Reductive thinking and the unfairness of Spotify payments
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
It's easier to illustrate that idea with a more extreme example:
User 1 listens to nothing but songs from an obscure independent jazz artist and never any pop songs.
For the author's particular examples...
>Now let's take a different scenario.
User 1 listens to 90 songs by Ariana Grande.
User 2 listens to 10 songs by Billie Eilish.
Using "user-centric" model, 100% of User 1's payment would go to AG and 100% of User 2 goes to BE. From the perspective of the TOTAL SUM, this also means that 50% of the total pie goes to AG and the other 50% goes to BE.
>Imagine two users of Spotify. Both pay £10/month.
User 1 only listens to 900 ABBA songs.
User 2 only listens to 100 Beatles songs.
90% ABBA, 10% Beatles ?
50% each ?
I'm in favor of paying artists in proportion to time played; that's a granular vote by users.
I suppose a middle of the road solution would be to allocate X% towards the user-centric pot and Y% towards a pool for overall. Maybe that's 50/50 or 80/20, I don't know. But niche artists seem like will continue to have a hard time unless they go viral under the current system.
Unless a given distribution method is resistant to artificially playing nothing but obscure artists on fake user clients 24/7, done for financial incentive, it's a non-starter.
Otherwise you end up with the Audible 60-minute silent book problem (if I'm remembering right?).
People sometimes assume that the user-centric model automatically favors the indie artist, but that's not really true. It favors artists whose fans listen to fewer streams per month than average, whether the artists themselves are popular or not.
User 1 listens once to a 3 minute song by Ariana Grande.
User 2 listens once to a 3 minute song by Billie Eilish.
That's all they do for that month.
I think most reasonable people would say that artists A & B would split the money evenly.
Does the artist own their songs? Does the label have any control on which streaming services are used? If the artist owns all of their songs, they don’t have to stream them on Spotify.
If they really are popular, they will be popular on the platform as well. Let the statistics define the value and compensation, hopefully equally.
Why don't you think this? What's unreasonable about the distribution in this example?
> Artists should be able to negotiate how much their stream costs. reply
How could that possibly work? It would lead to shop/bandcamp style artist-fan pricing, which the casual listening market has been trained out of.
The cake-slicing algorithm beloved by parents of waring siblings is a good example. "I cut, you choose" isn't guaranteed to give a 50/50 split. But it incentivises the cutter to act with loss minimisation as their goal. And most kids can intuit how fair that is.
There are cake slicing algorithms for increasing numbers of participants. But they become increasingly harder to understand for people who aren't experts in game theory.
So you're left with the problem of what causes the least complaints rather than what is logically fair.
Some artists are powerful enough that people would leave a streaming service if it didn't have them, so they are able to bargain for more then the service can pay to everyone.
It’s not like Spotify is getting rich. They keep 30% and give artists 70% (although much goes to labels, but the point is that Spotify only gets 30%).
The market isn’t there for people to pay so much for music. It’s not unfair as much as a busker not being a millionaire isn’t unfair either.
How much money should someone get for a million people listening to their song? What’s the fair amount? I’m not sure, but I think Spotify is the closest artists have ever gotten given the historical payouts for radio, album sales, etc.
I think most of this is just people not understanding and naturally wanting more.
I think it’s fine for artists to want more, it’s a free market after all, they might just not get it.
In other words, are there now more artists making money than before, even if the big hitters are making less off album sales? That matters a lot
I've talked to him a couple of time about the business side of it - when the band started they managed to create a nice community of people that liked their music, even before they released their first album. People would go to concerts and buy a lot of merchandise and their CDs and even vinils when they recorded and released their music.
He shared that with the popularization of streaming services, they lost a lot of their identity and this community lost a lot of force. At the same time, a lot more people were listening to their music (and still are), but the return to them was really low, both monetarily and in the sense of accomplishment of the band.
This is true, but only because their music is cheap/free. If it cost more, they would not be listening.
The community part seems real, but that’s a function of streaming and digital music in general and not so much the payout amount. I think Spotify could triple the payout (by tripling the price to customers) and your friend would still make less.
I'd also argue that "fairness" is not really that important. One could in theory charge a fixed monthly rate to customers and pay a fixed constant fee to artists as long as the company's finances work out favorably. It's not really the customer's business how the company's costs are distributed.
Users want to pay a fixed monthly fee and get unlimited access.
Spotify has figured out the best way to combine the two, and this involves pooling all the money paid by all users – regardless of what they listen to – and then allotting it to artists based on the number of streams they served to the platform.
Yes this means that plenty of users are subsidizing artists they don't like, but this is also what works best for everyone in the system. Trying to paint it as "fair" or "unfair" is pointless.
