So unless you believe that Spotify is bad at business and there's an extra ~75% of revenue Spotify could pull out of a hat, this is basically impossible to satisfy without cratering the total revenue by doubling prices, which is probably not in artist's interests.
According to one source [1], Spotify users stream on average 25 hours a month. Assuming an average song is 3 minutes [2], that's 500 streams per month. Going with the $9.99 per month rate, users pay about $0.02 per stream. Currently, the artists see only $0.0038 per stream, or less than 1/5th of what Spotify makes.
I think that with a 50% profit margin, Spotify should be very happy. Of course, it's not that easy / straightforward, all conditions and caveats apply, etc etc.
The other issue that has been raised a number of times is that I believe the revenue is still divided up based on overall listens across the platform, which means it's dominated by artists who feature heavily in popular playlists and automation-driver radio/recommendations.
These listens are often passive and should not be considered as valuable as those of someone listens only a few hours a month, but spends all of that time listening to specific artists (indie or otherwise).
Basically the argument is that if I spend $9.99 on a Spotify sub, the entirety of that cash (minus Spotify's cut) should be directed to the actual artists I listened to.
If there's two groups of people, one who listens to pop music for 10 hours a month and one who listens who indie artists for 20 hours a month (which could easily be the case if their recommended playlists are mostly indie artists as mine is), then switching to the model you propose would reduce how much money indie artists make, right?
It seems more fair to me that artists would get a set amount of money per stream, rather than the amount they get being dependent on how many other songs their listeners listened to.
I think the argument is not that it's the 10 vs 20 hour listeners, but rather the 10-40 hour listeners (workday) vs the 700 hour listeners (radio playing in the corner of a breakroom somewhere).
The 700 hour listener has no audience and no human curation, and yet it's got 10x the influence on who gets paid by Spotify.
The article I linked also makes a really good point about this model motivating artists to encourage listeners/fans to listen to whole albums rather than single songs— right now if you're playing Spotify for revenue, the only thing that matters is landing your songs on popular playlists where they will get hundreds of thousands of passive plays. The incentives there are not really aligned to what anyone wants long term out of music.
It’s not inherently clear to me that one play should be paid more than another play.
In fact, having a different fee per play dependent on the user is a pretty opaque and unclear metric. “How much are 1 million plays worth? It depends on your audience - if your listeners listen to lots of music you get paid less per play, and you will just have to trust us to compute an appropriate fee for you correctly.”
No matter how you cut these things there are pluses and minuses . You seem to think that Universal should get paid less for a single Katy Perry stream played from a global playlist compared to a small indie song streamed in a private playlist, and while that’s a valid opinion it’s not intrinsic or even self evident to me.
I don't think it would be that hard to show a small histogram which had your plays bucketed across different levels of commitment, engagement or some similar metric. Or instead of doing it that way, you'd bucket the users, so say "for song X, you had 30k unique users listen to it in the royalty time period, and here's a histogram of how engaged they were, with the left side being a small number of users who listened to it a lot or didn't listen to much else, and the right side being the large pool of users who heard it once and listened to many other things.
The reason this is good for artists is that it rewards them for what many want to be cultivating anyway: a relationship with enthusiastic fans, rather than faceless "plays" which could have come from anywhere.
In any case, obviously the conversation is DOA if you start it from a foundational assumption that "a play is a play", but if we acknowledge upfront that artist compensation has always been weird and often quite unfair (see radio royalties, for example— they sure as hell aren't getting compensated by how many people were tuned into a radio station playing their song), then there's room to discuss better options in a new medium that sits somewhere in between the old roles filled by FM radio and private collections of physical media.
> In any case, obviously the conversation is DOA if you start it from a foundational assumption that "a play is a play"
That's not my foundational assumption, but I've also not heard a compelling argument that one play / minute streamed should be inherently more valuable than another play / minute streamed.
It's also not clear how this value would be calculated, because I also don't think it's clear that proportion of listen time by user necessarily captures the difference in 'value' of one play against another.
It also feels like it will be very complex to negotiate with rights providers. Spotify's current negotiations with rights providers are really simple and easy to understand - we divvy up our revenue by play count, you are responsible for $x revenue by this metric, so let's negotiate the %. Moving all providers to another weird metric would be an extremely tough thing to do, particularly because having half on one and half on another would likely happen for a crossover, and would result in a loss of profit during the transition period.
I don't think it'll necessarily happen via Spotify renegotiating it. It'll happen via a competitor offering this scheme, and indie labels pulling their content from Spotify.
The obvious player to offer this competing service is Bandcamp. They haven't yet, though an awful lot of the pieces are in place— they have a mobile app that lets you trivially stream anything you've ever purchased and listen on trial to things you haven't, and it even has genre playlists and recommendations:
It's tough, because indie labels will likely find it hard to both remain popular/relevant while pulling all their songs off the worlds most popular listening platforms.
It's a bit of a catch 22 - these platforms are now where people discover new bands, so if you are not on them people don't discover you so can't buy your album, and if you are on them then people can listen to your album without paying.
Unfortunately I think the truth is that in the future bands will have to think of slightly different monetisation strategies - maybe a mix of subscriber content (see Pomplamoose Patreon as the creators of this concept), fan engagement, merchandise, shows, premium albums that aren't on streaming platforms e.t.c. rather than pulling from Spotify & Apple Music entirely.
> I've also not heard a compelling argument that one play / minute streamed should be inherently more valuable than another play / minute streamed.
Here's a compelling irrefutable argument.
Let's start the discussion from a couple of scenarios. These scenarios are not the definitive and complete set of use-cases, but are enough to prove a point.
Scenario 1: User manually searches for a song and clicks play. Again the following day. Again and again for a couple of weeks/months. The user forgets about the song after that period.
Scenario 2: User creates a playlist and clicks play. Then uses that same playlist again, and again and again for years. Alterantive scenario: users searches for a published album/compilation and plays that playlist again and again for years.
Scenario 3: Streaming service generates a new generic infinite playlist every day, based on a biased algorithm that upvotes some artists and downvotes some other artists. E.g. Playlist called - Discover Daily/Weekly.
Scenario 4. Streaming service generates a new generic infinite playlist every day, but personalized to the users taste and interests, again based on a biased algorithm that upvotes some artists and downvotes some other artists. E.g. Playlist called - Recommended for you today.
Scenario 5. User hits random play and a truly random algorithm decides what will be played next, no matter of musical style, language, culture or any other aspect. Truly random, no biases whatsoever.
So I will argue why not all streams are equal or should not be treated equal.
The difference is the specificity of intent. Whether the user wished to listen to some specific song, or if the user was force-fed some song. For the initial discussion I am assuming force-feeding, later I will discuss alternative scenarios (clicking skip).
In scenario 1 and 2 there is intent from the user what should be streamed, and this means that the user is interested in the music to be streamed. It can not be refuted that the authors of that specific song should be paid for the stream.
In scenario 3 and 4, the user just wishes to have something making noise, not anything specific, but not random. This is fine, if the user is satisfied, but the problem is all algorithms have biases. If the algorithm favors the most popular authors, and the user could be satisfied with anything in the same style and tempo without preferences, than the streaming service is not fair to the authors who are less popular and never gives them a standing chance to compete. This creates a boosting effect so that the most popular become force-fed to the audience involuntarily and they become even more popular. This is a well-known side-effect in all platforms that use popularity as ranking or rating metric. So here, not all streams can be considered equal, since some had higher probability to be present in the playlist due to inherent algorithm biases.
Scenario 5 is the only scenario where the user is force-fed music, but in a manner that is irrefutably unbiased and irrefutably fair to all authors and songs. In such a scenario all get a chance and all such streams are equal. Unfortunately, users that would prefer such a scenario do not exist. Nobody would endure the torture of a truly random playlist for more than 3 songs.
So we have use cases where the users know what they want, and use-cases where the users don't know what they want, but know what they don't want and the streaming service tries to guess what it is that they want next, without truly knowing.
How do the streaming services know what a user does not want? By measuring the % of the stream that went through. If the user managed to suffer only <5 secs before clicking skip, then that stream should not be counted at all towards payment to the musician. If it was 60 secs than it's a different case. If the song went through entirely it's even better. If the user streamed the entire song, and was actively using the app during the whole time than it is an indicator that the user appreciates the song even more than if a passive encounter occurred.
So they try to guess what to play next. With a biased recommender algorithm that tries to recommend what would be a good fit to play next, and as I said the algorithm might favor some musicians over others.
This is a hard problem and is always discussed at research conferences, both by researchers from the streaming services, and by independent researchers. The topics of bias, randomness, satisfaction are always present. Some authors are even using personality traits to discover the type of music that should be streamed next, which is a very very deep breach in user privacy. I imagine that some services might consider eaves dropping on their customers to evaluate if there is true interest and appreciation of the served content - whether the customer is eating, dancing, smiling, chatting, ..., having sex, during the stream. To gather as much data as possible on what is the context, to offer a better aligned next song (if you are a paying customer) of better aligned ads (if you are a non-paying customer).
This is why all streams must not be treated equal, and the streaming services must find a way to be as fair as possible towards musicians (having in mind that no-one likes a random playlist).
As this is a hard problem, I suspect that more and more services will divert their research towards automatically generated music, so nobody will care if the algorigths are fair and if the authors are paid. Music is most susceptible to this, as it is easy to generate music that sounds good enough to a fairly large audience without realizing it is all auto-generated.
Advertisers pay for a radio and tv service, not users, right?
Don't compare Spotify against god, compare it to the alternative. Everyone has a "recommendation algorithm", it just doesn't have to be spotify's. It could be the radio, or what they see talked about in pop culture (e.g. WAP), or what their friends are listening to, etc. Spotify's algorithm has the potential to be radically more fair than any of the available alternatives. A fair algorithm is one that always shows people the songs they're most likely to appreciate, and the incentives are correctly aligned for Spotify to make a good effort to get as close as possible to that ideal (Spotify's top-tier "discover weekly" playlists are why I stick with it over any other platform). Music I listen to through the recommender is actually more valuable to me than music I picked out myself - if I only wanted to listen to music I already know about, I would just pirate it or buy it on itunes and save myself $10/month.
As an aside, I also disagree with "In scenario 3 and 4, the user just wishes to have something making noise, not anything specific, but not random". I don't just want something making noise, I want something making the kind of noise that I like to listen to, which includes a mix of old songs/artists and new ones I've never heard before.
That argument isn't irrefutable at all - let's break it down.
> Scenario 1 & 2 it can't be refuted that artists should be paid for the stream.
Agreed.
> [Scenario 3 & 4] So here, not all streams can be considered equal, since some had higher probability to be present in the playlist due to inherent algorithm biases.
Disagree on the implication here - I don't see why it irrefutably follows that an artist should be paid less for these listens just because its in an automatic playlist (assigned because it matches the same profile as a record I previously liked). What you have here is an opinion, not an irrefutable argument.
My personal opinion is that if you have a streaming service, a minute paid for a minute listened is about as fair as a metric you can get.
Why are my listens, which are mainly from automatic playlists based on my historical listening, less valuable than someone else's listens, just because they listen to cool obscure bands not on the playlists?
Right, but artists don't care whether you're listening to their music actively or passively. Whether you stream 10-20 hours or 700 hours, 1 stream is 1 stream. I don't see why this should affect the payout
I agree and I think this is really the key demand that they should have organized around. Splitting up the revenues based on what you actually listen to is really how things should work from a fairness perspective to artists. It also is likely more compatible with heavier listeners than their demand of 1c per stream. To put that number into context, I listen to ~1000 songs per month on Spotify and I pay $2.50 for Spotify each month using a family plan. I'm not sure how the economics of 1c per stream are supposed to work out there.
Soundcloud has already gone in the direction of paying out based on what you actually listen to, and it would be great to see Spotify and other platforms follow suit. See http://fanpoweredroyalties.com/ for more details on Soundcloud's implementation.
Aren't your listens to an indie artist still driving up their listens across the platform? It's an interesting point that Spotify's algorithms probably drive more listens to popular artists, but I think overall listen-count it still the most equitable metric.
The point is that it's about valuing the content which actually makes or breaks people's decision to subscribe to the service. Spotify is convenient, but it wouldn't survive on top-40 content because people would just go back to their MP3s or listen to it on YouTube.
I'm pretty sure that Netflix understands this, by the way— they know that deep-pocketed competitors like Amazon are going to eat their lunch if they try to do mass-appeal prestige shows starring A-list celebs, so they only do a few of those (enough to basically fill the homepage), while leaning hard into extremely niche content. Like, have you seen how many weird cooking shows there are on there? Or Hallmark Christmas movies? This is stuff that's harder to find elsewhere, and there are dedicated audiences on Netflix who are mostly or exclusively consuming it. If Netflix's internal accounting worked like how Spotify pays royalties, those shows would be instantly canceled in favour of new primetime-style sitcoms.
But they aren't, and I think it's because there are pools of their subscribers who will cancel the service if there isn't a steady stream of the specific content they're interested in. Thus, their subscriber $$$ go directly to funding that content, rather than into a general pot that's broken up by raw viewership numbers.
Should is a big word, but it feels like Spotify could make us indie-lovers happy by rewarding the intentional listens with slightly more money. Perhaps giving them a cut of the next few recommendations. Even though I know that famous artists would get more of this than the indies, taking value from the long mid-catalog.
I think that's risky because then there's some process that puts you in one of the two buckets, and there's probably going to be a valley of suck between them, where you're big enough that you don't qualify for the indie special treatment, but not so big that you're raking it in like Taylor Swift.
The nice thing about the proposal from the article is that in theory it should be something where everyone's incentives are aligned, since it rewards artists and genres for having fans who listen to their stuff a lot.
