Justice at Spotify
unionofmusicians.org
unionofmusicians.org
This seems like it would roughly double Spotify's costs: https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/apps/how-much-...
And Spotify is already paying out 75% of it's revenue to royalty holders: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-pr...
So unless you believe that Spotify is bad at business and there's an extra ~75% of revenue Spotify could pull out of a hat, this is basically impossible to satisfy without cratering the total revenue by doubling prices, which is probably not in artist's interests.
[1] https://www.bumastemra.nl/en/everything-for-music-users/type...
In Greece there was the notorious AEPI [1] that was collecting fees from both stores, as well as subscriptions from artists so they can "represent" them. They were demanding fees even when a store owner was listening privately in their shop (e.g. they had a radio behind the counter). They were dismantled after a corruption scandal: most of the collected money ended up as exorbitant salaries for the board of directors, with the artists again receiving pennies.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170128110611/http://www.aepi.g...
Depending on how much leverage Spotify actually has here, they can of course try to change the existing agreements they have. Nothing in impossible and harder things have changed before.
I wish I could be told what the ethical price for something is and I might actually pay it.
And if that price is too high, then maybe that service shouldn't exist in the first place.
The music industry also seems a bit like a "winner takes all" market where there are a bunch of top grossing artists which make an insane amount of money and a much, much larger part which can't make a decent living out of it.
Not to go laser-eyes Marx, but this is definitely not unique to the music industry either
AFAIK while you need a distributor and can't just upload your stuff like you can on Youtube, there's a bunch of them that seem to give the artists everything.
If the artist choose to go with a label that takes their royalties, that's on them. If they do it because they want the visibility and services, that has a cost.
Music is a field where a lot of people do it just for fun, and it's quite saturated. Supply (as in diversity of products) way outweigh demand.
I make music, I own all rights, I upload to streaming service, I should get all cut from streaming service. What does said agent do?
They are not dumb decisions. An indie artist HAS to sign with labels if they want to make it in the industry. That's the way it's been and we've accepted for decades that that's the way it will be.
Mistreating workers is not okay. Workers joining the status quo to make a living is not dumb. Calling them "dumb" online is deplorable, however.
They do have a choice: they can get a better paying job if they don't like the amount they can earn from music. Society should not be responsible for funding someone's passion when there isn't demand.
And yes, the expectation that you can earn a good living just by being a recording artist is foolish. The vast majority of musicians throughout history have been unable to do so.
Get a better paying job is very easy in this business. The lowest of the low would be better paying.
Also, "if you're abused it's your own fault for being dumb" is usually a take you want to be pretty careful with.
In general, price competitiveness on the market is based on some form of workforce exploitation.
I know it's not a zero sum game and so on, but someone is paying the difference on the discounted price you are offered.
Bandcamp usually takes a ~20% cut, but now has regular events where they waive their cut.[1]
It should be clear that $10/mo is not a sustainable price to pay to listen to any and all music ever recorded.
[0]https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-artists-e...
Realize that the royalty holders are not the musicians, but typically the major labels. The musicians get virtually nothing.
The music industry lawyers were incredibly smart when they passed the DMCA back before online music was much at all, and got internet streaming defined as mechanical reproduction so they got dealt in on streaming.
ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, et al, which give large blanket licenses to cover most copyrights for songs charged well known quantity for licenses, and early music streaming services paid those. Harry Fox (at least at the time) was the clearing house for mechanical rights and there was actually no set rate or anything. DMCA created a compulsory license that Harry FOx would have to give, but the rates were not known at the time, so everyone was getting VC funding without knowing what anything would cost.
That rate is probably much higher than the songwriting royalties, so the music industry has succeeding in getting ahold of most of the money in a new format that was poised to benefit the artists directly.
I guess we should just be glad it didn't happen like video streaming and there are actually rights clearing houses so companies like Spotify and others can make compelling streaming services with very large catalogs, unlike the city-state video steaming where you need 3-4 services combined to get access to most of the mainstream stuff.
