Spotify Royalty Calculator | Hacker News Reader

Spotify Royalty Calculator

freeyourmusic.com

18 pointsbartoszhernas12 comments

GOD, this is so wrong. The "calculator" doesn't take account of country of origin for the listener, if it's free or premium account, or any other amount of arbitrary measures that Spotify uses to calculate the average, which they even explain two paragraphs down:

>>"So, many factors that come into play and it’s impossible to guarantee how much you will make from your streams."

So what's the point of the calculator?

By the way Spotify earnings vary WILDLY month by month based on your listeners. Sometimes it's 0.00005€ per play and sometimes it's 100x that.

Source: I have about 400k+ plays on Spotify

I would love to know how these figures compare to revenue's made from albums pre-online streaming.

It used to be the case that albums were the main money maker for artists, and going on tour supported the album sales.

E.G Queen didn't turn a profit on a world tour until something like 1985. However profited hugely on their album sales.

It tends to be the reverse now where most artists do not gain as much from artists, and touring tends to be the money maker, and now the album is to help sell tickets for the tour.

I know Spotify divides all money between all artists, regardless of what user actually listened. It is one big pot for both sides. Is there a service with (in my view) more fair model, where my monthly subscription is divided only between artists I actually listened in a month?

What's the source for your knowledge? Your claim is diametrically opposed to what the article claims.

I can't pinpoint where I got it from, it is kinda common knowledge (or so I thought).

Seems that TIDAL is the good one.

> TIDAL will be the first streaming service to pay artists with the money of subscribers who have actually listened to the artist. Other major music services such as Spotify and Apple Music now aggregate their users' money and give most of it to the artists with the greatest success. As a user, you actually pay musicians you never listened to. Many unions and artists have been criticizing this system for years. It favors stars and leaves little for the smaller musicians.

Source: https://freeyourmusic.com/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per...

Strange - normally you use pooling to even out the distribution, not to take from the poor to give to the rich.

Fair payouts empower independent labels, obviously biggest players in the music market are opposing it

I can't imagine this makes much of a difference unless users with a paid Spotify account have vastly different tastes than the non-paying ones, and even then it would depend on how much less the revenue per user they get from commercials is compared to the revenue for a paid user. Otherwise, whether a band gets paid 50% of the revenue from a single listener or 5% from the revenue of that listener plus ten non-listeners is immaterial. The money is most definitely not allotted without regard for what users listened to.

One other thing Tidal offers is if you buy their highest tier plan $20/mo) they give $2 a month to your most listened to artist. Wish it was more given that the plan is twice the cost of the next plan, but the plan does include a bunch of other stuff.

I used to run one of the biggest territories in the world for one of the biggest digital music distributors in the world.

This is a very blunt estimator based on questionable data and questionable assumptions about the listeners.

This seems…wrong? Doesn’t YouTube Music pay $0.008 per stream? According to this calculator, it’s much less? Is there some kind of nonlinear payout schedule for YouTube Music?

Would be interesting where they get their data from, wasn't entirely clear to me.

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