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Comment by drostie | Hacker News Reader

The insane thing here is that Spotify could just change the incentive structure and then it wouldn't have to take drastic action.

"You will gain 0.00x cents per listen, up to a maximum of 100 listens/day for any individual user" and "Your songs must all sound like distinct pieces, as judged by our testing team" seem jointly sufficient to rule out the two biggest forms of abuse here: sure, let someone stream 30-second clips of silence; after 50 minutes stop paying for it. Multiple silent clips are a violation only because they both sound the same.

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It could be even easier: don't count every listen the same; split each user's subscription fees among the songs they listen to each month.

Why don't they do that?

In any given period of time some people are going to listen to the same tracks multiple times. For example, on many radio stations the selection of music is really quite small, and the majority of airtime is occupied by less than 100 songs. If people are repeatedly listening to those songs then why shouldn't the artist that created them receive compensation proportionate to the number of plays the song received? I couldn't find data on Spotify users' listening habits, but here's my own, sorted descending by track plays, for example: http://www.last.fm/user/GarrettGrimsley/library/tracks

If everyone listened to the same amount of tracks, they would receive the exact same amount of compensation as they do now.

My suggestion (which has been raised by others many times), is that if a user listens to 1000 tracks/month, their listens should be worth 10x less than a user who only listens to 100 tracks/month, since they are both paying Spotify the same amount.

I'm not sure if it would result in very meaningful distinction in how much artists are actually compensated (maybe it would negatively harm smaller artists because, hypothetically, they are listened to more by people who listen to lots of music).

I'm actually pretty curious about why they have chosen to stick with this model, since the alternative I've described is pretty obvious and has been proposed many times.

I would say that there is more value in songs that are actively selected vs just played automatically (e.g. I often go to an artist's page, select a specific song, then let the playlist play without me paying much attention), but I don't know if that's really an economically meaningful distinction.

I thought you were saying to drop compensation for repeated tracks. It looks like you're suggesting the payout be for each song be calculated as

            Subscription fee - Spotify's take
      ---------------------------------------------  = Compensation from 1 user
    1 user's plays of song / User's total song plays

Is that correct?

Flattr works like that. I found it made me, as a low volume user, very concious about what I click on.

If Spotify made the change I would probably think more about what I listen to. Perhaps even use a second non-paid account for certain listening. But I might be a minority.

I would suggest yet another model: payment per unique listeners per day (or week, or month). It wouldn't be a big step from their current model but would be a lot less gameable.

Because they compensate streams by paid users at the same rate as free users right now, and if they did that, free streams would suddenly be paid for at a lower rate.

What is the downside to that though?

There's a fixed amount of money to distribute, and in some sense it seems fairer to compensate those artists who have paid listeners more.

Are they just trying to be super transparent with pricing to help artists feel like they're not being ripped off?

With my cynical hat on I can only assume that it would be more equitable, but the big music labels wouldn't sign on to that deal with Spotify initially as it was worse for the big labels (at a cost to smaller indies).

With no data to back it up I'd assume the commercial pop music it more likely to be played by free/high listen paid accounts (kids/gyms/cafes etc), while paid accounts with small play numbers are more likely to be listening to indies (think stereotypical early adopters and HN readers). The current system benefits the labels with big commercial high volume pop music.

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