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Comment by zaidf | Hacker News Reader

I rarely ever purchased music. And yet, thanks to Spotify I've been paying ~$10/mo for the last 4 years. For all the hate it gets, its turned people who rarely ever paid for music into paying for it every month.

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You might be interested to know that your $120/year is several times what the average consumer has ever spent on music per year.[0] It's quite likely that streaming services have already captured all the consumers willing to pay this much. The only growth will come from lowering prices.

[0]https://recode.net/2014/03/18/the-price-of-music/

I would never have normally spent $120 per year on music, yet I do for Spotify. I also listen to a ton more music than I would have otherwise, because after my $10 per month its 'free' - if an artist I'm tangentially interested in releases an album, it's likely I'll listen to it. Traditionally, I would never have done that because I wouldn't have paid >$20 for the album.

IIRC there's a great passage in "Steve Jobs" (Isaacson) that eloquently describes how the iTunes store got people to pay money for music they were previously getting for free.

Here's the Gen-Y version.

I think the only people that are really angry about Spotify are the artists. It seems like the way their payments are calculated, they get the short end of the stick.

Not that this excuses Spotify, but artists got the short end of the stick in the traditional system too.

Much more so on spotify (and streaming generally). In the traditional system an artist might have got 10% of retail price. That equates to much more than 10% of profit (could be around 40% of profit in some cases). While record companies do have various ways of chipping away at that, the fundamentals of a traditional points deal aren't actually as bad as usually presented and way better than in other retail industries (e.g. clothing).

that's not true , compared to Spotify, that's a total lie.

Artists don't get a 10% cut each time a song is played on Spotify. The only people getting rich with Spotify is Spotify and the label that grants the content rights. The artists do get almost nothing.

Spotify pays the labels who pay the artists. So shouldn't the artists work on negotiating better agreements with labels? That might compel labels to negotiate a better agreement with Spotify assuming that is possible. If any party overplays its card, it could all come tumbling down:

- if artists demand too much payment from labels, labels won't sign them

- if labels demand too much from spotify, spotify won't sign them

- if spotify doesn't sign enough labels or pays too much to them, it will die either due to not enough music or not enough revenue to find growth.

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