile app stores or make the PWA music apps have
| same features as native ones(I have a feeling that Google and
| Apple will fight hard against losing this big source of money)
| breck wrote:
| #abolishcopyright. Musicians if you're listening, find a
| different way to earn a living than depending upon the
| enslavement of ideas (and by extension, individuals). Copyright
| is abhorrent, and needs to go. There are better ways.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| We've had two decades to envision alternative funding models
| for music production, and all of them are substantially worse
| for the musician than "assign a creator's monopoly to the
| musician and civil liabilities for those who fail to negotiate
| proper licenses to it". Free markets are designed to allocate
| scarce goods; with the corollary any person whose work is not
| scarce does not get to eat. Ergo, if you want certain kinds of
| nonscarce goods to be made, you need to make them artificially
| scarce for some limited period.
|
| This is particular to creative works. Free Software gets around
| this with lots of subsidies, commodified complements, corporate
| investment, and occasional labors of love. The fact that
| software is highly collaborative and that licenses like the GPL
| exist helps. A handful of collaborating developers can produce
| a spare-time project that is actually useful to other people
| who will sponsor development of further improvements to the
| project. Music does not work that way.
| falcolas wrote:
| I largely agree with this.
|
| If you want music to be libre, someone needs to subsidize the
| cost of creation: The wages for the musicians for one-two
| months, the wages of the technicians, the rent for the
| studio, and also subsidize the cost of writing the song in
| the first place.
|
| The current paradigm amortizes those costs among all
| listeners of a song, with some profit for the facilitators.
| ccsnags wrote:
| An artist isn't entitled to having their work funded unless
| someone voluntarily funds it. This does not require legal
| fiction.
|
| Entire genres of music have been created from inexpensive
| musical equipment and free software. Art has never been
| more accessible to the people than it is now.
| falcolas wrote:
| > An artist isn't entitled to having their work funded
| unless someone voluntarily funds it.
|
| Then we simply never get their work. Some people would
| absolutely continue to create for the fun of it, but
| they'll remain the minority.
|
| Movies you'd watch in a Theater? Completely gone.
| Commercially funded TV shows, gone. A vast majority of
| books, written by full time writers and researchers,
| gone.
|
| And I'll also posit that most music would go away too.
| Even the amateurs I know expect to be paid for a gig.
| Most musicians are not willing to busk for a living.
|
| And, don't forget, software development relies heavily
| upon Copyright as well (licenses, your work-for-hire,
| etc).
| breck wrote:
| If everyone who threatens to stop creating content if
| they can't enslave ideas, were to stop creating content,
| the world would be a better place.
|
| The idea that people would stop creating is absurd. I
| work in Cancer Research and the absolute least
| contributing people in the medical industry are the ones
| obsessed with patenting and copyrighting their work,
| which is usually garbage and of frivolous value compared
| to the hard grunt work of millions of unsung heroes
| grinding it out for non-monopoly wages.
|
| I was an engineer at Microsoft and the average code there
| was total garbage compared to the open source code
| powering top public domain projects.
|
| And no modern epic is significantly better than Ilias.
|
| Every letter we are using; every word; every bit of
| tooling; was made by other people in a long pyramid
| stretching back tens of thousands of years and billions
| of people wide. All of us are putting grains of sand on
| top.
| falcolas wrote:
| > the world would be a better place.
|
| Really? Sounds pretty terrible to me. Few books. Few
| videogames. No movies. No TV shows. Most of the internet
| obliterated. Any content that is created is copied and
| regurgitated so much you'd be hard pressed find out who
| actually created it.
|
| I personally _like_ consuming entertainment. I work with
| the creative side of my brain all day long, and being
| able to go home and turn it off with some relatively
| mindless entertainment (my form is a combination of books
| and videogames). I 'd hate to come home one day and only
| have a zero budget, poorly tested, game to play, or a
| book that I've already re-read enough to quote it by
| memory.
|
| > And no modern epic is significantly better than Ilias.
|
| Pure opinion. And in any case, there's only one Iliad.
| There's hundreds of other "modern" epics out there - many
| of which I find more entertaining, though they are not as
| literarily significant.
|
| > the open source code powering top public domain
| projects
|
| Is it worth re-iterating that all of the open source
| licenses is supported by copyright protections?
|
| > All of us are putting grains of sand on top.
|
| Which obviously has its own value, as aptly demonstrated
| by the entertainment industry as a whole being valued in
| the trillions of dollars.
| breck wrote:
| > Really? Sounds pretty terrible to me. Few books. Few
| videogames. No movies. No TV shows. Most of the internet
| obliterated.
|
| This is such bullsh _t. First of all, the f_ cking
| Internet is public domain tech (DARPA, Web). Second, the
| evidence is overwhelming that people will create vast
| amounts of content without any idea enslavement rights.
| According to your logic we wouldn't have janitors
| cleaning rooms if they couldn't collect a toll in
| perpetuity.
|
| > Any content that is created is copied and regurgitated
| so much you'd be hard pressed find out who actually
| created it.
|
| Here's a hint: no one. You created zero of the 25 letters
| you used in that comment, zero of the punctation marks,
| zero of the 184 words. You strung some words together in
| a unique arrangement, but you are piggybacking on a vast
| amount of effort which you contributed effectively zilch
| too. And you think your contributions deserve special
| treatment? What a f*cking joke.
|
| > Is it worth re-iterating that all of the open source
| licenses is supported by copyright protections?
|
| I don't support licenses. Licenses are for losers. Public
| domain is the only game that matters. Keep in mind that
| the tool we are using to communicate was made public
| domain by Tim Berners Lee.
| falcolas wrote:
| > According to your logic we wouldn't have janitors
| cleaning rooms if they couldn't collect a toll in
| perpetuity.
|
| To torture this analogy further, in the world you're
| presenting, a janitor has to beg for tips or rely upon
| their fans to get paid for their efforts.
|
| > And you think your contributions deserve special
| treatment?
|
| This assumes that there's no original thought, or
| production, or anything else in this day and age. I
| fundamentally disagree with this. To use a popular
| example, the archetypes presented in "A Game of Thrones"
| may have existed for decades or centuries, but they're
| presented in a wholly original story. A story which would
| not have existed in the past, present, or future if it
| wasn't for GRRM, and by extension, his ability to work
| full time writing his books.
|
| > Keep in mind that the tool we are using to communicate
| was made public domain by Tim Berners Lee.
|
| No, the tool we're using was originally created by Paul
| Graham, and is not public domain.
|
| In any case, it appears that there are irreconcilable
| differences in the foundations of our opinions (and
| politeness). I wish you luck.
| cwkoss wrote:
| You are also discounting the cost to society for all the
| works of art that are created due to copyright.
|
| Copyright criminalizes remix culture and leads to evils
| like Youtube arbitrarily giving strikes because 5 seconds
| of a taylor swift song was in the background, suppression
| of criticism, and depriving the poor from access to
| modern culture.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Music is a passion and hobby for many. People would still
| make music if the didn't make money from it.
|
| Might have lower production quality and less glitzy
| marketing, but the vast quantity of free music out there is
| proof that many will continue making music regardless of
| financial incentive.
| dpatterbee wrote:
| This is an interesting take I haven't heard much before. Could
| you expand on what the alternatives are?
| jedimastert wrote:
| Other than performance and merchandise, I think Patreon is
| really the big ticket right now.
|
| I suppose, in reality, this has been the case for around 3
| decades now. Unless you have the marketing department, you
| don't make money from music sales.
| falcolas wrote:
| Patreon works because everybody's not on there. If I tried
| to give $1 to every artist that I listen to on Spotify, I'd
| be paying out hundreds of dollars a month. Throw in books,
| videos, movies, and TV shows (all of which rely upon
| copyright), I'd be paying out thousands of dollars.
|
| I could scale back my contribution to each artist to
| pennies each (which doesn't actually work, given the $0.30
| cent/3% CC cut), but then we're back to where we are today.
|
| Patreon (and their ilk) is not tenable at scale.
| dontblink wrote:
| Mostly merchandising and touring.
| falcolas wrote:
| How does an author do this? An artist? How much money can
| the 20th musician in a day doing a tour expect to really
| make? An orchestra?
|
| How about movies? They'd cease to exist (barring a few
| youtube-quality productions).
| breck wrote:
| It's an exciting time for alternatives.
|
| Patreon, Twitch, Cameo, OnlyFans, et al, are providing ways
| to connect with your community and earn a living through
| their support, which is not only very important during
| shutdowns when live events are harder, but will be a long
| term trend.
|
| On the production side costs continue to drop, and if we
| #abolishcopyright cost of living across the world will drop
| dramatically, so will be easier to balance the budget.
| toyg wrote:
| _> if we #abolishcopyright cost of living across the world
| will drop dramatically_
|
| I sincerely doubt that. Food and shelter won't magically
| cost less because there is no copyright.
| [deleted]
| jmercouris wrote:
| You'll have to enlighten me. What are the better ways? Why
| should you not own copyright to that which you produce?
| toyg wrote:
| _> Why should you not own copyright to that which you
| produce?_
|
| You don't want to use that line of argument, since authors
| and musicians are among the very few categories of workers
| with that privilege. As much as I agree with you (and
| actually think that privilege to be expanded to _all_
| workers), you won 't find any solidarity from the common
| public on that line.
| falcolas wrote:
| > since authors and musicians are among the very few
| categories of workers with that privilege
|
| Don't forget software developers. All of our various
| licenses (and even our work-for-hire for various companies)
| relies upon copyright as well.
|
| There's also reporters, photographers, journalists, YouTube
| content creators, TV, and movies, just to name a few off
| the top of my head.
| toyg wrote:
| In practice, very few of these actually benefit from
| copyright. Most do work-for-hire, which is effectively a
| negation or renounce to one's IP rights; and opensource
| is effectively a way to do the same. The ones who can
| actually extract direct benefit from IP are " the 1%", so
| to speak.
| justynadorsz wrote:
| This is interesting. I didn't know that most people were
| against copyright.
| juancn wrote:
| Copyright and patents creates artificial scarcity. The things
| protected are not scarce, they are abundant. Ideas and
| information are easy to copy/reproduce.
|
| So we built a fake framework on top of something plentiful
| and cheap to copy, to make it more expensive so some people
| can make money out of it.
| falcolas wrote:
| I agree, they're easy to copy and reproduce. But more
| importantly, they are _not_ easy to produce in the first
| place.
|
| How do you suggest an author (artist, musician, etc) make a
| living, if it takes them 6 months of normal working hours
| to produce a book and they get an expected $0 of revenue
| from that book?
| ccsnags wrote:
| Spending time on something people aren't willing to pay
| for is always a waste of time, whether you're writing a
| book or digging holes.
|
| We need to stop assuming that having no copyright means
| that the work cannot be monetized. It just can't be
| monetized as if it was a physical object or service
| rendered. Vinyl records, tee shirts, patronage, book
| signings, lectures, anything that isn't copyright
| dependent can be monetized easily.
|
| The fans of art are aware that paying for it will help
| create more art they like. This is a personal connection
| that the fan has with the artist and keeps the art
| accessible for the casuals.
| falcolas wrote:
| We had that once upon a time (the original version of
| Patronage), and it resulted in some, but not very much,
| artwork in the grand scheme of things. Nowhere near the
| amount we enjoy today with our spare-change
| subscriptions.
|
| Copyright also allows more creators to create without
| requiring them to be a live personality as well; to split
| their time between creating and hustling for money.
| donovanian wrote:
| > and it resulted in some, but not very much, artwork in
| the grand scheme of things
|
| I'm not sure I follow, my understanding is that
| patronage, say from the Medici family, led to a
| proliferation of art.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Maybe NFTs
| kmeisthax wrote:
| You're slightly wrong: _copies_ of copyrighted works are
| abundant. The actual works themselves are scarce.
| ccsnags wrote:
| Now we're getting into the simulacrum. If a work is
| entirely digital, what is the difference between the
| original and the copy?
| adwn wrote:
| > _If a work is entirely digital, what is the difference
| between the original and the copy?_
|
| The difference is that the original instance of the work
| potentially required considerable time and money, whereas
| its copies are essentially free to produce. There's no
| difference between the bits of the "original" and the
| bits of each copy, but concluding that copies of a work
| should be free for all because the act of creating that
| copy is free, is fallacious and intentionally misleading.
| falcolas wrote:
| The cost of the labor put in to create the original.
| ccsnags wrote:
| What is the cost if I did it for free?
| falcolas wrote:
| What well-researched book have you written for free?
|
| What hit album have you (and your band-mates) written and
| performed for free?
|
| What feature-length, CGI enhanced movie have you
| produced, cast, and distributed for free?
|
| What TV show have you produced, cast, and distributed for
| free?
|
| I'm not trying to call you out specifically, but your
| post uses "I", so I'm responding appropriately. For
| better or worse, garage bands, open source developers,
| and patreon writers are the vast minority of copyright
| users.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Well, in the article it says that they are doing this partly
| because coronavirus has wiped out a lot of live music. If they
| can't stream for profit and they can't do live shows what do
| you suggest?
| cwkoss wrote:
| Get a job that pays. Not everyone is talented and lucky
| enough to be paid a comfortable wage for the products of
| their hobbies.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Your bringing up another issue entirely. What do you think
| about the unionization effort?
| adwn wrote:
| > _Your bringing up another issue entirely._
|
| That's the poster's modus operandi here: he doesn't miss an
| opportunity to advertise his two favorite topics -
| abolishment of intellectual property and his own whitespace-
| based data notation - whether it's on-topic or not.
| breck wrote:
| Aloha anonymous coward,
|
| The correct term is #ImaginaryProperty
|
| Yours truly, Breck Yunits
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| I think this is a bit like the 2A argument.
|
| There's a really happy medium that neither side ever talks
| about. Just dramatically reduce the legal length of copyrights.
| One year maybe?
| mchusma wrote:
| The US Constitution set copyright originally as 14 years,
| extendable by another 14. This sounds about right.
|
| I think artists would not be dissuaded from working and would
| monetize the roughly the same with 20-30 year copyright
| terms.
| xoa wrote:
| > _The US Constitution set copyright originally_
|
| No, that's not correct. 14 years was the original term set
| by law not the Constitution, and the difference is
| important. Copyright and patents do not formally exist in
| the US Constitution, because IP was a contentious issue
| even then. Instead there is a clause that _empowers_
| Congress to decide to do so if they wish, but there is no
| requirement. Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8 says Congress
| shall have the power:
|
| > _" To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by
| securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
| exclusive Right to their respective Writings and
| Discoveries."_
|
| But there is nothing specific set out in the Constitution.
| If there was, it'd be near impossible to change at this
| point, for better or worse. On the one hand that might mean
| we'd have much shorter terms then now. On the other hand,
| it would also mean that if the courts had gone similarly
| badly in deciding stuff like software patents it'd be near
| totally hopeless, rather than merely very difficult, to
| reform. But since it's all down to "merely" legislation
| Congress could completely change things around on a dime
| through normal law if there was the political will for it.
| Though note another complexity is that the US has signed
| treaties around certain parts of IP as well, including
| minimum terms. While those too can be renegotiated, or
| revoked by Congress, it's a higher domestic political and
| geopolitical bar.
|
| There are lots of interesting reform proposals, within
| various bounds of feasibility. Hopefully one of them can
| take off at some point and momentum can slowly start
| building to go in the other direction then the maximalist
| positions taken for the last few decades.
