Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 162 posts

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#101

Post by anotheryou »

dom96 wrote: post #82
bergjs wrote: post #59

Spotify is the one service I'm happy to pay for. Their weekly mixes keep blowing my mind because it's such a great way to discover new music tailored to my taste. Plus, Spotify connect is a genius way to play music on loudspeakers. It works incredibly well with my Bose speakers. My impression is that they will continue to innovate in all kinds of areas so I think they have a good chance of winning. I needed to write…

While i have discovered a couple good songs in Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, i do find it a common occurrence nowadays that songs which i have listened to in the past are included. Does anyone else have that experience? Perhaps Spotify is just having a really hard time finding music related to my tastes?

It used to be great for me for about 1/2 a year, now it's not I hardly find anything new I like in the mix.

I allways skipped most of the songs, but if it manages to give me 1-2 new tracks I like and never heard before this is a big big win for me.

Back when pirate music blogs where still popular I used to skip through tracks of about 70 different artists a day, download 5 albums of these, and than keep maybe 2 albums a week, buying it when I returned to them more often too. Spotify was really a huge leap forward, being able to skip thorugh albums legally and "aquiring" as many as I whish.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#102

Post by lando2319 »

dom96 wrote: post #82
bergjs wrote: post #59

Spotify is the one service I'm happy to pay for. Their weekly mixes keep blowing my mind because it's such a great way to discover new music tailored to my taste. Plus, Spotify connect is a genius way to play music on loudspeakers. It works incredibly well with my Bose speakers. My impression is that they will continue to innovate in all kinds of areas so I think they have a good chance of winning. I needed to write…

While i have discovered a couple good songs in Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, i do find it a common occurrence nowadays that songs which i have listened to in the past are included. Does anyone else have that experience? Perhaps Spotify is just having a really hard time finding music related to my tastes?

I've noticed they added "daily mixes", these are on the Home tab, these are playlist made up of songs within your collection, grouped by genre, then they add new songs, based on that, that they anticipate you will like.

Also I noticed if you're listening to a playlist when it ends it will automatically start a Radio based on the songs within that playlist.

I love the Alexa and Google Home Integrations.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#103

Post by tjoff »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #89
tjoff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that because the artists are having shitty deals with the record labels though?

If you are completely independent the amount you get per play (before your distributor - e.g. CDBaby - takes a cut) is $0.006 - $0.008. If we say you get the max per play and you're a one person act (not a band) you need about 250,000 streams to make $2000 (just about enough money to live on). Obviously you have other ways to generate income (merch, touring) but even getting anywhere near that number of monthly strea…

If I understood it correctly about 50% (old and perhaps quite obsolete figure) of the monthly fee goes to labels and artists. That sounds reasonable to me, and given that that means roughly $5 goes directly to labels and artists from my subscription.

A Spotify subscription is more than I have ever paid for music, even half of it is - and the moment I stop my subscription I loose access to all of it. To me it sounds like the labels are the ones dictating, one way or another, who get's paid and how much.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#104

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

andymurd wrote: post #88
dom96 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While i have discovered a couple good songs in Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, i do find it a common occurrence nowadays that songs which i have listened to in the past are included. Does anyone else have that experience? Perhaps Spotify is just having a really hard time finding music related to my tastes?

Discover weekly is the reason that I pay for Spotify. I'm an old guy that prefers vinyl to mp3s, misses the local record store terribly and hates radio, so modern music distribution sucks for me. I first tried Spotify many years ago, back when playlists were quite new. At the time, I was living in the UK and a big user of last.fm but, out of curiosity, I spent an afternoon building one playlist out of the few tracks…

I agree. I don't know the magic that goes into programming Discover Weekly but any time I try another service, it is what brings me back to Spotify.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#105

Post by lucb1e »

tormeh wrote: post #92
thirdsun wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pay them because I want to compensate artists. You're paying the wrong people then. If you want to help artists buy their music instead of renting it from streaming services, which may lose access to it at any time.

Labels take most of that as well. Spotify isn't the problem - the labels are.

Yeah I've thought about this. Grooveshark tried to cut out that middle-man and they got sued to hell by the labels.

If artists keep signing with labels, their problem. You don't need a label to be on Spotify.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#106

Post by lucb1e »

StavrosK wrote: post #94
tormeh wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labels take most of that as well. Spotify isn't the problem - the labels are.

Aren't the labels basically the VCs that enabled the artists to reach you in the first place?

In the old days where you needed to print lots of CDs and distribute them, maybe. These days, I'm not sure they're really necessary. But then I'm not an artist so I can't really say.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#107

Post by aczerepinski »

dom96 wrote: post #82
bergjs wrote: post #59

Spotify is the one service I'm happy to pay for. Their weekly mixes keep blowing my mind because it's such a great way to discover new music tailored to my taste. Plus, Spotify connect is a genius way to play music on loudspeakers. It works incredibly well with my Bose speakers. My impression is that they will continue to innovate in all kinds of areas so I think they have a good chance of winning. I needed to write…

While i have discovered a couple good songs in Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, i do find it a common occurrence nowadays that songs which i have listened to in the past are included. Does anyone else have that experience? Perhaps Spotify is just having a really hard time finding music related to my tastes?

I subscribe to Apple Music and have the same experience there. Their personalized recommendations are almost exclusively albums I've recently listened to.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#108

Post by lucb1e »

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #98
lucb1e wrote: post #79

As a paying Spotify member, practices like these only make me want to switch to DRM-free music more. Blackmailing artists with "we won't promote you if you don't lower your prices" and wasting half a million on 2 weeks of exclusivity. That's not what I'm paying them for; I pay them because I want to compensate artists.

If you want to compensate artists, buy their albums on Bandcamp. If they're not on Bandcamp, tell them to get on :)

It doesn't scale to seek them all out individually. I've tried this in the past but it just doesn't work. Usually they don't even have a proper contact method other than through the label or a public channel like Twitter.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#109

Post by lucb1e »

bobsam wrote: post #80
lucb1e wrote: post #79

As a paying Spotify member, practices like these only make me want to switch to DRM-free music more. Blackmailing artists with "we won't promote you if you don't lower your prices" and wasting half a million on 2 weeks of exclusivity. That's not what I'm paying them for; I pay them because I want to compensate artists.

What if some artists demand to be compensated more than everyone else? It's a zero sum game after all.

I don't understand what you mean by that. I'm talking about promoting artists by pushing their numbers into people's auto-generated playlists (the weekly discovery list and the top charts), not being on Spotify at all.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#110

Post by k-mcgrady »

tjoff wrote: post #103
k-mcgrady wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are completely independent the amount you get per play (before your distributor - e.g. CDBaby - takes a cut) is $0.006 - $0.008. If we say you get the max per play and you're a one person act (not a band) you need about 250,000 streams to make $2000 (just about enough money to live on). Obviously you have other ways to generate income (merch, touring) but even getting anywhere near that number of monthly strea…

If I understood it correctly about 50% (old and perhaps quite obsolete figure) of the monthly fee goes to labels and artists. That sounds reasonable to me, and given that that means roughly $5 goes directly to labels and artists from my subscription. A Spotify subscription is more than I have ever paid for music, even half of it is - and the moment I stop my subscription I loose access to all of it. To me it sounds l…

I'm not sure I understand. The numbers I quoted were for someone not signed to a label. They get the stream rate that Spotify sets. Your original question was do artists not make much money because of bad deals with labels. The numbers clearly show that they don't make much money even if a label isn't involved because stream rates are less than 1¢ and subscription prices are very low.
Post reply on HN