Why Spotify Pays So Little
lit.vulf.de
Why Spotify Pays So Little
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Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#2Vulfpeck is also the band behind Sleepify[1], the album of ten silent 30s songs which fans looped on Spotify while they slept. Vulfpeck earned $20k as a result and used it to organize a tour.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#3Is the description of Spotify's model to pay artists accurate? It sounds suspiciously simple, free of any special deals with labels to get artists on board etc... (which I had just assumed was a necessary evil)
And do total stream divisions take into account only premium accounts? Or do they also include free ones? Because ya, as a premium user, I really do want (and perhaps naively expected) my $9/mo split between the artists I listen to, which certainly seems the fairest.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#4I thought this (what is proposed) is how they already do it.
I guess not.
It does seem more fair for the artist this way, though it probably means they need to do more crunching with map reduce or something.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#5Is the description of Spotify's model to pay artists accurate? It sounds suspiciously simple, free of any special deals with labels to get artists on board etc... (which I had just assumed was a necessary evil) And do total stream divisions take into account only premium accounts? Or do they also include free ones? Because ya, as a premium user, I really do want (and perhaps naively expected) my $9/mo split between t…
Money to pay the artists listened to by free users needs to come from somewhere. I don't think artists and rightsholders are willing to accept a lower per-play revenue from free users. Which means I doubt that the ad revenue is enough to support the free accounts without subsidy from paid users. (The ad revenue isn't nothing, and the ads helps encourage conversion to paid user, so they're not without value to Spotify, but I suspect actual paying customers are worth more than free users even though they stream more.) So if you take these two assumptions:
* A stream from a free user pays the same as a stream from a paid user, and
* Paid users bring in more than free users
I don't think Vulf's idea works.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#6Spotify has been villified since the beginning, and I certainly want a more fair system to exist for artists.
That said, has there EVER been a business model in the US that was profitable for artists? I don't think there was ever money in music for artists from album sales.
The cost of distributing and promoting music is just more expensive than making an album.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#7Is the description of Spotify's model to pay artists accurate? It sounds suspiciously simple, free of any special deals with labels to get artists on board etc... (which I had just assumed was a necessary evil) And do total stream divisions take into account only premium accounts? Or do they also include free ones? Because ya, as a premium user, I really do want (and perhaps naively expected) my $9/mo split between t…
I'm not sure, but I have a suspicion that this might open up a can of worms about artists not wanting their music to be available for free. This way, no matter whether the user is paying or not, the artist gets paid for every time his song is played. The proposed alternative, however, might create an incentive for "paid-only" music, since some distributors want guaranteed monetization.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#8If someone started a service that did exactly this, would artists take their music off spotify and onto this new service?
Would the users follow?
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#9Was Van Gogh one to challenge the system for a buck?
Did Kafka put pen to paper for his love of money?
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#10I think it depends on who the artist is. For the most popular the artists wouldn't be complaining about being paid too little.
Either way if a formula change, distributing earnings based on an individual user instead of the whole pool, means the popular songs would earn far less.
It also means if someone listens to one song that would earn more than someone who loves music and pays the same thing!
I would argue the formula isn't wrong its difficult comparing an total Audio CD sales vs a lifetime NPV of music played on Spotify for an author.