Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

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> a lifetime of spotify listening will make less money for an artist you like than buying a single album from them on Bandcamp.

This is false. And I mean, dramatically.

> Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify.

It's roughly 200$.

Number of songs per hour: 60 minutes / 3 minutes per song = 20 songs

Total listening hours per year: 8 hours/day * 365 days = 2,920 hours

Total streams per year: 20 songs/hour * 2,920 hours = 58,400 streams

Total earnings: 58,400 streams * $0.004 (average pay rate) = $233.60

How high do you think that number should be, to be non-"whopping"?

I am seriously confused about what or who anti-streamers think they are zealoting for, what alternative fantasy they are defending.

As someone who has worked in the music industry (i.e. the people actually making a living through music) I witnessed Spotify/YT and the likes as an absolute force of creation of a new class of musicians, that would never have existed before.

You and I did the same back-of-the-napkin math and arrived at slightly different numbers; I used a 5 minute average song duration and $0.003 average payout. See my other comments for elaboration on why the Bandcamp model is ultimately better for the artist.

I don't deny that Spotify has improved the situation for many artists, but rather that it hasn't done enough and other approaches do it better, and I believe this is factually true.

Yes, Bandcamp leaves a bigger percentage to the musician - from nothing/less. For a variety of reasons, Bandcamp is not actually being used and thus not doing for artists what Spotify has. You can start a personal crusade to combat that, but as long as you do not actually make it work (and I think there is good reasons rooted in what Spotify does well over Bandcamp and the service the former provides that the later won't), this is what is actually factually true.

Let's just skip the part, where we imply it's somehow okay to circumvent fair use, because nobody is making money off of streaming anyway or any such nonsense. Streaming as intended is fine for now. People can just use Spotify, or any of the alternatives, as they are intended and that's fine and on the whole better than anything we had before.

I didn't actually make that argument, though. I said that a user who circumvents ads on Spotify and buys albums from Bandcamp is more profitable for the artist than someone who just listens to Spotify ads, and I believe that this is factually true. A quick review of Google will turn up endless testimonies from artists who make more money from Bandcamp, usually by an order of magnitude or more. Spotify may be better than anything we had before (I don't believe this is true, but assume it for the moment), it is not better than anything that came after.

For the record, I am steelmanning a position in which abject piracy is a social negative, which I do not actually believe, but if we take that at face value my arguments still hold.

1. If you _really_ like an album, buy it on Bandcamp, because it gives more money to the artist.

2. If you just listen to the occasional song, listen to them on Spotify. Artist gets _some_ money, but nowhere near as much as #1.

3. If you don't care about the artist getting anything at all, then use workarounds like this tool, or download on torrents.

Most people used to do #3, and are now doing #2. #1 is just not going to happen, because there's too much friction.

0. If you really want to support an artist, just ask what is the best way to just send them some hard cash every month? Patreon, ko-fi... even straight wire transfer (isn't FedNow already working?).

Why do we keep insisting on having middlemen?

I don't believe most people care about a lot of the artists they listen to enough to seek them out and send money this way.

Not that I believe it's good or bad either way, it's just cumbersome. People want easy solutions. A few of my long distance friends are artists, and it makes them happy to see that I have bought their new cassette or vinyl on Bandcamp above the regular price, and send nice notes with it.

I can do this for more people more easily thru Bandcamp than figuring it all out myself.

> most people (don't) care about a lot of the artists they listen

Fair enough. Then don't pay anything?

> it makes them happy to see that I have bought their new cassette or vinyl

On the other hand, I do not want to buy merch, I don't care about physical media and I flat out refuse to buy something with DRM and/or through exploitative middlemen.

This computation is assuming streaming fraud though. If they see an account doing that, they'll flag it.

Assume the album has 10 songs, is one hour long and costs $20. Ten songs means they get $0.04 each time you listen to it. So, you need to listen to the album 500 times for the artist to be paid for the album. I mostly listen in the car; call it under 2 hours a day, but lets assume 4 hours a day of listening to Spotify.

A Spotify subscription is $11 a month. I can fit 4 non-fraud plays of the album into each day, so that's 4 * 30 = 120 streams. It'd take 4 months of listening to nothing but this one album for the artist to break even, and it'd cost me $44.

Bandcamp + bittorrent would give the artists about twice as much money on average. Buying merch also pays artists more, assuming the cost of the item plus shipping is under half what they charge.

The problem is with streaming really. Come to a shop where physical works of music are sold, everything is free for listening there. Come to bandcamp – where you can buy and own a digital album, everything is free for listening there. Come to spotify - here you pay to a middle man, who decides whatever crap cut he will pay to a musician per play button pressed – it is instantly visible the whole model is not viable and only makes the middle-man really profit

That creation of a new class of musicians is not due to their ads model though, but due to offering a platform for discovery and distribution.

Interesting to know. What are the comparative figures for youtube and TikTok videos?

What's the median payout? i.e. is it skewed by some very high earning artists?

$0.

13,400 bands (not artists) got paid over $50K by spotify in 2020:

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/how-many-artists-are-...

There are 8 million artists on spotify, and over 80% had under fifty monthly listeners:

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on...

Put another way, 0.16% made over $50K. That's median income in the US. If you assume the money gets split across 5 band members, that's median income in Indonesia.

This will also roughly be true for Bandcamp (albeit for each commercially failed band there's at least 3 friends and a mom, who will buy something off of the store and at a show, once when given the chance but I hope no one is cynical enough to argue about that being a lot better than $0).

The fact that every creative endeavour or sport is a mix of a few pros and a lot of amateurs (in the sense that they do not make a living) is not an issue.

The value of Spotify and the like to most artists is enabling them to publish to everyone for basically free, no matter how fringe or bad, and to do it all the time. I think that's wonderful.

They don't break down the distribution of how many artists got paid at all, but it looks like they're probably close to the estimated 15K bands that got non-trivial payments from Spotify this year:

https://bandcamp.com/about

> In the past year alone, they’ve spent $194 million on 14.2 million digital albums, 10.4 million tracks, 1.75 million vinyl records, 800,000 CDs, 350,000 cassettes, and 50,000 t-shirts.

Note that $194M is less than 10% of Spotify's revenue.

I'd love to see a breakdown by percentile income per band, but one thing's clear: If I buy something there, then more of my money goes to the artist I'm trying to support than they get from me streaming their album.

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