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Justice at Spotify

unionofmusicians.org

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Re: Justice at Spotify

#351

Post by cwkoss »

frabjoused wrote: post #166
disgu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why don't you become a musician and try to make it before laying it out like this? They hardly have another choice. Do you immediately assume 95% of artists are entrepreneurial fools?

There are lots of musicians who aren't producing a living-wage's worth of value to listeners.

They do have a choice: they can get a better paying job if they don't like the amount they can earn from music. Society should not be responsible for funding someone's passion when there isn't demand.

And yes, the expectation that you can earn a good living just by being a recording artist is foolish. The vast majority of musicians throughout history have been unable to do so.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#352

Post by mortenjorck »

dimgl wrote: post #323
herbturbo wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think it's easy for up and coming musicians to blame Spotify for their financial woes, but as someone who was an aspiring musician in the 90s I can tell you it was no picnic back then. Everyone I knew was broke, so the only way to make a record was to get signed, and that involved playing shows in front of A&R people which meant finding venues etc - all on your own dime. If you did manage to get signed and get…

I realize this is tangential, but I'm currently making a video game. Is the video game industry similar? I worry that I won't get much return on my investment...

Gaming, even indie gaming, follows a power law just like everything else: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/04/ars-analysis-80-of-st...

Re: Justice at Spotify

#353

Post by hashingroll »

diddid wrote: post #275

If artists got a penny per stream, I'd create one song and set it up on repeat 24/7. 365 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes = 525600 minutes 525600 / 3 minute song = 175200 streams 175200 pennies / 100 = $1752 So I could pay 120 bucks a year and make 1752! I like the sound of that! And with the family plan, I could pay 1.5x the cost a month but get 5x the revenue!

There has to be a catch here...

Re: Justice at Spotify

#354

Post by paxys »

lux wrote: post #341
paxys wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are an indie artist (no record label deals) and agree to Spotify's terms, how are major labels involved at all? How are they getting the payouts meant for you?

Deezer explains it well here: https://www.deezer.com/ucps

Well the size of the pie is still the same in this plan. All it would do is shuffle the money around a little bit, so some artists earn less and others more. The top demand from the linked campaign is for Spotify to pay out >3x what they currently do to artists, which is a completely different (and much more significant) ask.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#355

Post by cwkoss »

dimgl wrote: post #323
herbturbo wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think it's easy for up and coming musicians to blame Spotify for their financial woes, but as someone who was an aspiring musician in the 90s I can tell you it was no picnic back then. Everyone I knew was broke, so the only way to make a record was to get signed, and that involved playing shows in front of A&R people which meant finding venues etc - all on your own dime. If you did manage to get signed and get…

I realize this is tangential, but I'm currently making a video game. Is the video game industry similar? I worry that I won't get much return on my investment...

Yes it is similar, but the smaller indie studio model is much more viable than it was a decade or two ago, particularly for unique games that find deep popularity with a small niche. (See Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Coffee Stain Studios)

I think independent video game dev is good for people who want to write the game anyways, and want to monetize to allow them to keep working on it. But, it is very unlikely to make you significant wealth.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#356

Post by Closi »

mikepurvis wrote: post #347
Closi wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not inherently clear to me that one play should be paid more than another play. In fact, having a different fee per play dependent on the user is a pretty opaque and unclear metric. “How much are 1 million plays worth? It depends on your audience - if your listeners listen to lots of music you get paid less per play, and you will just have to trust us to compute an appropriate fee for you correctly.” No matter h…

I don't think it would be that hard to show a small histogram which had your plays bucketed across different levels of commitment, engagement or some similar metric. Or instead of doing it that way, you'd bucket the users, so say "for song X, you had 30k unique users listen to it in the royalty time period, and here's a histogram of how engaged they were, with the left side being a small number of users who listened…

> In any case, obviously the conversation is DOA if you start it from a foundational assumption that "a play is a play"

That's not my foundational assumption, but I've also not heard a compelling argument that one play / minute streamed should be inherently more valuable than another play / minute streamed.

It's also not clear how this value would be calculated, because I also don't think it's clear that proportion of listen time by user necessarily captures the difference in 'value' of one play against another.

