Justice at Spotify
unionofmusicians.org
unionofmusicians.org
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 at business and there's an extra ~75% of revenue Spotify could pull out of a hat, this is basically impossible to satisfy without cratering the total revenue by doubling prices, which is probably not in artist's interests.
I think that with a 50% profit margin, Spotify should be very happy. Of course, it's not that easy / straightforward, all conditions and caveats apply, etc etc.
[1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/ [2]: https://www.music-jobs.com/uk/article/news/news-pop-songs-ar...
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 that time listening to specific artists (indie or otherwise).
Basically the argument is that if I spend $9.99 on a Spotify sub, the entirety of that cash (minus Spotify's cut) should be directed to the actual artists I listened to.
Here's an articulation of this perspective from 2014: https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-to-make-streaming-royalties-...
It seems more fair to me that artists would get a set amount of money per stream, rather than the amount they get being dependent on how many other songs their listeners listened to.
The 700 hour listener has no audience and no human curation, and yet it's got 10x the influence on who gets paid by Spotify.
The article I linked also makes a really good point about this model motivating artists to encourage listeners/fans to listen to whole albums rather than single songs— right now if you're playing Spotify for revenue, the only thing that matters is landing your songs on popular playlists where they will get hundreds of thousands of passive plays. The incentives there are not really aligned to what anyone wants long term out of music.
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.
I'm pretty sure that Netflix understands this, by the way— they know that deep-pocketed competitors like Amazon are going to eat their lunch if they try to do mass-appeal prestige shows starring A-list celebs, so they only do a few of those (enough to basically fill the homepage), while leaning hard into extremely niche content. Like, have you seen how many weird cooking shows there are on there? Or Hallmark Christmas movies? This is stuff that's harder to find elsewhere, and there are dedicated audiences on Netflix who are mostly or exclusively consuming it. If Netflix's internal accounting worked like how Spotify pays royalties, those shows would be instantly canceled in favour of new primetime-style sitcoms.
But they aren't, and I think it's because there are pools of their subscribers who will cancel the service if there isn't a steady stream of the specific content they're interested in. Thus, their subscriber $$$ go directly to funding that content, rather than into a general pot that's broken up by raw viewership numbers.
The nice thing about the proposal from the article is that in theory it should be something where everyone's incentives are aligned, since it rewards artists and genres for having fans who listen to their stuff a lot.
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?
Because Bandcamp is perfect at this and nobody can beat them.
I say that with tongue in cheek, but they have been the platform for average musicians to self-publish on for a while. They've even totally foregone their cut periodically during the pandemic to help artists. And unlike Spotify, artists are able to apply their own branding to their pages. I've never met a musician with a bad thing to say about them or their platform.
One reason is due to flat rate bundled compulsory licensing. If you run a coffee shop with live music you either restrict all performers to only play original works and still probably get threatened with lawsuits, or you pay up the ASCAP/BMI/SESAC protection money and can play whatever.
So in many contexts weirdo obscure independent artists can't compete on price (e.g. give their music away just to get it heard) because the customer has already paid for a bundled rate for popular music.
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.
Some have pointed to logistical challenges in the latter model, but it's clearly not impossible, as SoundCloud just announced it will be the first service to adopt it: https://press.soundcloud.com/197001-soundcloud-introduces-fa...
Let's say that Spotify says No. Spotify's argument is, in effect, all artists are sharing a piece of the same pie; if they give Taylor Swift a higher than average rate, it lowers the average payout for every other artist. By saying No, in this hypothetical universe, Spotify is standing up for indie artists.
Taylor (more accurately, her rights holders) does not put her music on Spotify. Customers who come to Spotify for Taylor Swift's music no longer feel that their subscription is worthwhile; they stop paying.
Now, the pie is smaller. Indie artists receive a bigger chunk of a smaller pie. Customers are left without the music they want. Spotify's revenue is lower. Everyone loses.
Its easy to place the blame at Spotify, and I'm sure they deserve some, but we've known for about half a century that the record industry is a hive of shit, and this is just another symptom of this. The disparity in income between the popular artists and average artists is huge, and its mostly because of gatekeeping that the popular artists actively engage in to protect their nine-figure fortunes. Spotify could have stood up for smaller artists, but I'm not convinced they'd even exist today if they had; it was really their willingness to work with the record industry that turned them into the force they are.
I do have some hope that Square's purchase of Tidal could be a catalyst for change in the industry. In other words, if they maintain Tidal's high(est) revenue share with artists, improve the user experience (a lot), leverage their existing industry relationships to keep enough popular artists on the platform, and work with indie artists... it could be very good. I'm optimistic. I think Tidal's core investors being artists themselves and a traditionally low-margin payment processor is actually very healthy, versus Spotify who effectively is just a middle-man that needs to extract enough to survive.
https://soundcharts.com/blog/radio-royalties
I couldn't actually find out what was paid, but it did look to be that, artists weren't really paid. It was song writers and publishers who were paid. Performing artists, however, only generated word of mouth which generated ticket sales - so far as I could garner.
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 should get less, 2. top artists should get less or 3. consumers should pay more.
Or am I missing something?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/653926/music-streaming-s...
I'd argue that all music-streaming services have very little pricing power!
Streaming services rely on being an easier/friction-free option as opposed to piracy (or alternatively, buying the copies directly from the musicians).
Your point is still valid though, the competition is still fierce; Amazon, Tidal, Apple.. etc.
