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Why Spotify Pays So Little

lit.vulf.de

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Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#71

Post by beat »

baristaGeek wrote: post #47

It's incredible that there's no money in a thing that has been a need for the human being for centuries. Actually entertainment in general, has been a need since the origin of our species. The indie music industry as a whole is already selling more than the 3 major record labels together in the US. Once that 20th century model is 100% over, we will see technology doing really cool things in collaboration with music.

Technology collaborations are limited to a very narrow subset of music. As an often acoustic/folk musician, I expect collaboration to be a same-space realtime thing. Classical, jazz, and most rock musicians have the same limitations. You need very high bandwidth communication - subtle visual cues as well as audio cues.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#72

Post by niels_olson »

pjc50 wrote: post #48
mortenjorck wrote: post #35

Like others in this thread, I naively assumed this was how Spotify already worked, and wondered why the payouts tended to be so low. Now it makes sense, and puts the numbers here ( http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/ ) in context. Realistically, it would be both hard to change structurally and a hard sell for major labels to give up what is effectively a subsidy of popular music by indie fans. Let’s take…

But there's an impedance mismatch here. The copyright holders are being paid per-play but the users are paying all-you-can-eat. That's always going to be an imbalance. The only way to "fix" that would be to charge "Terry" a cent per listen like a jukebox. This is a bit like being a vegetarian at a buffet and complaining about your admission fee paying for steak which all those other people are eating. It's true, but…

So I prefer non-lyrical trip-hop. I wouldn't know I have that preference without discovering it through Spotify. You're telling me I should now start buying those albums on iTunes if I want to actually vector money toward those artists? But I can get most of them for almost free on Amazon Prime. So why not just send money to the artist directly?

I listen to Spotify and Pandora almost exclusively. Mainly Spotify. I probably listened to 300 tracks of Emancipator a month on Spotify. At 0.00786 per play, that works out to 2.85. For the last 2 years: 2.85 * 24. That's $56.59. I seriously doubt I would have spent that much on iTunes. In fact, from their site, I can only spend $46 on their music.

http://emancipator.shop.redstarmerch.com/Dept.aspx?cp=69283_...

In the long run, it seems to me that Emancipator is winning on Spotify, even if I overestimated by a factor of 3 and only listen to 100 tracks a month. Presumably, I will be listening to Emancipator for a long time.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#73

Post by dandare »

Am I the only one here who is tired by artist complaining that we don't sufficiently support their preferred lifestyle? Also, the whole argument is straw-man, read what "pjc50" wrote.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#74

Post by mod »

djloche wrote: post #32
kfor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed that having fans play your music on mute would be just as - if not more - effective, and would work without creating a prime target for banning. But I think in this case it made for a very effective "statement", even if it could've been a more efficient hack.

At least for the desktop software, they detect if you turn the volume down quickly, and pause the commercial. Spotify has pretty rude behavior towards their free users, but I suppose they want to push everyone to subscribe.

I use the (I think still considered "beta" or something) Linux desktop version and it does not know when I turn the volume down.

When commercials come on, I quickly mute the machine, and I get a nice popup with the next song title to let me know commercials are done.

It's nice because I find radio commercials particularly obnoxious--far more than television--and spotify will sometimes play them back to back.

Speaking of which: their radio algorithm must be broken. I can select an entire genre--say classical music--and start getting repeats within a couple of hours.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#75

Post by cozuya »

kfor wrote: post #2

Vulfpeck 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. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepify

In an alternate universe, Sleepify and Spotify are Browserify plug-ins.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#76

Post by TheHypnotist »

thomasahle wrote: post #24

> Terry is below average. In 2014 he averaged 350 streams per month. If his subscription money only went to artists he listened to, it would’ve been $0.02 per stream. > Instead it was $0.00786. This sounds like a much better way to do it. The artists should ask Spotify to change it. However I guess the big players don't really want it changed.

I wonder what the average is? Because that per stream rate obviously changes depending on how many streams you listen to. 350 sounds rather small. I listen at work, in the car, sometimes I listen to comedy. I might double that number in which case the difference becomes more and more negligible until I get to the point where I'm paying less per stream then what spotify currently pays. I can see this getting extremely complex.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#77

Post by pdpi »

mortenjorck wrote: post #35

Like others in this thread, I naively assumed this was how Spotify already worked, and wondered why the payouts tended to be so low. Now it makes sense, and puts the numbers here ( http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/ ) in context. Realistically, it would be both hard to change structurally and a hard sell for major labels to give up what is effectively a subsidy of popular music by indie fans. Let’s take…

> A subsidy of popular music by indie fans

That's an interesting problem — this is only true if indie fans listen to less music than pop fans.