[1] https://soundcharts.com/blog/how-the-music-publishing-works
This is not correct. Mechanical royalties have always belonged to the songwriter. A record label pays mechanicals to a songwriter's publishing company who then passes it on to the songwriter. When a record label sells a record that contains a song an artist owns the copyright to the record label must pay that songwriter a mechanical royalty. When that songs is played on the radio at least in the US the songwriter gets a performance royalty. The songwriter gets paid a royalty in both cases. The label as a mechanical license holder is obligated to pay out a mechanical royalty.
https://www.bmi.com/news/entry/Understanding_Mechanical_Roya...
They sign shitty contracts that leave them with "virtually nothing" and then complain to someone who is not responsible for them having "virtually nothing".
Do you know any musicians? Like, real musicians, for whom music is their life and their life's work, not dabblers?
Typically these are not shrewd business types. They don't hold a lot of negotiating power; if they're lucky enough to get a chance with a label deal they often don't push back on the terms very much at all. Labels are notoriously predatory in this regard, particularly mainstream large companies.
All they want is a fair shake. They see themselves and their fellow artists being screwed continually, while people that have nothing to do with their hard work, long nights, and passionate effort make money off their backs. For every artist that learns, there are ten more willing to take their place just for a tiny sliver of a chance at popularity.
The solution here is to do whatever we want to continue the slow work towards destroying mainstream labels. Indie labels still offer a reasonable value proposition in terms of the promotion and recording work they do in exchange for a share of the proceeds; mainstream labels don't. Like most media industries, they're headed by parenthetical elites, cosmopolitan types who have no loyalty to anything but profit, and will squeeze out every drop no matter the impact to the actual working artists.
Fuck 'em. Don't listen to mainstream music. Support indie artists and labels; buy direct wherever possible. If anything, the protest should be to make it trivial to directly host your music with Spotify for a nominal hosting fee, so that all revenue can go direct to the artist, rather than having to go through a 3rd party service.
I guess that's what you have to do when you're powerless. Record labels force you into shitty contracts. They have the power. Who has power over the record labels? Spotify.
What power does Spotify have over record labels?
[0] https://mashable.com/article/major-music-labels-19-million-p...
According to the statistics I have, Spotify has 34% market share while Apple Music has 21%, Amazon Music has 15% and others have 30%. That's hardly "no competitors".
They have the biggest share currently, but they're never safe.
If a user pays $10/mo and listens to nothing but indie streams, those indies are getting far less than $7.50 (more like pennies) due to the way they calculate their payouts. The major labels pocket the majority of that money.
Spotify have the ability to change this, but not the will to do so, because the major labels own a stake in them. Soundcloud recently launched a payment model that matches pretty much exactly what indies are asking Spotify to do, so we know it's possible but Spotify have been stonewalling indies about how it's too complicated for years.
Best case scenario: indies will get enough pennies so they stop complaining, big labels will continue as today, Spotify will allocate some of its own money to music creation...
and the problem will remain unfixed at the roots.
remember who forced Spotify and others before it, to negotiate a deal at all cost with the Majors or be declared illegal?
On the plus side, services like Soundcloud and Deezer are adopting the payment scheme that is the solution to this, which opens a potentially more promising avenue through which to pursue the issue ("if they can do it, why can't you?").
Steve Albini does a good job of breaking it down here: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music.
FTFA:
> For the average band, a $250,000 advance (in 1993 dollars) is distributed like this:
> Record company: $710,000
> Producer: $90,000
> Manager: $51,000
> Studio: $52,500
> Previous label: $50,000
> Agent: $7,500
> Lawyer: $12,000
> Band member net income each: $4,031.25
I don't know if it makes nearly as much sense in a world where you can just upload your music to YouTube and do direct marketing via Twitter/FB/TikTok.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/943818966/bob-dylan-sells-son...
Independent artists don't like this.
Since spotify already pay out the vast majority of their revenue, there is not really much more room for increase there, at best 5-10% which likely wouldn't settle the case.
Reasonable suggestions would be that either: 1. labels should get less, 2. top artists should get less or 3. consumers should pay more.
Or am I missing something?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/653926/music-streaming-s...
I'd argue that all music-streaming services have very little pricing power!
Streaming services rely on being an easier/friction-free option as opposed to piracy (or alternatively, buying the copies directly from the musicians).