Yeah, that's what I mean by the mid-catalog. People you didn't quite go intending to play, and not the headliners. To the degree that it's a fairness discussion though it always comes down to sorting into buckets (even if absolutely identical buckets) and arguing for some distribution.
Good point. That's the sort of thing that warms the cockles of my artist-supporting heart.
I agree with this argument, and this is THE reason why I don't pay for a streaming subscription. I have no desire to see my money to go to the likes of Justin Bieber (who I don't listen to), whereas I would much prefer it goes to the smaller ambient and indie artists that I like to listen to while working.
They do kick you off after a while if you're a free account, but the marginal cost of the bandwidth for them is basically nothing. Anyway, it's 2021— who would accept a pay-per-time-listened Spotify in an age where Netflix, Hulu, Prime, and Disney+ are all all-you-can-eat for a similar price?
I feel like you should take Spotify's audited financial statements about how much they make and how much they return to rights holders (~75% of revenue) more seriously than your back of the envelope estimates: https://investors.spotify.com/financials/default.aspx
Agreed. The above calculation for example does not account for the fact that Spotify pricing varies significantly between countries and can be as little as 1.60$ per month.
The problem is that most artists do not own the distribution rights to their own music, these are owned by various record labels. Many top tier artists create their own record labels and shoulder the cost of advertising/promotion while also dramatically increasing their cuts.
The fact that individuals aren't able to break out via self-publishing music is an oddity in the internet age. Why aren't there more avenues to hear "random new artist that matches my tastes"? or is it self-perpetuating that labels sign all successful artists who can go mainstream?
>Why aren't there more avenues to hear "random new artist that matches my tastes"?
Because Bandcamp is perfect at this and nobody can beat them.
I say that with tongue in cheek, but they have been the platform for average musicians to self-publish on for a while. They've even totally foregone their cut periodically during the pandemic to help artists. And unlike Spotify, artists are able to apply their own branding to their pages. I've never met a musician with a bad thing to say about them or their platform.
> Why aren't there more avenues to hear "random new artist that matches my tastes"?
One reason is due to flat rate bundled compulsory licensing. If you run a coffee shop with live music you either restrict all performers to only play original works and still probably get threatened with lawsuits, or you pay up the ASCAP/BMI/SESAC protection money and can play whatever.
So in many contexts weirdo obscure independent artists can't compete on price (e.g. give their music away just to get it heard) because the customer has already paid for a bundled rate for popular music.
I like to listen to jango.com which tries to "push" new artists while you listen to some "station"... I've found a few good "completely unknowns" there, but most stuff they push is really low quality. I think that a platform where you could discover new artists easily using a system similar to this (play mainstream artists, mostly, but throw in a few songs from unknown artists that play similar genres), but then had an option to "upgrade" to get stuff like offline access to artists you like, could become very successful.
Their revenue per subscriber is also substantively lower - including free users, discounted EDU users, and family memberships. Excluding free users, it's probably ~$5 per user.
That being said, Apple Music pays .75p/stream, Tidal is 1.25p/stream. They can probably figure it out.
If they cannot pay the artists more, a long-term freemium plan might not be a great business model then. If free users are seriously cutting into profits, should they change the free plan to a limited free trial? I was around in the 80s 90s and we didn't really have free cassettes and CDs and radio paid studios & artists with ad revenue. Spotify is well known enough now that it could be argued an unending free tier may no longer be necessary.
Perhaps the dynamics have changed since you had to shop for music in physical stores, and purchase it in hour-long increments.
I certainly play more music now than when I had to change the tape, but without the ritual and the intent, I listen a lot less. This changes my value from streaming over simply not having to store my music library locally.
It doesn't cost an artist more to be played more, but it does cost the streaming service. This may bring more casual listening and help some artists, and "underpay" someone who's more famous and would get the bulk of the first-song play that comes from intent. I don't think it's "wrong" but it may be the wrong fit for any given artist.
Totally agree. Maybe spotify should look like an app store with fees in the 30% range at the top end (shopify/apple/steam). Their role is very similar: distribution and discovery. They probably could wi points giving better payouts per stream to smaller artists too, like steam does. Hopefully competition will force it down too (eg epic vs steam vs apple). We might need open access to back catalogues and not exclusive deals, but its a start
The App Store for music exists many times over and users (including myself) prefer a lower cost streaming model.
There is simply too much cheap or free music out there now for me to value it at iTunes singles prices.
I mean, short of government legislation the market isn’t going to stop driving the price of music down. The marginal cost of additional “performances” of the song is almost zero and people are constantly making new recordings for free because they love doing so. I don’t see why making a living off digitally recorded music has to be sustainable, and I don’t see how it can be when the supply is so endless.
It very well may not be sustainable. But I guess my point is that Spotify's business model might turn out to not be sustainable if artists decide it's not worth it to have their music on it.
If they don't decide that, then of course, maybe you just can't make a living selling music through Spotify.
You could probably make a living as a musician in other ways, though.
This doesn’t make sense to me, it’s not that they are eating into profits, it’s that they are eating into average margin; they presumably still at least break even on free users. And I would bet dollars to donuts that those free users are not going to convert to paid when piracy, YouTube videos, and free trials of other services exist.
I think Spotify is the first service to tempt me from piracy. Piracy doesn't handle discovery, or access across multiple devices, is a pain, and is actually (who knew?) illegal. Spotify handles all of those and won't get you arrested.
Youtube for music is simply worse than pirating and being caught.
To be fair, back in the day I used last.fm for music discovery, social music stuff, etc. and the more Spotify forces podcasts down my (paying subscription) throat the more I want to go back to piracy + last.fm.
> Their revenue per subscriber is also substantively lower - including free users, discounted EDU users, and family memberships. Excluding free users, it's probably ~$5 per user.
> That being said, Apple Music pays .75p/stream, Tidal is 1.25p/stream. They can probably figure it out.
Their rates are per country, they differ. So these calculations gave to it into account, but everyone pays the 5 or whatever it costs now in the west.
The nominal figure of what the platform per stream pays artists should not be discussed without taking into consideration the amount of monthly active users using the platform. Tidal and AM have significantly fewer users than Spotify
The $0.0038 figure is probably due in part to the way Spotify calculates royalties, dividing a pool of all subscriber revenue among all streaming activity, rather than dividing the revenue from each subscriber among each subscriber's streaming activity.
Think about a strategic decision like this: Spotify decides to pay-out a $0.005/stream rate to Taylor Swift. That's more than most artists make, but its what Taylor demands, and Taylor holds some cards here because she's popular.
Let's say that Spotify says No. Spotify's argument is, in effect, all artists are sharing a piece of the same pie; if they give Taylor Swift a higher than average rate, it lowers the average payout for every other artist. By saying No, in this hypothetical universe, Spotify is standing up for indie artists.
Taylor (more accurately, her rights holders) does not put her music on Spotify. Customers who come to Spotify for Taylor Swift's music no longer feel that their subscription is worthwhile; they stop paying.
Now, the pie is smaller. Indie artists receive a bigger chunk of a smaller pie. Customers are left without the music they want. Spotify's revenue is lower. Everyone loses.
Its easy to place the blame at Spotify, and I'm sure they deserve some, but we've known for about half a century that the record industry is a hive of shit, and this is just another symptom of this. The disparity in income between the popular artists and average artists is huge, and its mostly because of gatekeeping that the popular artists actively engage in to protect their nine-figure fortunes. Spotify could have stood up for smaller artists, but I'm not convinced they'd even exist today if they had; it was really their willingness to work with the record industry that turned them into the force they are.
I do have some hope that Square's purchase of Tidal could be a catalyst for change in the industry. In other words, if they maintain Tidal's high(est) revenue share with artists, improve the user experience (a lot), leverage their existing industry relationships to keep enough popular artists on the platform, and work with indie artists... it could be very good. I'm optimistic. I think Tidal's core investors being artists themselves and a traditionally low-margin payment processor is actually very healthy, versus Spotify who effectively is just a middle-man that needs to extract enough to survive.
If Spotify is in fact spending 75% of its revenue on royalties, but according to you less than 25% of it arrives at the artist, what does that tell you? Either your calculation is wrong, or somebody who is not Spotify is pocketing the difference.
You think that the developers and every other party involved costs less than 50% here? Devs cost a lot. Bandwidth and servers don't cost that much, but for large scale data transfer like spotify, it does. Running the company costs a lot. Maybe the fair price is double what it currently is. But that might result in the artists making less than they currently do, not more (this is, in fact, my suspicion - if Spotify could increase profits by charging more, they would already be doing so).
I couldn't actually find out what was paid, but it did look to be that, artists weren't really paid. It was song writers and publishers who were paid. Performing artists, however, only generated word of mouth which generated ticket sales - so far as I could garner.
The quoted $0.0038 is the total of what Spotify pays out to the distributor, who then distributes it between themselves, the artist, songwriters, their labels, etc.
Are only paid plans paying out royalties? I used to pay for spotify, but cut it after a budget rebalance since we just didn't use it enough. I still use it about 50% as much as when I paid.
While I agree more money should be sent towards small artists and I really hate to see myself defending a giant tech company, the demands of "x per stream" always makes me a bit confused.
Since spotify already pay out the vast majority of their revenue, there is not really much more room for increase there, at best 5-10% which likely wouldn't settle the case.
Reasonable suggestions would be that either: 1. labels should get less, 2. top artists should get less or 3. consumers should pay more.
Maybe the artists think consumers should pay more. If Spotify wasn't a quasi-monopoly, it would seem silly for artists to demand consumers pay more only on the Spotify platform, but since Spotify is, the argument is at least prima facie reasonable?
Spotify doesn’t seem like a monopoly that has pricing power; they are in tight competition with multiple streaming services like Apple Music and amazon close behind and catching up. There are some sources that have Apple Music already with more paid subscribers than Spotify, and Spotify definitely can’t pay a penny per stream of their free ad users.
> Spotify doesn’t seem like a monopoly that has pricing power
I'd argue that all music-streaming services have very little pricing power!
Streaming services rely on being an easier/friction-free option as opposed to piracy (or alternatively, buying the copies directly from the musicians).
Your point is still valid though, the competition is still fierce; Amazon, Tidal, Apple.. etc.
For years there's been a conflict broadly defined as "streaming rates paid to artists are irrationally low" vs. "streaming services aren't making money as it is"; the problem is that those aren't mutually exclusive positions. They can both be true at the same time.
At least to me, this suggests that the real problem is that $8–10 a month for ad-free streams was too low a price point to set. If Spotify's pricing structure had been something more like Hulu's -- no free tier at all, $6/month with ads and $12/month without -- they'd have easily been able to meet that penny-per-stream pay rate. (Tidal beats that pay rate, but I suspect that's by virtue of charging $20/month for "hi-fi" streams.) But, at this point they've set consumer expectations: streaming music services cost $10 per month. Changing that would be pretty difficult.
> the real problem is that $8–10 a month for ad-free streams
Which sounds a bit weird to me. How many people used to spend more than $10 everymonth on LP or CD records. Probably many enthusiasts, but the average customer? Not a chance.
Yet artists say they get paid a lot less. The money must go somewhere.
> Yet artists say they get paid a lot less. The money must go somewhere.
I don't have any stats for this, but my first guess would be way more paid artists (before the internet, how many people could even hope to make money off music? Physical distribution vs digital distribution is a huge barrier).
IMO spending $10 a month on CDs is a different market, since you own an asset in perpetuity. Spotify would have to guarantee a perpetual license that expands your library access the more you pay in. Instead, Spotify rents access to a single large library (which is good enough for most but very different).
It's an interesting question. The cost structures are obviously very different, and while the assumption is that the internet always makes things cheaper and better, I haven't dug into that to see how it really plays out in this context.
The fact that they're showing up at Spotify's offices then shows even more why they're not making money. They seemingly don't understand the business they're in... at all.
They sign shitty contracts that leave them with "virtually nothing" and then complain to someone who is not responsible for them having "virtually nothing".
Unsigned artists don't sign anything with labels but we do agree to Spotify's terms, and those terms take from us and hand it over to major labels.
If a user pays $10/mo and listens to nothing but indie streams, those indies are getting far less than $7.50 (more like pennies) due to the way they calculate their payouts. The major labels pocket the majority of that money.
Spotify have the ability to change this, but not the will to do so, because the major labels own a stake in them. Soundcloud recently launched a payment model that matches pretty much exactly what indies are asking Spotify to do, so we know it's possible but Spotify have been stonewalling indies about how it's too complicated for years.
If you are an indie artist (no record label deals) and agree to Spotify's terms, how are major labels involved at all? How are they getting the payouts meant for you?
Well the size of the pie is still the same in this plan. All it would do is shuffle the money around a little bit, so some artists earn less and others more. The top demand from the linked campaign is for Spotify to pay out >3x what they currently do to artists, which is a completely different (and much more significant) ask.
That's exactly my point. I'm not arguing for the 1c/stream the OP is, rather to follow Deezer's model. Major labels are pocketing money that indies earned (and if you look into it they're not actually paying all of it out to their artists either). With this change indies won't be well paid, but they'll be paid fairly.
Tell that to listeners. Many artists don't list themselves there for that reason, but you're penalized for it because Spotify playlists are increasingly the only way many people access music at all. The do or don't isn't always so black and white.
It's the same problem with the use of WhatsApp. If people want to talk to me there are other means to contact me. It's just that everyone is on WhatsApp. So what choice do I have? Be part of the problem or be excluded from social life.
"due to the way they calculate their payouts": yes, I'm sure that's the real issue, but the solution isn't a penny per stream. The solution is definitely to redistribute money according to what people listen to, but I doubt the big labels will accept these terms: they are the ones who negotiated, they are the ones stealing from indies.
