Venues playing music to their customers have to pay public performance license fees as well, so that skews the popular music subsidies even more?
Why Spotify Pays So Little
201–210 of 305 posts
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#202Any discussion of how to split revenues is pointless without data about what paying users listen to. Top 40 listeners may percentage-wise be a much lower paying audience. Lots of the top 40 is aimed at teen/youth users, who have lots of hardware given to them, but not lots of subscription revenue or credit cards necessarily.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#203Like 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…
This is the same problem that any unlimited service has to deal with. Why does a user who downloads 10GB of data per month on their cable modem have to pay the same price as a user who downloads 300GB? They're subsidizing his usage! Why should I have to pay the same price as everyone else for Netflix when I really only ever watch House of Cards? The reason Spotify specifically works this way is because any other reim…
I always thought bands make their money on tour. live shows & merch; and the label makes more money from CD & song sells. I guess there is a new type of indie. Those that don't go on tour much and want money?
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#204Like 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…
So, under your model, Terry's band gets $7. Total. It's not even worth bothering to get involved with spotify if you only get one single cheap lunch out of it.
As it currently stands, Terry's band also gets a small amount of money from people who aren't listening to it, which is something you didn't include in your argument. There's really not going to be much difference for the tiny artists, however you carve it up. $7 is 'effectively zero percent of Spotify's monthly revenue' as well.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#205I would love for a portion of my Spotify subscription to be discretionary, so I could proactively reward bands I love. In fact, I would gladly pay $2-5 extra a month for this feature.
Here's how it could work. Every month, I'd get an email with the top 20 artists I listened to that month (stats! fun!). By default, my contribution goes to my most listened artist. I don't need to do a thing.
If I want, I can manually go in and change the contribution to another artist – say I listened to the new Kanye album a ton, but would rather give my extra dollars to my second-most-listened, way-less-famous artist.
I believe a lot of people get real personal value out of supporting artists they believe in. Right now, the best way to do this is to go to shows and buy merch.
Optional donations as describe above are an opportunity for Spotify to increase the amount of money spent on music, while generating lots of goodwill from users and artists alike.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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).
Interesting. I'm sure people are doing this illegally, but technically you're supposed to buy a commercial Spotify license for public performance.
"Spotify Free, Unlimited, and Premium accounts are for personal, non-commercial use only."
I can't imagine it's being done illegally regularly. It would be way to easy to identify by stream behavior.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Luckily they don't auto-unmute if you press play. So I just quickly hit mute then play. Their annoying behavior only costs a single keystroke.
or just plug in (cheap) headphones, now spotify thinks you're listening, the music is actually playing and you can physically see why when you try to play something else it doesn't work. Everyone wins!
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#208Earlier 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.
If Spotify wants to send me a representative, scrubbed dump of their streams table (id, userid, trackid, artistid), we could run some interesting what-if scenarios rather than guessing. It's an interesting trade-off: "punishing" artists with fans who only listen to a small amount of music, but who are dedicated to that artist vs. artists with fans who listen to a LOT of music. My gut is that very few artists are gett…
The real issue is simply that anything other than Top 40 isn't relevant to the public at large (power law). I don't really know how you correct that.
Even if the indie artists created their own service, several orders of magnitude less people would listen to it.
> My gut is that very few artists are getting "screwed"
Huh? How does that follow?
My gut is that a LOT of artists are getting screwed for exactly the reasons mentioned in the article.
This payment scheme isn't an accident. It favors the big, popular copyright holders to keep them off of Spotfy's back.
Of course, those big copyrights are also who bring in the majority of revenue for Spotify.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
>unless indie fans listen to less music than mainstream music fans That point is explicitly addressed in the post. Mainstream users listen more because mainstream users are gyms etc. that just let the top 40 run in shuffle 24/7.
Wouldn't that use be both against Spotify's EULA [0] and be illegal without a PPL [1] (in the UK at least). [0] https://www.spotify.com/uk/legal/end-user-agreement/#s4 [1] http://www.ppluk.com/
As a side note, there is infact a "commercial"-version of Spotify[0], even though i'm not sure whether its available outside of Sweden yet.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in Melbourne it's very common for venues to use Spotify - almost ubiquitous, in fact. The bar that I moonlight at used CDs for the longest time but eventually made the switch last year. Most venues don't want to spend time carefully selecting music when they could instead be focusing on customer service.
Sure, but what is the total market size of businesses versus individuals?
I agree. Even if 100% of commercial properties that play music was using Spotify behind the scenes 24/7 that's still got to be only a small percentage of total Spotify plays.