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Comment by Normal_gaussian | Hacker News Reader

Alice and Bob both pay $10/mo

Alice listens exclusively to Drake and Bob listens exclusively to Queen. But Queen gets $5 and Drake gets $15!

Why? Alice listened to twice as many tracks as Bob.

This really doesn't seem fair, I'm a very selective listener, and my gf isn't - she just wants lots of background music. She doesn't care what the song is and I'm subsidising artists that produce music that lands in the playlists she plays ("alexa, play happy music") more than I'm contributing to artists that produce music for my tastes. This is a very different to pre-streaming.

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It doesn’t matter because it would average out because you will have queen fans who listen at a high amount as well. Unless for some reason an artist has a fan base which majority listen to less music than the average person for some reason.

It absolutely does matter, and it absolutely does not even out. Background music is extremely profitable on streaming services. The more amenable to being played in the background your music is (whether at a party or around the clock at a hair salon or other business), the more you will make, at the expense of artists that are more suited for deliberate listening - even though those artists are probably why people subscribe to the streaming service in the first place.

How exactly is it bad to reward musicians for having more airtime? It seems the market is working as intended.

Although, you seem to make a good point. BMI differentiates radio royalties by number of performances[1]. Except---and I haven't researched this very well---they seem to pay more if a song is more popular.

[1] https://www.bmi.com/creators/royalty/us_radio_royalties

>even though those artists are probably why people subscribe to the streaming service in the first place.

Then surely the solution must be to try and determine which artist actually brought in the users and give them some kind of lead bonus. I would assume any platform that started doing that would eventually beat platforms that didn't because all the lead generating bands would move there and no new users would have a reason to go to the other services.

Assuming the normal and other statistical handwaving is very dangerous in this kind of dataset and application.

It will give you a high probability of being near right in a random case but completely destroys the detail. In this case the detail is niche music genres and artists, growing or dying, that contribute greatly to the "flavour and future of society". When we assume too much here we actively suppress minority positions making certain genres and use cases completely non-viable.

I highly doubt elevator music has the audience listening profile of eminem, and thus the current system either over or under pays elevator music producers.

Other areas which are likely extreme are: new EDM artists, classical compositions, play-a-long songs (ie learn guitar), cultural artists (US christian youth, Belarusian native rock).

I wouldn't see this as unfair, just changing the compensation model. In the past you still had background music playing on the radio or Musak or whatever. Now the compensation model is changing. Maybe the actual problem is people are assuming bands people actively want to listen to should be compensated more but it's actually more important to make the kind of music that ends up on the most "background listener" playlists if you want to get paid the most.

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