Best case scenario: indies will get enough pennies so they stop complaining, big labels will continue as today, Spotify will allocate some of its own money to music creation...
and the problem will remain unfixed at the roots.
remember who forced Spotify and others before it, to negotiate a deal at all cost with the Majors or be declared illegal?
I totally agree, the penny per stream focuses entirely on the wrong thing, further entrenching the real issue by derailing the whole discussion. It also makes it less likely the real issue will be taken as seriously later on after we've just "cried wolf" over this one.
On the plus side, services like Soundcloud and Deezer are adopting the payment scheme that is the solution to this, which opens a potentially more promising avenue through which to pursue the issue ("if they can do it, why can't you?").
> They sign shitty contracts that leave them with "virtually nothing" and then complain to someone who is not responsible for them having "virtually nothing".
I guess that's what you have to do when you're powerless. Record labels force you into shitty contracts. They have the power. Who has power over the record labels? Spotify.
Distribution tends to be the hardest part of any supply chain and it doesn't seem like music is any different. Spotify owns distribution and has almost no competitors anymore (either online or offline) and the future is very clearly streaming. So the labels will end up depending on Spotify for revenue. In 2018, streaming revenue accounted for half of all label revenue[0], and that will only increase.
>Spotify owns distribution and has almost no competitors anymore
According to the statistics I have, Spotify has 34% market share while Apple Music has 21%, Amazon Music has 15% and others have 30%. That's hardly "no competitors".
Spotify doesn't own any distribution. The labels do, and they could just not renew their contract and move to a competitor's service at a whim, destroying the company (who wants a service where 1/3 of the artists are not available?).
They have the biggest share currently, but they're never safe.
> They seemingly don't understand the business they're in... at all.
Do you know any musicians? Like, real musicians, for whom music is their life and their life's work, not dabblers?
Typically these are not shrewd business types. They don't hold a lot of negotiating power; if they're lucky enough to get a chance with a label deal they often don't push back on the terms very much at all. Labels are notoriously predatory in this regard, particularly mainstream large companies.
All they want is a fair shake. They see themselves and their fellow artists being screwed continually, while people that have nothing to do with their hard work, long nights, and passionate effort make money off their backs. For every artist that learns, there are ten more willing to take their place just for a tiny sliver of a chance at popularity.
The solution here is to do whatever we want to continue the slow work towards destroying mainstream labels. Indie labels still offer a reasonable value proposition in terms of the promotion and recording work they do in exchange for a share of the proceeds; mainstream labels don't. Like most media industries, they're headed by parenthetical elites, cosmopolitan types who have no loyalty to anything but profit, and will squeeze out every drop no matter the impact to the actual working artists.
Fuck 'em. Don't listen to mainstream music. Support indie artists and labels; buy direct wherever possible. If anything, the protest should be to make it trivial to directly host your music with Spotify for a nominal hosting fee, so that all revenue can go direct to the artist, rather than having to go through a 3rd party service.
I think this is the main thing most music fans (and young musicians) are forgetting: historically, musicians have never made money off of album sales, labels have. Musicians make the bulk of their money from touring and merchandise.
Historically this model made a lot of business sense... it was hard to distribute before the internet. The record company took the product and marketed and sold it to a broader audience than the artist or band would ever be able to reach on their own. The artist in turn collected the money on the live performances which, if there product was successful, would yield good returns.
I don't know if it makes nearly as much sense in a world where you can just upload your music to YouTube and do direct marketing via Twitter/FB/TikTok.
Music rights are split into two traditionally, the songwriting copyright and the mechanical reproduction right. Previous to the internet, media sales mostly went to the labels who held hte mechanical rights and songwriting copyright was earned directly to the artist. So if you bought a CD the label gets paid, if you play a song on the radio an artist gets paid.
The music industry lawyers were incredibly smart when they passed the DMCA back before online music was much at all, and got internet streaming defined as mechanical reproduction so they got dealt in on streaming.
ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, et al, which give large blanket licenses to cover most copyrights for songs charged well known quantity for licenses, and early music streaming services paid those. Harry Fox (at least at the time) was the clearing house for mechanical rights and there was actually no set rate or anything. DMCA created a compulsory license that Harry FOx would have to give, but the rates were not known at the time, so everyone was getting VC funding without knowing what anything would cost.
That rate is probably much higher than the songwriting royalties, so the music industry has succeeding in getting ahold of most of the money in a new format that was poised to benefit the artists directly.
I guess we should just be glad it didn't happen like video streaming and there are actually rights clearing houses so companies like Spotify and others can make compelling streaming services with very large catalogs, unlike the city-state video steaming where you need 3-4 services combined to get access to most of the mainstream stuff.
>" Previous to the internet, media sales mostly went to the labels who held hte mechanical rights and songwriting copyright was earned directly to the artist."So if you bought a CD the label gets paid, if you play a song on the radio an artist gets paid.
This is not correct. Mechanical royalties have always belonged to the songwriter. A record label pays mechanicals to a songwriter's publishing company who then passes it on to the songwriter. When a record label sells a record that contains a song an artist owns the copyright to the record label must pay that songwriter a mechanical royalty. When that songs is played on the radio at least in the US the songwriter gets a performance royalty. The songwriter gets paid a royalty in both cases. The label as a mechanical license holder is obligated to pay out a mechanical royalty.
Perhaps the GP meant to identify the two rights as the right to reproduce the composition (mechanical) and the master right. The royalty on streaming services for the former is even smaller than the latter.
Can you, or someone, share a source for the first paragraph? It completely changes my perception of music royalties and I'd like to be sure before I repeat it :)
You want to read up on music publishing as well as royalties[1][2]. It's important to understand both and it's hard to discuss one without the other. But basically if you understand the these two subject you will understand to a very large degree how the music business works. In the record label model of the music business a label advances you money to pay for your recording and advances you money to pay for your music's promotion(videos, tour support etc.) Before an artists sees a single cent of money from album sales they need to pay the label back all of the money the label advanced them. These advances are paid back via mechanical royalties. It is not until a label recoups every cent from the artist that the artist begins collecting royalties. This is how a lot of artists can sell a bunch of records and yet end up in debt to the record label. S
The three or four major media companies/rights holders correspond to roughly 75% of streams on Spotify, and probably the entire catalogue of music pre 2010. This gives them the bargaining power to influence playlists, recommendations, and so on. This is what they mean by payola. They can use this to launch new artists.
There is no such thing as a "royalty holder." Record labels are copyright holders. The record labels pay out royalties. Royalties are paid to performers, songwriters and publishing companies. For streaming the record label pays two types of royalties - a mechanical royalty and a performance royalty.
Is "charging so little you can't cover your rightful costs" bad at business? Then yes, I believe that Spotify is bad at business.
Hypothetically, my profit margin making widgets would be better if I could just pay my raw material provider half-price. I could pay them half-price, add, say, another one-third of that to cover other costs and overhead, and probably dominate the market since I could charge less for my widgets than any competitors who have to pay the full raw material costs.
Again, bad at business? Depends on who you're asking.
It makes me sad to time and time again learn that the low prices of services I love are unsustainable and instead subsidized by treating someone unfairly downstream.
I wish I could be told what the ethical price for something is and I might actually pay it.
And if that price is too high, then maybe that service shouldn't exist in the first place.
I think the 90's (Napster, Kazaa, etc.) has proven people are simply not going to pay that kind of money for the product (music).
The music industry also seems a bit like a "winner takes all" market where there are a bunch of top grossing artists which make an insane amount of money and a much, much larger part which can't make a decent living out of it.
Almost every major internet content industry is winner takes all. That is just the nature of power law distributions. Ask your average social media influencer how much they make. Also your average YouTuber/Twitch streamer. It is not unique to the music industry, just that the music industry is older and has more inefficiencies in the form of middle man that don't contribute much in value production but still takes a large cut.
The ethical way to pay for music is to actually buy it from a site like Bandcamp, instead of perpetually renting it from Spotify.[0] Expect to pay about $10 for an album.
Bandcamp usually takes a ~20% cut, but now has regular events where they waive their cut.[1]
It should be clear that $10/mo is not a sustainable price to pay to listen to any and all music ever recorded.
I don't think this will work. I can spend 8 euro for spotify subscription, but if i had to pay for albums, I'll buy maybe two a month, then resort to piracy. I don't think this is very unethical, bc even if there is no piracy, I still won't buy more than two albums. I'll listen to free music on soundcloud and YouTube, fm radio, whatever, but I won't pay more.
Wait - how are you responsible for the fact that the artists sign away their rights to shitty big labels that take the majority of the money that work generates? How are you responsible for dumb decisions musicians make?
I'm not sure you get how the music industry works. Getting a record contract isn't quite like getting a CS degree, passing a coding interview, and being handed 125k and benefits by HR. But sure, all these musicians are just dumb idiots. Have some respect for artists (unless you hate music, I guess).
There was time before streaming that artists absolutely needed record labels and that was the set of circumstances under which they signed deals with record labels. Before Youtube and streaming services record labels provided distribution of your product to local markets as well as promotion of that product in local markets both in stores and on radio. The overwhelming majority of the big 3 records label's catalogs are from that era. How exactly does that constitute "dumb decisions musicians make?" Your logic is absurd and seems to predicated on somehow being able to predict the future.
I bet you also think grocery workers are dumb for agreeing to work while demanding better working conditions and fair pay.
They are not dumb decisions. An indie artist HAS to sign with labels if they want to make it in the industry. That's the way it's been and we've accepted for decades that that's the way it will be.
Mistreating workers is not okay. Workers joining the status quo to make a living is not dumb. Calling them "dumb" online is deplorable, however.
It's something that's changing drastically every day. An indie artist is more and more able to record and upload their own song to spotify today than any time before.
Just being able to upload to Spotify does not make a sustainable career. You need marketing, and you need to build up a wide and loyal following of people who will buy your stuff.
Artists have literally shown up in the comments here explaining that it's not that simple, and that these rates are issues for people who sign to small/indie labels and even artists who own their own labels.
Also, "if you're abused it's your own fault for being dumb" is usually a take you want to be pretty careful with.
Why don't you become a musician and try to make it before laying it out like this? They hardly have another choice. Do you immediately assume 95% of artists are entrepreneurial fools?
There are lots of musicians who aren't producing a living-wage's worth of value to listeners.
They do have a choice: they can get a better paying job if they don't like the amount they can earn from music. Society should not be responsible for funding someone's passion when there isn't demand.
And yes, the expectation that you can earn a good living just by being a recording artist is foolish. The vast majority of musicians throughout history have been unable to do so.
I think it is sustainable if we can cut out the middle man, the royalties go mainly to labels and less so to artists. E.g. if an artist doesnt use a label on Spotify im sure his revenue will be higher and the current price would be sustainable. I think the royalties that go to labels are unsustainable
AFAIK while you need a distributor and can't just upload your stuff like you can on Youtube, there's a bunch of them that seem to give the artists everything.
If the artist choose to go with a label that takes their royalties, that's on them. If they do it because they want the visibility and services, that has a cost.
Music is a field where a lot of people do it just for fun, and it's quite saturated. Supply (as in diversity of products) way outweigh demand.
> It makes me sad to time and time again learn that the low prices of services I love are unsustainable and instead subsidized by treating someone unfairly downstream.
In general, price competitiveness on the market is based on some form of workforce exploitation.
I know it's not a zero sum game and so on, but someone is paying the difference on the discounted price you are offered.
There is plenty of money and it is sustainable, it's the curse of the middle man taking all of the money. If an artist uploads their own songs to spotify, there's plenty of money for the artist.
The pricing section seems incredibly naive. Why should streams be valued at a penny? Why not a tenth of a penny? I don't care how many streams it takes to buy a cup of coffee. What is the argument that 786 streams per cup of coffee is unfair? (I don't think it is)
Being a full time professional musician has only been a means to wealth for a handful of people through history. Most professional musicians, even successful ones, are unable to earn their lifetime expenses from their profession: they make some good money if they have a hit and then fade away and have to get another job. Or they have capitalize on their brand externally to the music market. Has there been any time period in the past several centuries when the average musician earned a living wage?
The goal of a million full-time professional musicians seems arbitrary and I'm not sure why it is necessarily desirable.
Music is a passion, so people are willing to spend time making music below market labor rates. With modern digital reproduction and ease of recording, demand will never exceed supply. I believe the cost of music can and should asymptotically approach zero over time as an ever-growing public domain becomes good enough for most uses.
Spotify doesn’t want to take the risk, but there’s probably money on the table from all the small gyms, coffee shops, etc that should be paying commercial rates.
I don't know about other countries but in the Netherlands companies already pay an additional fee which ends-up with the royalty holders [1]. Meaning you have to pay a special license fee when playing music in venue's such as stores, cafe's and even a common office work space.
In Greece there was the notorious AEPI [1] that was collecting fees from both stores, as well as subscriptions from artists so they can "represent" them. They were demanding fees even when a store owner was listening privately in their shop (e.g. they had a radio behind the counter). They were dismantled after a corruption scandal: most of the collected money ended up as exorbitant salaries for the board of directors, with the artists again receiving pennies.
I think that technically one is supposed to do that in commercial spaces in the US as well, but there’s an enforcement issue. Small businesses aren’t really at the mercy of roaming enforcement agents, but there are services businesses can subscribe to that cover the costs of royalties for playing in commercial spaces.
I seem to understand that they want "a penny per stream" to go to the actual artists, which sometimes are not the royalty holders. So paying out less to the royalty holders and more to the artists sound like it could work.
So the artists have a contract with the record labels to share revenue. How is it possible for Spotify to decide to split that revenue differently? Or is the demand to increase payout to the point that artists make $0.01 per stream?
