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Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber

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Re: Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber

#91

Post by dkrich »

mfoy_ wrote: post #77
dkrich wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's like saying that when you buy your favorite brand of ice cream at the store the grocery store keeps most of the profit because without the store the ice cream manufacturer wouldn't have a place to sell to the masses. If said artist is in such high demand, then he or she can go make their own streaming platform, charge $10/month, and keep 100%. Obviously that isn't the case, so they must get some utility out…

No... you're missing the point entirely The store is Spotify. The brands are artists. If I buy brand A, the store gets a cut, and brand A gets a cut. Brand B gets nothing. With Spotify, if I listen to Repartee, Justin Bieber is still getting some of my money.

Saying Justin Bieber gets some of your money isn't really the whole story. Justin Bieber's songs are streamed billions of times a year, so his music accounts for a very significant percentage of total streams, and consequently use of the Spotify platform. Thus, he is bringing an outsized amount of value to Spotify, so he rightly is deserving of more money.

Again, Repartee is free to pull their songs and sell them directly to you if they think that will bring them more fans and more money. It's kind of funny for two consenting parties who both use a platform to complain that the platform is treating them unfairly.

Re: Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber

#92

Post by briholt »

WalterBright wrote: post #80
briholt wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out writers weren't being paid for their songs, but were being paid for a portion of the massive markup on a plastic disk. Now that the disks are gone, the value of the song is laid bare. The same has largely become true for software. How many new Lotus's or Corels are being funded today?

Yup. The value of software has been driven literally to $0. Yet I still keep writing software :-)

Me too. But I write it for the web, so I get paid for the massive markup on web servers running the code.

Re: Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber

#93

Post by konschubert »

ilamont wrote: post #88

This is a story about middlemen. 30 years ago, the supply chain for recorded music went something like this: creator -> music label & radio -> retailers -> audience Now it's something like this: creator -> (label) -> digital platform -> audience Huge power is concentrated in the platforms, which essentially combine curation, distribution, sales, and marketing. They control pricing. They control the playlists. They co…

I'm worried about platforms moving into label territory too much because as soon as label start seeing them as competitors, they'll start rolling their own platforms and then we get that fragmentation which we know from video.

Re: Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber

#94

Post by sbuttgereit »

x0x0 wrote: post #2

Obviously the streaming numbers are minuscule, but if people bought CDs, they can play it unlimited times for a fixed rate. Streaming does substitute with radio and purchased music, but more the latter. Expecting radio rates for something that primarily substitutes for purchased CDs is ludicrous. It would have been more interesting (to me) if the article had compared the youtube/pandora payments with the equivalent C…

Your first point regarding how streaming cannibalizes CD I think is pretty spot on. Radio play for record companies and artists was a way to entice listeners to buy the record/cassette/CD/etc. and depending on where you sat in the payout chain, you really didn't expect money from radio... often times you paid to have your record played on radio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola ... and there were creative ways around the laws after they were created). But radio didn't play what you wanted when you wanted (that took buying records), radio played what they wanted when they wanted.

Streaming upends that. I don't buy records anymore, I pay a streaming subscription. I get pretty much anything I want whenever I want on demand. I have access to a much larger catalog than I would if I bought everything individually and I'm probably spending on-par with what I did in the old days. (I use to get a lot a free CDs and such because I worked for a record store chain in the 90's, but even so, I have access to a larger catalog today). The fact that I can get the vast majority of what I want means that those few hold out artists that I would like to listen to, but can't because they refuse to play the game (with good reason), simply don't get listened to... I have other choices.

I can't comment on the other issues you raise.

Re: Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber

#95

Post by konschubert »

joshuaheard wrote: post #70

The guy wrote a song. It took him, what, a month? For that he earned $150,000? Annualized, that's almost $2 million. I don't see the problem here.

The problem is that writing a hit song is not something he can do every month. It's like finding a nugget of gold. It still has to fund the operation.

Re: Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber

#96

Post by dgudkov »

joshuaheard wrote: post #70

The guy wrote a song. It took him, what, a month? For that he earned $150,000? Annualized, that's almost $2 million. I don't see the problem here.

It would be fair to count in years of education and training. Just like with any other profession.

Re: Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber

#97

Post by sxates »

tjr wrote: post #82
sxates wrote: post #81

Everyone is very focused on the contrast between the Radio royalties and the Streaming royalties - but we all skipped right past that first item: $149,000 in royalties for writing a song (just the first 3 years). That's a lot of money - more than most people make in 2-3 years - for what probably amounted to a few weeks of work. And we're supposed to feel sorry for him because he couldn't retire on it? Seems to me if…

I don't think his problem was with the $149,000, but rather, with the trend toward $200 for tens of millions of streaming plays. I.e., it might not be long before a comparable song with comparable popularity earns him $1000 instead of $150,000.

I have to accept that the value of the work I do may change in time, either up or down. Why do people in the music industry not have to accept that as well? Why are they entitled to the same economics decade after decade, while the rest of the world changes?

Re: Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber

#98

Post by tjr »

sxates wrote: post #97
tjr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think his problem was with the $149,000, but rather, with the trend toward $200 for tens of millions of streaming plays. I.e., it might not be long before a comparable song with comparable popularity earns him $1000 instead of $150,000.

I have to accept that the value of the work I do may change in time, either up or down. Why do people in the music industry not have to accept that as well? Why are they entitled to the same economics decade after decade, while the rest of the world changes?

I personally think that music is a bad career choice. I started out majoring in music in college 20 years ago before switching to computer science, and while I still enjoy playing and writing and recording music, I enjoy whatever money I may get from it like a bonus.

I don't think that music industry people are entitled to anything in particular. I do think there's probably something suboptimal going on with streaming payments. If I were watching payment for my work drop 100x, I would probably be both looking for ways to "correct" that if possible, and looking for other work to do...

Re: Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber

#99

Post by danbruc »

jbergens wrote: post #59
realthings wrote: post #19

Get with the times! The way people consume music has radically changed. The music gold rush is over. The simple fact is people listen to music on YouTube and Spotify now. Music is also absurdly high in supply because everyone wants to be a musician. Guess what that does to the value? That's right, music is cheap because it isn't worth much. Whenever I see people complain about this, I just feel sorry for them. The wo…

On the other hand there is money in music, and it could and should increase. When you have 1 billion people paying $10 / month you have $12 billion per year to split between the artists, songwriters, record companies and distributors. That might still be lower than before but it is some money.

$120 billion per year, you missed a factor of 10.

Re: Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber

#100

Post by WalterBright »

Retric wrote: post #83
WalterBright wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> abolishing money Communes have been tried, voluntary ones and forcible ones, over and over. They never work out. People just aren't wired up that way. > Star Trek is an imaginary utopia. You can always make things work when writing a script.

I know of several Communes that worked just fine for 20+ years. What's interesting is not that they die off, but that the form so naturally. To survive they need to be like collage fraternity's and focus on new membership regularly, but naturally occurring Communes don't have that drive out of thin air. Monastic orders for example can be stable over hundreds of years, but to pull that off they need a focus on new mem…

Another thread suggested I check out a long lived commune in the US, so I did. It turns out that it was indeed long lived, but the average member only stayed a year and a half before moving on.

The larger point is, in America, anyone can form a commune or choose to live in one. There's no law against it. What you don't get to do is force people to join and prevent them from leaving.

There seem to be orders of magnitude more people advocating communes than are willing to live in them.

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