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.
Which sounds a bit weird to me. How many people used to spend more than $10 every month on LP or CD records. Probably many enthusiasts, but the average customer? Not a chance.
Yet artists say they get paid a lot less. The money must go somewhere.
Realize that the royalty holders are not the musicians, but typically the major labels. The musicians get virtually nothing.
They sign shitty contracts that leave them with "virtually nothing" and then complain to someone who is not responsible for them having "virtually nothing".
If a user pays $10/mo and listens to nothing but indie streams, those indies are getting far less than $7.50 (more like pennies) due to the way they calculate their payouts. The major labels pocket the majority of that money.
Spotify have the ability to change this, but not the will to do so, because the major labels own a stake in them. Soundcloud recently launched a payment model that matches pretty much exactly what indies are asking Spotify to do, so we know it's possible but Spotify have been stonewalling indies about how it's too complicated for years.
I guess that's what you have to do when you're powerless. Record labels force you into shitty contracts. They have the power. Who has power over the record labels? Spotify.
Do you know any musicians? Like, real musicians, for whom music is their life and their life's work, not dabblers?
Typically these are not shrewd business types. They don't hold a lot of negotiating power; if they're lucky enough to get a chance with a label deal they often don't push back on the terms very much at all. Labels are notoriously predatory in this regard, particularly mainstream large companies.
All they want is a fair shake. They see themselves and their fellow artists being screwed continually, while people that have nothing to do with their hard work, long nights, and passionate effort make money off their backs. For every artist that learns, there are ten more willing to take their place just for a tiny sliver of a chance at popularity.
The solution here is to do whatever we want to continue the slow work towards destroying mainstream labels. Indie labels still offer a reasonable value proposition in terms of the promotion and recording work they do in exchange for a share of the proceeds; mainstream labels don't. Like most media industries, they're headed by parenthetical elites, cosmopolitan types who have no loyalty to anything but profit, and will squeeze out every drop no matter the impact to the actual working artists.
Fuck 'em. Don't listen to mainstream music. Support indie artists and labels; buy direct wherever possible. If anything, the protest should be to make it trivial to directly host your music with Spotify for a nominal hosting fee, so that all revenue can go direct to the artist, rather than having to go through a 3rd party service.
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 distributed like this:
> Record company: $710,000
> Producer: $90,000
> Manager: $51,000
> Studio: $52,500
> Previous label: $50,000
> Agent: $7,500
> Lawyer: $12,000
> Band member net income each: $4,031.25
I don't know if it makes nearly as much sense in a world where you can just upload your music to YouTube and do direct marketing via Twitter/FB/TikTok.
The music industry lawyers were incredibly smart when they passed the DMCA back before online music was much at all, and got internet streaming defined as mechanical reproduction so they got dealt in on streaming.
ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, et al, which give large blanket licenses to cover most copyrights for songs charged well known quantity for licenses, and early music streaming services paid those. Harry Fox (at least at the time) was the clearing house for mechanical rights and there was actually no set rate or anything. DMCA created a compulsory license that Harry FOx would have to give, but the rates were not known at the time, so everyone was getting VC funding without knowing what anything would cost.
That rate is probably much higher than the songwriting royalties, so the music industry has succeeding in getting ahold of most of the money in a new format that was poised to benefit the artists directly.
I guess we should just be glad it didn't happen like video streaming and there are actually rights clearing houses so companies like Spotify and others can make compelling streaming services with very large catalogs, unlike the city-state video steaming where you need 3-4 services combined to get access to most of the mainstream stuff.
This is not correct. Mechanical royalties have always belonged to the songwriter. A record label pays mechanicals to a songwriter's publishing company who then passes it on to the songwriter. When a record label sells a record that contains a song an artist owns the copyright to the record label must pay that songwriter a mechanical royalty. When that songs is played on the radio at least in the US the songwriter gets a performance royalty. The songwriter gets paid a royalty in both cases. The label as a mechanical license holder is obligated to pay out a mechanical royalty.
https://www.bmi.com/news/entry/Understanding_Mechanical_Roya...
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/943818966/bob-dylan-sells-son...
Independent artists don't like this.
Hypothetically, my profit margin making widgets would be better if I could just pay my raw material provider half-price. I could pay them half-price, add, say, another one-third of that to cover other costs and overhead, and probably dominate the market since I could charge less for my widgets than any competitors who have to pay the full raw material costs.
Again, bad at business? Depends on who you're asking.
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 music industry also seems a bit like a "winner takes all" market where there are a bunch of top grossing artists which make an insane amount of money and a much, much larger part which can't make a decent living out of it.
Not to go laser-eyes Marx, but this is definitely not unique to the music industry either
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-more-money-artists-e...
They are not dumb decisions. An indie artist HAS to sign with labels if they want to make it in the industry. That's the way it's been and we've accepted for decades that that's the way it will be.
Mistreating workers is not okay. Workers joining the status quo to make a living is not dumb. Calling them "dumb" online is deplorable, however.
Also, "if you're abused it's your own fault for being dumb" is usually a take you want to be pretty careful with.
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.
Get a better paying job is very easy in this business. The lowest of the low would be better paying.
AFAIK while you need a distributor and can't just upload your stuff like you can on Youtube, there's a bunch of them that seem to give the artists everything.
If the artist choose to go with a label that takes their royalties, that's on them. If they do it because they want the visibility and services, that has a cost.