I assume Spotify has agreements with the record labels about how much the royalty owner gets for each stream. Spotify could argue to change that so it's now 50/50 between the royalty holder and the artist.
Depending on how much leverage Spotify actually has here, they can of course try to change the existing agreements they have. Nothing in impossible and harder things have changed before.
>"And Spotify is already paying out 75% of it's revenue to royalty holders'
"Royalty holders" is not even an actual term. Copyright holders are the owners of master recording - often a record company. Streaming services license entire catalogs for a fixed price for a fixed period of time. Streaming service don't pay record labels royalties. Royalties of which there are two in the context of streaming are a) performance royalty and b) a mechanical royalty both of which are paid out to the publisher and songwriter.
>"So unless you believe that Spotify is bad at business and there's an extra ~75% of revenue Spotify could pull out of a hat, this is basically impossible to satisfy without cratering the total revenue by doubling prices, which is probably not in artist's interests."
The whole argument that the current predominant streaming model is the only viable business model is flawed. This seems to presume that the "pro-rata" distribution model that Spotify uses is the only distribution model. There is an alternative model that many artists are pushing for which is a the "user centric' distribution model. In that model the calculation of payments is based on the listening habits of each individual user. A simplified examples is that I only listen to one artist in a given month. In the user centric model the entire 10% of record labels 70% usually allocated to the artist cut is paid to that artist rather than those streams being calculated as percentage of all songs streamed from that one of the big 3's record label's massive catalogs.
> There is an alternative model that many artists are pushing for which is a the "user centric' distribution model. In that model the calculation of payments is based on the listening habits of each individual user. A simplified examples is that I only listen to one artist in a given month. In the user centric model the entire 10% of record labels 70% usually allocated to the artist cut is paid to that artist rather than those streams being calculated as percentage of all songs streamed from that one of the big 3's record label's massive catalogs.
Then they should push for that specifically, but it would not change the average rate paid per stream, but rebalance payments away from artists which are listened to by heavy music users towards artists which are listened to light music users.
They push for whatever they feel is right. I was simply pointing out that Spotify's distribution model is not the only one. It also has nothing to do with "heavy users" vs "light users." A heavy user can listen to the same artist or same small handful of albums.
> It also has nothing to do with "heavy users" vs "light users." A heavy user can listen to the same artist or same small handful of albums.
Currently, a heavy user (i.e. above average) controls the distribution of more money to artists than a below average user since they control the amount of money in proportion to how they stream.
A user-centric model that splits the revenue from a user means that those who listen to more music will generate less revenue to each artist per stream, and those that listen to less music will generate more revenue per stream.
An above average user that listens only to the same artist provides more money to artists now than in a user-centric revenue model.
Their business isn't to support Spotify, their business is to make money making music. If they can't do that with Spotify, then it would be better for them for Spotify to not exist.
None. Spotify doesn't use any of the platform mechanisms for monetization that take fractions of revenue. This is why you have to sign up on the web for Spotify.
I think the real issue here is that people just don't want to pay as much for music like they did during the golden age of the CD.
Most Spotify users are still on the free tier.
Blaming streaming companies isn't gonna change that.
Last I checked that wasn't exactly the problem, at least not by itself -- even accounting for inflation we're spending several times more per capita per month on music than we used to "during the golden age of the CD." Moreover, a much higher percentage of that revenue is actually going to artists than in years past.
Faced with that reality, it would be interesting to know what is actually going on. Is total dollars spent on music not reflective of what artists used to make? Are there just that many more musicians than there used to be? Was it way harder to make a living making music in years past than we're giving it credit for? Are artifacts of pay-per-listen rather than pay-per-song causing a different payout distribution impacting the majority of musicians (e.g., you used to have to buy a CD to listen to a song just once)?
I think focusing on cents per stream is a bit complicated. In the end, are artists making more or less money than before?
Because before people would record songs from the radio on tape and listen to those. They would buy used CDs, pirate. Radio would stream the song, but you didn't know exactly how many people were listening.
I used to spend $0 on music. Now I have spotify duo for me and my wife. I also started buying vinyl records, but my bet is that the artists makes way less money from my vinyl collection than from my Spotify account
Why aren't these people targeting others like Apple?
Or they want Spotify to operate as a Non-Profit because Apple is currently making Apple Music a Net Zero Profit business? ( Diluting there services revenue margin )
Do you have any idea how much bloat Spotify has that it can cut? Have you ever seen the NYC office? It's padded with hundreds of overpaid "creatives" poached from every NY agency who do nothing more than create unnecessary traditional marketing campaigns, all of which serve no one, while spending 80% of the day snacking on premium goods and watching insider music acts in their gigantic, swanky, luxury office space.
Source: Been there, seen it, a long time. Spotify needs to be nothing more than a functioning music utility. Instead their US offices are structured like a massive, bloated, 90's style agency party zone.
The hard truth in music (and in many creative industries) is that there's a huge oversupply (many musicians are willing to make music for free or very cheap) and demand has a low willingness to pay. The result is that there isn't much money to be made for musicians. In my mind, there's really no way around this fact. You can argue (as these folks are) that Spotify could take a smaller cut and give more to musicians. While this is technically true, Spotify is never going to do this. It's a strictly distributive transaction: musicians make more money, Spotify makes less.
Their other options are not so good either. Musicians can build a Spotify clone that's more favorable to artists. Nominally, this sounds like Tidal. The problem with Tidal is that nobody wants to spend that much money on a subscription. Even with the high profile artist exclusives it has less than 5% market share. Beyond the business model, building a Spotify clone is difficult to execute, especially for musicians and not software folks.
You can somehow lobby to outlaw streaming and go back to selling songs and albums individually. This would definitely hurt Spotify but probably doesn't help musicians too much. Potentially the top 1% of musicians are better off as they're able to capture more value but the long tail is way worse as nobody discovers their music anymore.
An interesting solution might be collective action. If enough musicians banded together and pulled their catalogs from Spotify, I could see that having a big negative impact on Spotify's revenue. There are a few bands that if their catalogs were off Spotify, I'd probably cancel. This would be effective but is probably too difficult to coordinate.
Overall, the problem for musicians is one of economics. Too many people willing to make music, not enough willing to pay. In other words, you can't push a rope. If you are a musician, my strong advice to you is to get comfortable with doing it for a reason other than money. Otherwise, you're in for inevitable disappointment.
Yeah I think it's easy for up and coming musicians to blame Spotify for their financial woes, but as someone who was an aspiring musician in the 90s I can tell you it was no picnic back then. Everyone I knew was broke, so the only way to make a record was to get signed, and that involved playing shows in front of A&R people which meant finding venues etc - all on your own dime. If you did manage to get signed and get an advance, you probably used it to buy better instruments and maybe pay rent for a month or two but it didn't last long. Then if you were lucky and the label decided to distribute your stuff, you'd make about a dollar between you for every full length album you sold. Music has never been about making money. You might as well play the lottery if that's your goal.
And as a consumer of music, I am very happy to be paying $14.99 a month for access to a collection that would have been virtually impossible for an individual to assemble 20 years ago. Music has been opened up to people in a way that did not exist before Spotify. Also, a good deal of the music I listen to is stuff I had already bought on CD or vinyl years before, so those artists are getting paid twice for me listening now.
Bottom line is it's always been hard to break through into making money from music. Nothing has changed except the way it's distributed.
I realize this is tangential, but I'm currently making a video game. Is the video game industry similar? I worry that I won't get much return on my investment...
Yes it is similar, but the smaller indie studio model is much more viable than it was a decade or two ago, particularly for unique games that find deep popularity with a small niche. (See Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Coffee Stain Studios)
I think independent video game dev is good for people who want to write the game anyways, and want to monetize to allow them to keep working on it. But, it is very unlikely to make you significant wealth.
>Overall, the problem for musicians is one of economics. Too many people willing to make music, not enough willing to pay.
Exactly. And we have finite amount of time and attention. Just like the head of Premiere League in UK said E-Sport ( Gaming ) and other entertainment like Netflix are their competitors. And we have less time for music. It is not only an abundance of music, but also in other entertainment.
K-POP essentially made their music and MV for free on YouTube. While making money on tours, merchandise, and show appearance.
I sympathies for them. But their problem has nothing to do with Spotify at all.
Microsoft inadvertently played a similar game in the 80s and 90s, by having multiple price tiers for similar products in different markets. You could buy Office at a computer store for $200, or get it bundled with a new computer for $20, or for "free" by copying the disks from someone. (Don't remember the exact prices). Then there were "upgrade" tiers and an academic discount. The free tier made it impossible for anybody to compete with them, thus protecting their market in the paid tier. They even tried competing with themselves, via "Microsoft Works," and gave up.
Creative works are a very strange market, because they don't fit any semblance of a demand curve. For instance, there's no such thing as a song that's slightly cheaper than a Taylor Swift hit, with slightly higher sales. You can't compete with Taylor Swift on a price/demand curve. Also, you can't compete with free.
There's still a bit of a demand curve for live music. For instance you can pay less to hear my band than to hear Taylor Swift. This may actually be why playing live is still a better economic deal for most rank-and-file musicians. It's one reason why I'm presently un-recorded. I have no need to know how much my music is loved by people who think I don't deserve to get paid.
> For instance, there's no such thing as a song that's slightly cheaper than a Taylor Swift hit, with slightly higher sales. You can't compete with Taylor Swift on a price/demand curve. Also, you can't compete with free.
Exactly this. You could remove 98% of music from Spotify and people would still gladly keep paying the $10/mo because they are there for Drake and Taylor Swift.
Right - and how did Drake and Taylor Swift rise to that level? Same way Madonna and Michael Jackson did. Getting radio play and touring, which took a record label. Getting people to actually give a shit about your music is a problem Spotify isn't going to solve for unknown artists.
I don't think it's as simple as supply and demand as you suggest. The behavior of record companies and distributors is completely atrocious in the music industry. It's monopolist behavior, and it completely distorts the actual market. If artists got the majority of royalties from each play of their song, things would be substantially different.
That's not the issue here. The issue is that "number of listens" is not correlated with "payouts from Spotify", even if we ignore the record labels taking their cut.
The ask is 1p/stream. I'm not sure that that's actually sustainable without a massive rise in spotify prices, given the proportion of free users and even paid users that listen to more than 1000 tracks a month. If spotify raises prices, consumers go back to piracy. I'm not sure this will have the effect they want.
Let's imagine a radio station. Something medium sized, about a million listeners. They play a track. Are they paying 10,000 per play, which would be the equivalent rate? I suspect not.
If this is not sustainable for the artists, how is this different than piracy? I'd say it is even worse, because people is paying but the money goes to a middleware company that is not paying the right price. It is like buying CDs from the street sellers.
There seems to be some idea of what musicians "should" make that other professions don't benefit from. I would like to make the same money from making furniture as I do from writing code, but I can't. I could blame the furniture stores for not promoting me or taking too big a cut or any number of other factors, or I could accept the fact that I'm not an amazing woodworker. But I still make my art/craft because I enjoy it and it's important to me.
There are plenty of ways for musicians to make a living, but I don't see a problem with the fact that spending a month or two a year recording an album is a privilege available to only the most talented subset of them.
You touch a point that has been discussed ad-nauseam before (I saw it in /. a long time ago): Why should artists be perpetually paid for the 40 hours of work they made?
Any normal people, has a pay rate (minimum $0.77 USD/hr where I live). Someone goes to work, works for 8 hours, and gets their 8hr equivalent salary.
But then you have "artists" who work to produce their product for say 80 hours, and then they want to be perpetually paid... not only that, they want to be paid enough to live a lifestyle similar to the person that get's paid for 40 hours a week job, for 30 years.
Comments such as yours are why I will not let my music be on Spotify as an artist. It's no different than piracy, the user is just paying Spotify for convenience of not having to search stuff on Soulseek themselves...
The fact that slapping some ads on my music on youtube made me earn more than being on Spotify says everything about how bad that deal is for any artist...
> I could blame the furniture stores for not promoting me or taking too big a cut or any number of other factors
not only could you but you should. Of course workers over the last few decades have internalised the mindset that they cannot use their power to bargain and that whatever they get is fair and they should just shut up, which is why we tolerate corporate middlemen eating our lunch.
I don't know if a penny per song is realistic or whatever, but going up against Spotify and record labels and trying to negotiate as much compensation for artists as possible collectively is exactly what they ought to do. Also, on the other end, as consumers we need to stop whining when we have to pay twenty bucks instead of ten bucks per month to compensate artists who we spend listening hours to every single week.
My scenario is not one of power imbalance, it is that I simply cannot create enough economic value doing it to make a living, and I have no right to change anyone else's rules to accommodate for that fact. I cannot make you a bookshelf cheaper than you can buy one at IKEA. At my software developer rate a Billy Bookcase would cost you $1000. It's probably safe to say you aren't going to "stop whining" and pay that.
But you know what I did last week? I didn't mope around at some job I hate complaining about "Big Furniture". I made a bookcase. I also wrote a bunch of software. I can call myself a woodworker, I paid my mortgage, and IKEA sold thousands of Billy Bookcases. All is good.
Your example is a little specious in that a bookcase is very different from a song. The production of one has huge economies of scale, whereas a song doesn't. I agree that producing things competitively is important to improve overall efficiency, but with the music industry you really have a small cartel of massive labels dictating the terms for everyone else (ie. engaging in massively anti-competitive behavior). It seems weird to me that your pro-market ideology leads you to support what (to me) seems to be more or less wage-fixing for a labor supplier (musicians)
> small cartel of massive labels dictating the terms for everyone else
Only for those who sign with them. So this brings the question
as what's stopping these musicians to make music independently and market using internet along the way avoiding these labels. It is not even the case that music can be listened only via monopolistic mobile app stores.
