Mariah Carey’s record-breaking day shows how little musicians make from Spotify
qz.com
qz.com
It makes me happy that the cost of digital goods is falling. The distribution costs are so low for a digital item that this price seems much more in line with what people should pay for a download / stream.
Interestingly, at $10 a month Spotify is charging users $0.00023 per minute (60 * 24 * 30). If each song is about 3 minutes, they're making money on anyone who spends less than 10% of their time listening to music.
Also, I'm sure Spotify pays for engineers, offices, lawyers, designers, servers, marketing, avocado toasts and other essentials in addition to royalties.
Competition for time is a great way of framing why I pay for many services. I pay $10 to Spotify to avoid hundreds of commercials each month, it is absolutely worth it to me. Same with Netflix. Would do the same with Gmail if it was an option.
It is, pay for G-Suite.
I'd like to still believe in this, but I'm not sure the logic holds up.
I pay about $20/year for Spotify because several of my friends have a family plan. I know this tactic is used with foreign students and cell phone plans as well.
If they had bought the CD (and many of them have) or the cassette (and many of them have) or the mp3 (and many of them have) or the iTunes AAC (and many of them have) they could play it infinite times and never pay Mariah another red cent.
The music industry keeps trying (and sometimes succeeding) to convince people that they deserve new payment for the same work on every form of new media forever.
> How many times have these people paid for this song?
You're really only paying for the medium, and renting the music.
What about in the future, when we add new dimensions to our music, that requires additional remastering? Our current music formats are really great, but I wouldn't be surprised to see another transformation before too long. Maybe downloadable VR concerts, or some integrated rumble data to assist with bass boost. Or possibly holographic versions of the artist performing.
You'll be buying the same music for as long as the industry can keep turning the knob, just enough to bring new interest.
An online stream of an existing audio recording is not a separate work.
If by "different master" you mean a separate recording of a different performance of the song, then yes, it is a different "work" - a separate copyrightable sound recording, but it is the same work of the song writer.
Re-mastering may or may not create a separately copyrightable work, depending on the creative expression that goes into the re-mastering.
Encoding to cassette, CD, mp3, audio stream in various formats is a mechanical process, not a separate "creative expression" that receives or deserves separate copyright protection.
That is not a correct interpretation of the first-sale doctrine. Someone who purchased a cassette, CD, etc. has the legal right to, among other things, rent the medium to others. For example, if I want to start a cassette tape rental company I can buy cassette tapes and rent them to the public, without seeking permission from the copyright holder of the music or other content on those tapes.
(Some exceptions apply, like the Record Rental Amendment of 1984.)
If it were recording medium then there are two issues at play: the right to make a copy, and the right to distribute. A rental agreement can exclude the right to sublease/re-rent. However, the copyright owners, by selling a copy of the work, have given up that right to prohibit further redistribution. The middle man may not make copies of the work but may rent them out. It is not "passing on the rental" because there was no rental in the first place; legally speaking.
OTOH, since streaming isn't covered under first sale doctrine, such distinctions are not relevant.
I finished paying off my toyota camry a couple years ago. It took 5 freaking years.
A 10 minutes video (of amateur level) involves something like:
* 6 hour of preparation: We have to select the topic and the exercise. And also thinking how to split the solution in the blackboard.
* 2 hours x 3 persons for recording: One person for the writing, one for the voice and me. We retake each step many times, and we discuss before and after each take.
* 6 hour of editing: Fix the sound (volume, big background noise, try to fix errors). Fix the writing (typos, recolor part of the writing, move some text). Also, change the speed of some parts, because sometimes writing is boring, but remember to resynchronize the voice.
(Some videos are easier and involve less time, some are more difficult and need more time to be finished.)
After all the preparation and edition (I hope) it looks very natural and it's very difficult to realize how much time it involves. But it is not at all at a profesional level.
So a 3 minutes song is not created in 3 minutes.
Perhaps it might be worth considering that this signals a model that could be re-thought to the benefit of the artist?
Another interesting tidbit is that if it was a patent rather than a copyright, the rights would have expired 3 years ago. I spent far longer than 15 minutes just talking to the patent attorney the last time I filed a patent.
Oh, and also, be a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties.
That said, holiday albums are just a ploy to net royalties in perpetuity-- you're guaranteed airtime and income once a year for as long as Christmas and copyright law exist. Nobody should expect to be making bank on long-tail efforts.
Mariah Carey is incredibly talented musician who dedicated her entire life to music. If she made a chart topping song in 15minutes, that just shows how good of a musician she (and her team) is.
Note that they don't make any claim about spotify's margins or profits here. It's a submarine article to demand they raise prices (and pass the increase on to the labels).
It's possible most artists are getting screwed, but the example given doesn't show that at all.
The real takeaway from this example should be how broken the copyright system is. It's disgusting that somebody can still milk out $92k a day for work they did 24 years ago.
The music industry is very, very top heavy when it comes to income distribution.
That’s not that much in terms of plays. Everybody wants to be a millionaire artist, but the economics don’t support that.
This Spotify news is a far greater tragedy for record companies, whose entire business model relies on royalty collection, than it is for the artists themselves. But rentier business models don't deserve a whole lot of sympathy.
Current Spotify premium user because I like the curated playlists
Maybe Spotify is ripping off artists, but this story doesn't demonstrate it.
But it should plainly obvious that the price charged is not sustainable.
Well, one of those partners earned them lots of money and the other massively devalued their goods.
What's even more laughable is that the iTunes Music Store represented a massive 'save' for the industry - prior to that they'd earned ~$0 on digital music thanks to rampant piracy.
I wish this could be seen as the high-water mark of stupidity for the industry but I know it well enough to be sure that's not the case.
Assume a CD costs $10, and half of that goes towards the distribution of the physical media. It has maybe ten tracks. If you listen to it every day for a few months that's roughly the same "price per play" if I'm doing my math right.
Maybe that's a little high for an estimate, but streaming is still within an order of magnitude, and probably reaches way more customers than a given CD track ever did.
For sheer resourcefulness (and humor) I enjoyed seeing the band Freezepop include a $3 royalty check in their Kickstarter music video, and offer the check itself as part of $400 backer reward.
That article is from 2016 yet they are still losing money.
There would be a lot more money involved for both Spotify and the artists if they went the Netflix route and cut out the record label middlemen. I’m sure they are trying to do that but for whatever reason they haven’t been successful yet. Probably because the back catalogue of the record labels has a lot more leverage than the back catalogue of a bunch of movies. I wonder if they went the route of churning out a ton of original content if that would gradually increase their influence and get people to sign with them for future releases because they would be paying more. It’s a precarious game, since I’m sure the record labels will be happy to yank all of their music once they get wind of Spotify trying something like this out.
If that's all the market's going to pay someone that has already reached a level of wealth that they can't spend in ten lifetimes, I won't lose any sleep. If you can live with the market when someone's making millions, you can live with the market when they're unable to make $100,000 in a day from one source and for one song.
I assume that they count multiple sources of revenue here, like radio licenses, royalties from movies and ads where this song was used, etc. So $92,400 per day only from one medium, is not that bad.
That is, assuming you made that much every day of the year (on Spotify), you would make $33.7 million a year.
Granted, you're not going to be able to replicate Christmas plays throughout the year, but still, that number doesn't seem small, even for a well-established artist.
Ok I guess we can assume that music earnings have a somewhat long tail, but hopefully you get my point - the maximum doesn't tell us much about the distribution.