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Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

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Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#501

Post by valvar »

URSpider94 wrote: post #464
toohotatopic wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have an orchestra with 100 musicians who receive something like $10^5 per year, you pay $10^7 per year. You need several years to practice and to form the orchestra into a team with a repertoire. If it takes 10 years, then that is $10^8.

Your numbers are grossly off here. I would bet that zero orchestra musicians are making anywhere close to $100k just from playing in an orchestra - the absolute top of the top might make that across all of their engagements. Most are making far, far less.

In good orchestras in the US and western Europe, $100k is actually fairly standard, perhaps even on the lower end. You need to be highly skilled, the competition is fierce, and the job is very demanding. I don't have a good source, but a quick Google search should confirm that $100k is not exactly wild.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#503

Post by bsder »

gwd wrote: post #81
quacked wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The music isn’t your product, the music is your marketing. The shows, the merch, your influence - that’s your product. Man, that's depressing.

>> The music isn’t your product, the music is your marketing. The shows, the merch, your influence - that’s your product. > Man, that's depressing. If the CEO of an open-source company said, "Software isn't our product, software is our marketing", would you feel the same way?

> "Software isn't our product, software is our marketing", would you feel the same way?

It did happen. We call it "In App Purchasing". And we ALL loathe it like the plague.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#504

Post by crazygringo »

philmcc wrote: post #497
crazygringo wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record. That's apples-to-oranges. Obviously a "hit" anything is hard in any field, by definition. A hit app is just as hard (even harder, probably, since there are a lot less hit apps than hit songs). But producing a single track? Seriously, it's not that hard. Yes, it takes a team of people and a lot of creativity and skill, but I do…

Not touching the whole heft of the argument, I would like to point out that the original poster didn't compare the difficulty of writing a hit song to a "hit app", he compared a creating a hit song with creating working software. I can co-sign on this part of his premise. I worked for a music producer who has a number of #1 hits (Beyonce, Fergie, John Legend etc). He wrote >1 songs per day almost every day for over a…

But working software doesn't mean commercially successful software. It just means it runs and does something.

"Working software" would be comparable to "listenable music". I'm sure every song that producer wrote daily was listenable.

But even if you mean "working software" as something that goes up on the app charts, top 100 in a popular category? I mean, then no -- I could easily see a developer spend an entire year building 1, 10, or even 100 apps and have none of them gain any traction at all.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#505

Post by jakelazaroff »

JAlexoid wrote: post #273
jakelazaroff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just speaking for my own band: we have had tens of thousands of streams on Spotify, yet we have made over 4x more revenue from music sales on BandCamp than we have on all streaming services combined.

Do you think that you'd make all of those sales, if you had no Spotify access at all? I mean... If you pointed me to your BandCamp store page and told me to buy an album, without first hearing it - I wouldn't buy it.

Hard to say! Spotify definitely isn’t a magic music marketing machine — you need a decent amount of organic traction before you’ll get any algorithmic promotion, and even more for editorial. It took us years of releasing music, playing shows, networking with other bands, pitching to blogs and buying ads before Spotify became an effective way for us to find fans.

It might be that “listen on Spotify before you buy on Bandcamp” is the 2020 version of “download on Bittorrent before you buy the CD”. But it feels like “is this slightly better for musicians than music piracy” is a pretty low bar for a $50 billion company to shoot for.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#506

Post by egypturnash »

JAlexoid wrote: post #427
egypturnash wrote: post #323

As a visual artist who regularly works on multi-year projects, and happily grabs a new album from bands she's been following for years who only put new work out once in a blue moon, I would like to cordially invite Mr. Ek to fuck himself. While I am handing out invitations to auto-copulation, I would also like to hand out a large number to every senator and representative who has voted to defund the arts. Making room…

So you're engaged with your audience enough for them to sponsor you on Patreon... and you managed to miss that you're literally doing what Ek talks about? You have auto-copulated right in front of everyone...

I am, and I am not, there's a huge difference between "I am releasing one page of my long graphic novel on a regular basis" and "I am regularly producing stuff designed to stand alone as complete objects" IMHO.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#507

Post by rhizome »

shakezula wrote: post #4

I used to work in the music industry professionally, on the ground level doing booking and management. This trend has been happening slowly for nearly a decade but it’s finally here. Rap and Hip Hop figured out a long time before most other genres that rapid small releases was a far better way to keep hype and sales up. Before Spotify was a thing, the shift was happening with YouTube but it wasn’t as predominant. Now…

Rap & Hip Hop are different because historically there's much less of a touring component than there is in Rock, Country, Soul/R&B, etc.

I'm not saying there's no overlap or that nobody can learn from anybody else, but to lump them all together ignores a lot of actual differences between marketing among genres. Heck, I bet TV talent shows are for country music right now what radio has been for hip-hop/R&B since the late 90s, which makes sense because country has (ironically) been appropriating just about all they can find in radio rap for the past many years (way before Lil Nas X).

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#508

Post by rnd0 »

s17n wrote: post #333
enumjorge wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the CEO’s take reminds me of Jobs’s “you’re holding it wrong”. So it’s not that Spotify is not paying artists enough, it’s that artists aren’t working hard enough. And even though artists have been complaining about the money they make from streaming for years, “in private” some of them are happy. Sure.

I don't think he was saying that artists aren't working hard enough, I think he was saying: 1. Albums don't maximize artist income - musicians should be steadily releasing new tracks. (Ironically, this is how things used to be up until the 70's, when a new technology, the LP, changed the dominant form of artistic expression.) 2. Nobody reads rolling stone anymore, mtv doesn't play music anymore, if you want a success…

Even so, he's wrong according to every thing I've read on the subject.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that if you're a musician the primary way you're going to be making money is through touring and selling merch at shows. Not by cutting more tracks for spotify to make a buck off of.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#509

Post by raindeer3 »

uberdru wrote: post #499

Musicians should be getting closer and closer to 100% royalties as the infrastructure gets cheaper and cheaper. But, tech CEOs all like crappy music. Which is why they should never be in control of the livelihoods of creatives.

The reason there are any royalties to distribute at all is that Spotify has managed to create a distribution service that ppl are willing to pay for. You can get free distribution for your music easily. Just put it on any torrent site...

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#510

Post by asdff »

idlewords wrote: post #394
alchemyromcom wrote: post #139

I wish more people, especially tech CEOs, could understand the incredible sacrifice of time, money, and energy it takes to make an album people actually enjoy. Everything you listen to, unless you are willing to listen to raw demos, is a miracle. I've worked both as a sound engineer and and a software developer. It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record. The way tech com…

The Beatles at the height of their fame put out two albums a year, while making a bunch of movies on top of it. That pace is inconceivable in 2020, but I've never understood why.

It was inconceivable even back then, and probably had a lot to do with the Beatles burning out and parting ways after a few years in the U.S.
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