Spotify artists earn $167 per 1 million plays.
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Spotify artists earn $167 per 1 million plays.
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Re: Spotify artists earn $167 per 1 million plays.
#2Is this surprising to anyone? You cannot simultaneously have the price of a good be zero at the margin and yet pay producers non-zero renumeration at the margin.
There is no Internet Economic Fairy that makes it possible to increase consumption of music by a factor of dozens while simultaneously decreasing monthly expenditures on music (relative to CD sales) AND leaving all participants in the system better off.
Re: Spotify artists earn $167 per 1 million plays.
#3The question is what did those listeners do? Did they go buy her album? Did they go buy a concert ticket?
Re: Spotify artists earn $167 per 1 million plays.
#4If people listen to twenty tracks a day, this rate amounts to $1 per person per year.
That seems lowish.
Re: Spotify artists earn $167 per 1 million plays.
#5yes, but how much would have been paid for the right to broadcast 100 times on a radio station with 10,000 listeners?
it's easy to see artists don't get the same returns from radio as CD sales. spotify and the like are a new medium again - but with more similarities to radio than CDs imho.
Re: Spotify artists earn $167 per 1 million plays.
#6yes, but how much would have been paid for the right to broadcast 100 times on a radio station with 10,000 listeners? it's easy to see artists don't get the same returns from radio as CD sales. spotify and the like are a new medium again - but with more similarities to radio than CDs imho.
But the difference is that users have control over the music on Spotify. Even with the free version you can listen to a song when you want, as many times as you want. So as long as they're a Spotify member, a user essentially owns the content on there.
With radio it's more of a teaser. You might hear a song you like but you'll have to purchase it if you want to listen to it on repeat.
Re: Spotify artists earn $167 per 1 million plays.
#7Can payment agreements like this be used in court during filesharing lawsuits to show that if RIAA members are willing to value music at $167 per million plays there's no reasonable way they can argue that each mp3 someone shares is worth the thousands of dollars they sue people for?
I recognize that these are apples to oranges, but there must be some reasonable conversion. Artist gets X amount per Y plays, and given standard artist % breakdowns that suggests a song has Z value. if Z < W, where W is how much one gets sued for sharing one mp3, then either the RIAA should pay their artists fair value, which would drive more users to pay for music, or they can't sue people for so much per song.
Re: Spotify artists earn $167 per 1 million plays.
#8"plays" is misleading. Number of listeners would be a better metric. I play songs MANY times.
Assuming each listener played the song 100 times in 5 months (slightly less than once per day), we have 10,000 listeners. $167 for 10K listeners is 1.6 cents per listener (quite low compared to the 10euro/mo Spotify charges). But the number of listeners could easily be lower, if people listen many times to their favourite songs (like me).
Re: Spotify artists earn $167 per 1 million plays.
#9This is only a problem if you think musicians need to be rich and famous.
That is, before feeling bad for artists, remember that the cost of producing and distributing music has also gone way down. A desktop computer with electronic instruments is sufficient to cut a professional quality song.
Artists who produce music will slowly become like bloggers. You will find them through the Internet and recommendation engines, not through MTV, just like you find bloggers through Google rather than the opinion column of the Washington Post or NYT. And just like with opinion, the best stuff will be done by talented amateurs for free (e.g. everyone here can name 100 bloggers better than Maureen Dowd).
Eventually, just like the NYT syndicates some top blogs, so too will the major record labels pick up some Internet artists (Soulja Boy being a leading albeit cacophonous example of said trend). But this is just a stopgap en route to a new future where Google (via search) and Apple (via iTunes) and Amazon (via reviews) are the middlemen and respectively replace the RIAA's promotion, distribution, and quality control functions.
...two other thoughts. First, the role of the composer looks set to return to importance once a database of every possible sond and voice is compiled. There's definitely room for software to produce a "perfect" song entirely from the sheet music + sound/voice synthesis + historical data, without any live voices or instruments at all. For all I know, this is how Trent Reznor already does it.
Second, the analysis above places little weight on the experience of listening to live music. I guess if you are a big fan of concerts, the Internet will kill the (music) video star.
Re: Spotify artists earn $167 per 1 million plays.
#10Is this surprising to anyone? You cannot simultaneously have the price of a good be zero at the margin and yet pay producers non-zero renumeration at the margin. There is no Internet Economic Fairy that makes it possible to increase consumption of music by a factor of dozens while simultaneously decreasing monthly expenditures on music (relative to CD sales) AND leaving all participants in the system better off.
The only money I've ever made off of music is doing live gigs. Give your music away for almost nothing (or dirt cheap) and then play your own shows.
Record sales as a way to profit probably should never have existed. I would not be surprised if music historians in the future look back on the 20th century record industry as an aberration that existed only in the time when live performances stopped being the singular way to hear music, but creation and distribution of recordings hadn't yet become trivial.
I have no problem with this model. For every musician that hit it big with a record deal and marketing promotion under the rule of the RIAA, a hundred or more went into debt after failing to sell enough records after signing their contract, and a thousand more never even got the contract. I'd much rather be able to work and see my effort pay off in a tangible way than play the lottery.