241–250 of 405 posts
Help small artists by listening more to their music.
"How do I find small artists on Spotify" you ask? That's what I did build https://tastemaker.cc/newcomers for.
It is a playlists showing you 6 new small (I call them newcomer) artists every day :D
Their other options are not so good either. Musicians can build a Spotify clone that's more favorable to artists. Nominally, this sounds like Tidal. The problem with Tidal is that nobody wants to spend that much money on a subscription. Even with the high profile artist exclusives it has less than 5% market share. Beyond the business model, building a Spotify clone is difficult to execute, especially for musicians and not software folks.
You can somehow lobby to outlaw streaming and go back to selling songs and albums individually. This would definitely hurt Spotify but probably doesn't help musicians too much. Potentially the top 1% of musicians are better off as they're able to capture more value but the long tail is way worse as nobody discovers their music anymore.
An interesting solution might be collective action. If enough musicians banded together and pulled their catalogs from Spotify, I could see that having a big negative impact on Spotify's revenue. There are a few bands that if their catalogs were off Spotify, I'd probably cancel. This would be effective but is probably too difficult to coordinate.
Overall, the problem for musicians is one of economics. Too many people willing to make music, not enough willing to pay. In other words, you can't push a rope. If you are a musician, my strong advice to you is to get comfortable with doing it for a reason other than money. Otherwise, you're in for inevitable disappointment.
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> And Spotify is already paying out 75% of it's revenue to royalty holders Realize that the royalty holders are not the musicians, but typically the major labels. The musicians get virtually nothing.
I think this is the main thing most music fans (and young musicians) are forgetting: historically, musicians have never made money off of album sales, labels have. Musicians make the bulk of their money from touring and merchandise. Steve Albini does a good job of breaking it down here: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music . FTFA: > For the average band, a $250,000 advance (in 1993 dollars) is distrib…
So I wanted to try put this into perspective since "a penny per stream" is intentionally meant to sound insignificant. This seems like it would roughly double Spotify's costs: https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/apps/how-much-... And Spotify is already paying out 75% of it's revenue to royalty holders: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-pr... So unless you believe that Spotify is bad…
According to one source [1], Spotify users stream on average 25 hours a month. Assuming an average song is 3 minutes [2], that's 500 streams per month. Going with the $9.99 per month rate, users pay about $0.02 per stream. Currently, the artists see only $0.0038 per stream, or less than 1/5th of what Spotify makes. I think that with a 50% profit margin, Spotify should be very happy. Of course, it's not that easy / st…
The fact that individuals aren't able to break out via self-publishing music is an oddity in the internet age. Why aren't there more avenues to hear "random new artist that matches my tastes"? or is it self-perpetuating that labels sign all successful artists who can go mainstream?
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According to one source [1], Spotify users stream on average 25 hours a month. Assuming an average song is 3 minutes [2], that's 500 streams per month. Going with the $9.99 per month rate, users pay about $0.02 per stream. Currently, the artists see only $0.0038 per stream, or less than 1/5th of what Spotify makes. I think that with a 50% profit margin, Spotify should be very happy. Of course, it's not that easy / st…
The other issue that has been raised a number of times is that I believe the revenue is still divided up based on overall listens across the platform, which means it's dominated by artists who feature heavily in popular playlists and automation-driver radio/recommendations. These listens are often passive and should not be considered as valuable as those of someone listens only a few hours a month, but spends all of…
Soundcloud has already gone in the direction of paying out based on what you actually listen to, and it would be great to see Spotify and other platforms follow suit. See http://fanpoweredroyalties.com/ for more details on Soundcloud's implementation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to one source [1], Spotify users stream on average 25 hours a month. Assuming an average song is 3 minutes [2], that's 500 streams per month. Going with the $9.99 per month rate, users pay about $0.02 per stream. Currently, the artists see only $0.0038 per stream, or less than 1/5th of what Spotify makes. I think that with a 50% profit margin, Spotify should be very happy. Of course, it's not that easy / st…
Yes, ignoring all other costs isn't great. Their revenue per subscriber is also substantively lower - including free users, discounted EDU users, and family memberships. Excluding free users, it's probably ~$5 per user. That being said, Apple Music pays .75p/stream, Tidal is 1.25p/stream. They can probably figure it out.
> Their revenue per subscriber is also substantively lower - including free users, discounted EDU users, and family memberships. Excluding free users, it's probably ~$5 per user.
> That being said, Apple Music pays .75p/stream, Tidal is 1.25p/stream. They can probably figure it out.
Their rates are per country, they differ. So these calculations gave to it into account, but everyone pays the 5 or whatever it costs now in the west.
So I wanted to try put this into perspective since "a penny per stream" is intentionally meant to sound insignificant. This seems like it would roughly double Spotify's costs: https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/apps/how-much-... And Spotify is already paying out 75% of it's revenue to royalty holders: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-pr... So unless you believe that Spotify is bad…
While I agree more money should be sent towards small artists and I really hate to see myself defending a giant tech company, the demands of "x per stream" always makes me a bit confused. Since spotify already pay out the vast majority of their revenue, there is not really much more room for increase there, at best 5-10% which likely wouldn't settle the case. Reasonable suggestions would be that either: 1. labels sho…
For years there's been a conflict broadly defined as "streaming rates paid to artists are irrationally low" vs. "streaming services aren't making money as it is"; the problem is that those aren't mutually exclusive positions. They can both be true at the same time.
At least to me, this suggests that the real problem is that $8–10 a month for ad-free streams was too low a price point to set. If Spotify's pricing structure had been something more like Hulu's -- no free tier at all, $6/month with ads and $12/month without -- they'd have easily been able to meet that penny-per-stream pay rate. (Tidal beats that pay rate, but I suspect that's by virtue of charging $20/month for "hi-fi" streams.) But, at this point they've set consumer expectations: streaming music services cost $10 per month. Changing that would be pretty difficult.
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It makes me sad to time and time again learn that the low prices of services I love are unsustainable and instead subsidized by treating someone unfairly downstream. I wish I could be told what the ethical price for something is and I might actually pay it. And if that price is too high, then maybe that service shouldn't exist in the first place.
Wait - how are you responsible for the fact that the artists sign away their rights to shitty big labels that take the majority of the money that work generates? How are you responsible for dumb decisions musicians make?
Also, "if you're abused it's your own fault for being dumb" is usually a take you want to be pretty careful with.
Have this people ever considered the need of user of Spotify? I doubt it.
Subscription to Spotify can be a lot to some people already, now with these greedy, self-involved and small-minded drama bunches, I just afraid the fee will go higher...
Why these people can be so shameless to blame on others for their very own problem that their work sucks?
So laughable.
As this is the typical liberal mindset that blame the whole world for your own problem.
LOSERS!