It also feels like it will be very complex to negotiate with rights providers. Spotify's current negotiations with rights providers are really simple and easy to understand - we divvy up our revenue by play count, you are responsible for $x revenue by this metric, so let's negotiate the %. Moving all providers to another weird metric would be an extremely tough thing to do, particularly because having half on one and half on another would likely happen for a crossover, and would result in a loss of profit during the transition period.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#357

Post by analog31 »

ksec wrote: post #332
tschwimmer wrote: post #242

The hard truth in music (and in many creative industries) is that there's a huge oversupply (many musicians are willing to make music for free or very cheap) and demand has a low willingness to pay. The result is that there isn't much money to be made for musicians. In my mind, there's really no way around this fact. You can argue (as these folks are) that Spotify could take a smaller cut and give more to musicians.…

>Overall, the problem for musicians is one of economics. Too many people willing to make music, not enough willing to pay. Exactly. And we have finite amount of time and attention. Just like the head of Premiere League in UK said E-Sport ( Gaming ) and other entertainment like Netflix are their competitors. And we have less time for music. It is not only an abundance of music, but also in other entertainment. K-POP e…

Microsoft inadvertently played a similar game in the 80s and 90s, by having multiple price tiers for similar products in different markets. You could buy Office at a computer store for $200, or get it bundled with a new computer for $20, or for "free" by copying the disks from someone. (Don't remember the exact prices). Then there were "upgrade" tiers and an academic discount. The free tier made it impossible for anybody to compete with them, thus protecting their market in the paid tier. They even tried competing with themselves, via "Microsoft Works," and gave up.

Creative works are a very strange market, because they don't fit any semblance of a demand curve. For instance, there's no such thing as a song that's slightly cheaper than a Taylor Swift hit, with slightly higher sales. You can't compete with Taylor Swift on a price/demand curve. Also, you can't compete with free.

There's still a bit of a demand curve for live music. For instance you can pay less to hear my band than to hear Taylor Swift. This may actually be why playing live is still a better economic deal for most rank-and-file musicians. It's one reason why I'm presently un-recorded. I have no need to know how much my music is loved by people who think I don't deserve to get paid.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#358

Post by SpaceCenturion »

smnrchrds wrote: post #307
Eridrus wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you should take Spotify's audited financial statements about how much they make and how much they return to rights holders (~75% of revenue) more seriously than your back of the envelope estimates: https://investors.spotify.com/financials/default.aspx

Agreed. The above calculation for example does not account for the fact that Spotify pricing varies significantly between countries and can be as little as 1.60$ per month. https://edm.com/industry/spotify-premium-prices-by-country

Indeed! I have a family account for 6 people here in Brazil and I pay around 0.77 USD per person.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#359

Post by number6 »

lux wrote: post #340
number6 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and why sign a deal or agree to terms that you don't agree to? Just don't go to Spotify?

Tell that to listeners. Many artists don't list themselves there for that reason, but you're penalized for it because Spotify playlists are increasingly the only way many people access music at all. The do or don't isn't always so black and white.

It's the same problem with the use of WhatsApp. If people want to talk to me there are other means to contact me. It's just that everyone is on WhatsApp. So what choice do I have? Be part of the problem or be excluded from social life.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#360

Post by toyg »

falcolas wrote: post #115
toyg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should you not own copyright to that which you produce? You don't want to use that line of argument, since authors and musicians are among the very few categories of workers with that privilege. As much as I agree with you (and actually think that privilege to be expanded to all workers), you won't find any solidarity from the common public on that line.

> since authors and musicians are among the very few categories of workers with that privilege Don't forget software developers. All of our various licenses (and even our work-for-hire for various companies) relies upon copyright as well. There's also reporters, photographers, journalists, YouTube content creators, TV, and movies, just to name a few off the top of my head.

In practice, very few of these actually benefit from copyright. Most do work-for-hire, which is effectively a negation or renounce to one’s IP rights; and opensource is effectively a way to do the same. The ones who can actually extract direct benefit from IP are “ the 1%”, so to speak.
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