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Why Spotify Pays So Little
251–260 of 305 posts
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#252Earlier 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 think it's pretty telling that comments surrounding an article about artists not complaining about getting paid enough people complain about the only method Spotify can implement other than charging you money for the service. It's not a rude behavior and is within their right when you utilize their service for free.
Commercials/advertisements are fine.
Allowing over compressed, perceivably louder sounding commercials on their system is annoying.
Recognizing that people hate this and trying to prevent people from turning down the volume in reaction to a jarring change in sound is rude.
Being rude to your free users in order to get them to upgrade is a strategy that works (nagware), but is it a better than other strategies?
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such bullshit. How on earth is it a "zero sum game" that they are paid their fair share of the cut? > There is little difference between 99% of the artists getting peanuts, and 100% of the artists getting peanuts. You just pulled those numbers out of your ass.
> How on earth is it a "zero sum game" In the sense that it is a fixed income situation, where the question of how the income is divided does not make everyone richer as a group. If you change the rules for dividing the spoils, those who get more income do so because someone else is getting less. This is consistent with the definition of "zero-sum game". > that they are paid their fair share of the cut? There is no u…
> ass numbers
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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.
i treat rdio like a collection of full length previews that allow me to discover a lot of new music. stuff i like gets my money for tickets, merch and vinyl. i do not understand why anyone would pay $10 a month to listen to the same shit they have on their ipod.
Same here, rdio is a giant preview platform for me, and it's a surprisingly great experience when you follow a bunch of people with good taste (heavy rotation section, collaborative playlists, etc.) - however everything I like gets bought since I want to own my music and prefer to keep it even if the licensing deals or the service itself changes. However, that means that there's actually a lot of overlap between my own personal (digital, lossless) collection and the one I have on rdio.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#255His 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…
How is this any different than say a phone bill format? that shows totals such as 'minutes' $XX, 'data' $XX' and then you can optionally view the entire logs
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but at worst bars and venues like this end up paying the flat fee to the recording cartels to basically have unlimited plays of whatever they want and none of that really goes to the artists in any significant way. And in most cases, it doesn't really come up until they're audited at least once, which might be never.
I know that calling them recording cartels is making a certain point, but the licensing companies in the US are ASCAP and BMI and they don't really have anything to do with actually recording music. They collect royalties on behalf of the artists. I happen to know because I was once in a band and the only money I really ever received for our recordings after the label advance was from ASCAP. Even years later I get a…
Spotify pays them, they get yet another cut and pays you.
at least that's how it goes for my friends receiving via bmi
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
The model is extremely simple. The number of formulaic, near-identical lines on an arbitrary report has nothing to do with complexity. Splitting per song already has to be done. This just gives you a different amount of money to split per song with the existing mechanisms.
Implementation and adoption are part of the complexity of a solution, in my book at least. I assume those who do not consider implementation and adoption part of the complexity have either come up with genuinely simple solutions to problems or never had to complete those portions of the task when they were not simple.
Implementation is one paragraph of SQL or statistical code, given access to the data set and a few minutes to execute.
This change in how revenue per song is calculated is truly simple.
The only hard part is convincing people it's better.
Adoption has nothing at all to do with complexity. Be careful you're not moving the goalposts.
Bill gates giving me a billion dollars to screw around with is extremely simple, and also will never be adopted.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#258The Top-40 pop song probably has quite limited shelf life. It gets lots of plays for now, but some other track can make money for next 20-50+ years.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It doesn't negate the validity of wanting compensation for Spotify plays. Not being on a music service is one way to let your listeners know that the system is fucked and maybe make it change.
The system isn't fucked. Those bands used to NEVER get radio play except from the occasional college radio station that almost nobody listened to. And many of those bands never even made it that big. Now they have listeners all over the world. And if there's a decent market for their music they will get concert ticket sales. Spotify has got to be the best marketing a small band can get, and Spotify pays you for the privilege of marketing for you.
Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
>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.
This also assumes that the balance of venues playing indie/alternative music versus those playing "mainstream" music tilts further than the balance of individual users doing the same.
I have a limited set of datapoints, but most if not all of the venues in which I encounter Spotify playlists are playing indie/alternative/etc. music, rather than "mainstream" music - places like my local coffeeshop and game shop, for example.