I have used small independent service providers for tax filing, lawn mowing, cleaning and myriad other services by finding at internet. They are not backed by big corporate chains. Why music has to come from big labels.
I think generally the point of cartelization is to make it very challenging NOT to sign with them. Clearly many independent labels can thrive, and I can't imagine that it's impossible for an artist to start their own label. Nevertheless, when eg. sound and recording engineers can be aggressively poached by a major studio it's got to be challenging to go it alone.
Price fixing? You can buy music directly from artists for any price you want. I do it all the time on Bandcamp and independent stores, for both digital and vinyl releases.
Piracy set the price at 0, Spotify pulled the price up from there, but there is literally nothing stopping consumers today from paying more for music except that they don't want to.
>Price fixing? You can buy music directly from artists for any price you want.
I think you're missing my point. The opportunity to market direct to consumer does not negate the massive wage-setting power of a cartel which can buy up rivals, production talent, leverage radio, venue, and streaming contracts, etc.
Like I don't know how you can read something like this and just say "well have you tried selling on Bandcamp?"
'''
Live Nation’s consolidation of the industry was rapid and aggressive, spending around $1 billion in just 18 months in the late 1990s buying independent concert promoters and venue owners. By 1999, when radio titan Clear Channel paid $4.4 billion for the company (then called SFX), it was the largest music venue owner and concert promoter. Antitrust enforcers took no action to stop the deal.
By 2005, Clear Channel had spun off its live music division into a new, standalone company: Live Nation, the country’s largest artists manager and concert promoter and second-largest venue owner. Today, Live Nation is once again part of a massive broadcasting and live music conglomerate that wields immense power.
Live Nation has since combined with the ticketing monopoly Ticketmaster, satellite radio monopolist SiriusXM, and online radio leader Pandora as part of media mega-conglomerate Liberty Media. Last year, Liberty Media was approved to take control of iHeartMedia, the largest radio station owner in the country; prior to 2014 iHeart was known as Clear Channel. The proverbial band was back together, antitrust concerns and all. Competition and consumer advocates stridently opposed every corporate tie-up along the way; my organization was part of a coalition that argued against the Liberty/iHeart deal last year. Antitrust enforcers permitted every one.
'''
Further down:
'''
The company’s power to steer business away from rivals is not theoretical. In late 2019 the Justice Department found that, for years, Live Nation had abused its monopoly by steering its artists and tours away from venues that refused to use Ticketmaster. The government could have sued for monopoly violations but instead simply amended the agreement it struck with the companies when they merged a decade ago.
> The production of one has huge economies of scale, whereas a song doesn't.
Actually, now that we're digital, the economies of scale of music are similar to software, in that they are massive (and Spotify is a key enabler of that).
> It seems weird to me that your pro-market ideology leads you to support what (to me) seems to be more or less wage-fixing for a labor supplier (musicians)
Musicians have been largely entrepreneurial for centuries. The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few. There is now far more opportunity for success and distribution without labels than there has been since they started.
>Actually, now that we're digital, the economies of scale of music are similar to software, in that they are massive
Is this the case? It seems that there's the fundamental limitation of 10 musicians not being able to record a song in 1/10th of the time. Certainly there are SOME economies of scale, but it seems a little incredible that music would be as "factory producible" as something like a bookshelf or a car.
> The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few.
This seems incongruous with the rest of what you are saying. Yes clearly there is an entrepreneurial component of music, and absolutely eg. SoundCloud and BandCamp is enabling independent artists in new and important ways. That doesn't change the fact that massive financial institutions are rent-seeking the bejeezus out of the bulk of the industry in a way that (to me) would appear to hurt competition.
Spotify is not the corporate middle man. The big record companies are. Any musician is free to not put their music on spotify and to not sell the rights to a record company. They can then let you stream a song for $50 on their website.
It's also absolutely ridiculous that you champion those who want to make more money while also saying that everyone on the other end who wants to spend less should "stop whining".
I champion people who produce things, be that artists, software developers, woodworkers or anyone else who builds stuff. Spotify and labels are both distributors and middlemen who profit from the work of others, it's consumers and large platforms that squeeze creators with their greedy mindset of 'as much as possible, for as little money as possible'.
It's long overdue that we move away from this sleazy consumer mindset and start valuing creators.
Except almost everyone can produce things. You have to produce things people want. Not only that, you need to find the people who want your stuff, especially if its niche.
Yes, I'm a highly paid software engineer. The people who created the company I work for are, however, far better paid.
There's nothing stopping me from quitting and building my own business and selling the software I produce. I have the funds to seed my own startup, so that's not even an issue. That's a shitload of work though, even if I hire people to handle the individual parts. Very quickly I'll be spending more time running a business, finding customers, marketing, dealing with legal crap, etc, than I will producing software. I can also produce software, stick it on github and hope for the best, but there's countless people who do that for shits and giggles (and for free).
Distribution, logistic, and those "middlemen" actually do a lot of work to link the product with the customers. Sure, there's parasites in the middle, organizations that just take licenses and shifts them around without doing anything. You can absolutely make a case to cut those off. But the orgs/software that link products directly to customers who want said products generate tremendous value, and it's often a lot harder to do than produce the good in the first place.
And I value the creators of Spotify who create good software and a great infrastructure for the service they're offering. I think we should move away from this sleazy consumer mindset that the creators of Spotify should not be rewarded for the service they're offering.
are you under the impression that engineers at spotify are currently going hungry and working minimum wages? As developers we are already ridiculously overpaid compared to artists. We are the ones who benefit from the shit salaries that musicians make, which is of course why people on this website don't want to hear anything about creators bargaining. It's the people here who benefit from the status quo.
>The ones who really benefit are the shareholders. Coincidentally, the same people who didn't do any of the work.
This is how capitalism works though. There's no way Spotify can be expected to fundamentally change the economic system they exist in. Reversing that is heading into the realm of revolution.
I mean....radio was never a money maker for acts. It was to get their name out their to make money elsewhere.
Just kinda how the market is setup. I don't think it is unsustainable for artists.
I fucking hate "exposure", but that is literally what radio/streaming is is.
It is never a substantial revenue stream until you hit big.
And with today's tech, radio had to become streaming.
Paying a penny per stream is highly unsustainable for everyone.
What would you suggest to fix it?
I think the system is pretty decent all things considered. Now, Spotify could definitely be better at hyping and pushing new music/low creators....but other than that I don't think they're the enemy here.
Streaming isn't comparable to radio. If a penny per stream is unsustainable, perhaps we better go back to just radio. Hyping new music isn't going to do shit about revenue.
Right, but the money has always gone to a middleman, be it record companies or Spotify. If Spotify gets any more expensive I can guarantee people will go back to privacy, music will become less accessible and those niche bands that Spotify knows I may like will never get found.
I understand the need to get paid more, but I am not sure killing Spotify is the solution.
> I understand the need to get paid more, but I am not sure killing Spotify is the solution.
If Spotify doesn't compromise, killing it would be the only solution, but this union doesn't have the power to do that initially. But this will never work because you have a infinite stream of new musicians wanting to be listen without receiving money for that.
New musicians want their work out there....without Spotify(or similar) it will be back to just blasting out your music for free online everywhere so you can get bug.
Spotify at least gives them some revenue while they increase their fandom.
For a moment in time, piracy of movies and series was at a low point. Recently, with the fragmentation of all the different streaming services it's rising again.
The real answer is that Spotify will melt under its own inadequacy and the new platform will thrive. You adapt or you die, and I would have no sympathy for Spotify if they couldn't adapt.
Presumably these new brands have to charge their customers more in order to pay the artists more, right? I’m about at the max of what I’m willing to pay for music per month...
Aren't Spotify deals typically coming from the record companies themselves, not the musicians? Unless artists reject the current record company model, Spotify isn't going to be able to fix this problem for them.
It's hard to argue that Spotify is a monopoly when Apple Music, whatever Google's service is called now and Tidal have pretty much the same selection. And you can buy DRM free music still on iTunes and Qobuz. And even physical media. Oligopoly at worst.
> If this is not sustainable for the artists, how is this different than piracy?
The difference is that every artist has a choice if his music lands on Spotify or not - and if he accepts the conditions offered. The main problem of many of these artists is that they signed bad distribution deals with their labels and are giving away a big chunk % of streaming revenues. That isn't Spotifys fault.
Also, according to Spotifys latest financial statement, they are expecting a $200-300m operating loss for 2021, so i find it hard to argue that Spotify is being "too greedy" when they aren't even profitable.
Clearly it is as artists are not starving and can pay for their rent, lifestyle etc.
They just simply ”want more”, and who wouldn’t, but free market and supply/demand disagrees with them. If artists don’t like Spotify’s offering they can pull their music out of the service.
Taking a look at their most recent financial statement we can do some quick calculations.
(All figures in million euros)
Revenue Cost of Revenue Profit
Premium : 7135 5126 2009
Free (ads): 745 739 6
Overall : 7880 5865 2015
Now currently the claim is that they are paying out $0.0038 per stream and we want to raise that to $0.01 which would be a 2.63 multiple.
For spotify free that would mean that they just have to include 2.63x more ads, this is doable but I'm sure it would hurt adoption and maybe people would move from the platform.
For spotify paid they could cut down their profit margin and pay 39% more per stream than they currently do (ignoring that they have more than 2B eur in other business expenses currently). But even after that they would still have to raise their prices by a multiple of 1.91.
This would mean they would have to charge about $19.10 a month to not loose money on licencing in the US market.
This is good analysis. Small quibble with the last part - we don't know how much the price charged to consumers needs to increase to be able to afford $0.01 a stream. Any increase in price will see a drop in subscribers, dropping revenue. An increase in price could reduce revenue, making it harder to afford the increased payout.
On the other hand, when you think about take-home pay for the artists, more people listening, even if paying less for individual streams, can mean more money.
Isn't one of the strengths of the internet the fact that it's easier to scale and reach a wider audience, thus having more money in the end?
Since the cost is linear to number of streams, it only matters if the premium subscribers that drop have a lower average streams/month rate than the average premium subscribers.
This assumes, like the post two levels above me, that Spotify don't need the profits for anything and just need to break even.
Also, consider the free account. Presumably, the artist still wants to get paid. So now Spotify somehow needs to be able to make back those 2,400 pennies per user from advertisement.
It's a fairly arbitrarily number sure, but I think it could be representative. During the working week I listen to music almost all the working day, when I as commuting that adds on another couple of hours.
Even if it's 2 hours a day it would still represent an increase in costs.
Another poster put it better: for $9.99 per month you would be able to pay for 999 streams, I am sure a typical user can easily exceed 999 streams in a month.
Well for instance, I'm on a family plan (6 people total for $15) and I stream a full workday+ daily. I know lots of people who do the same, where they have a lot of "background music" time and then a little active listening.
That ship sailed in the 90s with widespread music piracy. The market simply doesn't value digital copies of recorded music that much anymore.
Spotify was an increase in artist revenues as prior to that most people were paying nothing for their music, be it bittorrent in the 00s, cd copying in the 90s, or recording radio to tape in the 80s.
The problem is that people don't care about "all the music ever recorded". They mostly care about a very limited selection of music. And if Spotify starts costing like $45 a month, how many people still think it's worth it? You can buy like four albums off of iTunes for that and then listen to them as much as you want.
For all music ever recorded, maybe. But Spotify doesn't even have half of what I'm regularly listening to - a regular annoyance - let alone half of all music ever recorded.
There is also the issue of fraud. Click/Stream farms are already soaking up the artists pool of revenue, and this change would incentivize it more. Justin Bieber recently asked his fans to go to sleep with his new song on repeat, and I'm sure other artists/labels are looking at ways to game the system as well. In my opinion there needs to be a way to pay artists based on first time streams from new accounts.
I listen to far more than 1000 tracks a month, but quite a few of those are duplicates; though the music changes every month. With that listening pattern, it wouldn't make sense for me to pay for 1p/stream.
If the prices increased enough to offset a 1p/stream, I'd jump ship and buy used CDs again, since that would become more cost effective, even with buying a CD a month or so. There are cheaper substitutes to music listening, even if it would be less convenient to discover new music.
Imagine if Youtube creators started trying to get $0.01 per play. This is just a little crazy. Spotify and competitors successfully captured a LARGE number of people who were not paying anyone at all. There has already been a large increase in friction on streaming music the past few years, this will just be a nail in the coffin pushing everyone to go back to pirating.
Let's be honest, you aren't required to use a record label. Record labels just advertise, which definitely blow up some musicians.
In contrast, take the rapper Tom McDonald, his music actually hit the top 100 charts[1][2] and he's not signed to anyone. Just him and his girlfriend creating music. Was trending as the #1 download on iTunes for a couple weeks, etc.
Artists make a deal with the devil, make more money, then complain. Yet, with today's ability to distribute - it's not required.
I do think there should be an update to the spotify payout system, but Spotify doesn't have negotiating power; they need the record labels. With the record labels Spotify can get improved music, etc. Spotify is paying for the privilege that's why the smaller artists aren't making very much (the premium payments go to record labels).
In fairness, Tom MacDonald gets a lot of external publicity from conservatives; he's mostly a right-wing political rapper.
I've seen a big rise in conservative rappers on YouTube. I've got a conspiracy theory that the GOP is funding them like a record label. If so, it's a sweet deal for artists. The GOP cares far more about cultural effects than they do the money from the music.
I don’t doubt there is some of that, probably from all sides frankly.
However, the major point is that you don’t need the distribution.