Your point is still valid though, the competition is still fierce; Amazon, Tidal, Apple.. etc.
For years there's been a conflict broadly defined as "streaming rates paid to artists are irrationally low" vs. "streaming services aren't making money as it is"; the problem is that those aren't mutually exclusive positions. They can both be true at the same time.
At least to me, this suggests that the real problem is that $8–10 a month for ad-free streams was too low a price point to set. If Spotify's pricing structure had been something more like Hulu's -- no free tier at all, $6/month with ads and $12/month without -- they'd have easily been able to meet that penny-per-stream pay rate. (Tidal beats that pay rate, but I suspect that's by virtue of charging $20/month for "hi-fi" streams.) But, at this point they've set consumer expectations: streaming music services cost $10 per month. Changing that would be pretty difficult.
Which sounds a bit weird to me. How many people used to spend more than $10 every month on LP or CD records. Probably many enthusiasts, but the average customer? Not a chance.
Yet artists say they get paid a lot less. The money must go somewhere.
I don't have any stats for this, but my first guess would be way more paid artists (before the internet, how many people could even hope to make money off music? Physical distribution vs digital distribution is a huge barrier).
When I buy a CD, I have a physical good that is displayed on my shelf and it's going to stay with me for years, and which I can possibly re-sell.
$10 for Spotify gives me a month of listening to music. But after that is over, all I got is another $10 payment for the next month.
With 282 million citizens at the time, that means every US citizen spent $3.95/month on CDs. Adjusted for inflation it's $7.56.
I think that with a 50% profit margin, Spotify should be very happy. Of course, it's not that easy / straightforward, all conditions and caveats apply, etc etc.
[1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/ [2]: https://www.music-jobs.com/uk/article/news/news-pop-songs-ar...
https://soundcharts.com/blog/radio-royalties
I couldn't actually find out what was paid, but it did look to be that, artists weren't really paid. It was song writers and publishers who were paid. Performing artists, however, only generated word of mouth which generated ticket sales - so far as I could garner.
Their revenue per subscriber is also substantively lower - including free users, discounted EDU users, and family memberships. Excluding free users, it's probably ~$5 per user.
That being said, Apple Music pays .75p/stream, Tidal is 1.25p/stream. They can probably figure it out.
If they don't decide that, then of course, maybe you just can't make a living selling music through Spotify.
You could probably make a living as a musician in other ways, though.
Youtube for music is simply worse than pirating and being caught.
I certainly play more music now than when I had to change the tape, but without the ritual and the intent, I listen a lot less. This changes my value from streaming over simply not having to store my music library locally.
It doesn't cost an artist more to be played more, but it does cost the streaming service. This may bring more casual listening and help some artists, and "underpay" someone who's more famous and would get the bulk of the first-song play that comes from intent. I don't think it's "wrong" but it may be the wrong fit for any given artist.
> Their revenue per subscriber is also substantively lower - including free users, discounted EDU users, and family memberships. Excluding free users, it's probably ~$5 per user.
> That being said, Apple Music pays .75p/stream, Tidal is 1.25p/stream. They can probably figure it out.
Their rates are per country, they differ. So these calculations gave to it into account, but everyone pays the 5 or whatever it costs now in the west.
These listens are often passive and should not be considered as valuable as those of someone listens only a few hours a month, but spends all of that time listening to specific artists (indie or otherwise).
Basically the argument is that if I spend $9.99 on a Spotify sub, the entirety of that cash (minus Spotify's cut) should be directed to the actual artists I listened to.
Here's an articulation of this perspective from 2014: https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-to-make-streaming-royalties-...
Soundcloud has already gone in the direction of paying out based on what you actually listen to, and it would be great to see Spotify and other platforms follow suit. See http://fanpoweredroyalties.com/ for more details on Soundcloud's implementation.
It seems more fair to me that artists would get a set amount of money per stream, rather than the amount they get being dependent on how many other songs their listeners listened to.
The 700 hour listener has no audience and no human curation, and yet it's got 10x the influence on who gets paid by Spotify.
