Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewDucker | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to know whether Spotify was generally causing an increase or a decrease in the amount spent on music.

I'm currently spending £120/year on music that I wasn't spending before, but I'm aware that I might not be normal.

I don't use Spotify, I use Zune Pass (it was available in the US long before Spotify was), but when I got a Zune, I moved from pirating _everything_ to never pirating music. I've been a Zune Pass subscriber for three years now and have discovered tons of new music I hadn't heard before. On some artists I've found I'll go out and buy the album on vinyl so I have it at home but that's a very rare occurrence.

Just an anecdote from some random guy on the Internet, but when done right and with good integration, music subscriptions can be a great thing for the user _and_ the industry.

Only music I have bought in recent years is bands that aren't on the streaming services, like RHCP or Metallica. As a user these streaming services are a nice free alternative to buying music, but if I were a band with a well known brand (i.e. lots of money has been pumped into it over years/decades), then I would avoid streaming services like the plague.

Services like emusic are better for labels because they at least treat the music as something special and limited.

I'm the same as you. I occasionally bought an album from the Amazon $5 deals, but even then I would often fill my cart, not feel it's worth it and then skip buying. With spotify $10/month feels like a good deal for a good product. If labels want to pull all their music then I'll go back to listening to my catalog of stuff I already own and not spending money at all.

What matters is how much of that spending is making it back to the rights holders. Is that amount increased or decreased via spotify?

My understanding is that it pays a similar amount to airplay - and that if I want a band to make the same amount they would have made from me buying their album then I need to listen to it about 100 times.

Which, for albums I love, tends to happen. Rubbish albums full of fillers, on the other hand...

It all depends on how big a label they're with and so what terms they get from spotify but it looks more like 2000 (track) plays = ~200 full plays of an album in the best case scenario and perhaps as bad as 100,000 track plays in the worst case.Part of the problem is that its essentially impossible to tell from the outside which is which.

http://musically.com/2011/11/18/a-genuine-freakshow-manager-...

This was the key point of that post to me-

“Streaming services are very “long tail”. It takes time for consumers to discover your music, add it to playlists, favourite it, and share it with friends. The longer a label is on a streaming platform, the more established they become, and the more time users will have had to discover their music. Users need to dig deep and it also helps if labels market their playlists.”

Some good figures here: http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2011/09/how-much-does-a-band-...

Keep in mind that comparisons like this don't take into account that streaming services like Spotify attract a lot of users who would not have spent a dime on music distributed in any other way, so they are effectively useless to compare revenue streams. They are a bit like equating every pirated song to a lost sale.

Myself, I'm just like the guy above me, I literally spent $0 on music for over a decade, until I got a Spotify Premium account about a year ago. I think there are many others like me.

Services like Spotify and Netflix are marginal cost services. Their intent is to monetize the previously non-paying customers like yourself at unheard of low prices.

However, it's not all gravy. Marginal cost services cannibalize a portion of the existing market. The degree to which this happens depends on the popularity of the service. It may a small percentage or in the extreme, every customer.

If Spotify remains relatively small and is kept in check, then it will likely be a net benefit to artists and labels as it costs them little to participate.

However, it's also a disruptive innovation at a radically lower price point. If the lion's share of the music market were to switch to Spotify or a similar service, the drop in revenues would not sustain the market since great content is labour intensive and expensive.

This is a good infographic on that http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...

"What matters is how much of that spending is making it back to the rights holders."

Rights holders or artists? It's not like the artists receive a lot for each CD sale.

I'm not saying the music industry can't provide a valuable service, but if there where any real competition they would be out of business a long time ago. IMHO, it might be better for "music" if they all went bust.

I have been a premium subscriber for about a year, and for me it has gone up.

I buy even less music now.. but I spend more on music.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com