| ccsnags wrote:
| Most artists work for free. Some of the best artists I know
| have day jobs.
|
| The promise of fame and fortune is a product of an industry
| that is based on physical media being the only way to share
| information. The bit has liberated music for everyone yet
| we cling to the past.
| falcolas wrote:
| > Some of the best artists I know have day jobs.
|
| Most artists with regular output do not. The problem with
| a day job is it takes away from what a person can
| produce. For example, a content creator (i.e. YouTuber)
| with a day job is lucky to get out one-two videos a week.
| A full time content creator can produce one to two videos
| a day, often with better quality since they can focus on
| the work.
| ccsnags wrote:
| With the state of advertising on youtube, patreon, ad
| reads and super chats are a more reliable way to monetize
| than copyrighting the video.
|
| Youtube content creators are a good example of people
| monetizing art without the need for copyright. Donations
| and voluntary funding are key parts of the content
| creator world already. Copyright is not particularly
| important unless they are getting strikes from a
| copyright troll.
| falcolas wrote:
| Without copyright, someone will just take their output,
| cut out the ad reads and repost their output with their
| own embedded ads.
|
| This already happens today (Linus with his tech tips is
| only one example); without the ability for creators to
| fight back, it would only get worse.
|
| EDIT: That this is unpopular doesn't make it wrong. Even
| beyond the (currently) illegal reposting, there are lots
| of rights aggregators who pay viral content creators, and
| re-sell their content to TV channels (Chive TV,
| anybody?). The "pay creators" part goes away if you take
| away copyright.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| That seems quite long to me. 28 years is half of the
| average lifetime. Producing a certain sequence of sounds
| entitles you to own those sounds until people not yet born
| are full adults?
| notriddle wrote:
| That doesn't seem too awful. It basically means
| everything from the 80's or early 90's goes into the
| public domain.
|
| After that much time, it's a crime keeping the copyright
| monopoly: it's either exhausted all possible profit, so
| there's no point, or it's been around long enough that
| everything after it is influenced by it, like season 4
| and earlier of The Simpsons, and the original Star Wars
| movies.
|
| In other words, that seems like a decent cut-off point to
| say that if you still want to hold copyright on them,
| then you're rent-seeking off of stuff that has kinda
| become "cultural identity" stuff, specifically because
| it's what people grew up watching and influenced by.
| ccsnags wrote:
| Artist and Dev here.
|
| Yes to this. Having an imagination means you can think of
| different ways to monetize your work that isn't trying to put
| an imaginary wall around ideas and information.
| justynadorsz wrote:
| Also, artist and dev here. I don't agree. First, ideas are
| not copyrighted anyway. Second, you are both vague about
| those "different ways" of earning. Please expand on that.
| ccsnags wrote:
| Patrons. Sell merch. Sell tickets. Super chats.
|
| Patents and copyrights are literally ideas put on paper
| that one is claiming legal dominion over. Unless you are
| making physical media, your products are your ideas.
|
| It's a tradeoff, not a cure for problems artists face. The
| current system favors wealthy institutions over artists. No
| one is willing to donate to a giant record company but fans
| of the work will readily give money to the artist just
| because they like them. Patronage is a better system for
| artists.
| falcolas wrote:
| > Patrons. Sell merch. Sell tickets. Super chats.
|
| None of those scale. I pointed this out elsewhere, but
| how much money would a creator on Patreon make if all
| creators were on Patreon, hoping to make at least $1 per
| month per follower? Musicians alone would push me into
| the hundreds of dollars (which really means a vast
| majority of musicians would make nothing from me; less
| than they're getting via Spotify).
|
| How much are you willing to pay for tickets to the 20th
| tour in a week that's in your area? For their merch? As
| for myself, precious little. Probably not enough to even
| cover their tour costs, let alone the cost of producing
| the music (and merch) in the first place.
|
| > Patents and copyrights are literally ideas put on paper
| that one is claiming legal dominion over.
|
| Patents and copyrights make it practical to cover the
| costs of realizing those ideas in the first place. Ideas
| aren't worth anything until they're realized, be it in
| writing for a book, or a performance for a song.
|
| Books often take a minimum of 6 months of full time
| effort to produce. There's multiple people involved - the
| writer, the editor, the proofreader, the typesetter. How
| do they pay for it if they can't make any money from
| actually selling the book?
|
| Music takes weeks or months of effort in a studio to
| produce. How do you recoup those costs if you can't sell
| the output?
| cwkoss wrote:
| The majority of artists will not be able to support their
| entire lifestyle with their passion.
|
| Same as it is currently and ever was.
| justynadorsz wrote:
| "ideas put on paper" is oversimplifying it. There's a lot
| more work and time involved in creating art. It's not
| like: I have an idea, I "put it on paper", and 10 minutes
| later I have something to "claim dominion over".
| Spivak wrote:
| How do you keep a screen printing shop from just selling
| your merch for cheaper than you? In your hypothetical
| they'll always be able to undercut you since they don't
| have to support anything but screen printing business
| with the profits while you have to fund art production?
|
| The main point is that every avenue of monetizing art is
| create something that isn't your art that _is_ scarce and
| then sell that. Why not just have a system where you can
| make the art itself scarce?
| adwn wrote:
| > _#abolishcopyright_
|
| This isn't Twitter. I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish by
| using hashtags on HN, but it makes you look like an immature
| child - similar to writing "M$" in the 90s and early 00s.
| ccsnags wrote:
| #thisguyknowswhathashtagsmeanbutisajerkaboutit
| adwn wrote:
| > _#thisguyknowswhathashtagsmean[...]_
|
| I don't, actually. Please, enlighten me as to the purpose
| of hashtags on HN.
| breck wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. I understand that Twitter supports
| hashtags better, so that will be my preferred place to post
| things like #AbolishImaginaryProperty #EndPatents
| #BringBackNapster #LiberateIdeas
| 3saryHg6LP2e wrote:
| The record labels are a bigger problem than Spotify; they set the
| streaming prices and take a big cut.
| mcfedr wrote:
| That and copyright. If spotify didn't have to pay anyone to
| stream the music I listen to by dead artists there would be a
| lot more to go around with the people writing music today.
| kevincox wrote:
| Exactly. If the record labels thought the price was unfair they
| wouldn't see the rights to Spotify.
|
| The unfortunate part is that the artists have basically no
| power when bargaining with the record labels.
| lettergram wrote:
| Let's be honest, you aren't _required_ to use a record label.
| Record labels just advertise, which definitely blow up some
| musicians.
|
| In contrast, take the rapper Tom McDonald, his music actually
| hit the top 100 charts[1][2] and he's not signed to anyone.
| Just him and his girlfriend creating music. Was trending as
| the #1 download on iTunes for a couple weeks, etc.
|
| Artists make a deal with the devil, make more money, then
| complain. Yet, with today's ability to distribute - it's not
| required.
|
| I do think there should be an update to the spotify payout
| system, but Spotify doesn't have negotiating power; they need
| the record labels. With the record labels Spotify can get
| improved music, etc. Spotify is paying for the privilege
| that's why the smaller artists aren't making very much (the
| premium payments go to record labels).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_Woke\
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l6JUNFAJ9o
| curryst wrote:
| In fairness, Tom MacDonald gets a lot of external publicity
| from conservatives; he's mostly a right-wing political
| rapper.
|
| I've seen a big rise in conservative rappers on YouTube.
| I've got a conspiracy theory that the GOP is funding them
| like a record label. If so, it's a sweet deal for artists.
| The GOP cares far more about cultural effects than they do
| the money from the music.
| anoonmoose wrote:
| Yeah, Chance The Rapper is a more organic and less
| political example of a rapper making it without a label.
| cameroncairns wrote:
| It wouldn't be the first time.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUNuNilqrDQ
|
| It's hard to find a reliable source here but there was
| right wing folk music being made to combat the threat of
| communism in the 60s.
|
| https://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/01/janet_greene_th.ht
| ml
| lettergram wrote:
| I don't doubt there is some of that, probably from all
| sides frankly.
|
| However, the major point is that you don't need the
| distribution.
|
| Louis CK famously released a comedy special online with a
| download and just asked people to pay and not copy and
| share. He said he made more money off that than any other
| special he'd done.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| yeah, these artist seem kinda clueless of this reality...
|
| Courtney Love realized this over 20 years ago:
| https://www.gerryhemingway.com/piracy.html
| l1am0 wrote:
| Offtopic & Shameless self-plug:
|
| Help small artists by listening more to their music.
|
| "How do I find small artists on Spotify" you ask? That's what I
| did build https://tastemaker.cc/newcomers for.
|
| It is a playlists showing you 6 new small (I call them newcomer)
| artists every day :D
| redmattred wrote:
| A lot of the money in the industry is made by private music
| royalty funds that buy the rights to music and earn proceeds on
| their usage. Its a good investment (especially during covid) not
| available to retail investors.
|
| There is financial innovation that could happen to improve the
| outcomes for artists.
|
| Many asset classes previously unavailable to the public (private
| reits, real estate syndications, art investing, wine investing)
| have been brought downmarket with crowdfunding.
|
| There is green space for a music royalty fund that optimizes for
| artist benefit over profits and is available to the public.
| goatcode wrote:
| Are large gatherings allowed at all the planned locations? This
| seems a little tone-deaf.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I grew up thinking record companies were a confederacy of
| scumbags, and my attitude hasn't changed that much, but the
| question of what the fair price for a recorded song should be has
| been clouded by a mix of cynicism on the part of publishers, and
| magical thinking on the part of artists.
|
| Tech VC is an analogy for the risk model of record companies,
| where you have money from investors that needs a productive
| asset, and your risk/return appetite is being willing to accept
| that most of your bets will return zero, with just 2% of your
| investments yielding huge (10x+) multiples and 80% of your
| returns.
|
| Whether you are investing in bands making albums or entrepreneurs
| building startups, there seem to be direct similes for record
| sales, publishing rights, merch, side projects, and intellectual
| property. The point is artists make their money touring with
| shows, which is basically a job, where the record
| company/investor makes their big money because they get the
| benefit of having risked capital with leverage. A founder working
| for investors is analogous to a band touring in support of album
| sales. Your upside is probably a job with a lifestyle and a
| bonus.
|
| Which comes to the question of what a good price for a recording
| could be. Musicians generally don't take very much risk or use
| leverage that would yield investor-size returns. 99.9% of music
| is crap. The distribution curve of quality is really steep and
| long tailed, so if you invest in a given band, you are taking a
| <1% chance of ever seeing your money again. That's why record
| companies and VC make money. They're the producers. They're
| creating a portfolio spread over a wide pool of risk. If you
| write some songs, arguably, you have ventured nothing of value
| until someone discovers it. The music platforms provide this
| discovery. Sure, I wish I could earn the an equivalent living
| making music or writing as I do in tech, but since I'm not a
| superstar talent, I manage that expectation and accept
| comfortable mediocrity. As the amortized capital risked by a
| musician averaged across all the other musicians in their genre
| on a given song, the price of a stream above tiny fractions of a
| penny is generous. The missing feature seems to be a way to sell
| the licensing and publishing rights, where I can pay $100 to use
| it in a video.
|
| I get the sense that organizing spotify artists to complain is
| yet another way to hustle and exploit them, but this time for
| political ends instead of financial ones.
|
| edit: there is probably a producer/product-manager analogy to be
| made as well, but will leave it there.
| kangaroozach wrote:
| The model should be like Medium.
|
| Allocate peoples monthly membership in accordance to their
| listens.
|
| If one month I listen to 100 streams of Bob Dylan and thats it,
| then he should get my entire $7.00 instead of just a few cents
| for my small amount of streams.
|
| https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-...
| disantlor wrote:
| This seems almost too simple & good to be true. The counter
| points in the linked article mention that its too
| "computationally expensive" to calculate the payments, and the
| additional management costs could outweigh the benefit to
| smaller artists... how could that possible be true?
| Aissen wrote:
| It's one of the demands, the "user-centric" model. It's
| mostly because the major record labels (who have the top
| artists) might see a reduction of revenue. But even that was
| disproved in a recent french study:
|
| https://cnm.fr/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/01/CNM_UCPS_SyntheseF...
| natdempk wrote:
| Is there a translation of this report anywhere?
| Aissen wrote:
| Try https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=
| https:/... although it doesn't have graphics.
| natdempk wrote:
| It's simply not true. The whole business model of Spotify is
| that of any other internet business, selling a zero-marginal-
| cost good for a subscription fee. It would be more
| complicated to implement a per-user breakdown, and maybe
| slightly more expensive to run that analytics pipeline, but
| at scale there's no way the additional management costs would
| outweigh the benefit to smaller artists. The cost of that
| more advanced analytics job is going to be absorbed over the
| entire user base to the point where it effectively costs
| nothing in aggregate. The real counter point is probably that
| it was either easier to implement the current solution (from
| an engineering standpoint this is true, it's much easier to
| aggregate and scale their payment pipeline once per-geo-
| region) and there has been no push for change, or it favors
| larger artists and labels who have the bargaining power with
| Spotify.
| mcfedr wrote:
| It's clearly doable, and we recently saw that soundcloud
| moved to this model of calculating
| lux wrote:
| Sorry, but there are plenty of developers on here (myself
| included) who can easily confirm that "too computationally
| expensive" is just BS so they don't have to change.
|
| Proof: Soundcloud is doing exactly this, so it's absolutely
| possible.
|
| https://community.soundcloud.com/fanpoweredroyalties
|
| This is all so they can keep major labels happy (several of
| whom own a stake in Spotify) because the labels don't want to
| lose the free money gravy train they're making on the backs
| of artists they don't even represent, and Spotify doesn't
| want to lose the majors.
| paxys wrote:
| This is never going to happen because the top artists and their
| labels would never agree to it, and they are the ones bringing
| in the users.
|
| > The research found that in the current system the top 0.4% of
| artists get around 10% of all revenue, but they would only get
| about 5.6% of revenue under a user-centric system
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Here some photos of the demonstration:
| https://www.hotpress.com/music/union-of-musicians-and-allied...