The article I linked also makes a really good point about this model motivating artists to encourage listeners/fans to listen to whole albums rather than single songs— right now if you're playing Spotify for revenue, the only thing that matters is landing your songs on popular playlists where they will get hundreds of thousands of passive plays. The incentives there are not really aligned to what anyone wants long term out of music.
In fact, having a different fee per play dependent on the user is a pretty opaque and unclear metric. “How much are 1 million plays worth? It depends on your audience - if your listeners listen to lots of music you get paid less per play, and you will just have to trust us to compute an appropriate fee for you correctly.”
No matter how you cut these things there are pluses and minuses . You seem to think that Universal should get paid less for a single Katy Perry stream played from a global playlist compared to a small indie song streamed in a private playlist, and while that’s a valid opinion it’s not intrinsic or even self evident to me.
The reason this is good for artists is that it rewards them for what many want to be cultivating anyway: a relationship with enthusiastic fans, rather than faceless "plays" which could have come from anywhere.
In any case, obviously the conversation is DOA if you start it from a foundational assumption that "a play is a play", but if we acknowledge upfront that artist compensation has always been weird and often quite unfair (see radio royalties, for example— they sure as hell aren't getting compensated by how many people were tuned into a radio station playing their song), then there's room to discuss better options in a new medium that sits somewhere in between the old roles filled by FM radio and private collections of physical media.
That's not my foundational assumption, but I've also not heard a compelling argument that one play / minute streamed should be inherently more valuable than another play / minute streamed.
It's also not clear how this value would be calculated, because I also don't think it's clear that proportion of listen time by user necessarily captures the difference in 'value' of one play against another.
It also feels like it will be very complex to negotiate with rights providers. Spotify's current negotiations with rights providers are really simple and easy to understand - we divvy up our revenue by play count, you are responsible for $x revenue by this metric, so let's negotiate the %. Moving all providers to another weird metric would be an extremely tough thing to do, particularly because having half on one and half on another would likely happen for a crossover, and would result in a loss of profit during the transition period.
The obvious player to offer this competing service is Bandcamp. They haven't yet, though an awful lot of the pieces are in place— they have a mobile app that lets you trivially stream anything you've ever purchased and listen on trial to things you haven't, and it even has genre playlists and recommendations:
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/19/903547253/a-tale-of-two-ecosy...
It's a bit of a catch 22 - these platforms are now where people discover new bands, so if you are not on them people don't discover you so can't buy your album, and if you are on them then people can listen to your album without paying.
Unfortunately I think the truth is that in the future bands will have to think of slightly different monetisation strategies - maybe a mix of subscriber content (see Pomplamoose Patreon as the creators of this concept), fan engagement, merchandise, shows, premium albums that aren't on streaming platforms e.t.c. rather than pulling from Spotify & Apple Music entirely.
Here's a compelling irrefutable argument.
Let's start the discussion from a couple of scenarios. These scenarios are not the definitive and complete set of use-cases, but are enough to prove a point.
Scenario 1: User manually searches for a song and clicks play. Again the following day. Again and again for a couple of weeks/months. The user forgets about the song after that period.
Scenario 2: User creates a playlist and clicks play. Then uses that same playlist again, and again and again for years. Alterantive scenario: users searches for a published album/compilation and plays that playlist again and again for years.
Scenario 3: Streaming service generates a new generic infinite playlist every day, based on a biased algorithm that upvotes some artists and downvotes some other artists. E.g. Playlist called - Discover Daily/Weekly.
Scenario 4. Streaming service generates a new generic infinite playlist every day, but personalized to the users taste and interests, again based on a biased algorithm that upvotes some artists and downvotes some other artists. E.g. Playlist called - Recommended for you today.
Scenario 5. User hits random play and a truly random algorithm decides what will be played next, no matter of musical style, language, culture or any other aspect. Truly random, no biases whatsoever.
So I will argue why not all streams are equal or should not be treated equal.
The difference is the specificity of intent. Whether the user wished to listen to some specific song, or if the user was force-fed some song. For the initial discussion I am assuming force-feeding, later I will discuss alternative scenarios (clicking skip).
In scenario 1 and 2 there is intent from the user what should be streamed, and this means that the user is interested in the music to be streamed. It can not be refuted that the authors of that specific song should be paid for the stream.
