Hacker News Reader

Comment by rantee | Hacker News Reader

Lost in all coverage of this battle of the middlemen is the effect on the artists actually making the product. How would lower prices make any difference in Spotify’s royalty rate bullying in a market saturated with alternatives that they already dominate? Are there really that many more consumers who want but aren’t already paying for a streaming service or using free alternatives? There are legit discussions to be had about app store policies, but I can’t see how the music streaming context is the place to have them.

View on HN

Fairer App Store policies allows more streaming choice for consumers, including potentially opting for "fair trade"-style offerings that give more to artists.

Right now, both Apple AND Spotify have an anti-competitive advantage due to the app store (with Apple Music getting a massive advantage, and Spotify getting a better deal than new competition entering the market).

Although a lot of streaming payment rates are set upstream of streaming services.

Yes, agree that like any other technology, the artists typically get the short end of the stick regardless of the delivery platform. Even for the megastars, more money is raked in from sources other than streaming. (With notable exceptions, like megastars owning their own masters instead of a label, or blockbuster established songwriters.)

What policies need to be made more fair? It makes no sense to make Apple pay itself. And surely, Spotify is subject to the same fees as any other music streaming business.

And all fees can be avoided by not taking payment via the App Store. A streaming service can even accept payment in the Safari browser in iOS via Apple Pay, and it would not cost them anything.

99% of musicians being paid small amounts has only to do with the population at large liking a very, very small percentage of music much more than the vast majority of music.

> And all fees can be avoided by not taking payment via the App Store. A streaming service can even accept payment in the Safari browser in iOS via Apple Pay, and it would not cost them anything.

That was the crux of the case. Spotify was accepting payment through their web site in addition to taking payment via the App Store. And because they were processing their own payments, they could offer the same subscriptions for a lower price than on the App Store.

The issue was that Apple was not allowing them to inform App Store users that they could pay through a browser.

Spotify doesn't set rates for what artists get paid, labels that make their music available on Spotify do.

"Artists don't get paid fairly" is a tale that existed long before Spotify existed.

Are you sure about this? I hear the rates vary by platform. For example Tidal was pushing for much higher royalties as part of its push to get more artists to sign with it.

Yes, the rates vary by platform. In the US, there's a combo of statutory (or CRB-approved) rates on the publisher side, and negotiations on the label side.

On the publisher/songwriter side, streams are not "public performances" under the Copyright Act (in the US), so royalties are not handled by the court-sanctioned monopolies that have been in place since the early 20th century (ASCAP, BMI).

> On the publisher/songwriter side, streams are not "public performances" under the Copyright Act (in the US)

And the industry has been fighting tooth and nail to make streaming services use performance licenses, not mechanical licenses. Here's a very good (long) overview https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/14/17117160/spotify-mechanic...

Reasonably. Without any specific knowledge, Spotify doesn't actually own the rights to music - it's the rights holders (labels) that chose to make their music available to Spotify under the terms they want.

It's 10 years old at this point, but Sony's leaked contract with Spotify basically outlines that there's no such thing as a 'per stream' rate. Roughly, all the money available was split between the labels (with most favored nation clauses to get them even more money) https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/19/8621581/sony-music-spotif...

Also:

> Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors.

> In many cases, royalty payments happen once a month, but exactly when and how much artists and songwriters get paid depends on their agreements with their record label or distributor

https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/

And if publishers and/or labels were able to obtain better rates - via direct negotiations, the CRB, or otherwise - presumably some of those fractional cents per stream would trickle down to the artists and songwriters who are already in notoriously oppressive contracts with the major label and publisher oligopoly.

It's definitely important, but the DMA isn't a response to the existence of music streaming services. It's a direct remediation for Apple's uniquely anticompetitive practices, which affects everyone, artists or not. Arguably, this was a necessary first-step to prevent other platforms from following Apple's example and presenting less choice to the user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com