Music is a field where a lot of people do it just for fun, and it's quite saturated. Supply (as in diversity of products) way outweigh demand.
I make music, I own all rights, I upload to streaming service, I should get all cut from streaming service. What does said agent do?
In general, price competitiveness on the market is based on some form of workforce exploitation.
I know it's not a zero sum game and so on, but someone is paying the difference on the discounted price you are offered.
Being a full time professional musician has only been a means to wealth for a handful of people through history. Most professional musicians, even successful ones, are unable to earn their lifetime expenses from their profession: they make some good money if they have a hit and then fade away and have to get another job. Or they have capitalize on their brand externally to the music market. Has there been any time period in the past several centuries when the average musician earned a living wage?
The goal of a million full-time professional musicians seems arbitrary and I'm not sure why it is necessarily desirable.
Music is a passion, so people are willing to spend time making music below market labor rates. With modern digital reproduction and ease of recording, demand will never exceed supply. I believe the cost of music can and should asymptotically approach zero over time as an ever-growing public domain becomes good enough for most uses.
[1] https://www.bumastemra.nl/en/everything-for-music-users/type...
In Greece there was the notorious AEPI [1] that was collecting fees from both stores, as well as subscriptions from artists so they can "represent" them. They were demanding fees even when a store owner was listening privately in their shop (e.g. they had a radio behind the counter). They were dismantled after a corruption scandal: most of the collected money ended up as exorbitant salaries for the board of directors, with the artists again receiving pennies.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170128110611/http://www.aepi.g...
Depending on how much leverage Spotify actually has here, they can of course try to change the existing agreements they have. Nothing in impossible and harder things have changed before.
"Royalty holders" is not even an actual term. Copyright holders are the owners of master recording - often a record company. Streaming services license entire catalogs for a fixed price for a fixed period of time. Streaming service don't pay record labels royalties. Royalties of which there are two in the context of streaming are a) performance royalty and b) a mechanical royalty both of which are paid out to the publisher and songwriter.
>"So unless you believe that Spotify is bad at business and there's an extra ~75% of revenue Spotify could pull out of a hat, this is basically impossible to satisfy without cratering the total revenue by doubling prices, which is probably not in artist's interests."
The whole argument that the current predominant streaming model is the only viable business model is flawed. This seems to presume that the "pro-rata" distribution model that Spotify uses is the only distribution model. There is an alternative model that many artists are pushing for which is a the "user centric' distribution model. In that model the calculation of payments is based on the listening habits of each individual user. A simplified examples is that I only listen to one artist in a given month. In the user centric model the entire 10% of record labels 70% usually allocated to the artist cut is paid to that artist rather than those streams being calculated as percentage of all songs streamed from that one of the big 3's record label's massive catalogs.
Then they should push for that specifically, but it would not change the average rate paid per stream, but rebalance payments away from artists which are listened to by heavy music users towards artists which are listened to light music users.
I think the real issue here is that people just don't want to pay as much for music like they did during the golden age of the CD. Most Spotify users are still on the free tier. Blaming streaming companies isn't gonna change that.
Faced with that reality, it would be interesting to know what is actually going on. Is total dollars spent on music not reflective of what artists used to make? Are there just that many more musicians than there used to be? Was it way harder to make a living making music in years past than we're giving it credit for? Are artifacts of pay-per-listen rather than pay-per-song causing a different payout distribution impacting the majority of musicians (e.g., you used to have to buy a CD to listen to a song just once)?
Because before people would record songs from the radio on tape and listen to those. They would buy used CDs, pirate. Radio would stream the song, but you didn't know exactly how many people were listening.
I used to spend $0 on music. Now I have spotify duo for me and my wife. I also started buying vinyl records, but my bet is that the artists makes way less money from my vinyl collection than from my Spotify account
Why aren't these people targeting those labels?
Why aren't these people targeting others like Apple?
Or they want Spotify to operate as a Non-Profit because Apple is currently making Apple Music a Net Zero Profit business? ( Diluting there services revenue margin )
Source: Been there, seen it, a long time. Spotify needs to be nothing more than a functioning music utility. Instead their US offices are structured like a massive, bloated, 90's style agency party zone.
Trust me.
There is room to cut costs.
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.
And as a consumer of music, I am very happy to be paying $14.99 a month for access to a collection that would have been virtually impossible for an individual to assemble 20 years ago. Music has been opened up to people in a way that did not exist before Spotify. Also, a good deal of the music I listen to is stuff I had already bought on CD or vinyl years before, so those artists are getting paid twice for me listening now.
Bottom line is it's always been hard to break through into making money from music. Nothing has changed except the way it's distributed.
https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/ https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d/index.html
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.
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 essentially made their music and MV for free on YouTube. While making money on tours, merchandise, and show appearance.
I sympathies for them. But their problem has nothing to do with Spotify at all.
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.
Thank You. I need to copy this down in my book.
Let's imagine a radio station. Something medium sized, about a million listeners. They play a track. Are they paying 10,000 per play, which would be the equivalent rate? I suspect not.
There seems to be some idea of what musicians "should" make that other professions don't benefit from. I would like to make the same money from making furniture as I do from writing code, but I can't. I could blame the furniture stores for not promoting me or taking too big a cut or any number of other factors, or I could accept the fact that I'm not an amazing woodworker. But I still make my art/craft because I enjoy it and it's important to me.
