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Why Spotify Pays So Little

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Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#221

Post by bsder »

adventured wrote: post #53
tpeaton wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that represents a very small minority of artists. Most lose a lot of money or break even if they're lucky. Check out this article by Pomplamoose, who are a relatively successful band. https://medium.com/@jackconte/pomplamoose-2014-tour-profits-...

I find this to be a good examination article regarding the now infamous Pomplamoose tour breakdown: http://www.artistempathy.com/blog/the-pomplamoose-problem-ar... I think that doing only 24 tour dates as a mid-popularity group, while not exactly managing costs well, to be an obvious setup to lose money. If they want to treat it like a business, they're doing a terrible job of running a business.

> while not exactly managing costs well

In what way did they not manage costs well? Even if they pick up 10% across the board, they're still not making money.

Per diem of $20. Not per meal--per day--$20 for 3 meals.

$5K for insurance--we paid that for a group with WAY less liability.

$125 per day for hotel room. Okay, that's about the only thing that might be a little high. But you aren't going to find much under $80 that isn't a dump--and you're packing 2 people per room. Even if that line item is 50% high, they're still not making money.

There is very little I would call fat on this breakdown.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#222

Post by lepht »

joshstrange wrote: post #120
hsod wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-exp…

There's a support article here:

https://support.spotify.com/us/problems/#!/article/Why-have-...

They claim that the behavior matches your desired behavior of having a "pointer" that re-updates if availability changes and the explicit version is made available again

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#223

Post by majani »

freyr wrote: post #197
mark-r wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That means for every winner under a new scheme, there will be a loser. No, that doesn't follow. Imagine one artist is receiving all the money, and the other 10,000 artists are receiving none. Spotify could move to another payment model that would result in 10,000 winners and one loser.

Not really. Right now streaming services barely manage to pay even the top artists anything meaningful. This scheme would mean everyone gets paid barely anything, and the bigger artists may leave, which is an existential threat to the business.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#224

Post by kibibu »

torbit wrote: post #203
exelius wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not unprecedented - The Beatles didn't tour their last 7 studio albums (and on their own label, so they were arguably "indie")

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#225

Post by cmdrfred »

The real truth here is music is becoming cheaper and cheaper to make. A few grand worth of equipment is all that is required to generate most of the stuff you probably listen to, and if that isn't the case now it will be in what 5? 10 years?

Also think about the talent pool. The only longer line at the job fair is probably for playboy photographer.

Tons of people wanting to make music + low barrier to entry = Cheap music

The only thing attempting to hold this dinosaur market afloat is monolithic record companies, and their stranglehold on the popular genre seems to give them enough leverage to arrange a deal in their favor. Hence what we observe here.

What will likely end up happening is the next cost of music will become zero to the end user and bands and artists will find new revenue streams. Such as live performances, or perhaps product placement. Or does economics not apply to art?*

*I'm the weird guy who doesn't like music so I may be entirely wrong.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#226

Post by daave »

fragsworth wrote: post #118
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.

I don't think sampling's even necessary. Presumably Spotify log every play. If they pushed their logs into BigQuery or something similar, it would be trivial to calculate the revenue breakdown the way the OP describes. 'Big data' is here, and it works. With 100 million users at 1000 tracks per month, we're 'only' talking about 100 billion or so rows to process each month.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#227

Post by niels_olson »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #212
lambeosaurus wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's because the indie artists aren't looking at the big picture. They would be getting less than they hoped for from the Spotify model, but now you will likely never even hear about them. They're significantly hindering their growth potential and ability to sell concert tickets.

This. I think one issue is that the music industry pegged the price of CDs at around $18. But that was for hit maker CDs sold to mass market listeners.

But there's a separate listener: the explorer. The value of any given track is exceedingly low, but these are the people you depend on for the discovery function. Personally, I prefer that role, but the cost before Spotify was exorbitant unless you were an industry insider.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#228

Post by S_A_P »

pdpi wrote: post #77
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…

> A subsidy of popular music by indie fans That's an interesting problem — this is only true if indie fans listen to less music than pop fans. Imagine there are 10 users, 9 of whom only listen to pop, one only listens to indy, all of whom pay 10$. Now consider two scenarios: A. everybody listens to 100 tracks per month, or B. pop listeners stream 110 tracks per month, and the indy listener streams 10 track per month…

That would be an interesting spotify hack. Start recording 2 minute tracks. Would be a similar situation to 50s and 60s radio.

About your point with indie artists vs top 40- it seems to me to be a problem with fragmentation. Top 40 has much more overlap between listeners and casual music fans vs a much more curated play list for the indie music lover. So out of 100 casual music/top 40 fans the playlist is more or less the same. However two indie rock fans have a higher probability of having fewer tracks overlap in their playlist.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#229

Post by [deleted] »

rorykoehler wrote: post #179

Spotify should set aside X% of their equity and distribute it to artists. Each full play of a track would generate one 'artist' share. Then when they exit each artist gets their fair share. For example (to keep it simple I will use small numbers) let's say there are 100 plays in total on Spotify before they sell up, 1 of which belongs to Vulpeck (awesome band) then Vulpeck get 1% of X%. This way everyone gets paid fa…

[deleted]

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#230

Post by mrottenkolber »

mod wrote: post #74
djloche wrote: post #32

Earlier 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.

I use the (I think still considered "beta" or something) Linux desktop version and it does not know when I turn the volume down. When commercials come on, I quickly mute the machine, and I get a nice popup with the next song title to let me know commercials are done. It's nice because I find radio commercials particularly obnoxious--far more than television--and spotify will sometimes play them back to back. Speaking…

They just don't have much music. I tried spotify as a youtube substitute a few months back (at a friends house). Turns out they don't have a single song I searched for (all available on youtube, well known genre classics).
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