Hacker News Reader

Comment by peapicker | Hacker News Reader

I get .03 to .05 of a penny per stream on Spotify for my music, depending on factors I don’t understand. So $3 to $5 per thousand streams. Still not great but not as dismal as you put it. I have one very successful friend who gets about 1.2 million streams a year on Spotify. He works usually with two collaborators so the ~$50,000 he makes per year on Spotify is split three ways before income taxes. Of course he also is on other platforms too.

View on HN

It's better to be a Spotify shareholder than to be a musician publishing to the platform. That's where we are now...

I'm also baffled that Spotify does not grant verified/accomplished contributors to the platform free accounts by default. I wouldn't be surprised if a huge percentage of their premium listeners are the very same people who publish their music to the platform.

The Internet unfortunately is quickly becoming a "scam-based economy". It's flooding out all the potential it once had. I just decided to create and focus on my own personal music label web site moving forward. If I'm going to give most of my music away for pennies, I'd rather have more meaningful and useful analytics and FAR less complication in publishing my own music. :/

That math doesn't add up. If a single stream makes (0.04×0.01) dollars or 4% of $0.01 on average, thats $0.004 per stream. If your friend has 1.2M streams a year, that's $4800 in payout per year. Can you elaborate please?

Because Spotify, and the music industry in general relies heavily on "pyramid-based meritocracy", and because a lot of success is gamed by black hats, A lot of artists on the platform resort to paying for services and advertising, which also must be considered in comparison to profit.

A lot of artists need to emulate success and fandom in order to break into paid work, and that creates a toxic situation where they need to pay up front (for various other things like SEO, interviews, artificial promotion, awards, and even for spots in gigs to get to a success point) before any real success is achieved, or they need to spend many years in unpaid (and very defeating) obscurity before finding out whether they succeed or not.

Statistics really don't apply to everyone on a consistent basis, and a lot of numbers in the mix are totally calculated in "mysterious ways" on purpose.

I focus on licensing rather than streams, that way there is more of a (tangible) contractual negotiation involved.

Can't edit anymore, you're right, I typed an extra 0 -- he actually makes $5k per year on Spotify. I was up too late and not thinking correctly. I think the $50k was his total across all services.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com