Otherwise we get no new genres, no innovation, aand fewer up and coming artists.
This seems to be begging the question.
Spotify has figured out a way to combine the two. Many people clearly feel that it is not the best way, and some that it is not even working.
Think on it: pre-2009 (or whenever you first met Spotify), assuming you weren’t illegally downloading, there were really two main entities you were paying for the price of a CD: the label and the artist. I suppose if you wanted you could work in the distributor, like a Sam Goody or Best Buy.
And what happened? You paid $10-20 one time and the music was durably yours forever.
You could exchange CDs among your friends, which as a side note created made finding new music all the more personal.
Nowadays, I’m paying an ever increasing sum of money for music I’ll never own a copy of outright, to primarily pay off the Spotify platform’s AWS bill, c-level salaries, shareholders, and engineer salaries. Then basically the same thing for the record companies. And whatever detritus scraps are left over, dangle in front of the artist and make him do something embarrassing for it.
It’s basically techno-sadism. I sorta hope music just up and dies to teach us all a lesson about what a great bunch of twats we all are.
They don't want to think about whether a particular song or artist is on a particular CD.
They want to play one of anything, as the mood strikes them.
Generally, they're probably fine with leasing (cheaper) access to (more) music, versus (more expensively) owning (less) music. Ownership just doesn't confer enough utility to make up the price gap.
I'm as anti never-ownership-trend as you'll find, but it's hard to fault Spotify for "winning", given the huge disparity in user utility.
I fault mankind for being uncritically thinking to let Spotify win
But then again “mainstream” mankind made Taylor Swift and Kanye West billionaires.
Autocracy is great... as long as the autocratic is good.
But I'd worry about how that would have gone when Apple ran out of growth and needed to juice their revenue.
You can load a CD you bought at the store into iTunes and the bytes are yours for all time
Not sure what autocracy has to do with it
That's closest to the Spotify user experience.
However, it never would have happened if Apple hadn't had such a dominant position in the market (at the time, iPod) that they could force record companies into that deal.
I eyeroll every time I see someone here say "all the consumers are stupid because they don't behave exactly like I want them to behave, and I must be the right one"
I do worry about the centralization of the marketplace around Spotify. "The king is dead" -> "Long live the king" etc.
IMHO, it'd be much healthier if streaming revenue sharing operated on a FRAND model, where non-Spotify entrants were guaranteed access to Spotify revenue-sharing licensing pricing with the content owners, by using a standard formula.
Maybe that's the way it does work? National music licensing law in the streaming area is something I'm not overly familiar with.
Spotify only had one price increase in its history and it was in 2023.
Also, check the financial reports, 70+% of all revenue goes to paying royalties, so the majority of the revenue is disbursed to labels, not the scraps, the scraps are paying for engineers, editors, designers, lots of legal resources (try dealing with licencing across 100+ markets), all the infrastructure, C-level, and so on.
Just calling out because I do agree there are many problems with subscriptions in general but not the ones you brought up.
Also, you know you can still buy CDs, right? Vinyl as well if you're a masochist.
Assuming that most people have fairly stable lives they probably bought all their CDs some time in their 20s and maybe have to 1.25 cds a year to make up for wear and tear of their old music and the occasional new album.
For users with that kind of musical taste Streaming services are clearly a big increase in cost, offering no extra value.
For users with a wide ranging musical taste - which might be more applicable to younger generations who have been taught that access to all the world's music is a possibility - obviously the Streaming model is a superior value.
Or maybe it’s actually a net healthy thing—that is, demanding musical artists be lifelong paupers of the most fundamental degree—because music is an unproductive venture and starving artists make objectively better art.
I don't know the answer, but I'm a bit skeptical of the idea that small artists were making a better living via local CD shops (with limited inventory and zero economic incentive to push smaller, unknown artists).
Seems to be not close to dying.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/18/23878916/riaa-music-indus...
The recommendation system is amazing and totally worth an additional cost to me.
> You paid $10-20 one time and the music was durably yours forever.
I'm old enough to have re purchased my music on three platforms: vinyl, CD, mp3. If you buy physical media you have the added cost of needing space for the stuff and needing to move it around with you. As for Mp3, they are the great but they made sharing so easy stealing music became a real problem.
In the US, $0.00.
And "a million listens" is like KROQ playing your song only once where the once was a Tuesday afternoon in 1982.
If you want to get paid, ask people to pay you.
I have seen articles detailing the different payout per stream of the different services, several times in recent years. From this I had assumed the payouts were fixed rate. I accept I could have misunderstood.