Imagine there are 10 users, 9 of whom only listen to pop, one only listens to indy, all of whom pay 10$. Now consider two scenarios: A. everybody listens to 100 tracks per month, or B. pop listeners stream 110 tracks per month, and the indy listener streams 10 track per month

Scenario A:

    9 pop *  100 tracks =  900 tracks streamed
    1 indy * 100 tracks =  100 tracks streamed
    total                 1000 tracks streamed

    total to pop artists  = 900/1000 * 100$ = 90$
    total to indy artists = 100/1000 * 100$ = 10$
Scenario B:

    9 pop *  110 tracks =  990 tracks streamed
    1 indy *  10 tracks =   10 tracks streamed
    total                 1000 tracks streamed

    total to pop artists  = 990/1000 * 100$ = 99$
    total to indy artists =  10/1000 * 100$ =  1$
The argument remains that you'd expect your money to go to the artists you listen to, but the payment arrangements don't necessarily benefit mainstream artists over indies, unless indie fans listen to less music than mainstream music fans.

EDIT: Now that I think of it, it probably benefits pop music over metal and progressive rock (or, worse still, classical music), because pop tends towards short songs, so more tracks played over the same period of time.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#78

Post by toby »

mortenjorck wrote: post #35

Like others in this thread, I naively assumed this was how Spotify already worked, and wondered why the payouts tended to be so low. Now it makes sense, and puts the numbers here ( http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/ ) in context. Realistically, it would be both hard to change structurally and a hard sell for major labels to give up what is effectively a subsidy of popular music by indie fans. Let’s take…

I'm a bit confused by the reasoning here. It's clear that light users are subsidizing heavy users, but why are we assuming that light users prefer indie bands and heavy users prefer pop music?

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#79

Post by 6stringmerc »

tptacek wrote: post #61
6stringmerc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's not a myth; see the above link to what Steve Albini wrote if you'd like to get more educated and enhance your understanding of a very calculating and explotative business model.

Serious question: how much do you actually know about Steve Albini? Are you a Big Black fan? Are you at all acquainted with the Chicago punk scene he's from? Have you read anything else he's written, for instance about any band not from that scene? Or, for that matter, any of the story of his business relationship with the labels? And you know how he makes his money, right? (hint: not by touring Shellac). (I am an un…

I've followed him enough, can't stand his music because it sounds like noisy, barely competent shit to me and I know he makes his money just like Timbaland makes his money - getting paid on the back-end for production work. I can safely assume that most everybody has NOT read that article based on the ridiculous notion that somehow the music industry has changed its principles and methods since my family got started in the business in the late 1960s.

Why would I take seriously a person who says "Sound recordings are not cheap to make" and goes on to state "Artists still have to pay for that highly skilled labor" when frankly neither of these are true? Maybe it is for musicians who live in a 1960-1995 dynamic, but I have more computing and music making power and ability in my home studio than I know what to do with. Recording studios are dying by the dozens. For all the talk of disruption, that's one legacy industry that is taking it on the chin. Lowery is part of the problem, not the solution. Plus he tosses out anecdotes like "For a very long period of time record labels provided a decent living to thousands of lucky artists" and cites...nothing...

So the most ground breaking conclusion he has is Free+Streaming+Digital Sales? WOW. It's my business model for the past 10 years! Boy did I learn something from this guy! Oh, wait, no I didn't. That link is one of the most rambling and thinly veiled self-serving "discussions" of music in the new digital environment. I'll eventually study it more, simply to use it as cannon fodder for rebuttals. Thanks for sharing, I can always use more proof I know what I'm doing is right.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#80

Post by ianlevesque »

genericuser wrote: post #66

His proposition may sound simple to him, but it really isn't. It becomes very hard to ensure you are being paid properly in his proposed scenario, I would personally expect it would create even more controversy, or extremely long payment records every month for artists. For instance say we have 500 paid users. Lets call them user1 through user500. Each user listens to the same number of songs a month as the value fol…

The royalty reporting is this complex already anyway. It's really crazy.
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