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Comment by disantlor | Hacker News Reader

This seems almost too simple & good to be true. The counter points in the linked article mention that its too "computationally expensive" to calculate the payments, and the additional management costs could outweigh the benefit to smaller artists... how could that possible be true?

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It's simply not true. The whole business model of Spotify is that of any other internet business, selling a zero-marginal-cost good for a subscription fee. It would be more complicated to implement a per-user breakdown, and maybe slightly more expensive to run that analytics pipeline, but at scale there's no way the additional management costs would outweigh the benefit to smaller artists. The cost of that more advanced analytics job is going to be absorbed over the entire user base to the point where it effectively costs nothing in aggregate. The real counter point is probably that it was either easier to implement the current solution (from an engineering standpoint this is true, it's much easier to aggregate and scale their payment pipeline once per-geo-region) and there has been no push for change, or it favors larger artists and labels who have the bargaining power with Spotify.

Sorry, but there are plenty of developers on here (myself included) who can easily confirm that "too computationally expensive" is just BS so they don't have to change.

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.

It's one of the demands, the "user-centric" model. It's mostly because the major record labels (who have the top artists) might see a reduction of revenue. But even that was disproved in a recent french study:

https://cnm.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CNM_UCPS_SyntheseF...

Is there a translation of this report anywhere?

Try https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https:/... although it doesn't have graphics.

It's clearly doable, and we recently saw that soundcloud moved to this model of calculating

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