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Comment by drchopchop | Hacker News Reader

No way. How can music simultaneously be "unknown, has few fans" but also benefit from "access to millions of potential listeners"? If they get millions of listens they aren't exactly unknown anymore.

One CD sold at a gig for $10 is equal to about 2,000 Spotify plays. A t-shirt sale is double that. A mid-level band can play to 200 people a night and do $1000 daily in merch, easy (and I've personally done it). Sure, if people discover the band via Spotify, that brings them to shows, so there is the discoverability aspect - but the compensation is not remotely comparable.

Spotify profits off of the market value of streaming music having dropped to practically nothing (due to practically infinite supply), and their pay rates are terrible as a result.

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You're forgetting all the expense of printing the CD's. It can be thousands of dollars, for a basic bi-fold paper cover. Selling CD's at $10 can, and often is, a loss.

"Mid-level" band playing to 200 people who don't know who they are, and might buy a few T-Shirts isn't making much either. Plus they have to quit their jobs and travel, or settle for local shows once a month (or right now, zero shows for practically the entire year). The bar or "house" might pay the band $250 for the show, split 4 or 5 ways... plus deduct any overpriced alcohol and food the band consumed. They often walk away with barely enough money to put into the gas tank.

Heck, most of the professional, full-time "mid-level" bands can hardly afford their practice space monthly rent.

Very, very few "Mid-level" bands make money. It's a passion project. Very few get lucky enough to make it to the next level and tour with some known bands.

"One CD sold at a gig for $10 is equal to about 2,000 Spotify plays"

Assuming the album is 10 songs, am I then right in thinking that once I've listened to an album over 200 times (2000 individual song-plays) then the artist would have been better off if I'd used spotify rather than buying the cd?

200 plays over a few decades of album ownership sounds like a pretty low threshold for cds to be better for artists than spotify. Perversely, it looks as though the only artists who will have done better from me buying their album are ones I grew tired of quickly (though my reselling the album could mitigate that).

On the other hand I think it's more common to send a friend a link to a music streaming service for them to listen to a single track than it is to send an amazon link for them to order the CD. Streaming lets you capture revenue from people who may end up not liking your song(s), doesn't it?

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