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I always liked the idea of nonlinear revenue, eg paying
| proportionally to the cube root of the number of streams. It
| would allow smaller artists to get a greater proportion of the
| proceeds.
| tschwimmer wrote:
| The hard truth in music (and in many creative industries) is that
| there's a huge oversupply (many musicians are willing to make
| music for free or very cheap) and demand has a low willingness to
| pay. The result is that there isn't much money to be made for
| musicians. In my mind, there's really no way around this fact.
| You can argue (as these folks are) that Spotify could take a
| smaller cut and give more to musicians. While this is technically
| true, Spotify is never going to do this. It's a strictly
| distributive transaction: musicians make more money, Spotify
| makes less.
|
| Their other options are not so good either. Musicians can build a
| Spotify clone that's more favorable to artists. Nominally, this
| sounds like Tidal. The problem with Tidal is that nobody wants to
| spend that much money on a subscription. Even with the high
| profile artist exclusives it has less than 5% market share.
| Beyond the business model, building a Spotify clone is difficult
| to execute, especially for musicians and not software folks.
|
| You can somehow lobby to outlaw streaming and go back to selling
| songs and albums individually. This would definitely hurt Spotify
| but probably doesn't help musicians too much. Potentially the top
| 1% of musicians are better off as they're able to capture more
| value but the long tail is way worse as nobody discovers their
| music anymore.
|
| An interesting solution might be collective action. If enough
| musicians banded together and pulled their catalogs from Spotify,
| I could see that having a big negative impact on Spotify's
| revenue. There are a few bands that if their catalogs were off
| Spotify, I'd probably cancel. This would be effective but is
| probably too difficult to coordinate.
|
| Overall, the problem for musicians is one of economics. Too many
| people willing to make music, not enough willing to pay. In other
| words, you can't push a rope. If you are a musician, my strong
| advice to you is to get comfortable with doing it for a reason
| other than money. Otherwise, you're in for inevitable
| disappointment.
| nvarsj wrote:
| I don't think it's as simple as supply and demand as you
| suggest. The behavior of record companies and distributors is
| completely atrocious in the music industry. It's monopolist
| behavior, and it completely distorts the actual market. If
| artists got the majority of royalties from each play of their
| song, things would be substantially different.
| ksec wrote:
| >Overall, the problem for musicians is one of economics. Too
| many people willing to make music, not enough willing to pay.
|
| Exactly. And we have finite amount of time and attention. Just
| like the head of Premiere League in UK said E-Sport ( Gaming )
| and other entertainment like Netflix are their competitors. And
| we have less time for music. It is not only an abundance of
| music, but also in other entertainment.
|
| K-POP essentially made their music and MV for free on YouTube.
| While making money on tours, merchandise, and show appearance.
|
| I sympathies for them. But their problem has nothing to do with
| Spotify at all.
| analog31 wrote:
| Microsoft inadvertently played a similar game in the 80s and
| 90s, by having multiple price tiers for similar products in
| different markets. You could buy Office at a computer store
| for $200, or get it bundled with a new computer for $20, or
| for "free" by copying the disks from someone. (Don't remember
| the exact prices). Then there were "upgrade" tiers and an
| academic discount. The free tier made it impossible for
| anybody to compete with them, thus protecting their market in
| the paid tier. They even tried competing with themselves, via
| "Microsoft Works," and gave up.
|
| Creative works are a very strange market, because they don't
| fit any semblance of a demand curve. For instance, there's no
| such thing as a song that's slightly cheaper than a Taylor
| Swift hit, with slightly higher sales. You can't compete with
| Taylor Swift on a price/demand curve. Also, you can't compete
| with free.
|
| There's still a bit of a demand curve for live music. For
| instance you can pay less to hear my band than to hear Taylor
| Swift. This may actually be why playing live is still a
| better economic deal for most rank-and-file musicians. It's
| one reason why I'm presently un-recorded. I have no need to
| know how much my music is loved by people who think I don't
| deserve to get paid.
| herbturbo wrote:
| Yeah I think it's easy for up and coming musicians to blame
| Spotify for their financial woes, but as someone who was an
| aspiring musician in the 90s I can tell you it was no picnic
| back then. Everyone I knew was broke, so the only way to make a
| record was to get signed, and that involved playing shows in
| front of A&R people which meant finding venues etc - all on
| your own dime. If you did manage to get signed and get an
| advance, you probably used it to buy better instruments and
| maybe pay rent for a month or two but it didn't last long. Then
| if you were lucky and the label decided to distribute your
| stuff, you'd make about a dollar between you for every full
| length album you sold. Music has never been about making money.
| You might as well play the lottery if that's your goal.
|
| And as a consumer of music, I am very happy to be paying $14.99
| a month for access to a collection that would have been
| virtually impossible for an individual to assemble 20 years
| ago. Music has been opened up to people in a way that did not
| exist before Spotify. Also, a good deal of the music I listen
| to is stuff I had already bought on CD or vinyl years before,
| so those artists are getting paid twice for me listening now.
|
| Bottom line is it's always been hard to break through into
| making money from music. Nothing has changed except the way
| it's distributed.
| dimgl wrote:
| I realize this is tangential, but I'm currently making a
| video game. Is the video game industry similar? I worry that
| I won't get much return on my investment...
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Gaming, even indie gaming, follows a power law just like
| everything else:
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/04/ars-analysis-80-of-
| st...
| cwkoss wrote:
| Yes it is similar, but the smaller indie studio model is
| much more viable than it was a decade or two ago,
| particularly for unique games that find deep popularity
| with a small niche. (See Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program,
| Coffee Stain Studios)
|
| I think independent video game dev is good for people who
| want to write the game anyways, and want to monetize to
| allow them to keep working on it. But, it is very unlikely
| to make you significant wealth.
| nerdponx wrote:
| That's not the issue here. The issue is that "number of
| listens" is not correlated with "payouts from Spotify", even if
| we ignore the record labels taking their cut.
| paxys wrote:
| Exactly this. You could remove 98% of music from Spotify and
| people would still gladly keep paying the $10/mo because they
| are there for Drake and Taylor Swift.
| herbturbo wrote:
| Right - and how did Drake and Taylor Swift rise to that
| level? Same way Madonna and Michael Jackson did. Getting
| radio play and touring, which took a record label. Getting
| people to actually give a shit about your music is a problem
| Spotify isn't going to solve for unknown artists.
| Macha wrote:
| The ask is 1p/stream. I'm not sure that that's actually
| sustainable without a massive rise in spotify prices, given the
| proportion of free users and even paid users that listen to more
| than 1000 tracks a month. If spotify raises prices, consumers go
| back to piracy. I'm not sure this will have the effect they want.
|
| Let's imagine a radio station. Something medium sized, about a
| million listeners. They play a track. Are they paying 10,000 per
| play, which would be the equivalent rate? I suspect not.
| kdowns wrote:
| There is also the issue of fraud. Click/Stream farms are
| already soaking up the artists pool of revenue, and this change
| would incentivize it more. Justin Bieber recently asked his
| fans to go to sleep with his new song on repeat, and I'm sure
| other artists/labels are looking at ways to game the system as
| well. In my opinion there needs to be a way to pay artists
| based on first time streams from new accounts.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| I listen to far more than 1000 tracks a month, but quite a few
| of those are duplicates; though the music changes every month.
| With that listening pattern, it wouldn't make sense for me to
| pay for 1p/stream.
|
| If the prices increased enough to offset a 1p/stream, I'd jump
| ship and buy used CDs again, since that would become more cost
| effective, even with buying a CD a month or so. There are
| cheaper substitutes to music listening, even if it would be
| less convenient to discover new music.
| 101008 wrote:
| If this is not sustainable for the artists, how is this
| different than piracy? I'd say it is even worse, because people
| is paying but the money goes to a middleware company that is
| not paying the right price. It is like buying CDs from the
| street sellers.
| s0xTester wrote:
| I mean....radio was never a money maker for acts. It was to
| get their name out their to make money elsewhere.
|
| Just kinda how the market is setup. I don't think it is
| unsustainable for artists.
|
| I fucking hate "exposure", but that is literally what
| radio/streaming is is.
|
| It is never a substantial revenue stream until you hit big.
|
| And with today's tech, radio had to become streaming.
|
| Paying a penny per stream is highly unsustainable for
| everyone.
|
| What would you suggest to fix it?
|
| I think the system is pretty decent all things considered.
| Now, Spotify could definitely be better at hyping and pushing
| new music/low creators....but other than that I don't think
| they're the enemy here.
| tgv wrote:
| Streaming isn't comparable to radio. If a penny per stream
| is unsustainable, perhaps we better go back to just radio.
| Hyping new music isn't going to do shit about revenue.
| sparkling wrote:
| > If this is not sustainable for the artists, how is this
| different than piracy?
|
| The difference is that every artist has a choice if his music
| lands on Spotify or not - and if he accepts the conditions
| offered. The main problem of many of these artists is that
| they signed bad distribution deals with their labels and are
| giving away a big chunk % of streaming revenues. That isn't
| Spotifys fault.
|
| Also, according to Spotifys latest financial statement, they
| are expecting a $200-300m operating loss for 2021, so i find
| it hard to argue that Spotify is being "too greedy" when they
| aren't even profitable.
| efsavage wrote:
| "sustainable for the artists"
|
| There seems to be some idea of what musicians "should" make
| that other professions don't benefit from. I would like to
| make the same money from making furniture as I do from
| writing code, but I can't. I could blame the furniture stores
| for not promoting me or taking too big a cut or any number of
| other factors, or I could accept the fact that I'm not an
| amazing woodworker. But I still make my art/craft because I
| enjoy it and it's important to me.
|
| There are plenty of ways for musicians to make a living, but
| I don't see a problem with the fact that spending a month or
| two a year recording an album is a privilege available to
| only the most talented subset of them.
| xtracto wrote:
| You touch a point that has been discussed ad-nauseam before
| (I saw it in /. a long time ago): Why should artists be
| perpetually paid for the 40 hours of work they made?
|
| Any normal people, has a pay rate (minimum $0.77 USD/hr
| where I live). Someone goes to work, works for 8 hours, and
| gets their 8hr equivalent salary.
|
| But then you have "artists" who work to produce their
| product for say 80 hours, and then they want to be
| perpetually paid... not only that, they want to be paid
| enough to _live_ a lifestyle similar to the person that get
| 's paid for 40 hours a week job, for 30 years.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Comments such as yours are why I will not let my music be
| on Spotify as an artist. It's no different than piracy, the
| user is just paying Spotify for convenience of not having
| to search stuff on Soulseek themselves...
|
| The fact that slapping some ads on my music on youtube made
| me earn more than being on Spotify says everything about
| how bad that deal is for any artist...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > I could blame the furniture stores for not promoting me
| or taking too big a cut or any number of other factors
|
| not only could you but you should. Of course workers over
| the last few decades have internalised the mindset that
| they cannot use their power to bargain and that whatever
| they get is fair and they should just shut up, which is why
| we tolerate corporate middlemen eating our lunch.
|
| I don't know if a penny per song is realistic or whatever,
| but going up against Spotify and record labels and trying
| to negotiate as much compensation for artists as possible
| collectively is exactly what they ought to do. Also, on the
| other end, as consumers we need to stop whining when we
| have to pay twenty bucks instead of ten bucks per month to
| compensate artists who we spend listening hours to every
| single week.
| disgu wrote:
| Spotify is not the corporate middle man. The big record
| companies are. Any musician is free to not put their
| music on spotify and to not sell the rights to a record
| company. They can then let you stream a song for $50 on
| their website.
|
| It's also absolutely ridiculous that you champion those
| who want to make more money while also saying that
| everyone on the other end who wants to spend less should
| "stop whining".
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I champion people who produce things, be that artists,
| software developers, woodworkers or anyone else who
| builds stuff. Spotify and labels are both distributors
| and middlemen who profit from the work of others, it's
| consumers and large platforms that squeeze creators with
| their greedy mindset of 'as much as possible, for as
| little money as possible'.
|
| It's long overdue that we move away from this sleazy
| consumer mindset and start valuing creators.
| disgu wrote:
| And I value the creators of Spotify who create good
| software and a great infrastructure for the service
| they're offering. I think we should move away from this
| sleazy consumer mindset that the creators of Spotify
| should not be rewarded for the service they're offering.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| are you under the impression that engineers at spotify
| are currently going hungry and working minimum wages? As
| developers we are already ridiculously overpaid compared
| to artists. We are the ones who benefit from the shit
| salaries that musicians make, which is of course why
| people on this website don't want to hear anything about
| creators bargaining. It's the people here who benefit
| from the status quo.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| > We are the ones who benefit from the shit salaries that
| musicians make
|
| Not really. We are just being paid enough so that we do
| not leave for somewhere else.
|
| The ones who really benefit are the shareholders.
|
| Coincidentally, the same people who didn't do any of the
| work.
| bengale wrote:
| >The ones who really benefit are the shareholders.
| Coincidentally, the same people who didn't do any of the
| work.
|
| This is how capitalism works though. There's no way
| Spotify can be expected to fundamentally change the
| economic system they exist in. Reversing that is heading
| into the realm of revolution.
| shados wrote:
| Except almost everyone can produce things. You have to
| produce things people want. Not only that, you need to
| find the people who want your stuff, especially if its
| niche.
|
| Yes, I'm a highly paid software engineer. The people who
| created the company I work for are, however, far better
| paid.
|
| There's nothing stopping me from quitting and building my
| own business and selling the software I produce. I have
| the funds to seed my own startup, so that's not even an
| issue. That's a shitload of work though, even if I hire
| people to handle the individual parts. Very quickly I'll
| be spending more time running a business, finding
| customers, marketing, dealing with legal crap, etc, than
| I will producing software. I can also produce software,
| stick it on github and hope for the best, but there's
| countless people who do that for shits and giggles (and
| for free).
|
| Distribution, logistic, and those "middlemen" actually do
| a lot of work to link the product with the customers.
| Sure, there's parasites in the middle, organizations that
| just take licenses and shifts them around without doing
| anything. You can absolutely make a case to cut those
| off. But the orgs/software that link products directly to
| customers who want said products generate tremendous
| value, and it's often a lot harder to do than produce the
| good in the first place.
| efsavage wrote:
| My scenario is not one of power imbalance, it is that I
| simply cannot create enough economic value doing it to
| make a living, and I have no right to change anyone
| else's rules to accommodate for that fact. I cannot make
| you a bookshelf cheaper than you can buy one at IKEA. At
| my software developer rate a Billy Bookcase would cost
| you $1000. It's probably safe to say you aren't going to
| "stop whining" and pay that.
|
| But you know what I did last week? I didn't mope around
| at some job I hate complaining about "Big Furniture". I
| made a bookcase. I also wrote a bunch of software. I can
| call myself a woodworker, I paid my mortgage, and IKEA
| sold thousands of Billy Bookcases. All is good.
| ProofByAccident wrote:
| Your example is a little specious in that a bookcase is
| very different from a song. The production of one has
| huge economies of scale, whereas a song doesn't. I agree
| that producing things competitively is important to
| improve overall efficiency, but with the music industry
| you really have a small cartel of massive labels
| dictating the terms for everyone else (ie. engaging in
| massively anti-competitive behavior). It seems weird to
| me that your pro-market ideology leads you to support
| what (to me) seems to be more or less wage-fixing for a
| labor supplier (musicians)
| geodel wrote:
| > small cartel of massive labels dictating the terms for
| everyone else
|
| Only for those who sign with them. So this brings the
| question as what's stopping these musicians to make music
| independently and market using internet along the way
| avoiding these labels. It is not even the case that music
| can be listened only via monopolistic mobile app stores.
|
| I have used small independent service providers for tax
| filing, lawn mowing, cleaning and myriad other services
| by finding at internet. They are not backed by big
| corporate chains. Why music has to come from big labels.
| jyrkesh wrote:
| Price fixing? You can buy music directly from artists for
| any price you want. I do it all the time on Bandcamp and
| independent stores, for both digital and vinyl releases.
|
| Piracy set the price at 0, Spotify pulled the price up
| from there, but there is literally nothing stopping
| consumers today from paying more for music except that
| they don't want to.
| ProofByAccident wrote:
| >Price fixing? You can buy music directly from artists
| for any price you want.
|
| I think you're missing my point. The opportunity to
| market direct to consumer does not negate the massive
| wage-setting power of a cartel which can buy up rivals,
| production talent, leverage radio, venue, and streaming
| contracts, etc.
|
| Ex: wired.com/story/opinion-big-music-needs-to-be-broken-
| up-to-save-the-industry/
| ProofByAccident wrote:
| Like I don't know how you can read something like this
| and just say "well have you tried selling on Bandcamp?"