There are plenty of ways for musicians to make a living, but I don't see a problem with the fact that spending a month or two a year recording an album is a privilege available to only the most talented subset of them.
Any normal people, has a pay rate (minimum $0.77 USD/hr where I live). Someone goes to work, works for 8 hours, and gets their 8hr equivalent salary.
But then you have "artists" who work to produce their product for say 80 hours, and then they want to be perpetually paid... not only that, they want to be paid enough to live a lifestyle similar to the person that get's paid for 40 hours a week job, for 30 years.
The fact that slapping some ads on my music on youtube made me earn more than being on Spotify says everything about how bad that deal is for any artist...
not only could you but you should. Of course workers over the last few decades have internalised the mindset that they cannot use their power to bargain and that whatever they get is fair and they should just shut up, which is why we tolerate corporate middlemen eating our lunch.
I don't know if a penny per song is realistic or whatever, but going up against Spotify and record labels and trying to negotiate as much compensation for artists as possible collectively is exactly what they ought to do. Also, on the other end, as consumers we need to stop whining when we have to pay twenty bucks instead of ten bucks per month to compensate artists who we spend listening hours to every single week.
But you know what I did last week? I didn't mope around at some job I hate complaining about "Big Furniture". I made a bookcase. I also wrote a bunch of software. I can call myself a woodworker, I paid my mortgage, and IKEA sold thousands of Billy Bookcases. All is good.
It's also absolutely ridiculous that you champion those who want to make more money while also saying that everyone on the other end who wants to spend less should "stop whining".
It's long overdue that we move away from this sleazy consumer mindset and start valuing creators.
Just kinda how the market is setup. I don't think it is unsustainable for artists.
I fucking hate "exposure", but that is literally what radio/streaming is is.
It is never a substantial revenue stream until you hit big.
And with today's tech, radio had to become streaming.
Paying a penny per stream is highly unsustainable for everyone.
What would you suggest to fix it?
I think the system is pretty decent all things considered. Now, Spotify could definitely be better at hyping and pushing new music/low creators....but other than that I don't think they're the enemy here.
I understand the need to get paid more, but I am not sure killing Spotify is the solution.
If Spotify doesn't compromise, killing it would be the only solution, but this union doesn't have the power to do that initially. But this will never work because you have a infinite stream of new musicians wanting to be listen without receiving money for that.
New musicians want their work out there....without Spotify(or similar) it will be back to just blasting out your music for free online everywhere so you can get bug.
Spotify at least gives them some revenue while they increase their fandom.
For a moment in time, piracy of movies and series was at a low point. Recently, with the fragmentation of all the different streaming services it's rising again.
Because of contracts the _artists_ signed, not the consumer.
The difference is that every artist has a choice if his music lands on Spotify or not - and if he accepts the conditions offered. The main problem of many of these artists is that they signed bad distribution deals with their labels and are giving away a big chunk % of streaming revenues. That isn't Spotifys fault.
Also, according to Spotifys latest financial statement, they are expecting a $200-300m operating loss for 2021, so i find it hard to argue that Spotify is being "too greedy" when they aren't even profitable.
They just simply ”want more”, and who wouldn’t, but free market and supply/demand disagrees with them. If artists don’t like Spotify’s offering they can pull their music out of the service.
(All figures in million euros)
Revenue Cost of Revenue Profit
Premium : 7135 5126 2009
Free (ads): 745 739 6
Overall : 7880 5865 2015
For spotify free that would mean that they just have to include 2.63x more ads, this is doable but I'm sure it would hurt adoption and maybe people would move from the platform.
For spotify paid they could cut down their profit margin and pay 39% more per stream than they currently do (ignoring that they have more than 2B eur in other business expenses currently). But even after that they would still have to raise their prices by a multiple of 1.91.
This would mean they would have to charge about $19.10 a month to not loose money on licencing in the US market.
Isn't one of the strengths of the internet the fact that it's easier to scale and reach a wider audience, thus having more money in the end?
This assumes, like the post two levels above me, that Spotify don't need the profits for anything and just need to break even.
Let's say people stream for 4 hours a day on average.
4 * 60 = 240 minutes
Let's say a song is 3 minutes.
240 / 3 = 80 streams == 80p/day
80p * 30 days per month = 2400p
2400p == £24
So that would be ~2.4x increase in price for end users without including Spotify cut or taxes.
Doesn't seem possible to me.
Even if it's 2 hours a day it would still represent an increase in costs.
Another poster put it better: for $9.99 per month you would be able to pay for 999 streams, I am sure a typical user can easily exceed 999 streams in a month.
Spotify was an increase in artist revenues as prior to that most people were paying nothing for their music, be it bittorrent in the 00s, cd copying in the 90s, or recording radio to tape in the 80s.
If the prices increased enough to offset a 1p/stream, I'd jump ship and buy used CDs again, since that would become more cost effective, even with buying a CD a month or so. There are cheaper substitutes to music listening, even if it would be less convenient to discover new music.
The unfortunate part is that the artists have basically no power when bargaining with the record labels.
In contrast, take the rapper Tom McDonald, his music actually hit the top 100 charts[1][2] and he's not signed to anyone. Just him and his girlfriend creating music. Was trending as the #1 download on iTunes for a couple weeks, etc.
Artists make a deal with the devil, make more money, then complain. Yet, with today's ability to distribute - it's not required.