In scenario 3 and 4, the user just wishes to have something making noise, not anything specific, but not random. This is fine, if the user is satisfied, but the problem is all algorithms have biases. If the algorithm favors the most popular authors, and the user could be satisfied with anything in the same style and tempo without preferences, than the streaming service is not fair to the authors who are less popular and never gives them a standing chance to compete. This creates a boosting effect so that the most popular become force-fed to the audience involuntarily and they become even more popular. This is a well-known side-effect in all platforms that use popularity as ranking or rating metric. So here, not all streams can be considered equal, since some had higher probability to be present in the playlist due to inherent algorithm biases.
Scenario 5 is the only scenario where the user is force-fed music, but in a manner that is irrefutably unbiased and irrefutably fair to all authors and songs. In such a scenario all get a chance and all such streams are equal. Unfortunately, users that would prefer such a scenario do not exist. Nobody would endure the torture of a truly random playlist for more than 3 songs.
So we have use cases where the users know what they want, and use-cases where the users don't know what they want, but know what they don't want and the streaming service tries to guess what it is that they want next, without truly knowing.
How do the streaming services know what a user does not want? By measuring the % of the stream that went through. If the user managed to suffer only <5 secs before clicking skip, then that stream should not be counted at all towards payment to the musician. If it was 60 secs than it's a different case. If the song went through entirely it's even better. If the user streamed the entire song, and was actively using the app during the whole time than it is an indicator that the user appreciates the song even more than if a passive encounter occurred.
So they try to guess what to play next. With a biased recommender algorithm that tries to recommend what would be a good fit to play next, and as I said the algorithm might favor some musicians over others.
This is a hard problem and is always discussed at research conferences, both by researchers from the streaming services, and by independent researchers. The topics of bias, randomness, satisfaction are always present. Some authors are even using personality traits to discover the type of music that should be streamed next, which is a very very deep breach in user privacy. I imagine that some services might consider eaves dropping on their customers to evaluate if there is true interest and appreciation of the served content - whether the customer is eating, dancing, smiling, chatting, ..., having sex, during the stream. To gather as much data as possible on what is the context, to offer a better aligned next song (if you are a paying customer) of better aligned ads (if you are a non-paying customer).
This is why all streams must not be treated equal, and the streaming services must find a way to be as fair as possible towards musicians (having in mind that no-one likes a random playlist).
As this is a hard problem, I suspect that more and more services will divert their research towards automatically generated music, so nobody will care if the algorigths are fair and if the authors are paid. Music is most susceptible to this, as it is easy to generate music that sounds good enough to a fairly large audience without realizing it is all auto-generated.
Advertisers pay for a radio and tv service, not users, right?
As an aside, I also disagree with "In scenario 3 and 4, the user just wishes to have something making noise, not anything specific, but not random". I don't just want something making noise, I want something making the kind of noise that I like to listen to, which includes a mix of old songs/artists and new ones I've never heard before.
That argument isn't irrefutable at all - let's break it down.
> Scenario 1 & 2 it can't be refuted that artists should be paid for the stream.
Agreed.
> [Scenario 3 & 4] So here, not all streams can be considered equal, since some had higher probability to be present in the playlist due to inherent algorithm biases.
Disagree on the implication here - I don't see why it irrefutably follows that an artist should be paid less for these listens just because its in an automatic playlist (assigned because it matches the same profile as a record I previously liked). What you have here is an opinion, not an irrefutable argument.
My personal opinion is that if you have a streaming service, a minute paid for a minute listened is about as fair as a metric you can get.
Why are my listens, which are mainly from automatic playlists based on my historical listening, less valuable than someone else's listens, just because they listen to cool obscure bands not on the playlists?
The nice thing about the proposal from the article is that in theory it should be something where everyone's incentives are aligned, since it rewards artists and genres for having fans who listen to their stuff a lot.
Good point. That's the sort of thing that warms the cockles of my artist-supporting heart.
