Seems spot on: The top 1% of population (USA) receive 20.2% of the income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_share_of_...
Pro Rata and User Centric Distribution Models: A Comparative Study (2017)
31–40 of 88 posts
Re: Pro Rata and User Centric Distribution Models: A Comparative Study (2017)
#32The algorithm for payment is dumb. If I pay £15 a month and only listen to 4 artists over that time (I’m very predictable) I want those 4 to get £3.75 each. But they won’t. Lady ga ha will get most of it.
The algorithm isn't dumb at all. Lady Gaga is relatively more valuable for the platform, so she can ask for a bigger slice of the pie. If all you wanted was a streaming platform that didn't have all these major artists on it, it could be provided for much less than £15.
> If all you wanted was a streaming platform that didn't have all these major artists on it, it could be provided for much less than £15.
This sounds like economies of scale but backwards, which makes me suspicious of this claim.
Re: Pro Rata and User Centric Distribution Models: A Comparative Study (2017)
#33Yet another manifestation of Zipf‘s law... why is this notable or surprising? This is just a natural phenomenon
Re: Pro Rata and User Centric Distribution Models: A Comparative Study (2017)
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Edit: just to bring this up a bit higher in the thread, replies like from u/kgermino, u/dtech, and u/anonymoushn are saying that popular artists rack up their number of plays from background noise (my wording, not theirs) whereas niche artists won't have that advantage. A bar or coworker might play a popular playlist a ton of times as background noise whereas your niche artist will have some dedicated people listenin…
If it does it by aggregated listens and not by artist, then other people listening to some other artist diverts their funds to that artist. If they did it per user, that wouldn't happen.
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Re: Pro Rata and User Centric Distribution Models: A Comparative Study (2017)
#35A fair model would be to charge users a pay-as-you-go rate for every minute listened. Someone who listens 20 hours a week should pay more than someone who listens 5 hours a month on Spotify. Just set a rate/minute and track each user's usage and bill them monthly. Then pay the same rate/minute (minus a super small commission %) to the artists of whom the music was streamed. This would mean that artists get a fair sha…
A “fairer” model but not necessarily a more successful model for Spotify is it?
Re: Pro Rata and User Centric Distribution Models: A Comparative Study (2017)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
The algorithm isn't dumb at all. Lady Gaga is relatively more valuable for the platform, so she can ask for a bigger slice of the pie. If all you wanted was a streaming platform that didn't have all these major artists on it, it could be provided for much less than £15.
> If all you wanted was a streaming platform that didn't have all these major artists on it, it could be provided for much less than £15. This sounds like economies of scale but backwards, which makes me suspicious of this claim.
"economy of scale but backwards" describes the whole content industry, doesn't it? At your local shop you will typically pay more for a hit album CD with millions of copies made compared to an indie release with maybe 100 copies made.
Re: Pro Rata and User Centric Distribution Models: A Comparative Study (2017)
#37The algorithm for payment is dumb. If I pay £15 a month and only listen to 4 artists over that time (I’m very predictable) I want those 4 to get £3.75 each. But they won’t. Lady ga ha will get most of it.
Edit: just to bring this up a bit higher in the thread, replies like from u/kgermino, u/dtech, and u/anonymoushn are saying that popular artists rack up their number of plays from background noise (my wording, not theirs) whereas niche artists won't have that advantage. A bar or coworker might play a popular playlist a ton of times as background noise whereas your niche artist will have some dedicated people listenin…
>, and your artist will get 1/1000×15000=£15 and the other one will get 999/1000×£15000=£14985.
The denominator of 1000 in your fraction is artists but the pro rata calculation in the paper has total streams as the denominator.
If Spotify paid out by directly mapping userid to (unpopular) artist, and a user only listened to 1 track that month, that 1 artist of that 1 stream would receive the entire user's subscription revenue. (I.e. Assuming a rough calculation that Spotify pays ~70% of revenue to license royalties, that 1 artist would receive 70% of $15 which would be ~$10)
But with the total streams aggregation, the more people listen to Lady Gaga / Katy Perry / Taylor Swift / etc, the more it makes the denominator bigger with popular streams. Therefore, the more it reduces income percentage of the unpopular artist. (I.e., that's why an unpopular unknown indie artist receives a fraction of a cent for each stream instead of $10.[1])
It's a calculation that favors artists of popular songs (streams).
In contrast, I believe the Amazon's subscription for Kindle Unlimited payout is based on author's pages read without aggregating all other authors' pages into the denominator. Therefore, an Amazon's subscriber's revenue goes more towards the particular authors the subscriber read and is not affected by millions of others reading the more popular JK Rowling or Stephen King.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=spotify+indie+musician+payou...
Re: Pro Rata and User Centric Distribution Models: A Comparative Study (2017)
#38On Spotify, the top 0.4% of artists are responsible for 9.9% of streams.
But not 9.9% of the revenue. Bob streams track 11,12,13,14 1,000 times a month each for their €10 Jamie streams track 21,22,23,24 100 times each for their €10 Total revenue €20, Total streams 4,400. .45c per stream. Track 11 gets €4.50, track 21 gets €0.45
Stealing and rephrasing this for clarity:
Alice pays $10/month fee. Alice only listens to track A 990 times. Bob pays $10/month fee. Bob only listens to track B 10 times.
Total revenue $20, Total streams 1000. $0.02 per stream. Track A gets $19.80, track B gets $0.20
If Bob got his twin brother to subscribe, and they had the exact same listening pattern next month:
Alice pays $10/month fee. Alice only listens to track A 980 times. (Alice listens to the song less this month than last month)
The Bobs are now paying $20/month. The Bobs only listen to track B 20 times total (Each Bob listens to the track 10 times).
Total revenue $30, Total streams still 1000. $0.03 per stream. Track A gets $29.40. Track B gets $0.60.
Track A just increased its revenue 48% despite being listened to less the second month. Track B was responsible for Spotify earning $10 more, but only saw $0.40 of what it brought into Spotify.
However, I'm not sure what the downstream ramifications of the new incentives would be after hypothetically switching from pro-rata payment structure to a per-user structure. Would artists' / music labels' strategies change?
I also wonder what would happen to the revenue from users who pay subscriptions for a month, but neglect to use the service at all. It seems it would make sense to either pay the artists that user has listened to over their lifetime/past year, or distribute pro-rata across all of Spotify.
Re: Pro Rata and User Centric Distribution Models: A Comparative Study (2017)
#39Yet another manifestation of Zipf‘s law... why is this notable or surprising? This is just a natural phenomenon
Something a lot of people don't seem to know about spotify is that artists are compensated based on their position in the charts, not based directly on how many times their song was played.
So if you only listen to obscure folk music, most (possibly all) of the $10 you're paying goes to artists you don't listen to. That's why some indie artists say they prefer piracy to spotify, it's almost the same to them.
Re: Pro Rata and User Centric Distribution Models: A Comparative Study (2017)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The algorithm isn't dumb at all. Lady Gaga is relatively more valuable for the platform, so she can ask for a bigger slice of the pie. If all you wanted was a streaming platform that didn't have all these major artists on it, it could be provided for much less than £15.
> If all you wanted was a streaming platform that didn't have all these major artists on it, it could be provided for much less than £15. This sounds like economies of scale but backwards, which makes me suspicious of this claim.
The economies of scale for Spotify reduce the cost of their technology as measured in dollars per user, but since the majority of their costs are in artist payments the tech costs don't matter as much.