|
| '''
|
| Live Nation's consolidation of the industry was rapid and
| aggressive, spending around $1 billion in just 18 months
| in the late 1990s buying independent concert promoters
| and venue owners. By 1999, when radio titan Clear Channel
| paid $4.4 billion for the company (then called SFX), it
| was the largest music venue owner and concert promoter.
| Antitrust enforcers took no action to stop the deal.
|
| By 2005, Clear Channel had spun off its live music
| division into a new, standalone company: Live Nation, the
| country's largest artists manager and concert promoter
| and second-largest venue owner. Today, Live Nation is
| once again part of a massive broadcasting and live music
| conglomerate that wields immense power.
|
| Live Nation has since combined with the ticketing
| monopoly Ticketmaster, satellite radio monopolist
| SiriusXM, and online radio leader Pandora as part of
| media mega-conglomerate Liberty Media. Last year, Liberty
| Media was approved to take control of iHeartMedia, the
| largest radio station owner in the country; prior to 2014
| iHeart was known as Clear Channel. The proverbial band
| was back together, antitrust concerns and all.
| Competition and consumer advocates stridently opposed
| every corporate tie-up along the way; my organization was
| part of a coalition that argued against the
| Liberty/iHeart deal last year. Antitrust enforcers
| permitted every one.
|
| '''
|
| Further down:
|
| '''
|
| The company's power to steer business away from rivals is
| not theoretical. In late 2019 the Justice Department
| found that, for years, Live Nation had abused its
| monopoly by steering its artists and tours away from
| venues that refused to use Ticketmaster. The government
| could have sued for monopoly violations but instead
| simply amended the agreement it struck with the companies
| when they merged a decade ago.
|
| '''
| ProofByAccident wrote:
| > Only for those who sign with them.
|
| I think generally the point of cartelization is to make
| it very challenging NOT to sign with them. Clearly many
| independent labels can thrive, and I can't imagine that
| it's impossible for an artist to start their own label.
| Nevertheless, when eg. sound and recording engineers can
| be aggressively poached by a major studio it's got to be
| challenging to go it alone.
| efsavage wrote:
| > The production of one has huge economies of scale,
| whereas a song doesn't.
|
| Actually, now that we're digital, the economies of scale
| of music are similar to software, in that they are
| massive (and Spotify is a key enabler of that).
|
| > It seems weird to me that your pro-market ideology
| leads you to support what (to me) seems to be more or
| less wage-fixing for a labor supplier (musicians)
|
| Musicians have been largely entrepreneurial for
| centuries. The advent of physical media and distribution
| control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract
| rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a
| select few. There is now far more opportunity for success
| and distribution without labels than there has been since
| they started.
| [deleted]
| ProofByAccident wrote:
| >Actually, now that we're digital, the economies of scale
| of music are similar to software, in that they are
| massive
|
| Is this the case? It seems that there's the fundamental
| limitation of 10 musicians not being able to record a
| song in 1/10th of the time. Certainly there are SOME
| economies of scale, but it seems a little incredible that
| music would be as "factory producible" as something like
| a bookshelf or a car.
|
| > The advent of physical media and distribution control
| enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to
| enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few.
|
| This seems incongruous with the rest of what you are
| saying. Yes clearly there is an entrepreneurial component
| of music, and absolutely eg. SoundCloud and BandCamp is
| enabling independent artists in new and important ways.
| That doesn't change the fact that massive financial
| institutions are rent-seeking the bejeezus out of the
| bulk of the industry in a way that (to me) would appear
| to hurt competition.
| Milner08 wrote:
| Right, but the money has always gone to a middleman, be it
| record companies or Spotify. If Spotify gets any more
| expensive I can guarantee people will go back to privacy,
| music will become less accessible and those niche bands that
| Spotify knows I may like will never get found.
|
| I understand the need to get paid more, but I am not sure
| killing Spotify is the solution.
| moistbar wrote:
| And what do you expect to happen to Spotify when the
| musicians leave for someplace that pays them appropriately?
| SCHiM wrote:
| The answer is piracy again.
|
| For a moment in time, piracy of movies and series was at
| a low point. Recently, with the fragmentation of all the
| different streaming services it's rising again.
| moistbar wrote:
| The real answer is that Spotify will melt under its own
| inadequacy and the new platform will thrive. You adapt or
| you die, and I would have no sympathy for Spotify if they
| couldn't adapt.
| Milner08 wrote:
| I don't care if its Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music or some
| new competitor. But if they get more expensive they will
| not win people over.
| leesalminen wrote:
| Presumably these new brands have to charge their
| customers more in order to pay the artists more, right?
| I'm about at the max of what I'm willing to pay for music
| per month...
| cdepatie wrote:
| Aren't Spotify deals typically coming from the record
| companies themselves, not the musicians? Unless artists
| reject the current record company model, Spotify isn't
| going to be able to fix this problem for them.
| disgu wrote:
| Musicians have complained in the past and threatened to
| leave and some have left... just to then come back.
| kgog wrote:
| I'm trying to come up with a word for that.. I think it
| starts with a M and ends with a Y and has a onopol in the
| middle somewhere.
| Macha wrote:
| It's hard to argue that Spotify is a monopoly when Apple
| Music, whatever Google's service is called now and Tidal
| have pretty much the same selection. And you can buy DRM
| free music still on iTunes and Qobuz. And even physical
| media. Oligopoly at worst.
| meiraleal wrote:
| > I understand the need to get paid more, but I am not sure
| killing Spotify is the solution.
|
| If Spotify doesn't compromise, killing it would be the only
| solution, but this union doesn't have the power to do that
| initially. But this will never work because you have a
| infinite stream of new musicians wanting to be listen
| without receiving money for that.
| s0xTester wrote:
| Killing Spotify would be terrible.
|
| New musicians want their work out there....without
| Spotify(or similar) it will be back to just blasting out
| your music for free online everywhere so you can get bug.
|
| Spotify at least gives them some revenue while they
| increase their fandom.
| 101008 wrote:
| Those niche bands will put their music for free online
| until they are well known to get their fans pay for the
| music, as they did in the 90s and 00s.
| Milner08 wrote:
| Its not about it being free online, its about discovery.
| Spotify is currently excellent for discovering new bands.
| TPB? Not so much.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > I'd say it is even worse, because people is paying but the
| money goes to a middleware company that is not paying the
| right price
|
| Because of contracts the _artists_ signed, not the consumer.
| illuminati1911 wrote:
| Clearly it is as artists are not starving and can pay for
| their rent, lifestyle etc.
|
| They just simply "want more", and who wouldn't, but free
| market and supply/demand disagrees with them. If artists
| don't like Spotify's offering they can pull their music out
| of the service.
| 3saryHg6LP2e wrote:
| Let's do some back-of-the-envelop calculations:
|
| Let's say people stream for 4 hours a day on average.
|
| 4 * 60 = 240 minutes
|
| Let's say a song is 3 minutes.
|
| 240 / 3 = 80 streams == 80p/day
|
| 80p * 30 days per month = 2400p
|
| 2400p == PS24
|
| So that would be ~2.4x increase in price for end users without
| including Spotify cut or taxes.
|
| Doesn't seem possible to me.
| nso wrote:
| Also, consider the free account. Presumably, the artist still
| wants to get paid. So now Spotify somehow needs to be able to
| make back those 2,400 pennies per user from advertisement.
| Firadeoclus wrote:
| It seems extremely unlikely to me that Spotify users stream 4
| hours per day on average. I suspect it's less than one hour.
| 3saryHg6LP2e wrote:
| It's a fairly arbitrarily number sure, but I think it could
| be representative. During the working week I listen to
| music almost all the working day, when I as commuting that
| adds on another couple of hours.
|
| Even if it's 2 hours a day it would still represent an
| increase in costs.
|
| Another poster put it better: for $9.99 per month you would
| be able to pay for 999 streams, I am sure a typical user
| can easily exceed 999 streams in a month.
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| Well for instance, I'm on a family plan (6 people total for
| $15) and I stream a full workday+ daily. I know lots of
| people who do the same, where they have a lot of
| "background music" time and then a little active listening.
| kjakm wrote:
| It's also still remarkably cheap for unlimited access to all
| the music ever recorded.
| iterati wrote:
| I'd just go back to torrenting at that price.
| Hamuko wrote:
| The problem is that people don't care about "all the music
| ever recorded". They mostly care about a very limited
| selection of music. And if Spotify starts costing like $45
| a month, how many people still think it's worth it? You can
| buy like four albums off of iTunes for that and then listen
| to them as much as you want.
| falcolas wrote:
| Nit: It's nowhere close to all the music ever recorded.
| It's barely most of the mainstream artists.
| mschuetz wrote:
| For all music ever recorded, maybe. But Spotify doesn't
| even have half of what I'm regularly listening to - a
| regular annoyance - let alone half of all music ever
| recorded.
| 3saryHg6LP2e wrote:
| Will consumers pay that price is the question?
| Macha wrote:
| That ship sailed in the 90s with widespread music piracy.
| The market simply doesn't value digital copies of recorded
| music that much anymore.
|
| Spotify was an increase in artist revenues as prior to that
| most people were paying nothing for their music, be it
| bittorrent in the 00s, cd copying in the 90s, or recording
| radio to tape in the 80s.
| path411 wrote:
| Imagine if Youtube creators started trying to get $0.01 per
| play. This is just a little crazy. Spotify and competitors
| successfully captured a LARGE number of people who were not
| paying anyone at all. There has already been a large increase
| in friction on streaming music the past few years, this will
| just be a nail in the coffin pushing everyone to go back to
| pirating.
| robkop wrote:
| Taking a look at their most recent financial statement we can
| do some quick calculations. (All figures in
| million euros) Revenue Cost of
| Revenue Profit Premium : 7135 5126
| 2009 Free (ads): 745 739 6
| Overall : 7880 5865 2015
|
| Now currently the claim is that they are paying out $0.0038 per
| stream and we want to raise that to $0.01 which would be a 2.63
| multiple.
|
| For spotify free that would mean that they just have to include
| 2.63x more ads, this is doable but I'm sure it would hurt
| adoption and maybe people would move from the platform.
|
| For spotify paid they could cut down their profit margin and
| pay 39% more per stream than they currently do (ignoring that
| they have more than 2B eur in other business expenses
| currently). But even after that they would still have to raise
| their prices by a multiple of 1.91.
|
| This would mean they would have to charge about $19.10 a month
| to not loose money on licencing in the US market.
| nindalf wrote:
| This is good analysis. Small quibble with the last part - we
| don't know how much the price charged to consumers needs to
| increase to be able to afford $0.01 a stream. Any increase in
| price will see a drop in subscribers, dropping revenue. An
| increase in price could reduce revenue, making it harder to
| afford the increased payout.
| rsstack wrote:
| Since the cost is linear to number of streams, it only
| matters if the premium subscribers that drop have a lower
| average streams/month rate than the average premium
| subscribers.
|
| This assumes, like the post two levels above me, that
| Spotify don't need the profits for anything and just need
| to break even.
| cashewchoo wrote:
| A penny a stream is honestly way more than "a play" of music has
| cost. I'll admit I'm off the beaten path with how I do music but
| this is my setup:
|
| 1. I buy the CD release of music because I like to collect them,
| and the art is cool (I listen to folk metal and they usually do
| some cool stuff with album art and the front of the CD).
|
| 2. I rip them to FLACs and store them on my plex server
|
| 3. I stream them to my phone/etc.
|
| So I'm really used to paying something like... {cost of cd} /
| {lifetime play count}. Which honestly is probably a lot higher
| than what a single stream of music earns the artists but a lot
| lower than 1c per play.
|
| Just as an example, let's take Sonic Firestorm by Dragonforce. I
| probably started listening in 2007 or so. 14 years. I listened to
| the entire CD probably at least 3 times a week for the entirety
| of high school. So 4 years of high school times 52 weeks a year
| times 3 plays a week times 9 tracks per play is 5616. I'd guess I
| paid 12 bucks for the CD (it's 10 on amazon right now). So that's
| 0.00214 dollars per play. And that's just high school. Though
| admittedly that's one of my favorite albums, but I do think
| Alestorm and Ensiferum and several other bands are up in that
| play count too for my 4 years of college.
|
| And I don't think many bands want to make the argument of "yeah
| but we're one of those bands you're gonna buy our CD for 12 bucks
| and listen to 3 times and then we end up in the back of your CD
| holder because every time you flip through you're like 'nah not
| really feeling them right now' for weeks on end".
|
| So... I dunno. I'm all for paying artists more. But I would
| really prefer the way we do that is decrease the (massive) cut
| that goes to the labels and send more to the artists.
|
| I've been buying my CDs on bandcamp as much as I can recently
| because as I understand it, bands capture a lot more of that
| sticker price that way. At least it seems like they do. I get CDs
| from residential addresses in Norway, anyway.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Pay us at least one cent per stream
|
| I bet if Spotify adopted it, the publishers would still want a
| cut of that.
| bogomipz wrote:
| Music publishers work for the songwriter. Songwriters hold the
| publishing. Record labels are the copyright holders. Streaming
| companies license from the latter.
| kjakm wrote:
| I would be interested to see what would happen if Spotify changed
| the free account to something really small (and maybe annual).
| For example $10 a year. I'd guess that's still small enough that
| most people will pay it.
|
| There are a lot of comments saying Spotify can't raise prices -
| but Netflix has repeatedly raised prices successfully. I'm now
| paying them double what I originally did when I signed up.
| Macha wrote:
| And when you signed up, people likely just signed up to netflix
| and left it at that.
|
| Looking at my local pricing, the lowest plan (EUR7.99) is $2
| cheaper than the single plan that was available when I signed
| up (EUR9.99), and the equivalent plan to what was available
| then is (EUR12.99). So that's a 33% increase in 5 years, which
| is much less dramatic than the 100%-200% increase spotify would
| need for the suggested payouts.
|
| There's a lot of account sharing or rotating streaming service
| or plain old fashioned piracy (the "dodgy box", formerly a
| pirate satellite receiver and now usually a kodi box with a
| frontend to some pirate stream provider, has been more common
| in Ireland the last few years than since digital TV was just
| coming in and competing with free to air broadcast TV).
| m000 wrote:
| This case reminds me the French Press Association vs. Google News
| case [1]. The details differ, but the outcome is the same: It's
| not in your interest as content producer to be excluded. If it
| wasn't already free for you, you would probably be enticed to pay
| in order to gain visibility by your customer base.
|
| And frankly, I don't know what UMAW expects to get. Can really
| Spotify support the $0.01/stream without going out of business?
| Why are they making non-bilateral demands to Spotify (e.g. reveal
| business contracts)?
|
| And who are UMAW anyway? From a quick check of their page, the
| only names I could find were the steering committee, and it took
| several tries to find members with >1 albums on Spotify. With
| that level of opaqueness, it's hard to see them convince the
| public to throw their support behind them. And what's with the
| sub-committee mania?