I'm pretty sure that Netflix understands this, by the way— they know that deep-pocketed competitors like Amazon are going to eat their lunch if they try to do mass-appeal prestige shows starring A-list celebs, so they only do a few of those (enough to basically fill the homepage), while leaning hard into extremely niche content. Like, have you seen how many weird cooking shows there are on there? Or Hallmark Christmas movies? This is stuff that's harder to find elsewhere, and there are dedicated audiences on Netflix who are mostly or exclusively consuming it. If Netflix's internal accounting worked like how Spotify pays royalties, those shows would be instantly canceled in favour of new primetime-style sitcoms.
But they aren't, and I think it's because there are pools of their subscribers who will cancel the service if there isn't a steady stream of the specific content they're interested in. Thus, their subscriber $$$ go directly to funding that content, rather than into a general pot that's broken up by raw viewership numbers.
Some have pointed to logistical challenges in the latter model, but it's clearly not impossible, as SoundCloud just announced it will be the first service to adopt it: https://press.soundcloud.com/197001-soundcloud-introduces-fa...
The fact that individuals aren't able to break out via self-publishing music is an oddity in the internet age. Why aren't there more avenues to hear "random new artist that matches my tastes"? or is it self-perpetuating that labels sign all successful artists who can go mainstream?
Isn't that just "radio"?
Because Bandcamp is perfect at this and nobody can beat them.
I say that with tongue in cheek, but they have been the platform for average musicians to self-publish on for a while. They've even totally foregone their cut periodically during the pandemic to help artists. And unlike Spotify, artists are able to apply their own branding to their pages. I've never met a musician with a bad thing to say about them or their platform.
One reason is due to flat rate bundled compulsory licensing. If you run a coffee shop with live music you either restrict all performers to only play original works and still probably get threatened with lawsuits, or you pay up the ASCAP/BMI/SESAC protection money and can play whatever.
So in many contexts weirdo obscure independent artists can't compete on price (e.g. give their music away just to get it heard) because the customer has already paid for a bundled rate for popular music.
Let's say that Spotify says No. Spotify's argument is, in effect, all artists are sharing a piece of the same pie; if they give Taylor Swift a higher than average rate, it lowers the average payout for every other artist. By saying No, in this hypothetical universe, Spotify is standing up for indie artists.
Taylor (more accurately, her rights holders) does not put her music on Spotify. Customers who come to Spotify for Taylor Swift's music no longer feel that their subscription is worthwhile; they stop paying.
Now, the pie is smaller. Indie artists receive a bigger chunk of a smaller pie. Customers are left without the music they want. Spotify's revenue is lower. Everyone loses.
Its easy to place the blame at Spotify, and I'm sure they deserve some, but we've known for about half a century that the record industry is a hive of shit, and this is just another symptom of this. The disparity in income between the popular artists and average artists is huge, and its mostly because of gatekeeping that the popular artists actively engage in to protect their nine-figure fortunes. Spotify could have stood up for smaller artists, but I'm not convinced they'd even exist today if they had; it was really their willingness to work with the record industry that turned them into the force they are.
I do have some hope that Square's purchase of Tidal could be a catalyst for change in the industry. In other words, if they maintain Tidal's high(est) revenue share with artists, improve the user experience (a lot), leverage their existing industry relationships to keep enough popular artists on the platform, and work with indie artists... it could be very good. I'm optimistic. I think Tidal's core investors being artists themselves and a traditionally low-margin payment processor is actually very healthy, versus Spotify who effectively is just a middle-man that needs to extract enough to survive.
I think the real issue here is that people just don't want to pay as much for music like they did during the golden age of the CD. Most Spotify users are still on the free tier. Blaming streaming companies isn't gonna change that.
Faced with that reality, it would be interesting to know what is actually going on. Is total dollars spent on music not reflective of what artists used to make? Are there just that many more musicians than there used to be? Was it way harder to make a living making music in years past than we're giving it credit for? Are artifacts of pay-per-listen rather than pay-per-song causing a different payout distribution impacting the majority of musicians (e.g., you used to have to buy a CD to listen to a song just once)?
Because before people would record songs from the radio on tape and listen to those. They would buy used CDs, pirate. Radio would stream the song, but you didn't know exactly how many people were listening.
