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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

I feel like it's a false analogy to compare Spotify Streams to CD sales. For a fairer comparison, you should measure against something more ephemeral.

The biggest radio channels in the US have a few million listeners each. Let's say your record does ok, and gets airtime on a few second-tier radio stations. For easy math, let's do 20 plays * 50,000 listeners per play. This also gives you a total of one million listens.

I would be _extremely_ surprised if they would net much more than $5000 from these radio listens.

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I'm with this all the way. Appreciate this article is from 2016, but surprised the physical sale is still compared to Spotify streams. They're very different and I think Spotify is far more like radio with choice (a bit like Netflix and TV). I listen to lots of stuff on Spotify I never would have bought 15 years ago (thus no sale would be accounted for). But conversely, I suppose, I rarely buy a lot of records I listen to with fair frequency on Spotify. That said I go and watch live shows of a bunch of people I probably wouldn't have.

Times have changed. Everyone has to adapt. I doubt as many people are buying DVDs or Bluray anymore, right?

> I would be _extremely_ surprised if they would net much more than $5000 from these radio listens.

Me too. Unless they've recently changed the rules, the artist gets nothing when a song is played on the radio.

They haven't recently changed the rules. The average for terrestrial radio in the US is around 12c/play.

In the UK it can be up to £15/minute plus £35/play on a top radio station like Radio 1. Less mainstream stations pay less.

The artist may see half of that depending on their publishing deal.

So... Spotify's microcents per stream are a joke.

Around 80% of Spotify revenue goes to rights holders - i.e. a handful of big record companies.

Around 10% of that 80% goes to artists. [1]

The record labels keep the rest.

[1] The exact accounting details are byzantine, especially in their creative use of expenses which diminish apparent revenue. They also vary from artist to artist. Top artists get a much bigger cut than newly signed artists. But no one gets much from Spotify plays when compared to radio payments.

You need to divide that £15/minute+£35 per play by the number of listeners for them to be comparable. Radio 1 breakfast show has about 9 million weekly listeners. I've no idea how many people are listening at any particular time, but you'd still be talking micropennies.

> So... Spotify's microcents per stream are a joke.

If you treat it as analogous, sure, but it's not.

Airplay is finite in a way that streams are not. There is also a greater cost to get in to that airspace. So it's not surprising those costs cascade down.

People frame streaming like this all the time. Streams versus CD sales versus radio play. They're incomparable ecosystems, though. Costs, mechanisms, value ... none of it is 1:1 with the old world.

1 play on radio 1 could easily be 1 million listeners for which they get 100 quid you say, whereas this band say they got $5000 for a million listens on Spotify.

This is..complicated. The performer doesn't get money, but the song writer does. These are often the same person, but not always. Must suck for bands whose biggest hits are cover songs.

Max Martin must love it.

Spotify is closer to CDs than radio because you can play any song you want whenever you want at a quality similar to CDs.

I'm excited to sell all my Spotify albums on eBay then, I guess?

Trying to stuff the new-world of streaming into the old-world boxes of CD or Radio just doesn't work. the world changed.

That's why I pirate all my music.

I thing the general Idea is, with spotify, people are not buying CDs (or digital files) anymore, because they have the liberty to choose all the time what they wanna hear. So Spotify must compensate for the lose. At the end Spotify is a mix between radio and CDs, but more on the CD-Side, because with Radio you usually can't choose what you hear.

I wonder if Spotify also pays different depending on whether people choose a song or whether it was autplayed because of some public playlist or radio-feed (does spootify have something like that?).

> So Spotify must compensate for the los[s].

why?

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