I do think there should be an update to the spotify payout system, but Spotify doesn't have negotiating power; they need the record labels. With the record labels Spotify can get improved music, etc. Spotify is paying for the privilege that's why the smaller artists aren't making very much (the premium payments go to record labels).
I've seen a big rise in conservative rappers on YouTube. I've got a conspiracy theory that the GOP is funding them like a record label. If so, it's a sweet deal for artists. The GOP cares far more about cultural effects than they do the money from the music.
However, the major point is that you don’t need the distribution.
Louis CK famously released a comedy special online with a download and just asked people to pay and not copy and share. He said he made more money off that than any other special he’d done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUNuNilqrDQ
It's hard to find a reliable source here but there was right wing folk music being made to combat the threat of communism in the 60s.
Courtney Love realized this over 20 years ago: https://www.gerryhemingway.com/piracy.html
I think that they currently use a global split, which over-represents "users" like stores, gyms, etc.
https://cnm.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CNM_UCPS_SyntheseF...
Allocate peoples monthly membership in accordance to their listens.
If one month I listen to 100 streams of Bob Dylan and thats it, then he should get my entire $7.00 instead of just a few cents for my small amount of streams.
https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-...
Proof: Soundcloud is doing exactly this, so it's absolutely possible.
https://community.soundcloud.com/fanpoweredroyalties
This is all so they can keep major labels happy (several of whom own a stake in Spotify) because the labels don't want to lose the free money gravy train they're making on the backs of artists they don't even represent, and Spotify doesn't want to lose the majors.
https://cnm.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CNM_UCPS_SyntheseF...
> The research found that in the current system the top 0.4% of artists get around 10% of all revenue, but they would only get about 5.6% of revenue under a user-centric system
If I stream a record twice I cover my spotify premium fee (US is more expensive than Argentina or India, because people can pay more).
Copyrights create artificial scarcity, if you don't like it, just don't put your music on the platform, you have an effective monopoly.
Most music is not that valuable, prices used to be high due to cartelization of the publishers and because the media was difficult to produce (records, CDs).
Cassettes started changing that, and the internet completely destroyed it. There's no going back. If prices go up, piracy will too, and you'll likely end up making less money.
There is financial innovation that could happen to improve the outcomes for artists.
Many asset classes previously unavailable to the public (private reits, real estate syndications, art investing, wine investing) have been brought downmarket with crowdfunding.
There is green space for a music royalty fund that optimizes for artist benefit over profits and is available to the public.
1. I buy the CD release of music because I like to collect them, and the art is cool (I listen to folk metal and they usually do some cool stuff with album art and the front of the CD).
2. I rip them to FLACs and store them on my plex server
3. I stream them to my phone/etc.
So I'm really used to paying something like... {cost of cd} / {lifetime play count}. Which honestly is probably a lot higher than what a single stream of music earns the artists but a lot lower than 1c per play.
Just as an example, let's take Sonic Firestorm by Dragonforce. I probably started listening in 2007 or so. 14 years. I listened to the entire CD probably at least 3 times a week for the entirety of high school. So 4 years of high school times 52 weeks a year times 3 plays a week times 9 tracks per play is 5616. I'd guess I paid 12 bucks for the CD (it's 10 on amazon right now). So that's 0.00214 dollars per play. And that's just high school. Though admittedly that's one of my favorite albums, but I do think Alestorm and Ensiferum and several other bands are up in that play count too for my 4 years of college.
And I don't think many bands want to make the argument of "yeah but we're one of those bands you're gonna buy our CD for 12 bucks and listen to 3 times and then we end up in the back of your CD holder because every time you flip through you're like 'nah not really feeling them right now' for weeks on end".
So... I dunno. I'm all for paying artists more. But I would really prefer the way we do that is decrease the (massive) cut that goes to the labels and send more to the artists.
I've been buying my CDs on bandcamp as much as I can recently because as I understand it, bands capture a lot more of that sticker price that way. At least it seems like they do. I get CDs from residential addresses in Norway, anyway.
Maybe Drake's label demands a penny per stream for his new album or they pull it. And then somebody else who's on a tiny label gets 0.00000000001 cent per stream because that's all that's left.
They really need transparency, the labels will never be transparent so Spotify has to be. If nobody's transparent about these deals then there probably needs to be legislation.
That would be obvious anti-competitive behavior on the part of music labels if that's what's going on, and knowing them it probably is.
As for your actual question, no I don't think they are. They seem more like an advocacy or lobby group
Stealing from children to complain about theft.
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!
It doesn't matter if it can save you money in the long run. Remember, we're dealing with the masses here- the same lowest common denominator that caused A&W's 1/3lb hamburger to fail because people thought it was smaller than McDonald's 1/4lb hamburger.
If I record the sound of myself taking a crap and upload it to Spotify, do I deserve to get a perpetual minimum wage for being an artist?
the solution would be to remove all indie artists, and most of the rest too, and only keep the top 1% of pop/rock musicians.
I totally empathise with their demand for a cent per stream, but they could be asking for a share of revenue that doesn't exist. And if the median artist is making more now than they did before Napster, they could be asking for a cut of revenue that has never existed.
Here is a great source for learning more: http://copyx.org/lectures/
> Spotify generally pays between $. 003 and $. 005 per stream
Is Spotify making so much money that paying 3 orders of magnitude more money per stream is a realistic option?
That said, apparently most of Spotify's revenues already goes to pay artists, so it would not be achievable without significant increases in Spotify's fees. This would in turn reduce user numbers, leading to fewer streams, more users turning to piracy, etc.
