Justice at Spotify

Post by theragra » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 8:49 PM UTC

dublinben wrote: post #277

barbazoo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ethical way to pay for music is to actually buy it from a site like Bandcamp, instead of perpetually renting it from Spotify.[0] Expect to pay about $10 for an album. Bandcamp usually takes a ~20% cut, but now has regular events where they waive their cut.[1] It should be clear that $10/mo is not a sustainable price to pay to listen to any and all music ever recorded. [0] https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-m…

Post by lux » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #354

lux wrote: post #341

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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.

Post by m000 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:18 PM UTC

jsiepkes wrote: post #157

wilde wrote: post #58

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Spotify doesn’t want to take the risk, but there’s probably money on the table from all the small gyms, coffee shops, etc that should be paying commercial rates.

I don't know about other countries but in the Netherlands companies already pay an additional fee which ends-up with the royalty holders [1]. Meaning you have to pay a special license fee when playing music in venue's such as stores, cafe's and even a common office work space. [1] https://www.bumastemra.nl/en/everything-for-music-users/type...

Post by mikepurvis » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

Closi wrote: post #356

mikepurvis wrote: post #347

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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 o…

Post by cwkoss » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 10:12 PM UTC

kmeisthax wrote: post #107

breck wrote: post #7

#abolishcopyright. Musicians if you’re listening, find a different way to earn a living than depending upon the enslavement of ideas (and by extension, individuals). Copyright is abhorrent, and needs to go. There are better ways.

We've had two decades to envision alternative funding models for music production, and all of them are substantially worse for the musician than "assign a creator's monopoly to the musician and civil liabilities for those who fail to negotiate proper licenses to it". Free markets are designed to allocate scarce goods; with the corollary any person whose work is not scarce does not get to eat. Ergo, if you want certai…