Many of the artists I discovered via Spotify / Google Music make pennies from these sites. The truth is that unless you're buying an album (1) or other merchandise, you're not contributing significantly for the artist's survival.
I was chatting with Brock Van Wey last week (aka bvdub, my favorite choice of background music when programming) and he was describing how challenge it is to stay in business nowadays. I naïvely thought these apps were helping those folks...
I for one will try to buy more albums, even if digital, of the bands I listen to all the time.
(1) directly from the artist (e.g. via bandcamp). Google Music, at least, doesn't really give you the mp3 but only a protected file that can solely be played in their software.
It's the same as torrenting movies, people do it because it's convenient (and free) but now Netflix is here, it's even easier than torrenting. So that's why I'm subscribed to both services and have been for many years.
So artists that leave Spotify, like Taylor Swift for example. I may listen to their music because it's in the charts, but when she left Spotify I just didn't listen to her music at all. So I'm sure Spotify do give the artists attention they would never usually get.
Yet Spotify is not only still unprofitable, they're still all but setting money on fire. Some of the more recent reports I've seen are that they're trying to negotiate for lower music royalties.
I can't help but wonder if the ultimate problem here isn't with the idea of all-you-can-eat streaming, but with the idea that all-you-can-eat streaming is only worth $10 a month. What if the earliest services in this space had priced their services at $20 a month? I know, the immediate reaction is "they would have had no customers and it would be a death knell because no one would possibly pay that much," but is it possible we have that reaction because we've just internalized the notion that "$10 per month" is the "proper" price? Back in the Dark Ages--the 1990s and early 2000s--I knew many, many people who were spending $20 or more a month buying individual CDs. If in 1994 I'd have been told, "Hey, what if you could listen to nearly every song ever recorded for the price of only two CDs a month!?" then I'd have been on board.
Since Spotify wields an enormous influence over what music becomes popular, labels can treat it as a loss leader and keep pumping money into it that they make back from album sales/tours/merch/etc on their top artists. The issue with this is that it vastly favors labels who can leverage this economy of scale, and independent labels for whom album sales are a larger slice of their income can't weather the decrease in payment as well.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that Spotify divides payment per stream up by the total number of streams. Simplified example: if I stream two songs in one month, an indie artist once and a major artist once, they'll each get $5 of my $10. If I stream the indie artist once but the major artist twice, however, they get $6.66 and the indie artist only gets $3.33, even though I the amount I listened to them didn't change. (edit, the pool is actually comprised of all users, I just used one in this example for simplicity)
All this adds up to a system that is heavily stacked in favor of major labels and their respective artists at the expense of independent ones.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150219221341/http://www.spotif... The "Royalties in Detail" section.
/me gives a sidelong glance at every WeWork streaming Spotify 24/7
The bigger problem though, is that's not how it works. You may expect those two artists to split your 10$ (ignoring everybody else's cut for simplicity), but what actually happens is the sum total of the revenue that Spotify gets in a month is split up across all of the plays that month[0].
So what actually happens is the two artists you've streamed get paid a few pennies out of your subscription fee, and the rest of it goes to subsidize the streams of other people (heavy users, and/or business that leave it playing all day).
[0]: https://www.stereogum.com/1587932/spotify-explains-royalty-p...
To clarify further, my issue isn't that payment is calculated per play, but that it's measured relative to other artists instead of absolutely.
Put another way: an artist that that gets X plays shouldn't make more one month than the next, just because the next month they have to compete with a new album by Taylor Swift.
Edit: to clarify even further, I'm not saying they shouldn't be allowed to do this or even that it's immoral. All I'm saying is that it's a system that's heavily biased in favor of major labels at the expense of independent ones.
Why not?
The only way to make that fair to both that artist, and to Taylor Swift, is to make the monthly subscription fee change depending on how much music you listened to.
Really, the only problem with Spotify's system is that people who listen to a lot of music... Pay less to each artist for an hour of music, then someone who listens to very little music. The problem is not that indies are getting screwed, the problem is that Spotify charges someone streaming 24 hours a day the same amount that they charge someone streaming 24 minutes a day.
It doesn't follow at all that a constant price per stream can only be achieved by charging users a variable price based on usage. Film and TV streaming services charge a fixed monthly rate to each user, and light users almost certainly subsidize heavy ones.
It may be that a $10 a month simply isn't enough for Spotify to pay as per stream much as they are now. But that's Spotify's problem to solve — labels and artists really should only care inasmuch as it affects their streaming royalties. The fact that Spotify has figured a system out that lets them stay afloat and pay some amount in royalties doesn't mean it's a system that treats all participants equally.
> The problem is not that indies are getting screwed, the problem is that Spotify charges someone streaming 24 hours a day the same amount that they charge someone streaming 24 minutes a day.
This is how subscriptions work. Someone who watches six hours of Netflix a day gets more out of their subscription than someone who watches six hours a month. Someone who reads the New York Times cover to cover gets more out of their subscription than someone who just reads the front page. Someone who buys from Amazon every week gets more out of their Prime subscription than someone who buys every month or two.
It's no different for Spotify. People for whom the price isn't worth it can just use the free tier or buy albums (the original pay-as-much-as-you-use way to consume music!) instead.
Hm... maybe I'll have to try it, but I'm not optimistic. The best way I have expanded my musical horizons was back in the day when iTunes shared your music library by default with other people on the same local net. I could go to the Uni library and browse through a wide variety of people's collections while doing my work. We even "talked" using our music library names, and occasionally met in person.
"Show me more of the things I already like" won't be terrible, but it won't be the same thing.
Many people probably have similarly shocking listening stats but for the average user how many of those songs were just background noise and wouldn't be recognized again? Spotify is also a little crafty with the genre stats by using a ton of sub-genres that nobody has heard of to create the illusion of diversity. As for expanding taste, wouldn't Spotify-generated playlists theoretically do the opposite by attempting to replicate your demonstrated taste and converge on certain themes?
Again, I would describe my experience with Spotify as you did, I just don't think Spotify inherently expands peoples' tastes so much as it provides an endless supply of somewhat anonymized music that people already have a taste for.