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Justice at Spotify

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Re: Justice at Spotify

#281

Post by brabel »

lumost wrote: post #244
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to one source [1], Spotify users stream on average 25 hours a month. Assuming an average song is 3 minutes [2], that's 500 streams per month. Going with the $9.99 per month rate, users pay about $0.02 per stream. Currently, the artists see only $0.0038 per stream, or less than 1/5th of what Spotify makes. I think that with a 50% profit margin, Spotify should be very happy. Of course, it's not that easy / st…

The problem is that most artists do not own the distribution rights to their own music, these are owned by various record labels. Many top tier artists create their own record labels and shoulder the cost of advertising/promotion while also dramatically increasing their cuts. The fact that individuals aren't able to break out via self-publishing music is an oddity in the internet age. Why aren't there more avenues to…

I like to listen to jango.com which tries to "push" new artists while you listen to some "station"... I've found a few good "completely unknowns" there, but most stuff they push is really low quality. I think that a platform where you could discover new artists easily using a system similar to this (play mainstream artists, mostly, but throw in a few songs from unknown artists that play similar genres), but then had an option to "upgrade" to get stuff like offline access to artists you like, could become very successful.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#282

Post by mikepurvis »

anchpop wrote: post #259
mikepurvis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other issue that has been raised a number of times is that I believe the revenue is still divided up based on overall listens across the platform, which means it's dominated by artists who feature heavily in popular playlists and automation-driver radio/recommendations. These listens are often passive and should not be considered as valuable as those of someone listens only a few hours a month, but spends all of…

If there's two groups of people, one who listens to pop music for 10 hours a month and one who listens who indie artists for 20 hours a month (which could easily be the case if their recommended playlists are mostly indie artists as mine is), then switching to the model you propose would reduce how much money indie artists make, right? It seems more fair to me that artists would get a set amount of money per stream,…

I think the argument is not that it's the 10 vs 20 hour listeners, but rather the 10-40 hour listeners (workday) vs the 700 hour listeners (radio playing in the corner of a breakroom somewhere).

The 700 hour listener has no audience and no human curation, and yet it's got 10x the influence on who gets paid by Spotify.

The article I linked also makes a really good point about this model motivating artists to encourage listeners/fans to listen to whole albums rather than single songs— right now if you're playing Spotify for revenue, the only thing that matters is landing your songs on popular playlists where they will get hundreds of thousands of passive plays. The incentives there are not really aligned to what anyone wants long term out of music.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#283

Post by tedunangst »

mikepurvis wrote: post #199
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to one source [1], Spotify users stream on average 25 hours a month. Assuming an average song is 3 minutes [2], that's 500 streams per month. Going with the $9.99 per month rate, users pay about $0.02 per stream. Currently, the artists see only $0.0038 per stream, or less than 1/5th of what Spotify makes. I think that with a 50% profit margin, Spotify should be very happy. Of course, it's not that easy / st…

The other issue that has been raised a number of times is that I believe the revenue is still divided up based on overall listens across the platform, which means it's dominated by artists who feature heavily in popular playlists and automation-driver radio/recommendations. These listens are often passive and should not be considered as valuable as those of someone listens only a few hours a month, but spends all of…

Spotify should charge by the minute so you turn it off when you're not actually listening.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#284

Post by optimiz3 »

xorcist wrote: post #261
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think you are. For years there's been a conflict broadly defined as "streaming rates paid to artists are irrationally low" vs. "streaming services aren't making money as it is"; the problem is that those aren't mutually exclusive positions. They can both be true at the same time. At least to me, this suggests that the real problem is that $8–10 a month for ad-free streams was too low a price point to set.…

> the real problem is that $8–10 a month for ad-free streams Which sounds a bit weird to me. How many people used to spend more than $10 every month on LP or CD records. Probably many enthusiasts, but the average customer? Not a chance. Yet artists say they get paid a lot less. The money must go somewhere.

IMO spending $10 a month on CDs is a different market, since you own an asset in perpetuity. Spotify would have to guarantee a perpetual license that expands your library access the more you pay in. Instead, Spotify rents access to a single large library (which is good enough for most but very different).

Re: Justice at Spotify

#285

Post by tpmx »

xorcist wrote: post #261
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think you are. For years there's been a conflict broadly defined as "streaming rates paid to artists are irrationally low" vs. "streaming services aren't making money as it is"; the problem is that those aren't mutually exclusive positions. They can both be true at the same time. At least to me, this suggests that the real problem is that $8–10 a month for ad-free streams was too low a price point to set.…

> the real problem is that $8–10 a month for ad-free streams Which sounds a bit weird to me. How many people used to spend more than $10 every month on LP or CD records. Probably many enthusiasts, but the average customer? Not a chance. Yet artists say they get paid a lot less. The money must go somewhere.

Interesting question. The US recorded music market peaked year 2000, at $13.4B. (https://musicbusinessresearch.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/the-r...)

With 282 million citizens at the time, that means every US citizen spent $3.95/month on CDs. Adjusted for inflation it's $7.56.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#286

Post by mikepurvis »

tedunangst wrote: post #283
mikepurvis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other issue that has been raised a number of times is that I believe the revenue is still divided up based on overall listens across the platform, which means it's dominated by artists who feature heavily in popular playlists and automation-driver radio/recommendations. These listens are often passive and should not be considered as valuable as those of someone listens only a few hours a month, but spends all of…

Spotify should charge by the minute so you turn it off when you're not actually listening.

