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Comment by adamc | Hacker News Reader

Old geezer here: Does anyone know how often the songs on a CD are played? If I spent $10 on a CD, what was that likely to generate per-play? (I'm old enough that I remember taping LPs and then listening to the tapes -- which was a near-universal practice amongst the folks I knew.)

My guess is that great albums got listened to a lot -- driving down the revenue "per play" but generating great word of mouth and lots of net record/cd sales. How much of that applies to Spotify?

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Rather than guess what the number of plays is, I think what's more valuable is to see what the break even point is.

Assuming 12 songs on a CD, and that each CD costs $2 to print, distribute, and account for merchant margins, that gives us effectively $0.66666 per song. At the rate of $0.00786 per play on spotify, you'd have to play each song on your physical CD 84 times (or 1018 plays across varied tracks) before it produced less revenue for the artist than a play on spotify.

I'm guestimating here, but I'd say that in general artists/record companies benefit more from CD sales based on those numbers.

I'm happy to play along but first can you give us an idea of the answer(s) will relate to the topic at hand? I'm struggling to find a correlation.

I thought it would be interesting to get some kind of historical fix on whether this is really an unfair rate per song, and if so by how much. I'm also curious as to whether "per play" is really the right metric: if I sold you a CD and it sucked, you'd almost never play it so that rate might seem high... but be unimportant because you'd sell so few CDs. How does that translate to the Spotify model?

Maybe this is obvious to others? But not to me.

One thing to focus on is that the rate per song in the CD era can't fairly be compared to the rate per song today - particularly for popular songs that have a global reach. I would agree that "per play" is only a partial metric, but would caution against trying to compare too much over time.

Then how do we evaluate musicians' claims of not being paid fairly?

at the end of the day, it's art...'fair value' is a very unique construct

the main point I was making was that comparing 20 years ago to today in this case is likely not equivalent (at best I would say it's an incomplete view)

I don't really know how you quantify "number of plays" through time and attribute a "value per spin". Take John Coltrane's "Blue Train" - $10 for that album in 1957 would have given you almost 60 years of unlimited play (if you could keep the record clean!).

To a certain degree, "Buying an album" has always been a gamble. Spotify/Amazon/etc make it easier to (a) not buy albums that suck, and (b) buy more singles instead.

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