> Spotify generally pays between $.003 and $.005 per stream
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-does-spotify-pay-pe...
> Spotify paid the artists $0,0032 per stream
https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts
It's also worth noting, we're not talking about the total amount payed per stream, we're talking about the amount that makes it specifically to the artists. From the article being discussed
> To pay the median American monthly rent ($1,078) an artist needs to generate 283,684 recurring streams monthly.
Those number directly align with 0.38c per stream going to the artists (283,684 * 0.0038 = 1078). And since everywhere else seems to indicate that somewhere around 3-5/100th of that amount actually goes to artists, I'm curious what the disconnect it.
This seems consistent with the 0.38c suggested in the www.unionofmusicians.org website. "$.003" = 0.3c, right?
Thank you for taking the time to make me go back and look at my numbers. My apologies for wasting _your_ time.
And frankly, I don't know what UMAW expects to get. Can really Spotify support the $0.01/stream without going out of business? Why are they making non-bilateral demands to Spotify (e.g. reveal business contracts)?
And who are UMAW anyway? From a quick check of their page, the only names I could find were the steering committee, and it took several tries to find members with >1 albums on Spotify. With that level of opaqueness, it's hard to see them convince the public to throw their support behind them. And what's with the sub-committee mania?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_News#EU_copyright_and_d...
Except when I listen to an album, I'm often listening to 15 "ads" (tracks) in a row so I'm not really seeing the equivalence. Especially when there are albums I listen to in their entirety multiple times a month.
At least I use Tidal, which may have its faults but has historically paid out the most to artists.
That means the added incremental value of a new unit of art/etc. will asymptote to zero.
This is one negative downside to the many upsides of digital technology.
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
I sincerely hope people take my question at face value, I am aware it's a big world.
I bet if Spotify adopted it, the publishers would still want a cut of that.
If I had to guess at what's going on here, I'd bet this is driven more by publishers than artists. Music publishers are becoming increasingly irrelevant as platforms like Spotify enable artists to distribute their work more directly at similar margins. Artists are probably just the poster child used to garner sympathy for the cause from the public.
Spotify has to deal with the record labels because they own the licensing rights, there isn't much Spotify can do about it themselves.
The only thing I could see Spotify doing is to become a label themselves, and giving a bigger slice of the piedirectly to artists under them. But that could also bring some consequences, like becoming Spotify-exclusives, etc.
There are a lot of comments saying Spotify can't raise prices - but Netflix has repeatedly raised prices successfully. I'm now paying them double what I originally did when I signed up.
Looking at my local pricing, the lowest plan (€7.99) is $2 cheaper than the single plan that was available when I signed up (€9.99), and the equivalent plan to what was available then is (€12.99). So that's a 33% increase in 5 years, which is much less dramatic than the 100%-200% increase spotify would need for the suggested payouts.
There's a lot of account sharing or rotating streaming service or plain old fashioned piracy (the "dodgy box", formerly a pirate satellite receiver and now usually a kodi box with a frontend to some pirate stream provider, has been more common in Ireland the last few years than since digital TV was just coming in and competing with free to air broadcast TV).
The public valuation of music is that it is a commodity, and yes while it would be nice to make a living from art it would then be a product.
It has always been like this but I think the gap is bigger now.
I'm asking this because it could improve the artists situations if they could get the royalty directly without a middleman? Probably someone already did a research in this direction.
Yet we pay roughly the same per month for a Spotify subscription as we do for Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Is this just because when it comes to music, the revenue is spread much more thinly, amongst more artists?
I pay $10/mo to spotify, lets say $7 makes it to artists. If I do 100% of my streams for Obscure Band X, shouldn't 100% of my $7 go to Obscure Band X?
Right now, I end up a large fraction of that $7 to Taylor Swift, the weeknd, drake, etc, and not the actual performers I listen to.
In the end, if Spotify is not a sustainable business model for you as a musical artist, maybe it is time to look for alternatives, especially those where they do not directly compete with mega-acts?
Not everything needs to be “justice”. Quit diluting words and actions.
The "average observed per-stream payout on Apple Music is $0.00551 vs. $0.00318 for Spotify."[0] That said, a lot of that is because Spotify has free users, while Apple does not.
0. https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts#a...
Spotify is a recent creation and it was nothing without musicians yet they willingly went forward with it even though it was obvious what would happen and now the obvious has happened they want a better deal.
It's hard for me to muster up sympathy, they could have collectively stopped Spotify from happening but they willingly became part of it.
DO make noise. We are musicians after all.”
Recommending people to do something illegal is also illegal, so it seems that the creators of this webpage is already breaking Norwegian law.
And Tordenskioldsgate 2 in Oslo/Norway is just a coworking space, so you only find employees from Spotify there a couple of times a year on events or meetings.
The people fighting for 1p per stream want to focus on the killing of the album because in that way they look like poor mistreated artists who are just asking for crumbs considering what was taken from them.
And spotify etc. want to argue they are the ones who killed the radio, and thus it should cost them hardly anything and they are already paying way too much.
But at any rate 1p per stream is actually quite a significant increase in price considering what the user gets.
With an album one got album art etc. Lyrics / liner notes. And a number of songs - let us say 16 songs.
Nowadays you have to do your own work for the album art and lyrics, and could conceivably be asked to pay separately for them.
