Hacker News Reader

Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

$92,400 in a day. How little. For a single song (released in 1994 at that). How detached from reality can people be?

One that apparently took 15 minutes to write. If only I could derive a lifetime of income from 15 minutes worth of work.

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.

Picasso is sketching at a park. A woman walks by, recognizes him, and begs for her portrait. He agrees and a few minutes later hands her the sketch. She is elated about how wonderfully it captures the very essence of her character. What beautiful work it is. She asks how much she owes him. "5000 francs, madam," says Picasso. The woman is incredulous, outraged, and asks how that's even possible given it only took him 5 minutes. Picasso looks up and, without missing a beat, says: "No, madam, it took me my whole life."

... The woman pays the outrageous sum for the portrait, but Picasso still (somehow) owns it for the rest of his life, plus 70 years.

Bad comparison, you don't "buy" music, you buy the medium and rent the music. The woman bought the portrait.

A more apt comparison would be if the women bought a print of the original portrait.

Picasso might own the right to make copies of it, but Picasso wouldn't own the actual portrait.

Easy. Just spend years perfecting your art, then years perfecting the promotion of your art, and then you can have overnight success.

> Just spend years perfecting your art, then years perfecting the promotion of your art, and then you can have overnight success

Oh, and also, be a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties.

Half of marketing is makeup and appearance. They know what they're doing.

The song may have taken 15 minutes to write but I can guarantee it did not take 15 minutes to record, produce, and promote the song.

Also took far longer than 15 minutes to build her brand and audience to the point where she's releasing celebrity holiday albums that anybody cares to listen to instead of fading into obscurity. But for the lack of a holiday album, Limp Bizkit might still be with us.

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.

Mimi has an astounding 5 octave range for her voice. The only other modern singer in the 'popular' music realm that has a larger dynamic range is Axl Rose of GnR. Her voices spans from F2 to G7. Keeping that set of pipes working (especially for as long as she has) is a LOT of work and discipline. She, without any doubt, has worked for more than 15 minutes.

https://www.concerthotels.com/worlds-greatest-vocal-ranges

"Blink" is a great book by Malcolm Gladwell. He goes into detail about the flashes of inspiration or genius that people receive when creating great things and how that generally only happens to people who have spent their lives learning a craft and being steeped in it all the time. Many thousands and thousands of hours of hard work are behind most anyone who can sit down at a piano and hammer out a great song in a short period of time.

That's like saying Usain Bolt only ran for less than 10 seconds and he gets all the glory. It takes years of practice before one becomes an overnight success.

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.

You're missing the point. This is the absolute ceiling of success that can be reached in Spotify. If the payout of that is 90k, what do you thing the payout of the typical artist is on Spotify?

I love music, strongly support musicians, and buy tons of music, but you're not going to make me feel bad that artists can "only" make $92k a day on Spotify.

I think the point is an elite artist tops out at 92k, meaning unknown artists will be making peanuts for their contributions. You're not supposed to pity that top tier artist, only realize that the ceiling is relatively low for everyone.

It’s for a single day on a single platform for a single song. That’s a large amount of money even for the biggest stars to make in a day.

That's nonsense, and the given evidence doesn't support the conclusion. $92k in a day is ton of money by almost any measure. Even more so because the song was recorded 24 years ago.

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 artist isn't making that money, the rights holder is. Who knows how many hands see that money before the artist does.

Well, at least due to the effect of technology on music, many unknown artists are able to produce their own music and go directly to Spotify and other services. And they do that quite often now though I don't know that many making a living on streaming royalties.

So if the price is $15 and there are N users playing M streams of songs ... how much is really available to each artist?

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).

Instead of worrying about superstars making only 92k/day maybe you should worry about how much the typical artists makes. In today's winner-takes-it-all world there is a good chance that if Carey made much more the average guy still would make nothing.

I'm not sure how it works for people in the Mariah Carey echelon, but small acts make most of their money from touring and merch sales. My understanding is that CD sales don't really got back to the artist anyway, in an appreciable way, even before Spotify, so Spotify seems to be a continuation of that idea.

This song was written and released 24 years ago and earned its creators probably a million dollars on just this single streaming platform this year. That seems pretty damn good. Remember that streaming platforms are just one small piece of the pie.

Hmm, and Google makes many billions of dollars on their search engine every year. So all the little indy startup search engines must be making an ok living, right?

The music industry is very, very top heavy when it comes to income distribution.

I think a reasonable amount for a musician to earn is comparable to the average income. So let’s say what... 200$ / day? If they get $50/day total for their entire catalogue from just Spotify that’s pretty damn good and probably puts them at more than $200/day between streaming, song and album sales, and live performances and licensing. And that only takes 6000 total plays. Let’s say double that for dilution amongst other copyright holders or label or whatever.

That’s not that much in terms of plays. Everybody wants to be a millionaire artist, but the economics don’t support that.

In a vacuum where Spotify is the only income for a musician sure, but it is easier than ever to publish on many massive platforms tying in with revenue from live performances, merchandise, advertising, etc. Sure its not as safe a a 9-5 job but that is a conscious decision in order to do what one loves, what one is good at, or what one can get rich doing - unlike most 9 to 5s...

If the point was how little Spotify pays, they should have highlighted how little typical artists get rather than the example that’s 100-1000X what most people earn in a day.

Yeah but after splitting up the money between various parties, it's what maybe a Toyota camry each? Nothing right?

I finished paying off my toyota camry a couple years ago. It took 5 freaking years.

You guys are missing the point. It might be the all-time highest payout from Spotify. Because of Spotify, many many people will not buy the song. So what once would have been millions of dollars in revenue is much less, and the entire music industry is splitting a rapidly shrinking pie. Yea the very very top will still make enough money to live in big houses and drive big cars, but the middling people can't live off their take. So in order to make it you have to become an international sensation.

You're absolutely right. There's no way a regular, middling-fame performer can live off of revenue like this alone.

Perhaps it might be worth considering that this signals a model that could be re-thought to the benefit of the artist?

Most people who want to already bought the song. Then they can play their CD forever without paying another cent.

It's a pretty hefty sum for a 3-min song.

I don't know about profesional musician, but in the university we have a small YouTube channel about math exercises for the students.

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.

I can write programming script that took me 3-min to write, but creates $90k worth of business value. What's your point?

I agree. if it were a bank exec I'd bet they would be going on about income inequality

Reply on news.ycombinator.com