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Why Spotify Pays So Little

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Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#91

Post by curun1r »

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…

It gets even more complex if you take the fairness he's suggesting to it's logical conclusion. The system proposed still values playing each song equally, but shorter songs comprise less of a user's streaming activity.

So the per play rate should be determined by taking 70% of the user's subscription, dividing that by the number of seconds of streaming that user streamed that month and then multiplying that by the number of seconds that user streamed the artist's song (since songs can be stopped mid-song).

Regardless of how they bill, it's likely that artists will have to, for the most part, just trust Spotify. There can, and should, be independent audits of the billing code. It seems an analogous situation to what the NGC does around computerized gaming systems. Users have to trust that the system is fair, but the NGC is very thorough about checking that code complies with applicable laws.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#92

Post by breyten »

1. As soon as I'm playing more tracks than the number of tracks an average user pays I'm actually paying less than what Spotify currently pays. 2. People who do not play much music will probably not be exposed to much else than well know artists (Ie. Top 40). Or otherwise said: if I'm into music and spend time discovering not-so well known bands I'll probably play more tracks than the average user. 3. The number of people who will play less than the average number of tracks will be bigger than the number who play more.

The end result is that rich and well known artists will end up getting more money, and lesser known artists less.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#93

Post by sgwealti »

I don't see much discussion of Spotify's role in setting their subscription pricing. I think this is an area where artists have a legitimate gripe.

For example, in a hypothetical world let's say Spotify could capture a high amount of market share and still be profitable at $0.10/month. If they had the same revenue split they could say that they are giving artists 70% (0.07/month). I think the artists would rightfully complain that Spotify is devaluing their product.

Artists like Taylor Swift are starting to catch on but people act like she's greedy and out of touch when she pulls her catalog.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#94

Post by genericuser »

vlunkr wrote: post #85
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…

Do you artists would prefer being underpaid to getting extremely long payment records? I really don't see the issue.

No, but I believe humanity in general wants things to be beneficial to them AND simple. Hell most Americans (being one myself) don't just 'want' they feel entitled to. Because of that, I believe a huge number of artists would not bother to make sense of monthly records which could reach 1800 pages, and would complain even though they were presented with such records explaining why their 50000 plays this month were less valuable than their 3 plays the prior month.

I am not saying the Spotify method should not be changed just showing that the proposal at hand should not be called 'simple'.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#95

Post by Spooky23 »

toby wrote: post #78
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?

It's not that -- it's all about the impact of a larger denominator. Individually, the pro-rata share of one user's $9/mo for indie bands (say 1/100 plays = $0.09) will be larger than the 1/2,000,000 (worth $0.0000005) plays in the aggregate.

So basically, my dad, who listens to 60s and 70s music all day on Spotify is mostly compensating top-40 stuff. In the olden days of FM, his listening habits were paid for by the sponsors of the oldies station.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#96

Post by dublinben »

vinceguidry wrote: post #84
joshstrange wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hitting this point right now. After years of maintaining an mp3 collection I jumped ship to Spotify to try it out and loved it. It was great that I no longer had to spend any time to get access to the music I loved. Also community playlists were awesome (Especially the Top X Hit playlists that were updated monthly). Spotify even supported Last.FM, I was in heaven... Until Spotify didn't have that 1 song, or that…

I've got some plans. Right now I've got all my music on Google Play, having moved it from iTunes last year, which was painful, but not too bad. I eventually want to write some Ruby software that will hold all the metadata in a sqlite database replicated to Dropbox. That way I know what the tracks are. I'll seed the DB, hopefully by hooking into a Google Play API that hopefully exists. Then I want to grab all the file…

It sounds like you're working really hard to reinvent what Subsonic already achieves. It lets you build your own streaming service, and has apps (with caching) on all mobile platforms.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#97

Post by theg2 »

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 think it's pretty telling that comments surrounding an article about artists not complaining about getting paid enough people complain about the only method Spotify can implement other than charging you money for the service.

It's not a rude behavior and is within their right when you utilize their service for free.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#98

Post by vinceguidry »

dublinben wrote: post #96
vinceguidry wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got some plans. Right now I've got all my music on Google Play, having moved it from iTunes last year, which was painful, but not too bad. I eventually want to write some Ruby software that will hold all the metadata in a sqlite database replicated to Dropbox. That way I know what the tracks are. I'll seed the DB, hopefully by hooking into a Google Play API that hopefully exists. Then I want to grab all the file…

It sounds like you're working really hard to reinvent what Subsonic already achieves. It lets you build your own streaming service, and has apps (with caching) on all mobile platforms.

Doesn't bother me. I reinvent a lot of things. Doing it myself lets me fine-tune the interface and hook it into other projects.

Also, I've learned that reinvention often takes less time than learning someone else's service. If the API is really clean and useful, maybe it's worthwhile, but in most cases, it's not. If only because the vast majority of the time, I'm expected to use what's effectively a beta. I can write beta software too!

For this service specifically, just because I can self-host won't make it any easier to move off of it. Moving from iTunes to Google Play was pretty easy once I grabbed a library off of RubyGems to hook into iTunes. I'd have a coding task to do to move off this too. My own software can have everything I need, so I won't ever need to move off, just write translation layers. It's more work up front, but buys me a lot of flexibility down the road.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#99

Post by prostoalex »

There's some audio content that fits Spotify model better, since it's optimized for endless replays

* dance/electronic

* elevator music

* toddler songs (audience loves hearing that same song for 1,000th time)

On the other end of the spectrum you have audio content that is intended to be listened to once, with extremes being audio books and radio news.

An artist optimizing for endless replays would do well on Spotify: "E.D.M. artists like Avicii and David Guetta are seeing payouts in the millions. Avicii’s “Wake Me Up,” the most streamed song on Spotify, has more than three hundred million spins, which, using Spotify’s benchmark per-stream rate, would be worth about two million dollars to the rights holders." http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/revenue-streams

But it's not perfect model for every artist out there.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#100

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

6stringmerc wrote: post #60
smackfu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And remember that artists do not go to the press with stories of, "the label gave me a big advance and then the record was a flop."

Haha yeah that's technically true, because if that scenario actually happens that artist/band is effectively ruined, blacklisted, radioactive, whatever. Practically speaking though, are you aware of the "Sophmore Slump" concept at all? It's well known that after the first big success the record company wants MORE SUCCESS and that rarely happens. There are outliers like Adele, but far more often things go the way of S…

"Didn't recoup" doesn't necessarily mean the label didn't get its money back.

More commonly it means that artist royalties - which are a small proportion of label income - don't exceed the initial advance.

Book publishing works the same way. Labels/publishers can be comfortably in profit on a project, but the system is set up to make sure that artists don't get a share of that profit.

Now - labels played all kinds of games to make sure they paid artists as little as possible, up to and including outright lies about the sales and income. (Some writers have discovered that publishers sometimes still try this.)

Even so, most traditional label deals were far more generous to artists than today's streaming deals. Labels also spent significant money on PR, publicity, and payola, which Spotify and YouTube obviously don't.

Even fairly minor bands could live comfortably for a few years from radio play and royalties from a single mid-list album. Top sellers could afford castles, private jets, and custom-built recording studios.

This was partly a feature of scarcity, when there were far fewer artists selling music to a public that was more interested in music.

But it was also a direct result of more generous accounting/royalty options, and the fact that once artists crossed a certain threshold they had enough spare capital to start developing alternative stand-alone businesses.

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