This is all a long time ago but I would think it was $10 dollars per average CD during the heyday. (somebody here surely knows the actual number)
So 62.5 pennies per song if 16 songs.
Perhaps it should be 1p per stream, max cost 63p per song per user?
that of course still means spotify eats the part of the market that buys more than one version per year, as someone with ADHD I have had to buy London Calling about 20+ times in my life. At some point I think I should get it for free.
so 1p per song streamed, max 63p per person per song every two years. If they asked for that I would think that is maybe a bit more than its worth, but also approaching fairness.
But they aren't asking for that, even though they should be able to think these things through easier and quicker than I can - so until they start asking for something resembling an actual fair deal I say screw them.
Take the first demand for instance, pay $0.01 per play. on the face this sounds fine, until you look at the economics of this. Spotify Premium is $9.99, that means for every premium user there is only 999 plays per month at BEST if you don't consider any other overheads, before that payment is exhausted (not including things like discounts for 12 month plans, student and family pricing).
This is not to say artists shouldn't get paid more, but how many people would take say a 10x price increase to fund this level of payment?
That's not to mention they also want to remove the income stream of artists paying for increased plays on the platform (pushing more cost to the user)
again, the demands may be well intentioned, and many should just be adopted such as crediting all labour for a recording, but obviously no-one has looked at the economics' it would take to actually realise the level of payment being asked for here and thought about if consumers would be willing to pay that price.
Tech VC is an analogy for the risk model of record companies, where you have money from investors that needs a productive asset, and your risk/return appetite is being willing to accept that most of your bets will return zero, with just 2% of your investments yielding huge (10x+) multiples and 80% of your returns.
Whether you are investing in bands making albums or entrepreneurs building startups, there seem to be direct similes for record sales, publishing rights, merch, side projects, and intellectual property. The point is artists make their money touring with shows, which is basically a job, where the record company/investor makes their big money because they get the benefit of having risked capital with leverage. A founder working for investors is analogous to a band touring in support of album sales. Your upside is probably a job with a lifestyle and a bonus.
Which comes to the question of what a good price for a recording could be. Musicians generally don't take very much risk or use leverage that would yield investor-size returns. 99.9% of music is crap. The distribution curve of quality is really steep and long tailed, so if you invest in a given band, you are taking a <1% chance of ever seeing your money again. That's why record companies and VC make money. They're the producers. They're creating a portfolio spread over a wide pool of risk. If you write some songs, arguably, you have ventured nothing of value until someone discovers it. The music platforms provide this discovery. Sure, I wish I could earn the an equivalent living making music or writing as I do in tech, but since I'm not a superstar talent, I manage that expectation and accept comfortable mediocrity. As the amortized capital risked by a musician averaged across all the other musicians in their genre on a given song, the price of a stream above tiny fractions of a penny is generous. The missing feature seems to be a way to sell the licensing and publishing rights, where I can pay $100 to use it in a video.
I get the sense that organizing spotify artists to complain is yet another way to hustle and exploit them, but this time for political ends instead of financial ones.
edit: there is probably a producer/product-manager analogy to be made as well, but will leave it there.
While no party is without concern, I don't think either Spotify, the artist or the consumer is the problem here. There's a 800lb gorilla standing over there.
now a non US company is #1, they start to yell
you should have complained before
This is particular to creative works. Free Software gets around this with lots of subsidies, commodified complements, corporate investment, and occasional labors of love. The fact that software is highly collaborative and that licenses like the GPL exist helps. A handful of collaborating developers can produce a spare-time project that is actually useful to other people who will sponsor development of further improvements to the project. Music does not work that way.
If you want music to be libre, someone needs to subsidize the cost of creation: The wages for the musicians for one-two months, the wages of the technicians, the rent for the studio, and also subsidize the cost of writing the song in the first place.
The current paradigm amortizes those costs among all listeners of a song, with some profit for the facilitators.
Entire genres of music have been created from inexpensive musical equipment and free software. Art has never been more accessible to the people than it is now.
Then we simply never get their work. Some people would absolutely continue to create for the fun of it, but they'll remain the minority.
Movies you'd watch in a Theater? Completely gone. Commercially funded TV shows, gone. A vast majority of books, written by full time writers and researchers, gone.
And I'll also posit that most music would go away too. Even the amateurs I know expect to be paid for a gig. Most musicians are not willing to busk for a living.
And, don't forget, software development relies heavily upon Copyright as well (licenses, your work-for-hire, etc).
Might have lower production quality and less glitzy marketing, but the vast quantity of free music out there is proof that many will continue making music regardless of financial incentive.
There's a really happy medium that neither side ever talks about. Just dramatically reduce the legal length of copyrights. One year maybe?
I think artists would not be dissuaded from working and would monetize the roughly the same with 20-30 year copyright terms.
So we built a fake framework on top of something plentiful and cheap to copy, to make it more expensive so some people can make money out of it.
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.
I suppose, in reality, this has been the case for around 3 decades now. Unless you have the marketing department, you don't make money from music sales.
Patreon, Twitch, Cameo, OnlyFans, et al, are providing ways to connect with your community and earn a living through their support, which is not only very important during shutdowns when live events are harder, but will be a long term trend.
On the production side costs continue to drop, and if we #abolishcopyright cost of living across the world will drop dramatically, so will be easier to balance the budget.
Yes to this. Having an imagination means you can think of different ways to monetize your work that isn’t trying to put an imaginary wall around ideas and information.