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_News#EU_copyright_and_d...
| nindalf wrote:
| What was it like being a median artist in the 90s, before and
| after Napster? The music industry has always been top heavy, then
| and now. But does anyone have data on artist earnings? It'd be
| interesting to know if the earnings of the median artist have
| increased or decreased in the last couple of decades.
|
| I totally empathise with their demand for a cent per stream, but
| they could be asking for a share of revenue that doesn't exist.
| And if the median artist is making more now than they did before
| Napster, they could be asking for a cut of revenue that has never
| existed.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Digital data has created a fascinating situation for artists
| because every new piece of art/music/video/etc. will henceforth
| always be competing with perfect replicas from the corpus of all
| human creation.
|
| That means the added incremental value of a new unit of art/etc.
| will asymptote to zero.
|
| This is one negative downside to the many upsides of digital
| technology.
| diegoholiveira wrote:
| A genuine question: how much of Spotify royalty payments goes to
| the artist? I mean, many of them have agencies that get a cut of
| this money, or I'm wrong?
|
| I'm asking this because it could improve the artists situations
| if they could get the royalty directly without a middleman?
| Probably someone already did a research in this direction.
| CivBase wrote:
| As I understand, artists haven't made much from record sales or
| radio deals historically. Most of that money goes to publishers.
| Instead, artists used those mediums to boost their popularity and
| made most of their income from merchandise and live performances.
|
| If I had to guess at what's going on here, I'd bet this is driven
| more by publishers than artists. Music publishers are becoming
| increasingly irrelevant as platforms like Spotify enable artists
| to distribute their work more directly at similar margins.
| Artists are probably just the poster child used to garner
| sympathy for the cause from the public.
| mdoms wrote:
| If it's a worldwide event maybe they should define what a "penny"
| is. I think it's USD$0.01 but honestly I could be off by an order
| of magnitude, I really don't know.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| Does anyone know if this so-called union is an _actual_ union? As
| in, do they collect dues, do they represent a substantial % of
| artists, and do its members already collectively bargain with
| Spotify and similar publishers? If Spotify says no, do these
| demands have any teeth?
| rmrfrmrf wrote:
| It looks like yet another cosplay of 20th century labor
| politics, but with the typical 21st century twist of diverting
| the fight from those who wield power to... the paying
| customers, for whatever reason.
| jedimastert wrote:
| Actually, I believe it would be a _guild_ , as artists are not
| actually _employees_ of any particular label or service, but
| just contractors. I also thing Guild is a far cooler name, but
| that 's beside the point!
|
| As for your actual question, no I don't think they are. They
| seem more like an advocacy or lobby group
|
| https://www.unionofmusicians.org/#about
| intellix wrote:
| Reminder that Spotify have forced paying customers to beta test a
| new UI with significant features outright removed without the
| ability to opt out. There's 130 pages (1300 comments) of negative
| feedback and they don't care. I had been paying monthly for a
| decade and have since stopped until they revert my client:
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/New-Desktop...
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| So, if I listen to music for only ~2 hours (120 min) a day, and
| the average song is 4 minutes, that would be ~30 songs a day,
| which would be 30 cents a day. $0.30 * 30 days in a month is
| about $9/month...which is basically my entire subscription fee--
| probably more. Also, there's like 4 people per account if I
| remember correctly.
| aksss wrote:
| In US, Spotify Duo is two accounts for $13/mo. Family is 6
| accounts for $15/mo.
| juancn wrote:
| Penny per stream? That's an awful lot in most countries.
|
| If I stream a record twice I cover my spotify premium fee (US is
| more expensive than Argentina or India, because people can pay
| more).
|
| Copyrights create artificial scarcity, if you don't like it, just
| don't put your music on the platform, you have an effective
| monopoly.
|
| Most music is not that valuable, prices used to be high due to
| cartelization of the publishers and because the media was
| difficult to produce (records, CDs).
|
| Cassettes started changing that, and the internet completely
| destroyed it. There's no going back. If prices go up, piracy will
| too, and you'll likely end up making less money.
| petey283 wrote:
| But isn't this part of the negotiation process? Start with a
| higher demand and work your way to a more reasonable position.
| [deleted]
| Shadonototro wrote:
| when it was Apple/Google/Amazon, they all shut their mouth
|
| now a non US company is #1, they start to yell
|
| you should have complained before
| diddid wrote:
| If artists got a penny per stream, I'd create one song and set it
| up on repeat 24/7.
|
| 365 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes = 525600 minutes 525600 / 3
| minute song = 175200 streams 175200 pennies / 100 = $1752
|
| So I could pay 120 bucks a year and make 1752! I like the sound
| of that! And with the family plan, I could pay 1.5x the cost a
| month but get 5x the revenue!
| hashingroll wrote:
| There has to be a catch here...
| Galanwe wrote:
| The problem here is not the platform itself (Spotify). It'd the
| overall concept of needing a middle man to distribute your work.
|
| I believe blockchain can be a good remedy for unnecessary
| middlemen.
|
| Audius [1] is a good example applied to the music industry.
|
| [1] https://audius.co/
| Hamuko wrote:
| Blockchain is the snake oil of the Internet age. No matter what
| ails you, blockchain is the cure.
| Galanwe wrote:
| I get that you seem bored by the hype around blockchain, but
| that does not make anything blockchain related bad.
|
| In this particular issue, I think blockchain is a great
| solution, as it allows to publish content, gather fees from
| listeners to artists, without the need of an intermediary.
| Eridrus wrote:
| So I wanted to try put this into perspective since "a penny per
| stream" is intentionally meant to sound insignificant.
|
| This seems like it would roughly double Spotify's costs:
| https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/apps/how-much-...
|
| And Spotify is already paying out 75% of it's revenue to royalty
| holders: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-
| features/spotify-pr...
|
| So unless you believe that Spotify is bad at business and there's
| an extra ~75% of revenue Spotify could pull out of a hat, this is
| basically impossible to satisfy without cratering the total
| revenue by doubling prices, which is probably not in artist's
| interests.
| cwkoss wrote:
| The pricing section seems incredibly naive. Why should streams
| be valued at a penny? Why not a tenth of a penny? I don't care
| how many streams it takes to buy a cup of coffee. What is the
| argument that 786 streams per cup of coffee is unfair? (I don't
| think it is)
|
| Being a full time professional musician has only been a means
| to wealth for a handful of people through history. Most
| professional musicians, even successful ones, are unable to
| earn their lifetime expenses from their profession: they make
| some good money if they have a hit and then fade away and have
| to get another job. Or they have capitalize on their brand
| externally to the music market. Has there been any time period
| in the past several centuries when the average musician earned
| a living wage?
|
| The goal of a million full-time professional musicians seems
| arbitrary and I'm not sure why it is necessarily desirable.
|
| Music is a passion, so people are willing to spend time making
| music below market labor rates. With modern digital
| reproduction and ease of recording, demand will never exceed
| supply. I believe the cost of music can and should
| asymptotically approach zero over time as an ever-growing
| public domain becomes good enough for most uses.
| kle wrote:
| While I agree more money should be sent towards small artists
| and I really hate to see myself defending a giant tech company,
| the demands of "x per stream" always makes me a bit confused.
|
| Since spotify already pay out the vast majority of their
| revenue, there is not really much more room for increase there,
| at best 5-10% which likely wouldn't settle the case.
|
| Reasonable suggestions would be that either: 1. labels should
| get less, 2. top artists should get less or 3. consumers should
| pay more.
|
| Or am I missing something?
| jessriedel wrote:
| Maybe the artists think consumers should pay more. If Spotify
| wasn't a quasi-monopoly, it would seem silly for artists to
| demand consumers pay more only on the Spotify platform, but
| since Spotify is, the argument is at least prima facie
| reasonable?
| mattnewton wrote:
| Spotify doesn't seem like a monopoly that has pricing
| power; they are in tight competition with multiple
| streaming services like Apple Music and amazon close behind
| and catching up. There are some sources that have Apple
| Music already with more paid subscribers than Spotify, and
| Spotify definitely can't pay a penny per stream of their
| free ad users.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/653926/music-
| streaming-s...
|
| https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/
| _jstreet wrote:
| > Spotify doesn't seem like a monopoly that has pricing
| power
|
| I'd argue that all music-streaming services have very
| little pricing power!
|
| Streaming services rely on being an easier/friction-free
| option as opposed to piracy (or alternatively, buying the
| copies directly from the musicians).
|
| Your point is still valid though, the competition is
| still fierce; Amazon, Tidal, Apple.. etc.
| notriddle wrote:
| They're also competing with FM radio.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| No, I don't think you are.
|
| For years there's been a conflict broadly defined as
| "streaming rates paid to artists are irrationally low" vs.
| "streaming services aren't making money as it is"; the
| problem is that those aren't mutually exclusive positions.
| They can both be true at the same time.
|
| At least to me, this suggests that the real problem is that
| $8-10 a month for ad-free streams was too low a price point
| to set. If Spotify's pricing structure had been something
| more like Hulu's -- no free tier at all, $6/month with ads
| and $12/month without -- they'd have easily been able to meet
| that penny-per-stream pay rate. (Tidal beats that pay rate,
| but I suspect that's by virtue of charging $20/month for "hi-
| fi" streams.) But, at this point they've set consumer
| expectations: streaming music services cost $10 per month.
| Changing that would be pretty difficult.
| xorcist wrote:
| > the real problem is that $8-10 a month for ad-free
| streams
|
| Which sounds a bit weird to me. How many people used to
| spend more than $10 _every_ _month_ on LP or CD records.
| Probably many enthusiasts, but the _average_ customer? Not
| a chance.
|
| Yet artists say they get paid a lot less. The money must go
| somewhere.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| It's an interesting question. The cost structures are
| obviously very different, and while the assumption is
| that the internet always makes things cheaper and better,
| I haven't dug into that to see how it really plays out in
| this context.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > Yet artists say they get paid a lot less. The money
| must go somewhere.
|
| I don't have any stats for this, but my first guess would
| be _way_ more paid artists (before the internet, how many
| people could even hope to make money off music? Physical
| distribution vs digital distribution is a huge barrier).
| optimiz3 wrote:
| IMO spending $10 a month on CDs is a different market,
| since you own an asset in perpetuity. Spotify would have
| to guarantee a perpetual license that expands your
| library access the more you pay in. Instead, Spotify
| rents access to a single large library (which is good
| enough for most but very different).
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| When I buy a CD, I have a physical good that is displayed
| on my shelf and it's going to stay with me for years, and
| which I can possibly re-sell.
|
| $10 for Spotify gives me a month of listening to music.
| But after that is over, all I got is another $10 payment
| for the next month.
| tpmx wrote:
| Interesting question. The US recorded music market peaked
| year 2000, at $13.4B. (https://musicbusinessresearch.word
| press.com/2014/03/21/the-r...)
|
| With 282 million citizens at the time, that means every
| US citizen spent $3.95/month on CDs. Adjusted for
| inflation it's $7.56.
| wilde wrote:
| Spotify doesn't want to take the risk, but there's probably
| money on the table from all the small gyms, coffee shops, etc
| that should be paying commercial rates.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| I don't know about other countries but in the Netherlands
| companies already pay an additional fee which ends-up with
| the royalty holders [1]. Meaning you have to pay a special
| license fee when playing music in venue's such as stores,
| cafe's and even a common office work space.
|
| [1] https://www.bumastemra.nl/en/everything-for-music-
| users/type...
| m000 wrote:
| They're everywhere in Europe I believe.
|
| In Greece there was the notorious AEPI [1] that was
| collecting fees from both stores, as well as subscriptions
| from artists so they can "represent" them. They were
| demanding fees even when a store owner was listening
| privately in their shop (e.g. they had a radio behind the
| counter). They were dismantled after a corruption scandal:
| most of the collected money ended up as exorbitant salaries
| for the board of directors, with the artists again
| receiving pennies.
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170128110611/http://www.a
| epi.g...
| aksss wrote:
| I think that technically one is supposed to do that in
| commercial spaces in the US as well, but there's an
| enforcement issue. Small businesses aren't really at the
| mercy of roaming enforcement agents, but there are services
| businesses can subscribe to that cover the costs of
| royalties for playing in commercial spaces.
| capableweb wrote:
| I seem to understand that they want "a penny per stream" to go
| to the actual artists, which sometimes are not the royalty
| holders. So paying out less to the royalty holders and more to
| the artists sound like it could work.
| nindalf wrote:
| So the artists have a contract with the record labels to
| share revenue. How is it possible for Spotify to decide to
| split that revenue differently? Or is the demand to increase
| payout to the point that artists make $0.01 per stream?
| capableweb wrote:
| I assume Spotify has agreements with the record labels
| about how much the royalty owner gets for each stream.
| Spotify could argue to change that so it's now 50/50
| between the royalty holder and the artist.
|
| Depending on how much leverage Spotify actually has here,
| they can of course try to change the existing agreements
| they have. Nothing in impossible and harder things have
| changed before.
| barbazoo wrote:
| It makes me sad to time and time again learn that the low
| prices of services I love are unsustainable and instead
| subsidized by treating someone unfairly downstream.
|
| I wish I could be told what the ethical price for something is
| and I might actually pay it.
|
| And if that price is too high, then maybe that service
| shouldn't exist in the first place.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| > It makes me sad to time and time again learn that the low
| prices of services I love are unsustainable and instead
| subsidized by treating someone unfairly downstream.
|
| In general, price competitiveness on the market is based on
| some form of workforce exploitation.
|
| I know it's not a zero sum game and so on, but someone is
| paying the difference on the discounted price you are
| offered.
| path411 wrote:
| There is plenty of money and it is sustainable, it's the
| curse of the middle man taking all of the money. If an
| artist uploads their own songs to spotify, there's plenty
| of money for the artist.
| kfwerf wrote:
| I think it is sustainable if we can cut out the middle man,
| the royalties go mainly to labels and less so to artists.
| E.g. if an artist doesnt use a label on Spotify im sure his
| revenue will be higher and the current price would be
| sustainable. I think the royalties that go to labels are
| unsustainable
| shados wrote:
| Doesn't services like Spotify make that easier?
|
| AFAIK while you need a distributor and can't just upload
| your stuff like you can on Youtube, there's a bunch of them
| that seem to give the artists everything.
|
| If the artist choose to go with a label that takes their
| royalties, that's on them. If they do it because they want
| the visibility and services, that has a cost.
|
| Music is a field where a lot of people do it just for fun,
| and it's quite saturated. Supply (as in diversity of
| products) way outweigh demand.
| disgu wrote:
| Wait - how are you responsible for the fact that the artists
| sign away their rights to shitty big labels that take the
| majority of the money that work generates? How are you
| responsible for dumb decisions musicians make?
