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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

Fuck Spotify. They've played a major role in drastically reducing any chance of significant revenue flowing to musicians, in complete contrast to Bandcamp.

People hearing your music is nice and all (I like it when people hear my stuff on BC), but it is orthogonal to the revenue that used to be associated with making recorded music available. There's far, far more music out there than anyone will ever be able to listen to, and I consider the possibility of even 1 paid milkshake for a musician much more important than some random number of listeners who heard the track on Spotify. I appreciate that you may see things differently, but I think that you're wrong.

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You know what Glenn Jones (American guitarist), Talisk (Scottish folk), Tonbruket (Swedish jazz), Daniel Herskedal (Norwegian jazz, tuba), The Books (New York, sound collage), Yom (French klezmer clarinetist), Kongero (Swedish folk a cappella), and Naragonia (Belgian accordion folk) have in common?

That 1. I supported them on Bandcamp 2. I would never have found them if it wasn't for Spotify's discover weekly.

I could list a lot more artists for which this is true. It's not even counting the ones I found indirectly.

This is maybe something artists should be aware of when they think they get such a good deal from Bandcamp and such a bad deal from Spotify. It's not as simple as that. I'm sure it's true that most people who promise you "exposure" are trying to exploit you, but that doesn't mean you can ignore how you actually got in front of the audience you have.

The problem with this angle is that Bandcamp also has discovery features through which you may have found a different (or maybe an overlapping) 8 artists too. There's a good chance they would not be the same, and there's a argument that it might feel more difficult (Spotify appears to work VERY hard at getting better at prediction, Bandcamp is more like human curation, which is to say less reliable but also occasionally more serendipitous).

I see that indirectly, Spotify likes to recommend me stuff that has gotten attention from a few specific human curators: NPR desk concerts, the Mark Radcliffe Folk sessions (a BBC program I believe), and A Prairie Home Companion. So it's not an either-or, I would not even have heard of those curators without Spotify.

But some of the best stuff Spotify has found for me, has had ridiculously few plays and no obvious human curator connection.

Bandcamp just isn't in the same league, and I'd say Spotify is far better on serendipity too. It's far from predictable what it will recommend, there's not many human curators you can say that about (including the three I mentioned).

THANK you. Spotify is no Bandcamp substitute. Not even close. Not even remotely the same category of thing. Yikes.

I think you've identified the major problem for musicians: there's so much music available today that the value of writing more has crashed. The value to listeners is now in the delivery infrastructure and recommendations.

The population of music lovers, people that have favorite bands, genres, albums, want more music. Those who listen passively and do not own or care about albums and don't go to concerts etc. can be safely ignored; Spotify is fine for them.

> Those who listen passively and do not own or care about albums

I see it very differently. I care about good music. There's an incredible amount of good music out there, and it's rare that an album is full of it. Your definition of "good" may vary, but mine isn't really influenced by the artist. Most albums are mostly not-good-music. I'm picky, and look at unrelated songs independently. This is why I don't really care for albums. I feel no debt to a single artist or a nothing-more-than-release-time-related collection of music, which is what most are.

Some albums I do considered a complete, single, work, but that's relatively rare. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories is a good example, in my opinion.

I don't see what concerts have to do with anything. Those are often related to luck and finances/privilege.

Ah the no true Scotsman argument. I have favorite bands and genres, I support local bands when I find them, I go to concerts when I'm able, though I don't live in an ideal location for it. I play music and I try to get together with others to play. And I use Spotify. I'm not interested in owning albums, you can stream an album or individual songs.

I spent years buying music, ripping the CDs, organizing files, etc. I'm very glad that I don't need to bother any more. I don't own the medium the music is stored on, I don't really get why it matters.

> I don't really get why it matters.

Support, experience, control. Physical media supports the artist. When you play a physical album you experience the whole album. When you own an album you control it and it cannot be taken away, edited or lost.

Streaming doesn't support the artist. Streaming obliterates coherence of albums. When you stream music you do not control it and it can be taken away, edited or lost without your knowledge or consent.

There's a few albums I love listening to all the way through every time. But for the most part I want to listen to the songs I like. I think about all the times I've found one song that really moves me on an album I don't care for, your suggestion is kind of like "well you should miss out on those gems".

Physical media doesn't support the artist much better either, that's been a topic of conversation since I was a kid.

>our suggestion is kind of like "well you should miss out on those gems"

No, I'm the same way. Sometimes an album only has 1 good song; other times an album is great but I can't stand 1 or 2 songs. The important thing is that I listened to the whole album! I'm judging the songs in the context of their creators. I'm experiencing them together and in order, and that's a very different experience than interleaving songs. Interleaving is fine and can be an artform in itself (we used to call it a "mix tape") but I believe you owe it to the artist to listen to the thing they made in its entirety. It would be like reading a book collection interleaving the chapters. It's not fair to you or the authors.

That's how I feel about it. You ARE missing something.

>Physical media doesn't support the artist much better either, that's been a topic of conversation since I was a kid.

I have many musician friends, and they would ALL disagree with you quite strenuously. The money they make on streaming is ~0. The money they make selling CDs is almost all profit - and it's also the thing they made instead of sliced and diced and mixed with other things other people made.

> I'm experiencing them together and in order, and that's a very different experience than interleaving songs.

I don't follow. You're free to listen to full albums, in sequence, on Spotify. You can listen to any song at any time in any order, from the album, or custom playlists. It's just a large catalog of music where you can click and play/queue anything you see, with some recommendation systems that create custom playlists you can choose to listen to.

