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Comment by dustingetz | Hacker News Reader

> I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music

A lot of megastars acknowledge that the success of their "life's work" is somewhat a function of luck. Internet radio's artist discovery mechanics scale down to give exposure to smaller artists. It seems to me like we're headed in a direction where a manufactured top-40 single, funded by huge corporations, isn't a prerequisite to success, and that just doesn't seem possible without disruptors like Spotify.

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Here was a good perspective from a 'smaller artist' (on Merge and Secretly Canadian) from reddit on this subject: http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/2ld32y/the_1_hit_sing...

Basically, they have seen decreased sales, increased streaming, and no increase in touring opportunities due to streaming services.

Your music have been heard by more people due to streaming, but it doesn't necessarily mean it was good enough (or the right type of music) for people to pay to come to see you in concert

That's a big thing, and it's hard to solve too, in both directions. Some might argue that artists don't get a fair shake when someone just hears one song in a playlist of other songs. Some even claim that you can't listen to one song, you have to listen to the album (Garth Brooks and Pink Floyd are two examples). On the other side of the coin, who here has bought an album after hearing one song on the radio, only to find out the rest of the album sounds completely different? I know much of my family bought Kid Rock's album when "Picture" came out on the radio, only to find out he's a rock/rap artist, not a country artist. They spent $20 on literally one song.

I've done that on Spotify. I hear a song I like and go to the entire album, to find I hate the rest of the album. That's fine. That one song goes in my playlist and I listen to it over and over again, and the artist gets paid for making a song I enjoy, rather than me not buying their album because I know there is only one song I will enjoy.

Streaming creates non-fans. Buying a CD creates a fan. In some rare occasion I'll hear something I like so much that I then download the album, but in most cases I just stream a subgenre of music.

The end result is that I don't know any artist very well, although I'm well versed in the subgenre. I have no desire to go to a show, as I don't know any artists.

Buying a CD, while a bigger decision, almost entrenches you as a fan. I'm much more likely to want to go to a Taylor Swift concert if I've listened to her CD 100 times (and I'm almost certainly not going to listen to ANY album 100 times with Spotify).

Neither model is better than the other to me. But they are different, and value accrues in different ways for the models.

My experience is totally different. Streaming made a fan of so many artists because I can listen to a whole album and connect to their music. And it also made go to a lot more shows, because I can get familiar with the artists before the show.

I guess that the difference might come from the fact I've never been a big buyer of CDs, growing up in Eastern Europe meant that I couldn't really afford music so pirating MP3's was the norm.

There's a difference between radio and Spotify. Radio is free for listeners, but the listeners don't really own the music or add it to their collection. So it's a promotional medium for the artist, and the listener pays money to "collect" the music from elsewhere. Spotify lets listeners collect music (even if it's not to own, just a subscription) but they hardly pay the artist anything. If a multi-platinum star only gets $6 million per year from Spotify, smaller artists can't make anything near a living.

Its not about making a living, it's about exposure. We live in a world where content created yesterday can go viral today and reach millions of people. Once you have the exposure, you can figure out how to monetize it. More and more, the ability to gain exposure is in the content creator's hands, not a middleman.

This whole argument is about whether putting your music on Spotify makes more money than keeping it off. The quote you started with is specifically about compensation.

Edit: If you're using Spotify for exposure, why get paid for plays? And why would you be happy that listeners can "keep" the music instead of buying it somewhere for more money? Spotify seems like the worst of both worlds.

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