Louis CK famously released a comedy special online with a download and just asked people to pay and not copy and share. He said he made more money off that than any other special he’d done.
That and copyright. If spotify didn't have to pay anyone to stream the music I listen to by dead artists there would be a lot more to go around with the people writing music today.
They only hint at this, but I think a user-centric distribution model would be much better: define a percentage split (let's say 30% for Spotify, 70% for artists), and split that percentage of revenue between the artists THAT THE USER LISTENED TO.
I think that they currently use a global split, which over-represents "users" like stores, gyms, etc.
Indeed, it would be much more interesting. Deezer might be on track to implement it in France (not sure when?) but a recent study (in french) gives a lot of information on its potential impact:
Allocate peoples monthly membership in accordance to their listens.
If one month I listen to 100 streams of Bob Dylan and thats it, then he should get my entire $7.00 instead of just a few cents for my small amount of streams.
This seems almost too simple & good to be true. The counter points in the linked article mention that its too "computationally expensive" to calculate the payments, and the additional management costs could outweigh the benefit to smaller artists... how could that possible be true?
It's simply not true. The whole business model of Spotify is that of any other internet business, selling a zero-marginal-cost good for a subscription fee. It would be more complicated to implement a per-user breakdown, and maybe slightly more expensive to run that analytics pipeline, but at scale there's no way the additional management costs would outweigh the benefit to smaller artists. The cost of that more advanced analytics job is going to be absorbed over the entire user base to the point where it effectively costs nothing in aggregate. The real counter point is probably that it was either easier to implement the current solution (from an engineering standpoint this is true, it's much easier to aggregate and scale their payment pipeline once per-geo-region) and there has been no push for change, or it favors larger artists and labels who have the bargaining power with Spotify.
Sorry, but there are plenty of developers on here (myself included) who can easily confirm that "too computationally expensive" is just BS so they don't have to change.
Proof: Soundcloud is doing exactly this, so it's absolutely possible.
This is all so they can keep major labels happy (several of whom own a stake in Spotify) because the labels don't want to lose the free money gravy train they're making on the backs of artists they don't even represent, and Spotify doesn't want to lose the majors.
It's one of the demands, the "user-centric" model. It's mostly because the major record labels (who have the top artists) might see a reduction of revenue. But even that was disproved in a recent french study:
This is never going to happen because the top artists and their labels would never agree to it, and they are the ones bringing in the users.
> The research found that in the current system the top 0.4% of artists get around 10% of all revenue, but they would only get about 5.6% of revenue under a user-centric system
Penny per stream? That's an awful lot in most countries.
If I stream a record twice I cover my spotify premium fee (US is more expensive than Argentina or India, because people can pay more).
Copyrights create artificial scarcity, if you don't like it, just don't put your music on the platform, you have an effective monopoly.
Most music is not that valuable, prices used to be high due to cartelization of the publishers and because the media was difficult to produce (records, CDs).
Cassettes started changing that, and the internet completely destroyed it. There's no going back. If prices go up, piracy will too, and you'll likely end up making less money.
The proposed Singapore protest is illegal in Singapore (protests are limited to Hong Lim park with permission from government). I hope people participating realize this and don't get arrested.
A lot of the money in the industry is made by private music royalty funds that buy the rights to music and earn proceeds on their usage. Its a good investment (especially during covid) not available to retail investors.
There is financial innovation that could happen to improve the outcomes for artists.
Many asset classes previously unavailable to the public (private reits, real estate syndications, art investing, wine investing) have been brought downmarket with crowdfunding.
There is green space for a music royalty fund that optimizes for artist benefit over profits and is available to the public.
A penny a stream is honestly way more than "a play" of music has cost. I'll admit I'm off the beaten path with how I do music but this is my setup:
1. I buy the CD release of music because I like to collect them, and the art is cool (I listen to folk metal and they usually do some cool stuff with album art and the front of the CD).
2. I rip them to FLACs and store them on my plex server
3. I stream them to my phone/etc.
So I'm really used to paying something like... {cost of cd} / {lifetime play count}. Which honestly is probably a lot higher than what a single stream of music earns the artists but a lot lower than 1c per play.
Just as an example, let's take Sonic Firestorm by Dragonforce. I probably started listening in 2007 or so. 14 years. I listened to the entire CD probably at least 3 times a week for the entirety of high school. So 4 years of high school times 52 weeks a year times 3 plays a week times 9 tracks per play is 5616. I'd guess I paid 12 bucks for the CD (it's 10 on amazon right now). So that's 0.00214 dollars per play. And that's just high school. Though admittedly that's one of my favorite albums, but I do think Alestorm and Ensiferum and several other bands are up in that play count too for my 4 years of college.
And I don't think many bands want to make the argument of "yeah but we're one of those bands you're gonna buy our CD for 12 bucks and listen to 3 times and then we end up in the back of your CD holder because every time you flip through you're like 'nah not really feeling them right now' for weeks on end".
So... I dunno. I'm all for paying artists more. But I would really prefer the way we do that is decrease the (massive) cut that goes to the labels and send more to the artists.
I've been buying my CDs on bandcamp as much as I can recently because as I understand it, bands capture a lot more of that sticker price that way. At least it seems like they do. I get CDs from residential addresses in Norway, anyway.
Hell they might already be paying a penny per stream to some major labels, and everybody else takes whatever's left over, we have no idea.
Maybe Drake's label demands a penny per stream for his new album or they pull it. And then somebody else who's on a tiny label gets 0.00000000001 cent per stream because that's all that's left.
They really need transparency, the labels will never be transparent so Spotify has to be. If nobody's transparent about these deals then there probably needs to be legislation.
That would be obvious anti-competitive behavior on the part of music labels if that's what's going on, and knowing them it probably is.
Does anyone know if this so-called union is an actual union? As in, do they collect dues, do they represent a substantial % of artists, and do its members already collectively bargain with Spotify and similar publishers? If Spotify says no, do these demands have any teeth?
Actually, I believe it would be a guild, as artists are not actually employees of any particular label or service, but just contractors. I also thing Guild is a far cooler name, but that's beside the point!
As for your actual question, no I don't think they are. They seem more like an advocacy or lobby group
It looks like yet another cosplay of 20th century labor politics, but with the typical 21st century twist of diverting the fight from those who wield power to... the paying customers, for whatever reason.
So I could pay 120 bucks a year and make 1752! I like the sound of that! And with the family plan, I could pay 1.5x the cost a month but get 5x the revenue!
There are some folks trying to build an alternative that is better for musicians. https://resonate.is/
Last time I checked it was still pretty niche but the idea (graduated pricing to stream to own) is solid.
I'm not sure I'd call it solid, but it's an interesting take. However, I believe there's a very good reason that the various markets have went to the subscription model- there's a difference mentally between paying to stream all you want for a month and paying for each song, even when its fractions of a penny. Whenever a song you don't like starts playing on your stream, you realize you just paid for it. That's a negative experience, and those stack up.
It doesn't matter if it can save you money in the long run. Remember, we're dealing with the masses here- the same lowest common denominator that caused A&W's 1/3lb hamburger to fail because people thought it was smaller than McDonald's 1/4lb hamburger.
Why artists on Spotify are not treated the same as Uber drivers? They are in fact employees providing content for the platform. From that perspective, Spotify should be paying at least a minimum wage for every artist signed on to the platform, plus any streaming money as a bonus.
There is also a problem that some artists (from major labels) get more money than small artists for the same number of streams. I think this should be looked into by a regulator. The same way as workers doing the same job should be paid the same salary, artists should be receiving the same money per stream.
> They are in fact employees providing content for the platform. From that perspective, Spotify should be paying at least a minimum wage for every artist signed on to the platform
the solution would be to remove all indie artists, and most of the rest too, and only keep the top 1% of pop/rock musicians.
What was it like being a median artist in the 90s, before and after Napster? The music industry has always been top heavy, then and now. But does anyone have data on artist earnings? It'd be interesting to know if the earnings of the median artist have increased or decreased in the last couple of decades.
I totally empathise with their demand for a cent per stream, but they could be asking for a share of revenue that doesn't exist. And if the median artist is making more now than they did before Napster, they could be asking for a cut of revenue that has never existed.
People acting on emotions rather than actually doing the math and seeing that one penny per stream will make Spotify prices skyrocket and if no one uses Spotify, well, they will be in a worse situation.
Copyright and licensing is complicated, in the sense that a track has many different copyright holders, and the record companies usually make sure to own distribution rights by contract. The composers and artists might be powerless, even though they own the actual rights (which can not be sold or transferred). This partly the reason why the major labels hold so much power.
I was just listening to a podcast and the CEO was talking about how he wants 1 million artists to be able to live off Spotify[1]. I always find it interesting how far the company implementation of the vision diverges from what the founder says the vision is. This was also something that I saw with Uber. A question i have is what leads to this disconnect?
They're not asking for "orders of magnitude" more, but 2-3X more. The current average royalty is 0.38c per stream, and they want 1c per stream.
That said, apparently most of Spotify's revenues already goes to pay artists, so it would not be achievable without significant increases in Spotify's fees. This would in turn reduce user numbers, leading to fewer streams, more users turning to piracy, etc.
It's also worth noting, we're not talking about the total amount payed per stream, we're talking about the amount that makes it specifically to the artists. From the article being discussed
> To pay the median American monthly rent ($1,078) an artist needs to generate 283,684 recurring streams monthly.
Those number directly align with 0.38c per stream going to the artists (283,684 * 0.0038 = 1078). And since everywhere else seems to indicate that somewhere around 3-5/100th of that amount actually goes to artists, I'm curious what the disconnect it.
This case reminds me the French Press Association vs. Google News case [1]. The details differ, but the outcome is the same: It's not in your interest as content producer to be excluded. If it wasn't already free for you, you would probably be enticed to pay in order to gain visibility by your customer base.
And frankly, I don't know what UMAW expects to get. Can really Spotify support the $0.01/stream without going out of business? Why are they making non-bilateral demands to Spotify (e.g. reveal business contracts)?
And who are UMAW anyway? From a quick check of their page, the only names I could find were the steering committee, and it took several tries to find members with >1 albums on Spotify. With that level of opaqueness, it's hard to see them convince the public to throw their support behind them. And what's with the sub-committee mania?
It's just crazy.
Musicians are getting the equivalent of an ad per stream.
As a musician/composer that does it for the love I put it many, many hours on each song. Its frickin' outrageous that people get as good as nothing and it seems as the more successful you are the better the deal you get #pyramid
Also, the CEO of spotify is just horrible.
The "work" that the artist did once is producing a lifetime of revenue by taxing everyone else's work. The artist isn't lifting a finger in the work that Spotify (or any other music platform) is doing. Why are they expecting to get more?
What?
An artist’s work isn’t just once. They ‘lifted’ their fingers to get their skills and then created something unique.
Just like coding well isn’t a nice thing but very few coders make anything of their own. They are the session musicians.
> Musicians are getting the equivalent of an ad per stream.
Except when I listen to an album, I'm often listening to 15 "ads" (tracks) in a row so I'm not really seeing the equivalence. Especially when there are albums I listen to in their entirety multiple times a month.
At least I use Tidal, which may have its faults but has historically paid out the most to artists.
Digital data has created a fascinating situation for artists because every new piece of art/music/video/etc. will henceforth always be competing with perfect replicas from the corpus of all human creation.
That means the added incremental value of a new unit of art/etc. will asymptote to zero.
This is one negative downside to the many upsides of digital technology.
Just wondering if there are any developers on this post working with or defending the use of decentralised, music sharing, copyleft, anti-royalty, software? And if so, do you see the irony?
I sincerely hope people take my question at face value, I am aware it's a big world.
Music publishers work for the songwriter. Songwriters hold the publishing. Record labels are the copyright holders. Streaming companies license from the latter.
Reminder that Spotify have forced paying customers to beta test a new UI with significant features outright removed without the ability to opt out. There's 130 pages (1300 comments) of negative feedback and they don't care. I had been paying monthly for a decade and have since stopped until they revert my client: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/New-Desktop...
As I understand, artists haven't made much from record sales or radio deals historically. Most of that money goes to publishers. Instead, artists used those mediums to boost their popularity and made most of their income from merchandise and live performances.
If I had to guess at what's going on here, I'd bet this is driven more by publishers than artists. Music publishers are becoming increasingly irrelevant as platforms like Spotify enable artists to distribute their work more directly at similar margins. Artists are probably just the poster child used to garner sympathy for the cause from the public.
I always liked the idea of nonlinear revenue, eg paying proportionally to the cube root of the number of streams. It would allow smaller artists to get a greater proportion of the proceeds.
Seems like the artists are barking at the wrong tree. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for artists getting their fair share for something they created.
Spotify has to deal with the record labels because they own the licensing rights, there isn't much Spotify can do about it themselves.
The only thing I could see Spotify doing is to become a label themselves, and giving a bigger slice of the piedirectly to artists under them. But that could also bring some consequences, like becoming Spotify-exclusives, etc.
What is the average number of streams per user on Spotify? According to Last.fm, I listened to 55k songs last year, vast majority of it through Spotify.
I would be interested to see what would happen if Spotify changed the free account to something really small (and maybe annual). For example $10 a year. I'd guess that's still small enough that most people will pay it.
There are a lot of comments saying Spotify can't raise prices - but Netflix has repeatedly raised prices successfully. I'm now paying them double what I originally did when I signed up.
And when you signed up, people likely just signed up to netflix and left it at that.
Looking at my local pricing, the lowest plan (€7.99) is $2 cheaper than the single plan that was available when I signed up (€9.99), and the equivalent plan to what was available then is (€12.99). So that's a 33% increase in 5 years, which is much less dramatic than the 100%-200% increase spotify would need for the suggested payouts.
