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And yet the author uses figures to also generate a false dichotomy. Just because a gap in income might be wider does not mean everyone is worse off, it is not a zero sum game.It is, in fact, zero sum. Spotify puts the money for music streaming into a pot and payouts out proportionally to how much time a particular artists is listened to. Given there (a) a finite amount of money in the pot, and (b) a finite amount of time that people can listen to Spotify (per person, and cumulatively), it stands to reasons there's only so much 'pie' that can be sliced. Listening more to one artist means listening less to another, thus one artist gets paid more than another
Add to this that Spotify is creating/contracting music itself, such that is is both distributor and "artist", thus paying money out of the pot to itself.[1] Further Spotify controls the recommendation system, so it can send people to its own music, thus increasing the money it pays itself.
[1] https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/spotify-denies-creating-fa...
The author of the linked HN article, Damon Krukowski, recently did an interesting interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots about streaming music services and basically how they screw over small time musicians:
> Earlier this year, there was a growing movement among some musicians (lead by Neil Young) to remove music from Spotify as a protest against Joe Rogan. But frustration at the streaming music giant goes back a lot further than that. And it has to do with how royalties are paid, and the lack of transparency about how music gets discovered on the service. On this episode of Odd Lots, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with Damon Krukowsky, the former drummer of the indie rock band Galaxie 500, and one half of the duo Damon and Naomi. He gives us his perception of industry economics, and explains his frustration as an independent musician with how the service works.
* https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/ee1d1ad6-b109-11ec-b00b-0f6...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Krukowski