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

Justice at Spotify

unionofmusicians.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 405 posts

Re: Justice at Spotify

#91

Post by robkop »

Macha wrote: post #10

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…

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.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#92

Post by Hamuko »

cratermoon wrote: post #73
Eridrus wrote: post #27

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…

> 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.

Yeah, but that's not Spotify's problem to fix.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#93

Post by metajack »

antihero wrote: post #78
cratermoon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Isn't that a problem generally in the music industry?

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.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#94

Post by falcolas »

jedimastert wrote: post #71
dpatterbee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting take I haven't heard much before. Could you expand on what the alternatives are?

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.

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.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#95

Post by RhodesianHunter »

mchusma wrote: post #39
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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?

Re: Justice at Spotify

#96

Post by nindalf »

capableweb wrote: post #61
Eridrus wrote: post #27

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…

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.

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?

Re: Justice at Spotify

#97

Post by adwn »

breck wrote: post #7

#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.

> #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.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#98

Post by ccsnags »

justynadorsz wrote: post #65
ccsnags wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#99

Post by leesalminen »

moistbar wrote: post #87
SCHiM wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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...

Re: Justice at Spotify

#100

Post by Barrin92 »

efsavage wrote: post #84
101008 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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 ma…

> 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.

Post reply on HN