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Artists have literally shown up in the comments here
| explaining that it's not that simple, and that these rates
| are issues for people who sign to small/indie labels and
| even artists who _own_ their own labels.
|
| Also, "if you're abused it's your own fault for being dumb"
| is usually a take you want to be pretty careful with.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Being unable to monetize a hobby is not abuse.
| [deleted]
| bogomipz wrote:
| There was time before streaming that artists absolutely
| needed record labels and that was the set of circumstances
| under which they signed deals with record labels. Before
| Youtube and streaming services record labels provided
| distribution of your product to local markets as well as
| promotion of that product in local markets both in stores
| and on radio. The overwhelming majority of the big 3
| records label's catalogs are from that era. How exactly
| does that constitute "dumb decisions musicians make?" Your
| logic is absurd and seems to predicated on somehow being
| able to predict the future.
| kgog wrote:
| I bet you also think grocery workers are dumb for agreeing
| to work while demanding better working conditions and fair
| pay.
|
| They are not dumb decisions. An indie artist HAS to sign
| with labels if they want to make it in the industry. That's
| the way it's been and we've accepted for decades that
| that's the way it will be.
|
| Mistreating workers is not okay. Workers joining the status
| quo to make a living is not dumb. Calling them "dumb"
| online is deplorable, however.
| path411 wrote:
| It's something that's changing drastically every day. An
| indie artist is more and more able to record and upload
| their own song to spotify today than any time before.
| picardythird wrote:
| Just being able to upload to Spotify does not make a
| sustainable career. You need marketing, and you need to
| build up a wide and loyal following of people who will
| buy your stuff.
| [deleted]
| frabjoused wrote:
| Why don't you become a musician and try to make it before
| laying it out like this? They hardly have another choice.
| Do you immediately assume 95% of artists are
| entrepreneurial fools?
| cwkoss wrote:
| There are lots of musicians who aren't producing a
| living-wage's worth of value to listeners.
|
| They do have a choice: they can get a better paying job
| if they don't like the amount they can earn from music.
| Society should not be responsible for funding someone's
| passion when there isn't demand.
|
| And yes, the expectation that you can earn a good living
| just by being a recording artist is foolish. The vast
| majority of musicians throughout history have been unable
| to do so.
| picardythird wrote:
| I'm not sure you get how the music industry works. Getting
| a record contract isn't quite like getting a CS degree,
| passing a coding interview, and being handed 125k and
| benefits by HR. But sure, all these musicians are just dumb
| idiots. Have some respect for artists (unless you hate
| music, I guess).
| jsiepkes wrote:
| I think the 90's (Napster, Kazaa, etc.) has proven people are
| simply not going to pay that kind of money for the product
| (music).
|
| The music industry also seems a bit like a "winner takes all"
| market where there are a bunch of top grossing artists which
| make an insane amount of money and a much, much larger part
| which can't make a decent living out of it.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Almost every major internet content industry is winner
| takes all. That is just the nature of power law
| distributions. Ask your average social media influencer how
| much they make. Also your average YouTuber/Twitch streamer.
| It is not unique to the music industry, just that the music
| industry is older and has more inefficiencies in the form
| of middle man that don't contribute much in value
| production but still takes a large cut.
| ProofByAccident wrote:
| > has more inefficiencies in the form of middle man that
| don't contribute much in value production but still takes
| a large cut.
|
| Not to go laser-eyes Marx, but this is definitely not
| unique to the music industry either
| dublinben wrote:
| The ethical way to pay for music is to actually buy it from a
| site like Bandcamp, instead of perpetually renting it from
| Spotify.[0] Expect to pay about $10 for an album.
|
| Bandcamp usually takes a ~20% cut, but now has regular events
| where they waive their cut.[1]
|
| It should be clear that $10/mo is not a sustainable price to
| pay to listen to any and all music ever recorded.
|
| [0]https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-
| artists-e...
|
| [1]https://isitbandcampfriday.com/
| theragra wrote:
| I don't think this will work. I can spend 8 euro for
| spotify subscription, but if i had to pay for albums, I'll
| buy maybe two a month, then resort to piracy. I don't think
| this is very unethical, bc even if there is no piracy, I
| still won't buy more than two albums. I'll listen to free
| music on soundcloud and YouTube, fm radio, whatever, but I
| won't pay more.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"And Spotify is already paying out 75% of it's revenue to
| royalty holders'
|
| "Royalty holders" is not even an actual term. Copyright holders
| are the owners of master recording - often a record company.
| Streaming services license entire catalogs for a fixed price
| for a fixed period of time. Streaming service don't pay record
| labels royalties. Royalties of which there are two in the
| context of streaming are a) performance royalty and b) a
| mechanical royalty both of which are paid out to the publisher
| and songwriter.
|
| >"So unless you believe that Spotify is bad at business and
| there's an extra ~75% of revenue Spotify could pull out of a
| hat, this is basically impossible to satisfy without cratering
| the total revenue by doubling prices, which is probably not in
| artist's interests."
|
| The whole argument that the current predominant streaming model
| is the only viable business model is flawed. This seems to
| presume that the "pro-rata" distribution model that Spotify
| uses is the only distribution model. There is an alternative
| model that many artists are pushing for which is a the "user
| centric' distribution model. In that model the calculation of
| payments is based on the listening habits of each individual
| user. A simplified examples is that I only listen to one artist
| in a given month. In the user centric model the entire 10% of
| record labels 70% usually allocated to the artist cut is paid
| to that artist rather than those streams being calculated as
| percentage of all songs streamed from that one of the big 3's
| record label's massive catalogs.
| Eridrus wrote:
| > There is an alternative model that many artists are pushing
| for which is a the "user centric' distribution model. In that
| model the calculation of payments is based on the listening
| habits of each individual user. A simplified examples is that
| I only listen to one artist in a given month. In the user
| centric model the entire 10% of record labels 70% usually
| allocated to the artist cut is paid to that artist rather
| than those streams being calculated as percentage of all
| songs streamed from that one of the big 3's record label's
| massive catalogs.
|
| Then they should push for that specifically, but it would not
| change the average rate paid per stream, but rebalance
| payments away from artists which are listened to by heavy
| music users towards artists which are listened to light music
| users.
| bogomipz wrote:
| They push for whatever they feel is right. I was simply
| pointing out that Spotify's distribution model is not the
| only one. It also has nothing to do with "heavy users" vs
| "light users." A heavy user can listen to the same artist
| or same small handful of albums.
| soperj wrote:
| Their business isn't to support Spotify, their business is to
| make money making music. If they can't do that with Spotify,
| then it would be better for them for Spotify to not exist.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > And Spotify is already paying out 75% of it's revenue to
| royalty holders
|
| Realize that the royalty holders are not the musicians, but
| typically the major labels. The musicians get virtually
| nothing.
| johbjo wrote:
| The three or four major media companies/rights holders
| correspond to roughly 75% of streams on Spotify, and probably
| the entire catalogue of music pre 2010. This gives them the
| bargaining power to influence playlists, recommendations, and
| so on. This is what they mean by payola. They can use this to
| launch new artists.
|
| Independent artists don't like this.
| disgu wrote:
| The fact that they're showing up at Spotify's offices then
| shows even more why they're not making money. They seemingly
| don't understand the business they're in... at all.
|
| They sign shitty contracts that leave them with "virtually
| nothing" and then complain to someone who is not responsible
| for them having "virtually nothing".
| lux wrote:
| Unsigned artists don't sign anything with labels but we do
| agree to Spotify's terms, and those terms take from us and
| hand it over to major labels.
|
| If a user pays $10/mo and listens to nothing but indie
| streams, those indies are getting far less than $7.50 (more
| like pennies) due to the way they calculate their payouts.
| The major labels pocket the majority of that money.
|
| Spotify have the ability to change this, but not the will
| to do so, because the major labels own a stake in them.
| Soundcloud recently launched a payment model that matches
| pretty much exactly what indies are asking Spotify to do,
| so we know it's possible but Spotify have been stonewalling
| indies about how it's too complicated for years.
| weddpros wrote:
| "due to the way they calculate their payouts": yes, I'm
| sure that's the real issue, but the solution isn't a
| penny per stream. The solution is definitely to
| redistribute money according to what people listen to,
| but I doubt the big labels will accept these terms: they
| are the ones who negotiated, they are the ones stealing
| from indies.
|
| Best case scenario: indies will get enough pennies so
| they stop complaining, big labels will continue as today,
| Spotify will allocate some of its own money to music
| creation...
|
| and the problem will remain unfixed at the roots.
|
| remember who forced Spotify and others before it, to
| negotiate a deal at all cost with the Majors or be
| declared illegal?
| lux wrote:
| I totally agree, the penny per stream focuses entirely on
| the wrong thing, further entrenching the real issue by
| derailing the whole discussion. It also makes it less
| likely the real issue will be taken as seriously later on
| after we've just "cried wolf" over this one.
|
| On the plus side, services like Soundcloud and Deezer are
| adopting the payment scheme that is the solution to this,
| which opens a potentially more promising avenue through
| which to pursue the issue ("if they can do it, why can't
| you?").
| paxys wrote:
| If you are an indie artist (no record label deals) and
| agree to Spotify's terms, how are major labels involved
| at all? How are they getting the payouts meant for you?
| lux wrote:
| Deezer explains it well here:
|
| https://www.deezer.com/ucps
| paxys wrote:
| Well the size of the pie is still the same in this plan.
| All it would do is shuffle the money around a little bit,
| so some artists earn less and others more. The top demand
| from the linked campaign is for Spotify to pay out >3x
| what they currently do to artists, which is a completely
| different (and much more significant) ask.
| lux wrote:
| That's exactly my point. I'm not arguing for the
| 1c/stream the OP is, rather to follow Deezer's model.
| Major labels are pocketing money that indies earned (and
| if you look into it they're not actually paying all of it
| out to their artists either). With this change indies
| won't be well paid, but they'll be paid fairly.
| number6 wrote:
| and why sign a deal or agree to terms that you don't
| agree to? Just don't go to Spotify?
| lux wrote:
| Tell that to listeners. Many artists don't list
| themselves there for that reason, but you're penalized
| for it because Spotify playlists are increasingly the
| only way many people access music at all. The do or don't
| isn't always so black and white.
| number6 wrote:
| It's the same problem with the use of WhatsApp. If people
| want to talk to me there are other means to contact me.
| It's just that everyone is on WhatsApp. So what choice do
| I have? Be part of the problem or be excluded from social
| life.
| core-questions wrote:
| > They seemingly don't understand the business they're
| in... at all.
|
| Do you know any musicians? Like, real musicians, for whom
| music is their life and their life's work, not dabblers?
|
| Typically these are not shrewd business types. They don't
| hold a lot of negotiating power; if they're lucky enough to
| get a chance with a label deal they often don't push back
| on the terms very much at all. Labels are notoriously
| predatory in this regard, particularly mainstream large
| companies.
|
| All they want is a fair shake. They see themselves and
| their fellow artists being screwed continually, while
| people that have nothing to do with their hard work, long
| nights, and passionate effort make money off their backs.
| For every artist that learns, there are ten more willing to
| take their place just for a tiny sliver of a chance at
| popularity.
|
| The solution here is to do whatever we want to continue the
| slow work towards destroying mainstream labels. Indie
| labels still offer a reasonable value proposition in terms
| of the promotion and recording work they do in exchange for
| a share of the proceeds; mainstream labels don't. Like most
| media industries, they're headed by parenthetical elites,
| cosmopolitan types who have no loyalty to anything but
| profit, and will squeeze out every drop no matter the
| impact to the actual working artists.
|
| Fuck 'em. Don't listen to mainstream music. Support indie
| artists and labels; buy direct wherever possible. If
| anything, the protest should be to make it trivial to
| directly host your music with Spotify for a nominal hosting
| fee, so that all revenue can go direct to the artist,
| rather than having to go through a 3rd party service.
| afavour wrote:
| > They sign shitty contracts that leave them with
| "virtually nothing" and then complain to someone who is not
| responsible for them having "virtually nothing".
|
| I guess that's what you have to do when you're powerless.
| Record labels force you into shitty contracts. They have
| the power. Who has power over the record labels? Spotify.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Who has power over the record labels? Spotify._
|
| What power does Spotify have over record labels?
| tschwimmer wrote:
| Distribution tends to be the hardest part of any supply
| chain and it doesn't seem like music is any different.
| Spotify owns distribution and has almost no competitors
| anymore (either online or offline) and the future is very
| clearly streaming. So the labels will end up depending on
| Spotify for revenue. In 2018, streaming revenue accounted
| for half of all label revenue[0], and that will only
| increase.
|
| [0] https://mashable.com/article/major-music-
| labels-19-million-p...
| Orphis wrote:
| Spotify doesn't own any distribution. The labels do, and
| they could just not renew their contract and move to a
| competitor's service at a whim, destroying the company
| (who wants a service where 1/3 of the artists are not
| available?).
|
| They have the biggest share currently, but they're never
| safe.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Spotify owns distribution and has almost no
| competitors anymore_
|
| According to the statistics I have, Spotify has 34%
| market share while Apple Music has 21%, Amazon Music has
| 15% and others have 30%. That's hardly "no competitors".
| antihero wrote:
| Isn't that a problem generally in the music industry?
| metajack wrote:
| Music rights are split into two traditionally, the
| songwriting copyright and the mechanical reproduction
| right. Previous to the internet, media sales mostly went to
| the labels who held hte mechanical rights and songwriting
| copyright was earned directly to the artist. So if you
| bought a CD the label gets paid, if you play a song on the
| radio an artist gets paid.
|
| The music industry lawyers were incredibly smart when they
| passed the DMCA back before online music was much at all,
| and got internet streaming defined as mechanical
| reproduction so they got dealt in on streaming.
|
| ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, et al, which give large blanket
| licenses to cover most copyrights for songs charged well
| known quantity for licenses, and early music streaming
| services paid those. Harry Fox (at least at the time) was
| the clearing house for mechanical rights and there was
| actually no set rate or anything. DMCA created a compulsory
| license that Harry FOx would have to give, but the rates
| were not known at the time, so everyone was getting VC
| funding without knowing what anything would cost.
|
| That rate is probably much higher than the songwriting
| royalties, so the music industry has succeeding in getting
| ahold of most of the money in a new format that was poised
| to benefit the artists directly.
|
| I guess we should just be glad it didn't happen like video
| streaming and there are actually rights clearing houses so
| companies like Spotify and others can make compelling
| streaming services with very large catalogs, unlike the
| city-state video steaming where you need 3-4 services
| combined to get access to most of the mainstream stuff.
| rsstack wrote:
| Can you, or someone, share a source for the first
| paragraph? It completely changes my perception of music
| royalties and I'd like to be sure before I repeat it :)
| bzbarsky wrote:
| https://www.royaltyexchange.com/blog/mechanical-royalties
| seems like a decent explanation, though I'm not an expert
| in this area...
| robbyking wrote:
| I think this is the main thing most music fans (and young
| musicians) are forgetting: historically, musicians have never
| made money off of album sales, labels have. Musicians make
| the bulk of their money from touring and merchandise.
|
| Steve Albini does a good job of breaking it down here:
| https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music.
|
| FTFA:
|
| > For the average band, a $250,000 advance (in 1993 dollars)
| is distributed like this:
|
| > Record company: $710,000
|
| > Producer: $90,000
|
| > Manager: $51,000
|
| > Studio: $52,500
|
| > Previous label: $50,000
|
| > Agent: $7,500
|
| > Lawyer: $12,000
|
| > Band member net income each: $4,031.25
| conradfr wrote:
| After a pandemic year one might see the problem.
| meddlepal wrote:
| Historically this model made a lot of business sense... it
| was hard to distribute before the internet. The record
| company took the product and marketed and sold it to a
| broader audience than the artist or band would ever be able
| to reach on their own. The artist in turn collected the
| money on the live performances which, if there product was
| successful, would yield good returns.
|
| I don't know if it makes nearly as much sense in a world
| where you can just upload your music to YouTube and do
| direct marketing via Twitter/FB/TikTok.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Yeah, but that's not Spotify's problem to fix.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Well musicians do voluntarily sign the contracts with major
| labels. And they do get payed for it.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/943818966/bob-dylan-sells-
| son...
| pwinnski wrote:
| Is "charging so little you can't cover your rightful costs" bad
| at business? Then yes, I believe that Spotify is bad at
| business.
|
| Hypothetically, my profit margin making widgets would be better
| if I could just pay my raw material provider half-price. I
| could pay them half-price, add, say, another one-third of that
| to cover other costs and overhead, and probably dominate the
| market since I could charge less for my widgets than any
| competitors who have to pay the full raw material costs.
|
| Again, bad at business? Depends on who you're asking.
| Tenal wrote:
| Do you have any idea how much bloat Spotify has that it can
| cut? Have you ever seen the NYC office? It's padded with
| hundreds of overpaid "creatives" poached from every NY agency
| who do nothing more than create unnecessary traditional
| marketing campaigns, all of which serve no one, while spending
| 80% of the day snacking on premium goods and watching insider
| music acts in their gigantic, swanky, luxury office space.
|
| Source: Been there, seen it, a long time. Spotify needs to be
| nothing more than a functioning music utility. Instead their US
| offices are structured like a massive, bloated, 90's style
| agency party zone.
|
| Trust me.
|
| There is room to cut costs.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| According to one source [1], Spotify users stream on average 25
| hours a month. Assuming an average song is 3 minutes [2],
| that's 500 streams per month. Going with the $9.99 per month
| rate, users pay about $0.02 per stream. Currently, the artists
| see only $0.0038 per stream, or less than 1/5th of what Spotify
| makes.
|
| I think that with a 50% profit margin, Spotify should be very
| happy. Of course, it's not that easy / straightforward, all
| conditions and caveats apply, etc etc.
|
| [1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/
| [2]: https://www.music-jobs.com/uk/article/news/news-pop-songs-
| ar...
| Eridrus wrote:
| I feel like you should take Spotify's audited financial
| statements about how much they make and how much they return
| to rights holders (~75% of revenue) more seriously than your
| back of the envelope estimates:
| https://investors.spotify.com/financials/default.aspx
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Agreed. The above calculation for example does not account
| for the fact that Spotify pricing varies significantly
| between countries and can be as little as 1.60$ per month.
|
| https://edm.com/industry/spotify-premium-prices-by-country
| SpaceCenturion wrote:
| Indeed! I have a family account for 6 people here in
| Brazil and I pay around 0.77 USD per person.
| NopeNotToday wrote:
| How much of Spotify's revenue goes towards songwriters,
| labels, distributors, publishers, as opposed to the artist?