There's a lot of account sharing or rotating streaming service or plain old fashioned piracy (the "dodgy box", formerly a pirate satellite receiver and now usually a kodi box with a frontend to some pirate stream provider, has been more common in Ireland the last few years than since digital TV was just coming in and competing with free to air broadcast TV).
> We are asking Spotify to raise the average streaming royalty from $.0038 to a penny per stream. Doing so would give artists a better chance at making a living from their art, and begin to restore the public valuation of music.
The public valuation of music is that it is a commodity, and yes while it would be nice to make a living from art it would then be a product.
As a musician one has to reconcile with the difference between the magic of emotional response and the utility of that.
The bigger that utility the more the people who make money from it will pay you.
In this day and age it’s the streaming and the Crowd.
It has always been like this but I think the gap is bigger now.
A genuine question: how much of Spotify royalty payments goes to the artist? I mean, many of them have agencies that get a cut of this money, or I'm wrong?
I'm asking this because it could improve the artists situations if they could get the royalty directly without a middleman? Probably someone already did a research in this direction.
Meanwhile, I have spent quite a bit directly to bands using band camp, buying music and vinyl there.
In the end, if Spotify is not a sustainable business model for you as a musical artist, maybe it is time to look for alternatives, especially those where they do not directly compete with mega-acts?
If it's a worldwide event maybe they should define what a "penny" is. I think it's USD$0.01 but honestly I could be off by an order of magnitude, I really don't know.
I’ll make a track 1 second long, post to Spotify, and with my Spotify account I’ll listen to it non stop. I’ll earn $26000/month. I see no problem here.
Spotify is the largest player, by far, and pays the least per customer.
The "average observed per-stream payout on Apple Music is $0.00551 vs. $0.00318 for Spotify."[0] That said, a lot of that is because Spotify has free users, while Apple does not.
You willingly handed over your work to Spotify, you signed the contracts, now you're unhappy with the deal.
Spotify is a recent creation and it was nothing without musicians yet they willingly went forward with it even though it was obvious what would happen and now the obvious has happened they want a better deal.
It's hard for me to muster up sympathy, they could have collectively stopped Spotify from happening but they willingly became part of it.
This point is illegal in Norway, because you can’t make noise without applying for it first:
“At the action:
DO make noise. We are musicians after all.”
Recommending people to do something illegal is also illegal, so it seems that the creators of this webpage is already breaking Norwegian law.
And Tordenskioldsgate 2 in Oslo/Norway is just a coworking space, so you only find employees from Spotify there a couple of times a year on events or meetings.
'You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern.... One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."'
so streaming music has eaten several different cakes - it has eaten the cake of radio in which I doubt the artist got 1p per play, it has eaten home taping in https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/21/arts/issue-and-debate-roy... in which there was some money paid out for the purchase of home taping equipment but which I think would not at all reach 1p per listen, it has eaten into the album which often cost enough that people bought them intermittently as a few albums could represent a significant part of disposable income, and it has eaten into the singles market (a small record with a b-track on the opposite side - already quite killed by cassettes and CDs)
The people fighting for 1p per stream want to focus on the killing of the album because in that way they look like poor mistreated artists who are just asking for crumbs considering what was taken from them.
And spotify etc. want to argue they are the ones who killed the radio, and thus it should cost them hardly anything and they are already paying way too much.
But at any rate 1p per stream is actually quite a significant increase in price considering what the user gets.
With an album one got album art etc.
Lyrics / liner notes.
And a number of songs - let us say 16 songs.
Nowadays you have to do your own work for the album art and lyrics, and could conceivably be asked to pay separately for them.
This is all a long time ago but I would think it was $10 dollars per average CD during the heyday. (somebody here surely knows the actual number)
So 62.5 pennies per song if 16 songs.
Perhaps it should be 1p per stream, max cost 63p per song per user?
that of course still means spotify eats the part of the market that buys more than one version per year, as someone with ADHD I have had to buy London Calling about 20+ times in my life. At some point I think I should get it for free.
so 1p per song streamed, max 63p per person per song every two years. If they asked for that I would think that is maybe a bit more than its worth, but also approaching fairness.
But they aren't asking for that, even though they should be able to think these things through easier and quicker than I can - so until they start asking for something resembling an actual fair deal I say screw them.
just noting also - if you were to make 1p per song without any of my proposed limitations or similar then given the fact that people consume the songs they loved in their 20s all their lives, if you could manage to have a couple top streaming hits for that age group for a couple years you might just be able to go fishing for the rest of your life!
many of the demands listed, while well intentioned, are ill considered at best.
Take the first demand for instance, pay $0.01 per play. on the face this sounds fine, until you look at the economics of this. Spotify Premium is $9.99, that means for every premium user there is only 999 plays per month at BEST if you don't consider any other overheads, before that payment is exhausted (not including things like discounts for 12 month plans, student and family pricing).
This is not to say artists shouldn't get paid more, but how many people would take say a 10x price increase to fund this level of payment?
That's not to mention they also want to remove the income stream of artists paying for increased plays on the platform (pushing more cost to the user)
again, the demands may be well intentioned, and many should just be adopted such as crediting all labour for a recording, but obviously no-one has looked at the economics' it would take to actually realise the level of payment being asked for here and thought about if consumers would be willing to pay that price.
So, if I listen to music for only ~2 hours (120 min) a day, and the average song is 4 minutes, that would be ~30 songs a day, which would be 30 cents a day. $0.30 * 30 days in a month is about $9/month...which is basically my entire subscription fee--probably more. Also, there's like 4 people per account if I remember correctly.
I grew up thinking record companies were a confederacy of scumbags, and my attitude hasn't changed that much, but the question of what the fair price for a recorded song should be has been clouded by a mix of cynicism on the part of publishers, and magical thinking on the part of artists.
Tech VC is an analogy for the risk model of record companies, where you have money from investors that needs a productive asset, and your risk/return appetite is being willing to accept that most of your bets will return zero, with just 2% of your investments yielding huge (10x+) multiples and 80% of your returns.
Whether you are investing in bands making albums or entrepreneurs building startups, there seem to be direct similes for record sales, publishing rights, merch, side projects, and intellectual property. The point is artists make their money touring with shows, which is basically a job, where the record company/investor makes their big money because they get the benefit of having risked capital with leverage. A founder working for investors is analogous to a band touring in support of album sales. Your upside is probably a job with a lifestyle and a bonus.
Which comes to the question of what a good price for a recording could be. Musicians generally don't take very much risk or use leverage that would yield investor-size returns. 99.9% of music is crap. The distribution curve of quality is really steep and long tailed, so if you invest in a given band, you are taking a <1% chance of ever seeing your money again. That's why record companies and VC make money. They're the producers. They're creating a portfolio spread over a wide pool of risk. If you write some songs, arguably, you have ventured nothing of value until someone discovers it. The music platforms provide this discovery.
Sure, I wish I could earn the an equivalent living making music or writing as I do in tech, but since I'm not a superstar talent, I manage that expectation and accept comfortable mediocrity. As the amortized capital risked by a musician averaged across all the other musicians in their genre on a given song, the price of a stream above tiny fractions of a penny is generous. The missing feature seems to be a way to sell the licensing and publishing rights, where I can pay $100 to use it in a video.
I get the sense that organizing spotify artists to complain is yet another way to hustle and exploit them, but this time for political ends instead of financial ones.
edit: there is probably a producer/product-manager analogy to be made as well, but will leave it there.
Would it really be the end to ask consumers for 50% more Spotify Premium to solve the problem? I would personally be willing to pay more and feel music is undervalued. I can't imagine they would lose 50% of their subscription base.
I’ve said before that I’d give up Netflix before Spotify, so yeah maybe. But something would have to give out of principle. I think the better solution in this musician/label/distributor mess is the label takes less. That has costs and would change how discovery works, but frankly maybe for the better.
How much of that 50% would go to the record labels? We'd pay 50% more and the artist would probably get 5% more. That doesn't seem like a good ROI.
While no party is without concern, I don't think either Spotify, the artist or the consumer is the problem here. There's a 800lb gorilla standing over there.
#abolishcopyright. Musicians if you’re listening, find a different way to earn a living than depending upon the enslavement of ideas (and by extension, individuals). Copyright is abhorrent, and needs to go. There are better ways.
We've had two decades to envision alternative funding models for music production, and all of them are substantially worse for the musician than "assign a creator's monopoly to the musician and civil liabilities for those who fail to negotiate proper licenses to it". Free markets are designed to allocate scarce goods; with the corollary any person whose work is not scarce does not get to eat. Ergo, if you want certain kinds of nonscarce goods to be made, you need to make them artificially scarce for some limited period.
This is particular to creative works. Free Software gets around this with lots of subsidies, commodified complements, corporate investment, and occasional labors of love. The fact that software is highly collaborative and that licenses like the GPL exist helps. A handful of collaborating developers can produce a spare-time project that is actually useful to other people who will sponsor development of further improvements to the project. Music does not work that way.
If you want music to be libre, someone needs to subsidize the cost of creation: The wages for the musicians for one-two months, the wages of the technicians, the rent for the studio, and also subsidize the cost of writing the song in the first place.
The current paradigm amortizes those costs among all listeners of a song, with some profit for the facilitators.
An artist isn’t entitled to having their work funded unless someone voluntarily funds it. This does not require legal fiction.
Entire genres of music have been created from inexpensive musical equipment and free software. Art has never been more accessible to the people than it is now.
> An artist isn’t entitled to having their work funded unless someone voluntarily funds it.
Then we simply never get their work. Some people would absolutely continue to create for the fun of it, but they'll remain the minority.
Movies you'd watch in a Theater? Completely gone. Commercially funded TV shows, gone. A vast majority of books, written by full time writers and researchers, gone.
And I'll also posit that most music would go away too. Even the amateurs I know expect to be paid for a gig. Most musicians are not willing to busk for a living.
And, don't forget, software development relies heavily upon Copyright as well (licenses, your work-for-hire, etc).
If everyone who threatens to stop creating content if they can't enslave ideas, were to stop creating content, the world would be a better place.
The idea that people would stop creating is absurd. I work in Cancer Research and the absolute least contributing people in the medical industry are the ones obsessed with patenting and copyrighting their work, which is usually garbage and of frivolous value compared to the hard grunt work of millions of unsung heroes grinding it out for non-monopoly wages.
I was an engineer at Microsoft and the average code there was total garbage compared to the open source code powering top public domain projects.
And no modern epic is significantly better than Ἰλιάς.
Every letter we are using; every word; every bit of tooling; was made by other people in a long pyramid stretching back tens of thousands of years and billions of people wide. All of us are putting grains of sand on top.
Really? Sounds pretty terrible to me. Few books. Few videogames. No movies. No TV shows. Most of the internet obliterated. Any content that is created is copied and regurgitated so much you'd be hard pressed find out who actually created it.
I personally like consuming entertainment. I work with the creative side of my brain all day long, and being able to go home and turn it off with some relatively mindless entertainment (my form is a combination of books and videogames). I'd hate to come home one day and only have a zero budget, poorly tested, game to play, or a book that I've already re-read enough to quote it by memory.
> And no modern epic is significantly better than Ἰλιάς.
Pure opinion. And in any case, there's only one Iliad. There's hundreds of other "modern" epics out there - many of which I find more entertaining, though they are not as literarily significant.
> the open source code powering top public domain projects
Is it worth re-iterating that all of the open source licenses is supported by copyright protections?
> All of us are putting grains of sand on top.
Which obviously has its own value, as aptly demonstrated by the entertainment industry as a whole being valued in the trillions of dollars.
You are also discounting the cost to society for all the works of art that are created due to copyright.
Copyright criminalizes remix culture and leads to evils like Youtube arbitrarily giving strikes because 5 seconds of a taylor swift song was in the background, suppression of criticism, and depriving the poor from access to modern culture.
> According to your logic we wouldn't have janitors cleaning rooms if they couldn't collect a toll in perpetuity.
To torture this analogy further, in the world you're presenting, a janitor has to beg for tips or rely upon their fans to get paid for their efforts.
> And you think your contributions deserve special treatment?
This assumes that there's no original thought, or production, or anything else in this day and age. I fundamentally disagree with this. To use a popular example, the archetypes presented in "A Game of Thrones" may have existed for decades or centuries, but they're presented in a wholly original story. A story which would not have existed in the past, present, or future if it wasn't for GRRM, and by extension, his ability to work full time writing his books.
> Keep in mind that the tool we are using to communicate was made public domain by Tim Berners Lee.
No, the tool we're using was originally created by Paul Graham, and is not public domain.
In any case, it appears that there are irreconcilable differences in the foundations of our opinions (and politeness). I wish you luck.
Music is a passion and hobby for many. People would still make music if the didn't make money from it.
Might have lower production quality and less glitzy marketing, but the vast quantity of free music out there is proof that many will continue making music regardless of financial incentive.
No, that's not correct. 14 years was the original term set by law not the Constitution, and the difference is important. Copyright and patents do not formally exist in the US Constitution, because IP was a contentious issue even then. Instead there is a clause that empowers Congress to decide to do so if they wish, but there is no requirement. Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8 says Congress shall have the power:
>"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
But there is nothing specific set out in the Constitution. If there was, it'd be near impossible to change at this point, for better or worse. On the one hand that might mean we'd have much shorter terms then now. On the other hand, it would also mean that if the courts had gone similarly badly in deciding stuff like software patents it'd be near totally hopeless, rather than merely very difficult, to reform. But since it's all down to "merely" legislation Congress could completely change things around on a dime through normal law if there was the political will for it. Though note another complexity is that the US has signed treaties around certain parts of IP as well, including minimum terms. While those too can be renegotiated, or revoked by Congress, it's a higher domestic political and geopolitical bar.
