Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Spotify Pays So Little

lit.vulf.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 305 posts

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#281

Post by exelius »

kibibu wrote: post #224
torbit wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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")

That was a different era in music. Technology has made it a lot easier to create and distribute music, so there is a lot more music out there, which means the value of the recording is less than it was prior to the 2000s. The Beatles were also an anomaly in the music industry; they were so popular they basically WERE the industry. Music today is much more of a long-tail market now that there's not a bottleneck in the recording and distribution functions.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#282

Post by noamsml »

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…

Uber and Lyft don't provide per-ride accounting for rides for this reason. I think spotify could get away with "N plays - total $X" in this case, especially since user privacy is at stake. Also the %30 cut is extremely easy to model -- a user that pays $10 with a 30% cut is like a user that pays $7 without one.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#283

Post by dasil003 »

jschwartzi wrote: post #280
dasil003 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is it's all speculation. We don't have any hard numbers to tell us how any given revenue split policy would affect payouts to different artists. My instinct (and I'm the Co-Founder of a streaming service that does revenue share FWIW) is that the reason so little is paid is because there are just a lot of streams period, and changing the algorithm around to try to make it "more fair" might shift the distri…

It seems inevitable at this point that if most or all plays are done through streaming services the only thing we will have available to stream are top 40 singles.

For most of humanity musicians have earned their living through live performance. The last 70 years have been an extreme outlier as recording and playback technology has matured, but now the novelty and barrier to entries are gone, and the supply is flooded. I don't see any shortage of new artists willing to give their music away to get discovered. I also don't see streaming services succeeding with just Top 40 (diversity of music has never been higher). Sure some artists will pull their catalog or straight up retire out of spite, but I don't see any trends or market forces pointing to this "inevitable" outcome.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#285

Post by jessaustin »

MattHeard wrote: post #183
MichaelGG wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daylight savings is easy to fix: don't use it, just standardize on UTC. That's what essentially everyone does in, say, telecom.

In telecom there is a lot of local-time based billing.

I guess GP was talking about switches and mediation. Certainly, once you get to billing (and downstream to "data warehouses"), CDRs have local times! Although they also have a duration field, so extra or missing hours don't cause a problem, which was the original concern.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#286

Post by hsod »

6stringmerc wrote: post #46
tpeaton wrote: post #6

Spotify has been villified since the beginning, and I certainly want a more fair system to exist for artists. That said, has there EVER been a business model in the US that was profitable for artists? I don't think there was ever money in music for artists from album sales. The cost of distributing and promoting music is just more expensive than making an album.

In my experience, while Spotify pays little outright, it is one of the few services that genuinely provides exposure in a beneficial way, one that may actually correlate to iTunes sales. That mentioned, Spotify deserves credit for paying anything, rather than sitting around and saying that exposure itself is a tangible payment form (e.g. McDonalds & SXSW). As Spotify expands, I can genuinely see new nations discoveri…

> That mentioned, Spotify deserves credit for paying anything, rather than sitting around and saying that exposure itself is a tangible payment form (e.g. McDonalds & SXSW).

Or the pro-piracy crowd...

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#287

Post by [deleted] »

darkmighty wrote: post #264
Consultant32452 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Just because situation is better doesn't mean it can't be further improved. You're considering 'No Spotify' vs 'Spotify' instead of 'Spotify' vs 'A better Spotify'. If you think on principles, Spotify should in the long term aim for maximum customer satisfaction. This means optimizing the satisfaction per customer instead of per music play , seems to be currently done. By concentrating money on bands each user listen…

[deleted]

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#288

Post by imissmyjuno »

darkmighty wrote: post #264
Consultant32452 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Just because situation is better doesn't mean it can't be further improved. You're considering 'No Spotify' vs 'Spotify' instead of 'Spotify' vs 'A better Spotify'. If you think on principles, Spotify should in the long term aim for maximum customer satisfaction. This means optimizing the satisfaction per customer instead of per music play , seems to be currently done. By concentrating money on bands each user listen…

Never mind the fact that it's just plain wrong to assume that "those bands NEVER used to get airplay". E.g. there are a number of significant artists on the label Drag City, such as Ty Segall and White, both of which get plenty of radio play, and most of the label's catalogue is not available to stream.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#289

Post by 21echoes »

mytochar wrote: post #233
21echoes wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Music does it the same way: https://play.google.com/intl/ALL_ALL/about/artist-terms.html """ (a) “Subscription Fees” shall be the greater of: (A): Monthly Subscription Minimum * number of Google Play music subscription service subscribers on the last day of such month * Your Subscription Activity Ratio -- OR -- (B): Subscription Revenue Share * Music Subscription Revenue * Your Subscription Activity Ratio """…

So does this mean that an artist makes more money when I /don't/ choose Google Music, because they get paid per advertisement shown when I load their video? ... this makes me sad.

not even close! you'd have to watch the video more than a thousand times, each of those views having a pre-roll video ad before it, and never skipping thru the pre-roll video ad.

realistically, this means the artist would have to get more than fifty thousand streams per month to equal just one subscriber.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#290

Post by yermoshin »

This is an interesting proposition, and one which I'm sure has been thought about and considered by the labels. However, I think people who think this would be better for indie artists are misguided.

The reason this change would very likely not benefit indie artists is simple:

People who listen to more music are more likely to have a high proportion of their music listening being "indie" than those people listening to less.

Pdpi's example explains very nicely how this would benefit pop artists over indie.

Does this system have other benefits?

Yes, a wonderful inadvertent thing you get for free is eliminating fraud listening. People would be unable to create accounts to listen to one artist on repeat all month long and laugh six months later when the checks come in (see the Vulfpeck story for those unfamiliar)

Would some indie artists benefit from the change?

Yes, of course some artists wouldbenefit, that's pretty much inevitable under any calculation methodology change.

None of this addresses the issue of time spent listening. Classical and Jazz payouts will consistently under-index people's time spent listening simply because the track recordings are so much longer than the average recording length. A time spent listening payout system would be a huge improvement, but then you can imagine people trying to manipulate this (throwing 25 minutes of silence on the last track of the album anyone?). Smoke and mirrors...

Post reply on HN