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| The quoted $0.0038 is the total of what Spotify pays out to
| the distributor, who then distributes it between
| themselves, the artist, songwriters, their labels, etc.
| [deleted]
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| I tried to look into what radio paid out to these same
| people as a comparison, but the information I found seemed
| to be purposefully obtuse:
|
| https://soundcharts.com/blog/radio-royalties
|
| I couldn't actually find out what was paid, but it did look
| to be that, artists weren't really paid. It was song
| writers and publishers who were paid. Performing artists,
| however, only generated word of mouth which generated
| ticket sales - so far as I could garner.
| grumple wrote:
| You think that the developers and every other party involved
| costs less than 50% here? Devs cost a lot. Bandwidth and
| servers don't cost that much, but for large scale data
| transfer like spotify, it does. Running the company costs a
| lot. Maybe the fair price is double what it currently is. But
| that might result in the artists making less than they
| currently do, not more (this is, in fact, my suspicion - if
| Spotify could increase profits by charging more, they would
| already be doing so).
| smachiz wrote:
| Yes, ignoring all other costs isn't great.
|
| Their revenue per subscriber is also substantively lower -
| including free users, discounted EDU users, and family
| memberships. Excluding free users, it's probably ~$5 per
| user.
|
| That being said, Apple Music pays .75p/stream, Tidal is
| 1.25p/stream. They can probably figure it out.
| vardaro wrote:
| The nominal figure of what the platform per stream pays
| artists should not be discussed without taking into
| consideration the amount of monthly active users using the
| platform. Tidal and AM have significantly fewer users than
| Spotify
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| > Yes, ignoring all other costs isn't great.
|
| > Their revenue per subscriber is also substantively lower
| - including free users, discounted EDU users, and family
| memberships. Excluding free users, it's probably ~$5 per
| user.
|
| > That being said, Apple Music pays .75p/stream, Tidal is
| 1.25p/stream. They can probably figure it out.
|
| Their rates are per country, they differ. So these
| calculations gave to it into account, but everyone pays the
| 5 or whatever it costs now in the west.
| smachiz wrote:
| The amount they pay per stream differs per country too, I
| think.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| If they cannot pay the artists more, a long-term freemium
| plan might not be a great business model then. If free
| users are seriously cutting into profits, should they
| change the free plan to a limited free trial? I was around
| in the 80s 90s and we didn't really have free cassettes and
| CDs and radio paid studios & artists with ad revenue.
| Spotify is well known enough now that it could be argued an
| unending free tier may no longer be necessary.
| mattnewton wrote:
| This doesn't make sense to me, it's not that they are
| eating into profits, it's that they are eating into
| average margin; they presumably still at least break even
| on free users. And I would bet dollars to donuts that
| those free users are not going to convert to paid when
| piracy, YouTube videos, and free trials of other services
| exist.
| Rule35 wrote:
| I think Spotify is the first service to tempt me from
| piracy. Piracy doesn't handle discovery, or access across
| multiple devices, is a pain, and is actually (who knew?)
| illegal. Spotify handles all of those _and_ won 't get
| you arrested.
|
| Youtube for music is simply worse than pirating and being
| caught.
| dont__panic wrote:
| To be fair, back in the day I used last.fm for music
| discovery, social music stuff, etc. and the more Spotify
| forces podcasts down my (paying subscription) throat the
| more I want to go back to piracy + last.fm.
| Rule35 wrote:
| Perhaps the dynamics have changed since you had to shop
| for music in physical stores, and purchase it in hour-
| long increments.
|
| I certainly play more music now than when I had to change
| the tape, but without the ritual and the intent, I
| _listen_ a lot less. This changes my value from streaming
| over simply not having to store my music library locally.
|
| It doesn't cost an artist more to be played more, but it
| does cost the streaming service. This may bring more
| casual listening and help some artists, and "underpay"
| someone who's more famous and would get the bulk of the
| first-song play that comes from intent. I don't think
| it's "wrong" but it may be the wrong fit for any given
| artist.
| mrgreenfur wrote:
| Totally agree. Maybe spotify should look like an app
| store with fees in the 30% range at the top end
| (shopify/apple/steam). Their role is very similar:
| distribution and discovery. They probably could wi points
| giving better payouts per stream to smaller artists too,
| like steam does. Hopefully competition will force it down
| too (eg epic vs steam vs apple). We might need open
| access to back catalogues and not exclusive deals, but
| its a start
| mattnewton wrote:
| The App Store for music exists many times over and users
| (including myself) prefer a lower cost streaming model.
| There is simply too much cheap or free music out there
| now for me to value it at iTunes singles prices.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Of course, and users would prefer completely free music
| over cheap music too. That doesn't mean it's sustainable,
| though.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I mean, short of government legislation the market isn't
| going to stop driving the price of music down. The
| marginal cost of additional "performances" of the song is
| almost zero and people are constantly making new
| recordings for free because they love doing so. I don't
| see why making a living off digitally recorded music has
| to be sustainable, and I don't see how it can be when the
| supply is so endless.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| The $0.0038 figure is probably due in part to the way Spotify
| calculates royalties, dividing a pool of all subscriber
| revenue among all streaming activity, rather than dividing
| the revenue from each subscriber among each subscriber's
| streaming activity.
|
| Some have pointed to logistical challenges in the latter
| model, but it's clearly not impossible, as SoundCloud just
| announced it will be the first service to adopt it:
| https://press.soundcloud.com/197001-soundcloud-introduces-
| fa...
| lumost wrote:
| The problem is that most artists do not own the distribution
| rights to their own music, these are owned by various record
| labels. Many top tier artists create their own record labels
| and shoulder the cost of advertising/promotion while also
| dramatically increasing their cuts.
|
| The fact that individuals aren't able to break out via self-
| publishing music is an oddity in the internet age. Why aren't
| there more avenues to hear "random new artist that matches my
| tastes"? or is it self-perpetuating that labels sign all
| successful artists who can go mainstream?
| indigochill wrote:
| >Why aren't there more avenues to hear "random new artist
| that matches my tastes"?
|
| Because Bandcamp is perfect at this and nobody can beat
| them.
|
| I say that with tongue in cheek, but they have been the
| platform for average musicians to self-publish on for a
| while. They've even totally foregone their cut periodically
| during the pandemic to help artists. And unlike Spotify,
| artists are able to apply their own branding to their
| pages. I've never met a musician with a bad thing to say
| about them or their platform.
| brabel wrote:
| I like to listen to jango.com which tries to "push" new
| artists while you listen to some "station"... I've found a
| few good "completely unknowns" there, but most stuff they
| push is really low quality. I think that a platform where
| you could discover new artists easily using a system
| similar to this (play mainstream artists, mostly, but throw
| in a few songs from unknown artists that play similar
| genres), but then had an option to "upgrade" to get stuff
| like offline access to artists you like, could become very
| successful.
| tekromancr wrote:
| > play mainstream artists, mostly, but throw in a few
| songs from unknown artists that play similar genres
|
| Isn't that just "radio"?
| derivagral wrote:
| This is Pandora, right?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(streaming_service)
| incrudible wrote:
| If Spotify is in fact spending 75% of its revenue on
| royalties, but according to you less than 25% of it arrives
| at the artist, what does that tell you? Either your
| calculation is wrong, or somebody who is _not Spotify_ is
| pocketing the difference.
| 015a wrote:
| Think about a strategic decision like this: Spotify decides
| to pay-out a $0.005/stream rate to Taylor Swift. That's more
| than most artists make, but its what Taylor demands, and
| Taylor holds some cards here because she's popular.
|
| Let's say that Spotify says No. Spotify's argument is, in
| effect, all artists are sharing a piece of the same pie; if
| they give Taylor Swift a higher than average rate, it lowers
| the average payout for every other artist. By saying No, in
| this hypothetical universe, Spotify is standing up for indie
| artists.
|
| Taylor (more accurately, her rights holders) does not put her
| music on Spotify. Customers who come to Spotify for Taylor
| Swift's music no longer feel that their subscription is
| worthwhile; they stop paying.
|
| Now, the pie is smaller. Indie artists receive a bigger chunk
| of a smaller pie. Customers are left without the music they
| want. Spotify's revenue is lower. Everyone loses.
|
| Its easy to place the blame at Spotify, and I'm sure they
| deserve some, but we've known for about half a century that
| the record industry is a hive of shit, and this is just
| another symptom of this. The disparity in income between the
| popular artists and average artists is huge, and its mostly
| because of gatekeeping that the popular artists actively
| engage in to protect their nine-figure fortunes. Spotify
| could have stood up for smaller artists, but I'm not
| convinced they'd even exist today if they had; it was really
| their willingness to work with the record industry that
| turned them into the force they are.
|
| I do have some hope that Square's purchase of Tidal could be
| a catalyst for change in the industry. In other words, if
| they maintain Tidal's high(est) revenue share with artists,
| improve the user experience (a lot), leverage their existing
| industry relationships to keep enough popular artists on the
| platform, and work with indie artists... it could be very
| good. I'm optimistic. I think Tidal's core investors being
| artists themselves and a traditionally low-margin payment
| processor is actually very healthy, versus Spotify who
| effectively is just a middle-man that needs to extract enough
| to survive.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Are only paid plans paying out royalties? I used to pay for
| spotify, but cut it after a budget rebalance since we just
| didn't use it enough. I still use it about 50% as much as
| when I paid.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| The other issue that has been raised a number of times is
| that I believe the revenue is still divided up based on
| overall listens across the platform, which means it's
| dominated by artists who feature heavily in popular playlists
| and automation-driver radio/recommendations.
|
| These listens are often passive and should not be considered
| as valuable as those of someone listens only a few hours a
| month, but spends all of that time listening to specific
| artists (indie or otherwise).
|
| Basically the argument is that if I spend $9.99 on a Spotify
| sub, the entirety of that cash (minus Spotify's cut) should
| be directed to the actual artists I listened to.
|
| Here's an articulation of this perspective from 2014:
| https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-to-make-streaming-
| royalties-...
| Rule35 wrote:
| Should is a big word, but it feels like Spotify could make
| us indie-lovers happy by rewarding the intentional listens
| with slightly more money. Perhaps giving them a cut of the
| next few recommendations. Even though I know that famous
| artists would get more of this than the indies, taking
| value from the long mid-catalog.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I think that's risky because then there's some process
| that puts you in one of the two buckets, and there's
| probably going to be a valley of suck between them, where
| you're big enough that you don't qualify for the indie
| special treatment, but not so big that you're raking it
| in like Taylor Swift.
|
| The nice thing about the proposal from the article is
| that in theory it should be something where everyone's
| incentives are aligned, since it rewards artists and
| genres for having fans who listen to their stuff a lot.
| Rule35 wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I mean by the mid-catalog. People you
| didn't quite go intending to play, and not the
| headliners. To the degree that it's a fairness discussion
| though it always comes down to sorting into buckets (even
| if absolutely identical buckets) and arguing for some
| distribution.
|
| Good point. That's the sort of thing that warms the
| cockles of my artist-supporting heart.
| [deleted]
| tebbers wrote:
| I agree with this argument, and this is THE reason why I
| don't pay for a streaming subscription. I have no desire to
| see my money to go to the likes of Justin Bieber (who I
| don't listen to), whereas I would much prefer it goes to
| the smaller ambient and indie artists that I like to listen
| to while working.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Spotify should charge by the minute so you turn it off when
| you're not actually listening.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| They do kick you off after a while if you're a free
| account, but the marginal cost of the bandwidth for them
| is basically nothing. Anyway, it's 2021-- who would
| accept a pay-per-time-listened Spotify in an age where
| Netflix, Hulu, Prime, and Disney+ are all all-you-can-eat
| for a similar price?
| anchpop wrote:
| If there's two groups of people, one who listens to pop
| music for 10 hours a month and one who listens who indie
| artists for 20 hours a month (which could easily be the
| case if their recommended playlists are mostly indie
| artists as mine is), then switching to the model you
| propose would reduce how much money indie artists make,
| right?
|
| It seems more fair to me that artists would get a set
| amount of money per stream, rather than the amount they get
| being dependent on how many other songs their listeners
| listened to.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I think the argument is not that it's the 10 vs 20 hour
| listeners, but rather the 10-40 hour listeners (workday)
| vs the 700 hour listeners (radio playing in the corner of
| a breakroom somewhere).
|
| The 700 hour listener has no audience and no human
| curation, and yet it's got 10x the influence on who gets
| paid by Spotify.
|
| The article I linked also makes a really good point about
| this model motivating artists to encourage listeners/fans
| to listen to whole albums rather than single songs--
| right now if you're playing Spotify for revenue, the only
| thing that matters is landing your songs on popular
| playlists where they will get hundreds of thousands of
| passive plays. The incentives there are not really
| aligned to what anyone wants long term out of music.
| babelfish wrote:
| Right, but artists don't care whether you're listening to
| their music actively or passively. Whether you stream
| 10-20 hours or 700 hours, 1 stream is 1 stream. I don't
| see why this should affect the payout
| edoceo wrote:
| Doesn't Spotify say "don't play at work"? Seems it
| shouldn't be on in the break room
| Closi wrote:
| It's not inherently clear to me that one play should be
| paid more than another play.