There are lots of interesting reform proposals, within various bounds of feasibility. Hopefully one of them can take off at some point and momentum can slowly start building to go in the other direction then the maximalist positions taken for the last few decades.
That seems quite long to me. 28 years is half of the average lifetime. Producing a certain sequence of sounds entitles you to own those sounds until people not yet born are full adults?
That doesn't seem too awful. It basically means everything from the 80's or early 90's goes into the public domain.
After that much time, it's a crime keeping the copyright monopoly: it's either exhausted all possible profit, so there's no point, or it's been around long enough that everything after it is influenced by it, like season 4 and earlier of The Simpsons, and the original Star Wars movies.
In other words, that seems like a decent cut-off point to say that if you still want to hold copyright on them, then you're rent-seeking off of stuff that has kinda become "cultural identity" stuff, specifically because it's what people grew up watching and influenced by.
Most artists work for free. Some of the best artists I know have day jobs.
The promise of fame and fortune is a product of an industry that is based on physical media being the only way to share information. The bit has liberated music for everyone yet we cling to the past.
Most artists with regular output do not. The problem with a day job is it takes away from what a person can produce. For example, a content creator (i.e. YouTuber) with a day job is lucky to get out one-two videos a week. A full time content creator can produce one to two videos a day, often with better quality since they can focus on the work.
With the state of advertising on youtube, patreon, ad reads and super chats are a more reliable way to monetize than copyrighting the video.
Youtube content creators are a good example of people monetizing art without the need for copyright. Donations and voluntary funding are key parts of the content creator world already. Copyright is not particularly important unless they are getting strikes from a copyright troll.
Without copyright, someone will just take their output, cut out the ad reads and repost their output with their own embedded ads.
This already happens today (Linus with his tech tips is only one example); without the ability for creators to fight back, it would only get worse.
EDIT: That this is unpopular doesn't make it wrong. Even beyond the (currently) illegal reposting, there are lots of rights aggregators who pay viral content creators, and re-sell their content to TV channels (Chive TV, anybody?). The "pay creators" part goes away if you take away copyright.
Well, in the article it says that they are doing this partly because coronavirus has wiped out a lot of live music. If they can't stream for profit and they can't do live shows what do you suggest?
Copyright and patents creates artificial scarcity. The things protected are not scarce, they are abundant. Ideas and information are easy to copy/reproduce.
So we built a fake framework on top of something plentiful and cheap to copy, to make it more expensive so some people can make money out of it.
I agree, they're easy to copy and reproduce. But more importantly, they are not easy to produce in the first place.
How do you suggest an author (artist, musician, etc) make a living, if it takes them 6 months of normal working hours to produce a book and they get an expected $0 of revenue from that book?
Spending time on something people aren’t willing to pay for is always a waste of time, whether you’re writing a book or digging holes.
We need to stop assuming that having no copyright means that the work cannot be monetized. It just can’t be monetized as if it was a physical object or service rendered. Vinyl records, tee shirts, patronage, book signings, lectures, anything that isn’t copyright dependent can be monetized easily.
The fans of art are aware that paying for it will help create more art they like. This is a personal connection that the fan has with the artist and keeps the art accessible for the casuals.
We had that once upon a time (the original version of Patronage), and it resulted in some, but not very much, artwork in the grand scheme of things. Nowhere near the amount we enjoy today with our spare-change subscriptions.
Copyright also allows more creators to create without requiring them to be a live personality as well; to split their time between creating and hustling for money.
> If a work is entirely digital, what is the difference between the original and the copy?
The difference is that the original instance of the work potentially required considerable time and money, whereas its copies are essentially free to produce. There's no difference between the bits of the "original" and the bits of each copy, but concluding that copies of a work should be free for all because the act of creating that copy is free, is fallacious and intentionally misleading.
What well-researched book have you written for free?
What hit album have you (and your band-mates) written and performed for free?
What feature-length, CGI enhanced movie have you produced, cast, and distributed for free?
What TV show have you produced, cast, and distributed for free?
I'm not trying to call you out specifically, but your post uses "I", so I'm responding appropriately. For better or worse, garage bands, open source developers, and patreon writers are the vast minority of copyright users.
> Why should you not own copyright to that which you produce?
You don't want to use that line of argument, since authors and musicians are among the very few categories of workers with that privilege. As much as I agree with you (and actually think that privilege to be expanded to all workers), you won't find any solidarity from the common public on that line.
In practice, very few of these actually benefit from copyright. Most do work-for-hire, which is effectively a negation or renounce to one’s IP rights; and opensource is effectively a way to do the same. The ones who can actually extract direct benefit from IP are “ the 1%”, so to speak.
Other than performance and merchandise, I think Patreon is really the big ticket right now.
I suppose, in reality, this has been the case for around 3 decades now. Unless you have the marketing department, you don't make money from music sales.
Patreon works because everybody's not on there. If I tried to give $1 to every artist that I listen to on Spotify, I'd be paying out hundreds of dollars a month. Throw in books, videos, movies, and TV shows (all of which rely upon copyright), I'd be paying out thousands of dollars.
I could scale back my contribution to each artist to pennies each (which doesn't actually work, given the $0.30 cent/3% CC cut), but then we're back to where we are today.
Patreon, Twitch, Cameo, OnlyFans, et al, are providing ways to connect with your community and earn a living through their support, which is not only very important during shutdowns when live events are harder, but will be a long term trend.
On the production side costs continue to drop, and if we #abolishcopyright cost of living across the world will drop dramatically, so will be easier to balance the budget.
Yes to this. Having an imagination means you can think of different ways to monetize your work that isn’t trying to put an imaginary wall around ideas and information.
Also, artist and dev here.
I don't agree.
First, ideas are not copyrighted anyway. Second, you are both vague about those "different ways" of earning. Please expand on that.
Patents and copyrights are literally ideas put on paper that one is claiming legal dominion over. Unless you are making physical media, your products are your ideas.
It’s a tradeoff, not a cure for problems artists face. The current system favors wealthy institutions over artists. No one is willing to donate to a giant record company but fans of the work will readily give money to the artist just because they like them. Patronage is a better system for artists.
How do you keep a screen printing shop from just selling your merch for cheaper than you? In your hypothetical they'll always be able to undercut you since they don't have to support anything but screen printing business with the profits while you have to fund art production?
The main point is that every avenue of monetizing art is create something that isn't your art that is scarce and then sell that. Why not just have a system where you can make the art itself scarce?
None of those scale. I pointed this out elsewhere, but how much money would a creator on Patreon make if all creators were on Patreon, hoping to make at least $1 per month per follower? Musicians alone would push me into the hundreds of dollars (which really means a vast majority of musicians would make nothing from me; less than they're getting via Spotify).
How much are you willing to pay for tickets to the 20th tour in a week that's in your area? For their merch? As for myself, precious little. Probably not enough to even cover their tour costs, let alone the cost of producing the music (and merch) in the first place.
> Patents and copyrights are literally ideas put on paper that one is claiming legal dominion over.
Patents and copyrights make it practical to cover the costs of realizing those ideas in the first place. Ideas aren't worth anything until they're realized, be it in writing for a book, or a performance for a song.
Books often take a minimum of 6 months of full time effort to produce. There's multiple people involved - the writer, the editor, the proofreader, the typesetter. How do they pay for it if they can't make any money from actually selling the book?
Music takes weeks or months of effort in a studio to produce. How do you recoup those costs if you can't sell the output?
"ideas put on paper" is oversimplifying it. There's a lot more work and time involved in creating art. It's not like: I have an idea, I "put it on paper", and 10 minutes later I have something to "claim dominion over".
That's the poster's modus operandi here: he doesn't miss an opportunity to advertise his two favorite topics – abolishment of intellectual property and his own whitespace-based data notation – whether it's on-topic or not.
This isn't Twitter. I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish by using hashtags on HN, but it makes you look like an immature child – similar to writing "M$" in the 90s and early 00s.
Thanks for the feedback. I understand that Twitter supports hashtags better, so that will be my preferred place to post things like #AbolishImaginaryProperty #EndPatents #BringBackNapster #LiberateIdeas
dear Breck, I've been appreciating your posts on IP, and your campaigning for this cause overall.
I'm wondering if you knew that Karl Marx summed up the desire of communists in one sentence [in The Communist Manifesto]?
"...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." [1]
That's it.
That's what all the fuss is about. It was a revelation to me because it seemed too simple at first, yet that's all that communists desire to bring about. This desire includes abolishing 'intellectual property' (trade secrets, copyrighted material, patented processes etc.). As you rightly described, any human knowledge originates socially to start with: “We are all putting grains of sand on mountains built by our ancestors”. This inheritance is what we aim to communize. Even though the communist manifesto is over 170 years old, Marx' critique remains as relevant as relevant as ever: capitalist firms caused the opioid crisis in the US; all over the world there's a landlord crisis - with many suffering homelessness (despite there being vacant buildings) [2]; capitalists have moved much of the industrial production to the global south - e.g. clothes are produced in sweatshops in China/Bangladesh/Eritrea; Playstations are causing wars in Congo [3]; our smartphones are made with conflict resources [4]; and we have a toxic e-waste crisis that is blocking us from re-using black-boxed hardware/components (as well as trade secrets and patents stopping many from being able to learn about technology and science in the first place - artificial scarcity of expertise created by capitalists) - as well as well as this e-waste leaching chemicals and poisoning the land, predominantly in the global south [5].
With 'abolishing private property' we don't mean that we want to get rid of the idea of all property systems. We want to get rid of today's bourgeois property system, as it has allowed a small minority to exclude others and plunder the commons [6], resulting in the division of labor and alienation. It's not about having a big or small capitalist government (capitalist governments are the ones who grant monopolies in the first place). We want full democracy in the workplace. That is what we call socialism, communism, or a communist production system. We also believe that this system, communism, is humanity's true nature.
The reason we have been persecuted is because many capitalists are very happy with their 'haul' (and the power-over others domination that comes with it), and because we communists want to continually ask the question: "how we can constantly expand who benefits from new science and technology?" (which we refer to as communizing/socializing the means of production).
I'm a bit scared this might be something you already know, so please do let me know if I've overstepped. My yearning by writing this is to meet my needs for connection, clarity and cooperation, yet this might not be the best strategy.
Copyrights and patents are the opposite of property. The
term "intellectual property" is a complete lie. You could
probably make a strong case that it is proof there is such a
thing as a "Big Lie".
If you have copyrights and patents, you do not have
property rights. Once you implement those, you then remove
the rights people have over their atomic property, like
computers and paper and printers et cetera.
You cannot have a logical conversation with anyone who uses
the term "intellectual property", because at that point it
would be like trying to talk to someone about "fire water".
There is no such thing.
The reason why that term became so big is that because
during the Cold War capitalism and property rights were all
the rage, so the proponents of copyrights and patents jumped
on the bandwagon and rebranded their issues to be about
property rights, even though they were the opposite. It was
a very shrewd move, and I'm amazed at how effective it was.
It would be like the cigarette industry was able to convince
people that cigarettes were actually "health sticks".
That is why you will never see me ever ever use that term,
and instead I will refer to them as "Imaginary Property"
rights, and encourage everyone else to do so (I read the
"Imaginary Property" term for the first time right here on
HN).
So all that said, I am a strong believer in property
rights. I believe Marx was wrong, and that property rights
are an engineering solution to the problem of "how do we
assign decision making power over scarce atoms in an
efficient way".
I believe the real problem is copyrights and parents.
Abolish those and you will eventually unchain the minds of
billions of people, and we will be living in a lot more
intelligent and prosperous world.
I get that you seem bored by the hype around blockchain, but that does not make anything blockchain related bad.
In this particular issue, I think blockchain is a great solution, as it allows to publish content, gather fees from listeners to artists, without the need of an intermediary.
As a creator, relying on these platforms is problematic because they are the #1 target for Government taxation. Depending on the country, 20% of customer spend is swallowed up immediately by sales taxes. Another 30% is potentially swallowed up by Google and Apple.
The solution is really to go direct-to-consumer, through things like Crowdfunding (unfortunately Patreon now charges VAT). Though of course this adds a lot of overhead.
Alternatively, petition Governments to be leaner, and to increase retirement ages to 70 (pensions are the single major and fastest increasing Government expense), and to lower taxes (including sales taxes) with the savings.
Pressure on Google and Apple (via regulation) to reduce commissions is another avenue.
I was thinking that musicians could create a platform themselves and avoid the parasites but at this moment you still have the mobile store parasites that will tax you even more for each sale so before musicians can do soemthing about it we need to fix the mobile app stores or make the PWA music apps have same features as native ones(I have a feeling that Google and Apple will fight hard against losing this big source of money)
is that really the problem here??? i would think spotify uses its market dominance to drive down what they give back to the artists. also, evading tax is not a good idea. it's there for a reason.
Going after the pensions is probably the single quickest way to find yourself unelected. Old people vote, and there are a lot of them.
Also direct-to-consumer hardly absolves you from following tax law. I agree that sales tax is bad, but only because it is regressive and disproportionately taxes the poor. Raise income taxes and abolish sales tax.
The thing about exports is that they're also imports - and imports are subject to VAT. So if I buy something internationally, I need to declare it and then pay VAT on it.
This seems like it would roughly double Spotify's costs: https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/apps/how-much-...
And Spotify is already paying out 75% of it's revenue to royalty holders: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-pr...
So unless you believe that Spotify is bad at business and there's an extra ~75% of revenue Spotify could pull out of a hat, this is basically impossible to satisfy without cratering the total revenue by doubling prices, which is probably not in artist's interests.