That's the poster's modus operandi here: he doesn't miss an opportunity to advertise his two favorite topics – abolishment of intellectual property and his own whitespace-based data notation – whether it's on-topic or not.
This isn't Twitter. I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish by using hashtags on HN, but it makes you look like an immature child – similar to writing "M$" in the 90s and early 00s.
I'm wondering if you knew that Karl Marx summed up the desire of communists in one sentence [in The Communist Manifesto]?
"...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." [1]
That's it.
That's what all the fuss is about. It was a revelation to me because it seemed too simple at first, yet that's all that communists desire to bring about. This desire includes abolishing 'intellectual property' (trade secrets, copyrighted material, patented processes etc.). As you rightly described, any human knowledge originates socially to start with: “We are all putting grains of sand on mountains built by our ancestors”. This inheritance is what we aim to communize. Even though the communist manifesto is over 170 years old, Marx' critique remains as relevant as relevant as ever: capitalist firms caused the opioid crisis in the US; all over the world there's a landlord crisis - with many suffering homelessness (despite there being vacant buildings) [2]; capitalists have moved much of the industrial production to the global south - e.g. clothes are produced in sweatshops in China/Bangladesh/Eritrea; Playstations are causing wars in Congo [3]; our smartphones are made with conflict resources [4]; and we have a toxic e-waste crisis that is blocking us from re-using black-boxed hardware/components (as well as trade secrets and patents stopping many from being able to learn about technology and science in the first place - artificial scarcity of expertise created by capitalists) - as well as well as this e-waste leaching chemicals and poisoning the land, predominantly in the global south [5].
With 'abolishing private property' we don't mean that we want to get rid of the idea of all property systems. We want to get rid of today's bourgeois property system, as it has allowed a small minority to exclude others and plunder the commons [6], resulting in the division of labor and alienation. It's not about having a big or small capitalist government (capitalist governments are the ones who grant monopolies in the first place). We want full democracy in the workplace. That is what we call socialism, communism, or a communist production system. We also believe that this system, communism, is humanity's true nature.
The reason we have been persecuted is because many capitalists are very happy with their 'haul' (and the power-over others domination that comes with it), and because we communists want to continually ask the question: "how we can constantly expand who benefits from new science and technology?" (which we refer to as communizing/socializing the means of production).
I'm a bit scared this might be something you already know, so please do let me know if I've overstepped. My yearning by writing this is to meet my needs for connection, clarity and cooperation, yet this might not be the best strategy.
I also want to share with you this awesome video I watched a few days ago, in case it interests you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U
[1] The Communist Manifesto (chapter 2), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...
[2] Push (2019) - a short new documentary about venture capital and the financialization of housing. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iLWpuZrd-I, full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4 (you can easily download with yt1s.com if you're not currently in the US/Canada, if it's geo-blocked)
[3] Inside Africa's 'PlayStation War', https://www.wired.com/2008/07/the-playstation-2/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J7efsz_Y-c
[4] Blood in the Mobile, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv-hE4Yx0LU
[5] Agbobloshie, Ghana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I
[6] Professor Guy Standing on 'rentier capitalism', https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
If you have copyrights and patents, you do not have property rights. Once you implement those, you then remove the rights people have over their atomic property, like computers and paper and printers et cetera.
You cannot have a logical conversation with anyone who uses the term "intellectual property", because at that point it would be like trying to talk to someone about "fire water". There is no such thing.
The reason why that term became so big is that because during the Cold War capitalism and property rights were all the rage, so the proponents of copyrights and patents jumped on the bandwagon and rebranded their issues to be about property rights, even though they were the opposite. It was a very shrewd move, and I'm amazed at how effective it was. It would be like the cigarette industry was able to convince people that cigarettes were actually "health sticks".
That is why you will never see me ever ever use that term, and instead I will refer to them as "Imaginary Property" rights, and encourage everyone else to do so (I read the "Imaginary Property" term for the first time right here on HN).
So all that said, I am a strong believer in property rights. I believe Marx was wrong, and that property rights are an engineering solution to the problem of "how do we assign decision making power over scarce atoms in an efficient way".
I believe the real problem is copyrights and parents. Abolish those and you will eventually unchain the minds of billions of people, and we will be living in a lot more intelligent and prosperous world.
I believe blockchain can be a good remedy for unnecessary middlemen.
Audius [1] is a good example applied to the music industry.
In this particular issue, I think blockchain is a great solution, as it allows to publish content, gather fees from listeners to artists, without the need of an intermediary.
The solution is really to go direct-to-consumer, through things like Crowdfunding (unfortunately Patreon now charges VAT). Though of course this adds a lot of overhead.
Alternatively, petition Governments to be leaner, and to increase retirement ages to 70 (pensions are the single major and fastest increasing Government expense), and to lower taxes (including sales taxes) with the savings.
Pressure on Google and Apple (via regulation) to reduce commissions is another avenue.
The public suspicion is that they do this to avoid paying pension, most of which has been squandered by the government.
Also direct-to-consumer hardly absolves you from following tax law. I agree that sales tax is bad, but only because it is regressive and disproportionately taxes the poor. Raise income taxes and abolish sales tax.
VAT is there for everyone, you can't avoid it because you are a 'creator' thats insane.
How do you go direct to consumer without collecting VAT (while not breaking tax laws)?
Of course, this varies by country, but its possible to incorporate your business in a country where this is the case.