|
| In fact, having a different fee per play dependent on the
| user is a pretty opaque and unclear metric. "How much are
| 1 million plays worth? It depends on your audience - if
| your listeners listen to lots of music you get paid less
| per play, and you will just have to trust us to compute
| an appropriate fee for you correctly."
|
| No matter how you cut these things there are pluses and
| minuses . You seem to think that Universal should get
| paid less for a single Katy Perry stream played from a
| global playlist compared to a small indie song streamed
| in a private playlist, and while that's a valid opinion
| it's not intrinsic or even self evident to me.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I don't think it would be that hard to show a small
| histogram which had your plays bucketed across different
| levels of commitment, engagement or some similar metric.
| Or instead of doing it that way, you'd bucket the users,
| so say "for song X, you had 30k unique users listen to it
| in the royalty time period, and here's a histogram of how
| engaged they were, with the left side being a small
| number of users who listened to it a lot or didn't listen
| to much else, and the right side being the large pool of
| users who heard it once and listened to many other
| things.
|
| The reason this is good for artists is that it rewards
| them for what many want to be cultivating anyway: a
| relationship with enthusiastic fans, rather than faceless
| "plays" which could have come from anywhere.
|
| In any case, obviously the conversation is DOA if you
| start it from a foundational assumption that "a play is a
| play", but if we acknowledge upfront that artist
| compensation has always been weird and often quite unfair
| (see radio royalties, for example-- they sure as hell
| aren't getting compensated by how many people were tuned
| into a radio station playing their song), then there's
| room to discuss better options in a new medium that sits
| somewhere in between the old roles filled by FM radio and
| private collections of physical media.
| Closi wrote:
| > In any case, obviously the conversation is DOA if you
| start it from a foundational assumption that "a play is a
| play"
|
| That's not my foundational assumption, but I've also not
| heard a compelling argument that one play / minute
| streamed _should_ be inherently more valuable than
| another play / minute streamed.
|
| It's also not clear how this value would be calculated,
| because I also don't think it's clear that proportion of
| listen time by user necessarily captures the difference
| in 'value' of one play against another.
|
| It also feels like it will be very complex to negotiate
| with rights providers. Spotify's current negotiations
| with rights providers are really simple and easy to
| understand - we divvy up our revenue by play count, you
| are responsible for $x revenue by this metric, so let's
| negotiate the %. Moving all providers to another weird
| metric would be an extremely tough thing to do,
| particularly because having half on one and half on
| another would likely happen for a crossover, and would
| result in a loss of profit during the transition period.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I don't think it'll necessarily happen via Spotify
| renegotiating it. It'll happen via a competitor offering
| this scheme, and indie labels pulling their content from
| Spotify.
|
| The obvious player to offer this competing service is
| Bandcamp. They haven't yet, though an awful lot of the
| pieces are in place-- they have a mobile app that lets
| you trivially stream anything you've ever purchased and
| listen on trial to things you haven't, and it even has
| genre playlists and recommendations:
|
| https://www.npr.org/2020/08/19/903547253/a-tale-of-two-
| ecosy...
| natdempk wrote:
| I agree and I think this is really the key demand that they
| should have organized around. Splitting up the revenues
| based on what you actually listen to is really how things
| should work from a fairness perspective to artists. It also
| is likely more compatible with heavier listeners than their
| demand of 1c per stream. To put that number into context, I
| listen to ~1000 songs per month on Spotify and I pay $2.50
| for Spotify each month using a family plan. I'm not sure
| how the economics of 1c per stream are supposed to work out
| there.
|
| Soundcloud has already gone in the direction of paying out
| based on what you actually listen to, and it would be great
| to see Spotify and other platforms follow suit. See
| http://fanpoweredroyalties.com/ for more details on
| Soundcloud's implementation.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Aren't your listens to an indie artist still driving up
| their listens across the platform? It's an interesting
| point that Spotify's algorithms probably drive more listens
| to popular artists, but I think overall listen-count it
| still the most equitable metric.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| The point is that it's about valuing the content which
| actually makes or breaks people's decision to subscribe
| to the service. Spotify is convenient, but it wouldn't
| survive on top-40 content because people would just go
| back to their MP3s or listen to it on YouTube.
|
| I'm pretty sure that Netflix understands this, by the
| way-- they know that deep-pocketed competitors like
| Amazon are going to eat their lunch if they try to do
| mass-appeal prestige shows starring A-list celebs, so
| they only do a few of those (enough to basically fill the
| homepage), while leaning hard into extremely niche
| content. Like, have you seen how many weird cooking shows
| there are on there? Or Hallmark Christmas movies? This is
| stuff that's harder to find elsewhere, and there are
| dedicated audiences on Netflix who are _mostly or
| exclusively consuming it_. If Netflix 's internal
| accounting worked like how Spotify pays royalties, those
| shows would be instantly canceled in favour of new
| primetime-style sitcoms.
|
| But they aren't, and I think it's because there are pools
| of their subscribers who will cancel the service if there
| isn't a steady stream of the specific content they're
| interested in. Thus, their subscriber $$$ go _directly_
| to funding that content, rather than into a general pot
| that 's broken up by raw viewership numbers.
| [deleted]
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Isn't Spotify barely making a profit?
|
| I think the real issue here is that people just don't want to
| pay as much for music like they did during the golden age of
| the CD. Most Spotify users are still on the free tier. Blaming
| streaming companies isn't gonna change that.
| hansvm wrote:
| Last I checked that wasn't exactly the problem, at least not
| by itself -- even accounting for inflation we're spending
| several times more per capita per month on music than we used
| to "during the golden age of the CD." Moreover, a much higher
| percentage of that revenue is actually going to artists than
| in years past.
|
| Faced with that reality, it would be interesting to know what
| is actually going on. Is total dollars spent on music not
| reflective of what artists used to make? Are there just that
| many more musicians than there used to be? Was it way harder
| to make a living making music in years past than we're giving
| it credit for? Are artifacts of pay-per-listen rather than
| pay-per-song causing a different payout distribution
| impacting the majority of musicians (e.g., you used to have
| to buy a CD to listen to a song just once)?
| [deleted]
| ksec wrote:
| And that is 75% to Labels.
|
| Why aren't these people targeting those labels?
|
| Why aren't these people targeting others like Apple?
|
| Or they want Spotify to operate as a Non-Profit because Apple
| is currently making Apple Music a Net Zero Profit business? (
| Diluting there services revenue margin )
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Are there any figures on the % of overall Spotify revenue taken
| by platform owners ie. Apple and Google?
| Eridrus wrote:
| None. Spotify doesn't use any of the platform mechanisms for
| monetization that take fractions of revenue. This is why you
| have to sign up on the web for Spotify.
| varispeed wrote:
| Why artists on Spotify are not treated the same as Uber drivers?
| They are in fact employees providing content for the platform.
| From that perspective, Spotify should be paying at least a
| minimum wage for every artist signed on to the platform, plus any
| streaming money as a bonus. There is also a problem that some
| artists (from major labels) get more money than small artists for
| the same number of streams. I think this should be looked into by
| a regulator. The same way as workers doing the same job should be
| paid the same salary, artists should be receiving the same money
| per stream.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > They are in fact employees providing content for the
| platform. From that perspective, Spotify should be paying at
| least a minimum wage for every artist signed on to the platform
|
| the solution would be to remove all indie artists, and most of
| the rest too, and only keep the top 1% of pop/rock musicians.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Not all music has value. Music is almost never a full time job.
| Supply vastly outpaces demand.
|
| If I record the sound of myself taking a crap and upload it to
| Spotify, do I deserve to get a perpetual minimum wage for being
| an artist?
| emilecantin wrote:
| They only hint at this, but I think a user-centric distribution
| model would be much better: define a percentage split (let's say
| 30% for Spotify, 70% for artists), and split that percentage of
| revenue between the artists THAT THE USER LISTENED TO.
|
| I think that they currently use a global split, which over-
| represents "users" like stores, gyms, etc.
| jlelse wrote:
| That's what Deezer proposed: https://www.deezer.com/ucps
| Aissen wrote:
| Indeed, it would be much more interesting. Deezer might be on
| track to implement it in France (not sure when?) but a recent
| study (in french) gives a lot of information on its potential
| impact:
|
| https://cnm.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CNM_UCPS_SyntheseF...
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Meanwhile, I have spent quite a bit directly to bands using band
| camp, buying music and vinyl there.
|
| In the end, if Spotify is not a sustainable business model for
| you as a musical artist, maybe it is time to look for
| alternatives, especially those where they do not directly compete
| with mega-acts?
| csommers wrote:
| Then don't put your band there. Oh wait: you'd be complaining
| about Bandcamp and no recognition then.
|
| Not everything needs to be "justice". Quit diluting words and
| actions.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| so streaming music has eaten several different cakes - it has
| eaten the cake of radio in which I doubt the artist got 1p per
| play, it has eaten home taping in
| https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/21/arts/issue-and-debate-roy...
| in which there was some money paid out for the purchase of home
| taping equipment but which I think would not at all reach 1p per
| listen, it has eaten into the album which often cost enough that
| people bought them intermittently as a few albums could represent
| a significant part of disposable income, and it has eaten into
| the singles market (a small record with a b-track on the opposite
| side - already quite killed by cassettes and CDs)
|
| The people fighting for 1p per stream want to focus on the
| killing of the album because in that way they look like poor
| mistreated artists who are just asking for crumbs considering
| what was taken from them.
|
| And spotify etc. want to argue they are the ones who killed the
| radio, and thus it should cost them hardly anything and they are
| already paying way too much.
|
| But at any rate 1p per stream is actually quite a significant
| increase in price considering what the user gets.
|
| With an album one got album art etc. Lyrics / liner notes. And a
| number of songs - let us say 16 songs.
|
| Nowadays you have to do your own work for the album art and
| lyrics, and could conceivably be asked to pay separately for
| them.
|
| This is all a long time ago but I would think it was $10 dollars
| per average CD during the heyday. (somebody here surely knows the
| actual number)
|
| So 62.5 pennies per song if 16 songs.
|
| Perhaps it should be 1p per stream, max cost 63p per song per
| user?
|
| that of course still means spotify eats the part of the market
| that buys more than one version per year, as someone with ADHD I
| have had to buy London Calling about 20+ times in my life. At
| some point I think I should get it for free.
|
| so 1p per song streamed, max 63p per person per song every two
| years. If they asked for that I would think that is maybe a bit
| more than its worth, but also approaching fairness.
|
| But they aren't asking for that, even though they should be able
| to think these things through easier and quicker than I can - so
| until they start asking for something resembling an actual fair
| deal I say screw them.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| just noting also - if you were to make 1p per song without any
| of my proposed limitations or similar then given the fact that
| people consume the songs they loved in their 20s all their
| lives, if you could manage to have a couple top streaming hits
| for that age group for a couple years you might just be able to
| go fishing for the rest of your life!
| prionassembly wrote:
| Honest question: why are all those people not on Bandcamp
| instead?
| blfr wrote:
| What is the average number of streams per user on Spotify?
| According to Last.fm, I listened to 55k songs last year, vast
| majority of it through Spotify.
| philderbeast wrote:
| many of the demands listed, while well intentioned, are ill
| considered at best.
|
| Take the first demand for instance, pay $0.01 per play. on the
| face this sounds fine, until you look at the economics of this.
| Spotify Premium is $9.99, that means for every premium user there
| is only 999 plays per month at BEST if you don't consider any
| other overheads, before that payment is exhausted (not including
| things like discounts for 12 month plans, student and family
| pricing).
|
| This is not to say artists shouldn't get paid more, but how many
| people would take say a 10x price increase to fund this level of
| payment?
|
| That's not to mention they also want to remove the income stream
| of artists paying for increased plays on the platform (pushing
| more cost to the user)
|
| again, the demands may be well intentioned, and many should just
| be adopted such as crediting all labour for a recording, but
| obviously no-one has looked at the economics' it would take to
| actually realise the level of payment being asked for here and
| thought about if consumers would be willing to pay that price.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > Pay us at least one cent per stream
|
| > Spotify generally pays between $. 003 and $. 005 per stream
|
| Is Spotify making so much money that paying 3 orders of magnitude
| more money per stream is a realistic option?
| Reason077 wrote:
| They're not asking for "orders of magnitude" more, but 2-3X
| more. The current average royalty is 0.38c per stream, and they
| want 1c per stream.
|
| That said, apparently most of Spotify's revenues already goes
| to pay artists, so it would not be achievable without
| significant increases in Spotify's fees. This would in turn
| reduce user numbers, leading to fewer streams, more users
| turning to piracy, etc.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| The places I'm looking show much, much lower numbers.
|
| > Spotify generally pays between $.003 and $.005 per stream
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-does-spotify-pay-
| pe...
|
| > Spotify paid the artists $0,0032 per stream
|
| https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts
|
| It's also worth noting, we're not talking about the total
| amount payed per stream, we're talking about the amount that
| makes it specifically to the artists. From the article being
| discussed
|
| > To pay the median American monthly rent ($1,078) an artist
| needs to generate 283,684 recurring streams monthly.
|
| Those number directly align with 0.38c per stream going to
| the artists (283,684 * 0.0038 = 1078). And since everywhere
| else seems to indicate that somewhere around 3-5/100th of
| that amount actually goes to artists, I'm curious what the
| disconnect it.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" The places I'm looking show much, much lower numbers.
| > Spotify generally pays between $.003 and $.005 per
| stream"_
|
| This seems consistent with the 0.38c suggested in the
| www.unionofmusicians.org website. "$.003" = 0.3c, right?
| RHSeeger wrote:
| I apologize, you are right. I misread it as talking about
| cents based on the second reference and then my brain
| just decided to take it's own path.
|
| Thank you for taking the time to make me go back and look
| at my numbers. My apologies for wasting _your_ time.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Has music become a commodity, and if so, should it face price
| regulation such like other commodities?
| aksss wrote:
| Noise is a commodity.
| johbjo wrote:
| Copyright and licensing is complicated, in the sense that a track
| has many different copyright holders, and the record companies
| usually make sure to own distribution rights by contract. The
| composers and artists might be powerless, even though they own
| the actual rights (which can not be sold or transferred). This
| partly the reason why the major labels hold so much power.
|
| Here is a great source for learning more:
| http://copyx.org/lectures/
| Reason077 wrote:
| It's curious how the advent of streaming has seemingly resulted
| in boom times for television and film producers, yet apparently
| not so for musicians.
|
| Yet we pay roughly the same per month for a Spotify subscription
| as we do for Netflix or Amazon Prime.
|
| Is this just because when it comes to music, the revenue is
| spread much more thinly, amongst more artists?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Justice would be paying out revenue on a per-streamer basis.
|
| I pay $10/mo to spotify, lets say $7 makes it to artists. If I do
| 100% of my streams for Obscure Band X, shouldn't 100% of my $7 go
| to Obscure Band X?
|
| Right now, I end up a large fraction of that $7 to Taylor Swift,
| the weeknd, drake, etc, and not the actual performers I listen
| to.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| Seems like the artists are barking at the wrong tree. Don't get
| me wrong, I'm all for artists getting their fair share for
| something they created.
|
| Spotify has to deal with the record labels because they own the
| licensing rights, there isn't much Spotify can do about it
| themselves.
|
| The only thing I could see Spotify doing is to become a label
| themselves, and giving a bigger slice of the piedirectly to
| artists under them. But that could also bring some consequences,
| like becoming Spotify-exclusives, etc.
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