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Comment by BosunoB | Hacker News Reader

This might be true if Spotify's monetization was distributed fairly, but instead it's basically redistributive to the biggest players. In short, instead of splitting a person's premium payment equally among all the artists they listened to, it's split among all artists on the platform. E.g. if Lady Gaga is 2% of all Spotify plays in a month, they get 2% of the money, even if you personally didn't listen to Lady Gaga at all.

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Does this really work out differently?

It probably gets complicated w/ ads vs premium subs, but if I was 1 subscriber and there were 100 total subs, and I listened exclusively to 1 artist, but 99 other people listened to a different artist... the artist I listened to gets the same amount if they get 100% of my fee or 1% of the total fees, right?

I guess users with idle subscriptions is another edge case here.

I wonder how that is influenced by demographics, i.e. if the people who are on a family plan or a free plan are more likely to listen to certain artists and less likely to listen to others.

It’s actually even MORE weighted in favor of major label artists like Lady Gaga, thanks to special deals between the big majors and Spotify. My numbers aren’t exact here, but this is the principle of the deal - let’s say Lady Gaga gets 2% of streams and random indie artist gets 2% of streams - because of the deals, Lady Gaga’s music gets paid out 2.5% of the pot and the indie gets 1.5% of it.

If a rando artist suddenly gets as many streams as Gaga, then Spotify might make that deal with the "random indie artist".

But let's be real - majority of people go to Spotify BECAUSE there is Gaga, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Adelle, The Weekend, Shawn Mendes, etc... If you take those names out of the pot - Spotify turns into crappier Soundcloud.

These indie artists literally cottail on the big names.

As it should be. In aggregate it makes total sense. The distillation to a single user's streams is a distraction from the critique having no merit.

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