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Why Spotify Pays So Little

lit.vulf.de

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Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#151

Post by Spooks »

jstelly wrote: post #54
cwyers wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People make tools to game usage-based rewards in free to play games. They call it "idling". You could hack this by making an idling tool for spotify that would re-stream your tracks when you weren't using spotify.

couldn't you do this with a premium account as well?... assuming you can make more than $9 a month from 24/7 listening

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#152

Post by benihana »

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…

>Complex accounting isn't a good reason to pay artists unfairly.

That wasn't ever mentioned or implied. The point was, the author doesn't understand how complex his simple solution is.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#153

Post by pbreit »

The OP's idea does make some sense but so does Spotify's current scheme. The one area where there should absolutely be differentiated pricing is "radio-style" listens vs on demand listens (which should generate much more revenue for artist).

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#154

Post by clay_to_n »

kazinator wrote: post #122

The proposition in the article only works because users pay a fixed monthly rate for unlimited listening, rather than a charge that is metered based on how much they stream. Jack Stratton's proposition is wagered on the proposition that the users who listen to his tracks are ones who don't listen to very much other stuff. His listeners pay $9.99 per months, but don't stream very much, and a big chunk of what they do…

>The proposed rule would just create a tiny group which gets quite a lot more revenue than the rest, at the cost of slightly impoverishing every member of the remaining group, who then gets a slightly smaller fraction of a cent.

Nope, this rule would do the opposite. Currently, only a very small fraction are getting any "real" money at all. This would cut out some chunk of their revenue and distribute it slightly more evenly across all the artists. This is a more "fair for everyone" approach, in the sense that socialism is more "fair for everyone".

(Personally I like the idea a lot, but it sucks for the artists currently making a killing on Spotify. Perhaps for big labels as well, though since they have a ton of small artists typically it might be near neutral for them)

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#155

Post by genericuser »

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…

Another thing to note (although it represents a pretty useless edge case) is that given a user who spends $10 a month on Premium if they were to listen to 1400 songs in a single month (10/(.005/.7)) bands who he is the only person who listens to and he only listens to once would receive nothing, due to accounting (and the ieee) using round to even, and 0 being the closest even penny.

I realize this the amount they are paying now per song is not too far above the $0.005 amount which rounds to 0, and therefore given changes in the market could potentially drop to an amount which would round to 0 for single play also. I also get that a single penny isn't what anyone is going to be upset about. Also that few artists will have a single play. I just find the low number of plays (1400 in a month isn't really that many) required by a person for an artist to potentially not get paid interesting.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#156

Post by kowdermeister »

ignostic wrote: post #114
mkolodny wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> 99% of artists would prefer this model, even if it meant more complex accounting. > What are you basing that on?

Simple, artists who are paid penauts would prefer getting paid more. We just released an album but we are not putting it on Spotify. Why bother.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#157

Post by mkolodny »

ignostic wrote: post #114
mkolodny wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 99% of artists would prefer this model

I mean that objectively, based on how much money they would make.

99% of artists would make more money in this model.

And, again, cumbersome accounting is a bad excuse for unfair pay.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#158

Post by mark-r »

pfraze wrote: post #123
ignostic wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If only we had some kind of machine that was capable of computing these complex models for us... EDIT: my point being, if the model is fairer, we can deal with a little extra complexity.

It's a zero sum game. Spotify isn't going to pay any more in total, no matter how the rules change. That means for every winner under a new scheme, there will be a loser. If those losers are the popular artists that the service can't exist without, you have a non-starter.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#159

Post by ScottWhigham »

adamc wrote: post #144
ScottWhigham wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought it would be interesting to get some kind of historical fix on whether this is really an unfair rate per song, and if so by how much. I'm also curious as to whether "per play" is really the right metric: if I sold you a CD and it sucked, you'd almost never play it so that rate might seem high... but be unimportant because you'd sell so few CDs. How does that translate to the Spotify model? Maybe this is obvi…

I don't really know how you quantify "number of plays" through time and attribute a "value per spin". Take John Coltrane's "Blue Train" - $10 for that album in 1957 would have given you almost 60 years of unlimited play (if you could keep the record clean!).

To a certain degree, "Buying an album" has always been a gamble. Spotify/Amazon/etc make it easier to (a) not buy albums that suck, and (b) buy more singles instead.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#160

Post by kudu »

corndoge wrote: post #110

Streaming: + Huge catalogue on-demand - Lower quality - Latency, dropped streams - Monthly subscription - Artists get next to nothing - Player lock-in Hard disk: + Zero latency + Highest quality + Artists get everything + Any player - Device storage limitations - Heavy file transfers I never understood why streaming caught on to begin with.

Local storage (which is what I think you mean, unless no stream service runs from HDD or no user stores music on an SSD) isn't necessarily better quality, since lossless music downloads are very rare. Also, you're ignoring the fact that buying every song one plays is much more expensive than simply paying $9/month.
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