They do kick you off after a while if you're a free account, but the marginal cost of the bandwidth for them is basically nothing. Anyway, it's 2021— who would accept a pay-per-time-listened Spotify in an age where Netflix, Hulu, Prime, and Disney+ are all all-you-can-eat for a similar price?

Re: Justice at Spotify

#287

Post by ProofByAccident »

ProofByAccident wrote: post #280
jyrkesh wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price fixing? You can buy music directly from artists for any price you want. I do it all the time on Bandcamp and independent stores, for both digital and vinyl releases. Piracy set the price at 0, Spotify pulled the price up from there, but there is literally nothing stopping consumers today from paying more for music except that they don't want to.

>Price fixing? You can buy music directly from artists for any price you want. I think you're missing my point. The opportunity to market direct to consumer does not negate the massive wage-setting power of a cartel which can buy up rivals, production talent, leverage radio, venue, and streaming contracts, etc. Ex: wired.com/story/opinion-big-music-needs-to-be-broken-up-to-save-the-industry/

Like I don't know how you can read something like this and just say "well have you tried selling on Bandcamp?"

'''

Live Nation’s consolidation of the industry was rapid and aggressive, spending around $1 billion in just 18 months in the late 1990s buying independent concert promoters and venue owners. By 1999, when radio titan Clear Channel paid $4.4 billion for the company (then called SFX), it was the largest music venue owner and concert promoter. Antitrust enforcers took no action to stop the deal.

By 2005, Clear Channel had spun off its live music division into a new, standalone company: Live Nation, the country’s largest artists manager and concert promoter and second-largest venue owner. Today, Live Nation is once again part of a massive broadcasting and live music conglomerate that wields immense power.

Live Nation has since combined with the ticketing monopoly Ticketmaster, satellite radio monopolist SiriusXM, and online radio leader Pandora as part of media mega-conglomerate Liberty Media. Last year, Liberty Media was approved to take control of iHeartMedia, the largest radio station owner in the country; prior to 2014 iHeart was known as Clear Channel. The proverbial band was back together, antitrust concerns and all. Competition and consumer advocates stridently opposed every corporate tie-up along the way; my organization was part of a coalition that argued against the Liberty/iHeart deal last year. Antitrust enforcers permitted every one.

'''

Further down:

'''

The company’s power to steer business away from rivals is not theoretical. In late 2019 the Justice Department found that, for years, Live Nation had abused its monopoly by steering its artists and tours away from venues that refused to use Ticketmaster. The government could have sued for monopoly violations but instead simply amended the agreement it struck with the companies when they merged a decade ago.

'''

Re: Justice at Spotify

#288

Post by mikepurvis »

Rule35 wrote: post #269
mikepurvis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other issue that has been raised a number of times is that I believe the revenue is still divided up based on overall listens across the platform, which means it's dominated by artists who feature heavily in popular playlists and automation-driver radio/recommendations. These listens are often passive and should not be considered as valuable as those of someone listens only a few hours a month, but spends all of…

Should is a big word, but it feels like Spotify could make us indie-lovers happy by rewarding the intentional listens with slightly more money. Perhaps giving them a cut of the next few recommendations. Even though I know that famous artists would get more of this than the indies, taking value from the long mid-catalog.

I think that's risky because then there's some process that puts you in one of the two buckets, and there's probably going to be a valley of suck between them, where you're big enough that you don't qualify for the indie special treatment, but not so big that you're raking it in like Taylor Swift.

The nice thing about the proposal from the article is that in theory it should be something where everyone's incentives are aligned, since it rewards artists and genres for having fans who listen to their stuff a lot.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#289

Post by lux »

disantlor wrote: post #211
kangaroozach wrote: post #206

The model should be like Medium. Allocate peoples monthly membership in accordance to their listens. If one month I listen to 100 streams of Bob Dylan and thats it, then he should get my entire $7.00 instead of just a few cents for my small amount of streams. https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-...

This seems almost too simple & good to be true. The counter points in the linked article mention that its too "computationally expensive" to calculate the payments, and the additional management costs could outweigh the benefit to smaller artists... how could that possible be true?

Sorry, but there are plenty of developers on here (myself included) who can easily confirm that "too computationally expensive" is just BS so they don't have to change.

Proof: Soundcloud is doing exactly this, so it's absolutely possible.

https://community.soundcloud.com/fanpoweredroyalties

This is all so they can keep major labels happy (several of whom own a stake in Spotify) because the labels don't want to lose the free money gravy train they're making on the backs of artists they don't even represent, and Spotify doesn't want to lose the majors.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#290

Post by picardythird »

disgu wrote: post #109
barbazoo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me sad to time and time again learn that the low prices of services I love are unsustainable and instead subsidized by treating someone unfairly downstream. I wish I could be told what the ethical price for something is and I might actually pay it. And if that price is too high, then maybe that service shouldn't exist in the first place.

Wait - how are you responsible for the fact that the artists sign away their rights to shitty big labels that take the majority of the money that work generates? How are you responsible for dumb decisions musicians make?

I'm not sure you get how the music industry works. Getting a record contract isn't quite like getting a CS degree, passing a coding interview, and being handed 125k and benefits by HR. But sure, all these musicians are just dumb idiots. Have some respect for artists (unless you hate music, I guess).
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