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Why Spotify Pays So Little

lit.vulf.de

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Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#111

Post by fragsworth »

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?

> why are we assuming that light users prefer indie bands and heavy users prefer pop music?

The article explained this - because heavy users are playing music 24/7 at gyms, etc., and never play the smaller groups or genres that only some individuals like (and would like to support).

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#112

Post by JoeAltmaier »

ignostic wrote: post #108
vlunkr wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right now the payment is easy to understand why you were paid as you were. Listens * payment * .7 = my check. If the proposal were followed, all transparency is lost. "Extremely long payment records" is quite an under-statement. Imagine sending a popular artist a 27-million line breakdown (you'd need a LINE PER LISTEN, and what % of a listeners listens that was). That's absurd , and STILL less transparent. I understa…

SO that's what, a few gigabytes? Takes 30 seconds to download? Then run some stats, get some totals and compare it to your check. What's the problem? Its the 3rd Millennium, get with it.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#113

Post by ScottWhigham »

adamc wrote: post #101

Old geezer here: Does anyone know how often the songs on a CD are played? If I spent $10 on a CD, what was that likely to generate per-play? (I'm old enough that I remember taping LPs and then listening to the tapes -- which was a near-universal practice amongst the folks I knew.) My guess is that great albums got listened to a lot -- driving down the revenue "per play" but generating great word of mouth and lots of…

I'm happy to play along but first can you give us an idea of the answer(s) will relate to the topic at hand? I'm struggling to find a correlation.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#114

Post by ignostic »

mkolodny wrote: post #107
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…

Complex accounting isn't a good reason to pay artists unfairly. Having said that, the accounting doesn't have to be that complex: 1. When paying out an artist, list out the (anonymous) users who listened to their music on Spotify. 2. For each user: a) Show the what percent of the user's total listening was spent listening to that artist. (e.g. 40%) b) Multiply the amount the user paid by the percentage from (a). (e.g…

It might not be complicated, but it's cumbersome as hell: "Hey, Rhianna, here's your 65-million line payment breakdown for the week! I know it used to just be one simple intuitive calculation, but isn't this great!?"

> 99% of artists would prefer this model, even if it meant more complex accounting.

What are you basing that on?

Artists paid more might not complain, and those paid less (likely the more popular artists) would complain. Then there are new artists, growing artists, and people who would just be annoyed by the complexity.

The theory is simple, but the implementation is a complete nightmare.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#115

Post by ScottWhigham »

nacho2sweet wrote: post #103

Splitting with everyone is better because it gets the majors on Spotify which you need to give the service legitimacy. Major studios are bringing brands to Spotify, indies are draws but aren't big draws. They will put their stuff on Soundcloud and stream it for free to get ears to get concerts.

I don't follow. Why does splitting revenue amongst millions of people provide a boon for the major studios (thus making splitting everyone better)? You say it's better but I don't see the an elaboration on the why.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#116

Post by microtonal »

niels_olson wrote: post #72
pjc50 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

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 don't think most people listen to 300 tracks of any artist per month consecutively. Say you are doing 30 tracks per month on average by an artist, that's $5.66, less than buying three 10 track albums.

I have hundreds of albums on CD (I'd guess ~500 or 600). There are many that I probably only listened to five times.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#117

Post by MichaelGG »

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…

Daylight savings is easy to fix: don't use it, just standardize on UTC. That's what essentially everyone does in, say, telecom.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#118

Post by fragsworth »

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…

> Realistically, it would be both hard to change structurally

Perhaps there is a simpler solution. Here's one idea: for accounting purposes, only count a limited number of plays per month, per user. It can be the first 100 plays, or if you want to prevent any biasing, it can be a random sample of 100 of each user's plays.

A random sampling can even be audited to prove that it was fair.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#119

Post by ianlevesque »

genericuser wrote: post #83
ianlevesque wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Please provide an example. As the examples I have seen of artists showing their Spotify payments do not support this assertion. Here is a link to one such example I have seen which has each song paid at the same amount per play. This has made the number of items on the payment record to simply be the number of different songs which were played by that artist. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02…

That is a statement sent to the artist but broadcasters report far more detail to SoundExchange and licensing agencies.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#120

Post by joshstrange »

hsod wrote: post #106
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…

> That coupled with CONSTANTLY turning explicit music on my playlists to the "clean"/"radio edit" versions pissed me off to no end (I know why this is happening and I find it completely unacceptable). Why is this happening? Bugs the hell out of me too

Ok, I've posted in the forums a few times on this and the reason seems to be that music gets licensed and unlicensed all the time on Spotify but they try to hide that from the user (as they should). However in a number of cases when an explicit song that gets unlicenced (even if it is almost immediately re-licensed) then it will fallback to the clean licenced version because Spotify always wants to default to non-explicit songs (In fact for a while, and maybe still, they didn't allow explicit songs on the mobile app, the only way to hear them was to add them to a playlist on desktop first, there was no way to search for or find them). I'm fine with this IF AND ONLY IF when the explicit version is re-added that my song (or rather my "pointer" to the song) gets "upgraded".

Ideally there would be an "explicit-only" checkbox like there is "hide explicit" one that would always show the explicit instead of the clean version.

Edit: My Spotify forum post for reference https://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-Desktop-Linux-Mac-and/... I can't seem to find my orignal post... Maybe I'm mis-remembering and I just read it on the forums...

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