Spotiwhy? : Are Subscription Music Services a Sustainable Business Model? • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotiwhy? : Are Subscription Music Services a Sustainable Business Model?

#31

Post by InclinedPlane » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 12:12 AM UTC

jamesbritt wrote: post #24

cletus wrote: post #17

The author makes three errors, one of which he stipulates (the he doesn't know the revenue split). The other two are: 1. Streaming is basically a perpetual source of revenue. If 1 download is equivalent to 200 streams then ask yourself how many times on average does someone listen to a purchased song? 2. The comparison you should be making isn't to digital music purchasing but to radio royalties. The formulae for thi…

How does the music business differ from the book business? Authors do not plan on supporting themselves by touring. Why is this more or less expected for musicians? Are authors worse off for not having a viable touring option? I'm mainly curious about assorted business models that work well for musicians for whom live performances are not practical. If one person with a pc and some electronics makes an album, live gi…

In some regards it's even worse for authors. A lot of authors, especially of technical non-fiction books, have day jobs.

Regardless, the reason why this is so is simply because it has become the norm. There is nothing about it that is particularly good except the degree to which it concentrates wealth in the hands of publishers (which they certainly enjoy). Over the long term I expect the norm will change to self-publishing or very low-overhead mostly self-service publishing.

Re: Spotiwhy? : Are Subscription Music Services a Sustainable Business Model?

#32

Post by daemin » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 6:52 AM UTC

colincsl wrote: post #21

dextorious wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If 1 download is equivalent to 200 streams then ask yourself how many times on average does someone listen to a purchased song? For most downloaded songs, a couple of times. Most people just amass mp3 collections they rarely listen to in their entirety.

A couple times?? Surely some people do that, but I doubt it's the majority. This is way too broad of a generalization.

I'd say, anecdotally from my own experience, that it's more of a power law distribution. Some songs/albums I listen to quite frequently, while others I listen to once and then forget about.

Suffice to say using this sort of subscription model, the hits would still be big money spinners, but for the vast majority - the long tail so to speak - wouldn't make enough to live on.

Re: Spotiwhy? : Are Subscription Music Services a Sustainable Business Model?

#33

Post by earbitscom » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 8:56 AM UTC

cletus wrote: post #28

earbitscom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The recording industry likes to paint this as the artists are getting screwed. And they are getting screwed but not by streaming services. They're getting screwed by the recording industry [1]. This isn't an or proposition. Artists are being screwed by both. Yes, the industry takes the lion's share of revenue from artists. That doesn't mean that on-demand streaming services aren't a joke in terms of compensating ar…

That doesn't invalidate my point because curation, which you can argue radio is, and promotion (radio stations are paid to pay particular songs) is still possible with streaming. Just look at Pandora, last.fm, etc. Also there are different definitions of streaming. The purest definition is where you have to have an Internet connection to listen. There will be various levels of caching involved here. For example, the…

I wasn't arguing for or against the article or your overall argument. I was simply pointing out some issues with two of the things you said.