I'm getting the impression that many people criticizing these streaming services don't understand what they actually are.

Prepare for your music to disappear at any point. Licensing deals end and albums you love are suddenly removed from platforms. I understand that's an acceptable trade off for a casual listener. I actually use Spotify for previewing albums and consider it great value.

However any music I care about I buy as I plan to own my library for decades to come.

Plus, you're missing out on a lot of great music that never has been available on streaming platforms.

> Prepare for your music to disappear at any point.

So far it's only happened because the musician himself pulled the music, and I wasn't really enthused after that to try and find it again. As the gp said, there's so much music now... I might be missing out on some music but if I've already got too much to ever listen to then why does that matter? In fact, having to make the choice to purchase is necessarily going to limit the amount available and my willingness to take a chance on it.

Streaming has opened up so much for me that I would never have found browsing music shops. Of course if Spotify disappeared then I'd have to find another service or buy the music then. A problem for it's time.

> People hearing your music is nice and all

As a listener, this is my entire concern, use case, and reason for paying for a streaming site: finding new music to listen to. I don't think I'm unique. Artists should get more, which is why I pay for Spotify Premium, but the use case of a listener is important. Bandcamp doesn't address that, for me.

There is more music on Bandcamp than you could listen to in a lifetime. More comes out in a week than you could (probably) listen to in a week.

So when you sayd "finding new music to listen to", there's a hidden implication in there: you want to find new music that is on Spotify (which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc.

Bandcamp is an amazing resource for discovering new music, but a subset of all new music, just as Spotify is. It's fine to say you prefer what you can find on Spotify, just don't make the claim that Bandcamp somehow isn't up for this general task.

I'll rephrase: I don't want to find the music. I want recommendation of music that I might like. I want a mostly passive experience, where I can click a like button to get more like that, added to feed. I don't want to actively search, because I'm doing other things when I listen to music. If I find a song that interests me, I'll listen to the songs "radio" to find similar artists. This is an acceptable use pattern.

> which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc.

This is nonsensical [1]. I follow YouTubers have their music on Spotify. Some are just spoof songs.

[1] https://artists.spotify.com/en/get-started

I’m unaware of anything on Bandcamp that is remotely as useful to me as the auto-built playlists and artist/song radio tools in Spotify. That there’s “a lot” of music on either platform is meaningless if the tools to find things I’d like don’t work for me.

I get the compensation model sucks for artists. I try to buy things from bands I like. But ultimately, if artists don’t like the Spotify model, they should pull their music - but I’m going to continue to use a platform that gives me access to everything I’d ever want to hear for like, $10/mo.

> but I’m going to continue to use a platform that gives me access to everything I’d ever want to hear for like, $10/mo.

I'm going to continue to use a platform that can only cost as little as it does because the people who create the art that motivates the entire existence of the platform get paid essentially nothing

well, uh, bravo, I guess.

Then they should pull their music. You know, the part I said that you cut off so you could what, poorly paraphrase my position as negatively as possible? To what end? Was your day that bad that you needed to make someone else look little to feel better about it?

But uh, bravo, I guess.

I think the auto-built playlists are bad. Not only because they slip in something jarring, but even the "This is..." playlists can't be trusted. They often mix artists with the same name who have nothing to do with each other.

No, I think it's for active discovery Spotify is good. I have never enjoyed everything on the Discover weekly playlist, quite often it contains stuff that makes me ask "why did you even think I would like that crap, Spotify". But when it hits, it hits amazingly well.

And yet you're listening to Spotify, still, instead of 'albums you bought'.

This is really the point. It's not new: radio was the previous way to have music discovery for 'free', or at least unmetered, with its own costs and issues.

If Spotify made no pretense that it even attempted to pay rights holders anything it'd probably fit its role even better, but it actively tries to supplant the whole concept of having to buy or own albums or music at all. It's designed to be what you have INSTEAD of buying music. When it hits, you don't need to buy music.

The music MAKERS might need you to buy their music, but Spotify is for helping you ignore that.

Heh. How about an ad-supported Spotify, except literally all the ads are for bands and live gigs and music? Bring payola to Spotify. You never pay for it, but you get radio levels of interstitials and they are all from music producers trying to sell their album or single, all for literal music. Albums used to get late-night TV ads and label promotion…

"And yet"? Did you respond to the wrong post?

I have not been able to use Bandcamp to discover music. Even for music in niches that are so tiny that they're not on Spotify, I didn't find them on Bandcamp (I found them on YouTube). Bandcamp's recommendations for me are lousy.

does Spotify pay artists more for listens on premium? I seriously doubt it.

All the revenue goes into a big pot, then split up [1].

That pot is 95% premium users [2].

[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/120314/spoti....

It's separate pots for ad listens vs. subscriber listens. AFAIK there are also separate pots by country, since subscription fees and profitability of ad markets vary widely by country.

Do you have a reference for this? If the pots are different, what's the practical difference, when the majority of the profits, and payout, comes from premium?

This is easy to check. Yes, premium listens are pooled separately from ad-supported listens.

If an artist is extremely popular with ad-supported listeners, that doesn't let them eat into the pool of payments from premium listeners.

Note, however, that listens are pooled by country, not per user. So premium accounts running background music in a hair salon 6 days a week will decide where your subscription money goes far more than the music you listen to.

Originally, this was because the big record companies demanded it. Now, the record companies are having second thoughts, but Spotify, which has adapted to the funding key favouring background music, are the ones resisting.

Buy on Bandcamp but also listen on Spotify, isn't it perfect for both?

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