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Why Spotify Pays So Little

lit.vulf.de

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Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#161

Post by KFW504 »

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…

One thing to focus on is that the rate per song in the CD era can't fairly be compared to the rate per song today - particularly for popular songs that have a global reach. I would agree that "per play" is only a partial metric, but would caution against trying to compare too much over time.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#162

Post by kudu »

This is a terrible idea, in my opinion. It would effectively cause users to "budget" the music they play, e.g.: "If I play that Rihanna song after playing 10 songs from my favorite indie band this month, it'll severely dilute the money going to them." The last thing Spotify wants is people not playing music for moral reasons.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#163

Post by ianlevesque »

genericuser wrote: post #124
ianlevesque wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And this whole time I was precisely talking about what would need to be sent to the artist... Guess I am just missing your point, if you had one. Edit due to reply since its getting nested way too deep: Thanks for clarifying. I never meant to say it was a reason to switch, complexity should never be a reason not to improve. I am just trying to say it isn't what I would call a 'simple' solution as the author asserts.…

Just trying to convey that complexity of the accounting for broadcasters is not a reason to stick with the current payout system. The proposal isn't much more complicated than the data we already have to report to some agencies.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#164

Post by rwissmann »

exelius wrote: post #148
rwissmann wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the article really missed this point. One could also mentioned some sort of tiered payout scheme or a non-linear minimum after a certain amount of plays plus a percentage above that. Likely something that Spotify will experiment with over the years.

I doubt it. The business overhead of distributing payment this way is enormous. Right now, Spotify just runs a report that takes some top level numbers, splits them out by copyright owner and divides a single pool of money. This means they manage only as many pools of money as they have copyright owners. If they start doing it the way OP suggests, they DRAMATICALLY increase the number of pools of money they manage (a…

They likely already record and store all the necessary data (and more) in order to build out people's listener profiles.

Pools of money is not really a relevant metric. They collect all the subscription premiums and pay a portion of them out according to their contractual agreements.

Pay(artist_i) = 0.7 * sum_j [ premium(viever_j) * ratio_ji ]

is not that much harder to do.

I agree that auditing would be more complicated, but usually one does selective audits anyway. I doubt this would be a show stopper.

The confusion on the receivers' side would increase massively though. As someone else has pointed out, there would be a lot less correlation between #plays and payout.

(To be clear, I have no real opinion on whether this would be a better schema.)

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#165

Post by cwyers »

Guvante wrote: post #11
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…

You could merge the two ideas to meet in the middle. 35% based on total revenue and 35% based on used revenue.

You could, I guess. Why would you want to, if you're Spotify? It's more bookkeeping for no benefit to them. The author believes he's getting hosed because gyms and nail salons are playing Spotify all day over their PAs, but... I'm not sure that's true, and even if they are, those are still plays Spotify has to pay for.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#166

Post by genericuser »

kudu wrote: post #162

This is a terrible idea, in my opinion. It would effectively cause users to "budget" the music they play, e.g.: "If I play that Rihanna song after playing 10 songs from my favorite indie band this month, it'll severely dilute the money going to them." The last thing Spotify wants is people not playing music for moral reasons.

Pretty sure Spotify would have no problem with people who are paying for Premium choosing to not listen to music. Saves bandwith and doesn't reduce revenue, what is to not want?

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#167

Post by benihana »

vinceguidry wrote: post #43
nicpottier wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I finally admitted last year that I was tired of maintaining my own MP3 library and that $9/mo was a fair enough price to listen to whomever I want. But ya, that sure seems like that should be fair enough and profitable enough for the artists I listen to, so if Spotify isn't doing a good job of making sure that is the case then I hope someone else arrives on the scene who does. After all, switching costs are…

> Agreed, I finally admitted last year that I was tired of maintaining my own MP3 library. If a subscription service could get me out of that chore, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But the music I listen to is crazy all over the place, and if the service doesn't have even one of the songs I want, then it's worthless. Even if I can upload mp3s, now I'm back to maintaining an mp3 library. If I switch services, I have to eith…

There's a third issue: Playback on spotify sounds horrible, even with high quality playback turned on it. It cannot come close in quality and richness to a VBR mp3. Anytime I really want to feel the music, I have to fire up forbar2000

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#168

Post by lambeosaurus »

niels_olson wrote: post #131
microtonal wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

I don't have to listen to it consecutively. But I listen while driving, while studying, while working. I certainly fall in the category of indie fan listening to a lot of music from catalog artists, not hit makers.

Another checking in. Guilty as charged.

My main gripe is that because of this stupid model, it pushes a lot of the artists I would listen to away from spotify because it doesn't connect them directly with the revenue stream they should be getting from their true fans. Artists have a hard time surviving without that.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#169

Post by robwilliams »

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.

For streaming you forgot:

+ Easy discovery (find an artist and play instantly without any download)

+ Your saved albums are available on any device instantly

+ No catalog/file management (important for mobile listening, as transferring new music was always a hassle)

+ Professional curation, social playlists

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#170

Post by ricardobeat »

ignostic wrote: post #125
genericuser wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said it was a reason to. I simply said this method is anything but simple, as the author called it. Your method would require even more potential lines on the monthly report than the nearly identical method I described above. As yours would require a per user line, even though many of them would have duplicate rates. Keep in mind things would still need to be split per song also, as rights holders vary per so…

Exactly. Based on data from Spotify[1] and taking an average payment[2] of $.0052, I calculated Spotify would be storing about 20 BILLION accounting records PER MONTH. Showing my work: 15m paying subscribers = ~150m per month, ~105m paid to artists @ .0052 per song = 20.154 million songs in a month. [1] https://press.spotify.com/us/information/ [2] http://thetrichordist.com/2014/11/12/the-streaming-price-bib...

20 billion records per month is still reasonable, there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of businesses storing a multiple of that amount of data daily.
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