Live data from Hacker News

Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

torrentfreak.com

321–330 of 470 posts

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to see a streaming service where my payment goes to artists I listen to. Spotify pays 70% of their music revenue to publishers based on the total number of listens. All revenue is put together and split based on the global numbers. Which means that niche band I like will get next to nothing. Instead if they account for 50% of my listening time in one month, they should get 35% of what I paid to Spotify that…

I'm not sure I follow your logic. 100 people subscribe to spotify and listen for 100 hours a month each, for $10 a month. You listen to your favourite artist for 50 hours and other stuff for 50 hours. No-one else listens to your favourite artist. I assume that if this is band is treated as the "average" Total listening hours = 100 * 100 = 10,00. Total money: 100 * 10 = $1,000. They get: 50 / 10,000 * $1,000 = $5 That…

The unfairness comes when you spend an abnormal amount of time listening. If you listen less than the average user then the bands you like won't be getting x% of your money that lines up with your listening habits.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't like what they do to artists. Global distribution. For $40/year. That was fucking unheard of 20 years ago. Spotify is the best thing that ever happened to artists. Don't let the mediocre one's who blame their lack of success on Spotify fool you. They don't make money because they likely suck and can't book dates because no one wants to see them.

Finally the correct take on spotify. Artists were 100% fucked before spotify, streaming saved them. Now we have more artists making money than ever, but since most of them arent really successful they whine and whine when they'd be making nothing 20 years ago.

Yep. If you can't make it with Spotify and all the social media channels available, you definitely wouldn't have made it before all of this stuff.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#323
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't like what they do to artists Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify: > It pays roughly two-thirds of every dollar it generates from music, with nearly 80% allocated to recording royalties and about 20% to publishing, though how much artists and songwriters ultimately receive depends on their agreements with rights holders, which Spotify does not control. [0] Spotify is frantically trying…

Wow. This is certainly a take. Two things: 1. Spotify has had a policy for a couple years now of not paying artists who generate less than 1,000 streams per year PER song. So if I get 999 streams on each of my 50 songs every year, I get nothing from Spotify. 2. Major labels own major stakes in Spotify. They are one and the same.

If you dont get 1000 streams per year your are not a professional musician

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#324
post #207
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify paid out ten billion dollars to artists in 2024. This is not small potatoes - total 2024 music industry merchandise sales was around $14b. These big platform payouts matter a lot.

Correction: to record labels. When you read artists' blog posts you can see they get peanuts. Not due to Spotify - due to the recording deals. If you want an exhaustive but eye-opening account of all of the details, I recommend "All you need to know about the music business" by Don Passman.

This is the artists fault for signing with the labels. The labels own their music, of course they get the payment.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Intellectual property" is a hack we put together to make capitalism properly assign value to abstract ideas that we all agree have value, but are inherently devalued by free market forces. Capitalism by itself is incapable of valuing art and ideas beyond the marginal cost of producing duplicates, which has been on a steady downward trend since the invention of the printing press. Our economy is increasingly reliant…

What an incredible shallow reading of "capitalism". Capitalism doesn't "assign value" to anything. It can't assign value to anything. The value of something is determined only by a transaction. It's not assigned. The value of something is made apparent only after an exchanged is made. Otherwise there is no "inherent" or "assigned" value to anything. The value is made explicit only after a transaction is made. Abstrac…

Their point is that market forces push the value down to the marginal cost of copying.

This complaint about "determining" versus "assigning" value is not important. And copyright does follow execution, not the abstract idea.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. This is certainly a take. Two things: 1. Spotify has had a policy for a couple years now of not paying artists who generate less than 1,000 streams per year PER song. So if I get 999 streams on each of my 50 songs every year, I get nothing from Spotify. 2. Major labels own major stakes in Spotify. They are one and the same.

If you dont get 1000 streams per year your are not a professional musician

There are 10s of thousands of pro musicians who don’t generate 1000 streams per year on many of the songs in their back catalog.

And the premise of your statement is that only pro musicians deserve to be compensated for their work. That’s a pretty messed up world view.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are all not Anna's Archive and one is not like the other. Z-library, LibGen maybe, Archive.is might be eastern Europe but almost certainly not Russia. Just because it's advantageous in some cases to appear Russian or Chinese doesn't mean it is true. Some are better in their camouflage others like https://migflash.com/ not so much.

There's at least a strong case that Archive.is is Russian run: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...

There is no "strong case" in this article. Yeah the guy linked to it has a slavic name and likely speaks Russian. Guess what? That's true for most of eastern Europe you will find plenty of people matching these criteria all over the rest of Europe.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#329
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's not about the money primarily. There are enough parties out there that want the people behind Anna's archive behind bars and I'm afraid this will end the same way as for the Pirate Bay guys in the best case and like it ended for Aaron Schwartz in the worst.

Fwiw, piratebay continues to be the -to my knowledge- biggest public tracker out there, with basically every media production available. And I think that was his point. They may ruin some people's life's... but aside from that, they achieve nothing.

> basically every media production available.

not sure why you made this claim as its not at all germane to the discussion but this isn't even remotely true.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#330
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how to feel about any of this. First and foremost, I feel like Spotify is scummy. I don't like what they did when they were founded, I don't like what they do to artists. I hate the hyperscalers being in this business (Google, Apple, Amazon) as that's another thing they do that devalues an otherwise healthy market. Bringing in outside business division revenues to dump on another market's prices is ecolo…

I've always liked China's business model for music. In China, all music is free to stream and download. Musicians make their money the more traditional way, through performances, merchandise, promotions/advertising, etc.

That’s basically the US model as well now.
Post reply on HN