Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think this matters at all.

Whether royalties are calculated per-play-per-user or per-play-per-all-users, I don't see any evidence there's any meaningful difference at all.

Most people who subscribe to Spotify listen to lots of different stuff -- that's the entire point of streaming. Virtually nobody is listening to one song a month, or 2 albums per month. They listen to playlists and radio and their 8,000 liked songs on shuffle. None of the examples you give are very realistic. (Somebody who only listens to one album is just going to buy the album, not subscribe to Spotify.)

In the end, the two models are going to average out to essentially the same.

If you don't think they do, that means you think there's some correlation between the amount of music listened to per month, and whether a person's tastes skew more mainstream or niche. Can you show that's the case, and in which direction? Because that's entirely non-obvious.

(And commercial settings like stores are a drop in the bucket of Spotify subscriptions, they just don't matter. Big places like grocery stores and department stores and fast food don't use Spotify, and coffee shops or clothing boutiques are just as likely to be playing niche stuff.)

"Rounding errors" like these always favour the larger players. It's a form of slowly extracting money that should have gone to smaller artists and instead gets funnelled into the pockets of major label artists who arguably don't need it, at the expense of smaller artists and especially niche genres that don't have the same mass appeal as pop music. That's a group that's severely lacking representation in the discussions around how to pay fairly.

Another way they're screwing smaller artists is next year they'll be requiring each song to have 1k streams _per year_ before qualifying for monetization. They estimate that'll steal another ~$40M/year from smaller artists to help line the pockets of majors. It's actually sickening to watch from the sidelines.

> "Rounding errors" like these always favour the larger players.

I don't see it -- how?

> requiring each song to have 1k streams _per year_ before qualifying for monetization

Each stream is ~$0.004. It doesn't seem unreasonable at all to require a song to hit $4 per year -- or $0.33/mo. -- to qualify. There is some level of overhead involved here, after all. These are ludicrously small amounts of money.

Also how does this "help line the pockets of majors"? It's all just going back into the same pot of revenue that gets shared the same as before. So proportionally it's helping the artists with smaller songs still over 1K streams just as much.

And even if it's $40M, that's just 0.3% of Spotify's overall revenue. Proportionally, it's pretty irrelevant.

This isn’t per artist, it’s per song, which means an artist might put out an album and only the single gets widespread play and if the few thousand plays the rest receive all fall just under 1k they’d be discounted to unpaid plays. Remember, for smaller artists every dollar counts. Most have already seen their revenues from music drop by 90-95% since Spotify ate the industry, so why should they be so willing to accept that the first 1k plays are worth $0.00 and the next are only worth $0.003 or less.

This is also compounded by their refusal to adopt a user-centric payment model where the artists you actually listened to that month are the ones your money goes to. Look at comparisons others have published and you’ll see how their current model siphons money from smaller artists towards major label artists (I’m discretely typing this in bits from our local chamber orchestra’s AGM and can’t look up facts for you atm).

With this change, it ensures that even moving to a user-centric model they’ll still be able to underpay smaller artists. It’s not so alarming on its own, but it ensures they can continue to keep the status quo even if they give in to pressure and adopt a user-centric payment model by being able to not have to pay for much of their catalog.

But the artists never made any money in the first place. Spotify allowed for the insanely long tail of no-play artists to get a platform to begin with, paying a nominal fee seems like not that big of a deal, considering the same folks would never have gotten any exposure.

Artists had plenty of thriving platforms to get their music out digitally before Spotify came along. The difference is almost every one of them paid better or let you sell your music. Spotify has accounted for artist music revenues dropping by ~90% and has done almost nothing to help smaller artists that they weren’t already getting elsewhere. They grew in popularity due to offering listeners endless playlists. Sadly, Songza was killing it in this area too and could have been a serious Spotify competitor until Google bought it and ruined it almost overnight.

> Most people who subscribe to Spotify listen to lots of different stuff -- that's the entire point of streaming. Virtually nobody is listening to one song a month, or 2 albums per month.

Considering the asks you're making, I imagine you'll have no problem substantiating this?

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