Why Spotify Pays So Little • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#301

Post by detail3 » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 5:03 PM UTC

jakejake wrote: post #241

geoelectric wrote: post #193

Earlier 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…

Their service isn't free, they charge an administration fee of 3-7% (depending upon the organization we are talking about). It just comes out before you get your check.

They are 'non-profits' but so is the NFL.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#302

Post by detail3 » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

avn2109 wrote: post #87

mortenjorck wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how Spotify works, though. According to the link above: Every time somebody listens to a song on Spotify it generates payments, but Spotify does not calculate royalties based upon a fixed “per play” rate. Unless there are some secret deals being struck for fixed per-stream royalties that Spotify isn’t admitting to publicly, every rightsholder gets a percentage of monthly revenue. Which sounds fair, until y…

>> "...assuming no secret deals..." You're totally right on the merits, but it's worth noting that the big record labels are composed entirely of and built their empire solely upon unjust-seeming secret deals, and we have no reason to believe that they've stopped that modus operandi now merely because they're dealing with Spotify.

Indeed, there were secret deals with record labels in which Spotify gave up 'some amount' of equity to majors in order to be able to stream their catalogs....along with an upfront sum of course.

I think the real problem that isn't being discussed is the fact that on a service such as Spotify it is impossible for an artist to be independent, his/her efforts WILL support majors via their equity in streaming services.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#303

Post by detail3 » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

goatforce5 wrote: post #234

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 imagine Spotify cares more about not being sued by the majors than distributing money to smaller artists (without legal teams behind them). Also, isn't a big chunk of Spotify owned by the major labels anyway?

Yes, though what size chunk is not clear. So certainly 'a' chunk.

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#304

Post by SeanAnderson » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

JDiculous wrote: post #295

joshstrange wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hitting this point right now. After years of maintaining an mp3 collection I jumped ship to Spotify to try it out and loved it. It was great that I no longer had to spend any time to get access to the music I loved. Also community playlists were awesome (Especially the Top X Hit playlists that were updated monthly). Spotify even supported Last.FM, I was in heaven... Until Spotify didn't have that 1 song, or that…

Now I just use Youtube (via Streamus, a Chrome extension that plays from Youtube) and SoundCloud. Not having that 1 song really does ruin Spotify or any similar kind of service for me.

:D That's what I like to hear! (Developer of Streamus here... thanks for using it!!)

Re: Why Spotify Pays So Little

#305

Post by basseq » Mon, Mar 23, 2015, 1:11 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #208

basseq wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reason…

> My gut is that a LOT of artists are getting screwed for exactly the reasons mentioned in the article.

The article makes the hypothesis that people who listen to "indie" music also listen to less music. I don't think that's true.

(I don't have hard evidence to back up the counter-factual, but neither does the author in proving the hypothesis. He just sets up a straw man example, then bashes yoga studios, Daft Punk, and the idea of a subscription model as a whole.)