I used to spend $0 on music. Now I have spotify duo for me and my wife. I also started buying vinyl records, but my bet is that the artists makes way less money from my vinyl collection than from my Spotify account
"Royalty holders" is not even an actual term. Copyright holders are the owners of master recording - often a record company. Streaming services license entire catalogs for a fixed price for a fixed period of time. Streaming service don't pay record labels royalties. Royalties of which there are two in the context of streaming are a) performance royalty and b) a mechanical royalty both of which are paid out to the publisher and songwriter.
>"So unless you believe that Spotify is bad at business and there's an extra ~75% of revenue Spotify could pull out of a hat, this is basically impossible to satisfy without cratering the total revenue by doubling prices, which is probably not in artist's interests."
The whole argument that the current predominant streaming model is the only viable business model is flawed. This seems to presume that the "pro-rata" distribution model that Spotify uses is the only distribution model. There is an alternative model that many artists are pushing for which is a the "user centric' distribution model. In that model the calculation of payments is based on the listening habits of each individual user. A simplified examples is that I only listen to one artist in a given month. In the user centric model the entire 10% of record labels 70% usually allocated to the artist cut is paid to that artist rather than those streams being calculated as percentage of all songs streamed from that one of the big 3's record label's massive catalogs.
Then they should push for that specifically, but it would not change the average rate paid per stream, but rebalance payments away from artists which are listened to by heavy music users towards artists which are listened to light music users.
Currently, a heavy user (i.e. above average) controls the distribution of more money to artists than a below average user since they control the amount of money in proportion to how they stream.
A user-centric model that splits the revenue from a user means that those who listen to more music will generate less revenue to each artist per stream, and those that listen to less music will generate more revenue per stream.
An above average user that listens only to the same artist provides more money to artists now than in a user-centric revenue model.
Source: Been there, seen it, a long time. Spotify needs to be nothing more than a functioning music utility. Instead their US offices are structured like a massive, bloated, 90's style agency party zone.
Trust me.
There is room to cut costs.
Hypothetically, my profit margin making widgets would be better if I could just pay my raw material provider half-price. I could pay them half-price, add, say, another one-third of that to cover other costs and overhead, and probably dominate the market since I could charge less for my widgets than any competitors who have to pay the full raw material costs.
Again, bad at business? Depends on who you're asking.
Why aren't these people targeting those labels?
Why aren't these people targeting others like Apple?
Or they want Spotify to operate as a Non-Profit because Apple is currently making Apple Music a Net Zero Profit business? ( Diluting there services revenue margin )
Being a full time professional musician has only been a means to wealth for a handful of people through history. Most professional musicians, even successful ones, are unable to earn their lifetime expenses from their profession: they make some good money if they have a hit and then fade away and have to get another job. Or they have capitalize on their brand externally to the music market. Has there been any time period in the past several centuries when the average musician earned a living wage?
The goal of a million full-time professional musicians seems arbitrary and I'm not sure why it is necessarily desirable.
Music is a passion, so people are willing to spend time making music below market labor rates. With modern digital reproduction and ease of recording, demand will never exceed supply. I believe the cost of music can and should asymptotically approach zero over time as an ever-growing public domain becomes good enough for most uses.
Their other options are not so good either. Musicians can build a Spotify clone that's more favorable to artists. Nominally, this sounds like Tidal. The problem with Tidal is that nobody wants to spend that much money on a subscription. Even with the high profile artist exclusives it has less than 5% market share. Beyond the business model, building a Spotify clone is difficult to execute, especially for musicians and not software folks.
You can somehow lobby to outlaw streaming and go back to selling songs and albums individually. This would definitely hurt Spotify but probably doesn't help musicians too much. Potentially the top 1% of musicians are better off as they're able to capture more value but the long tail is way worse as nobody discovers their music anymore.
An interesting solution might be collective action. If enough musicians banded together and pulled their catalogs from Spotify, I could see that having a big negative impact on Spotify's revenue. There are a few bands that if their catalogs were off Spotify, I'd probably cancel. This would be effective but is probably too difficult to coordinate.
Overall, the problem for musicians is one of economics. Too many people willing to make music, not enough willing to pay. In other words, you can't push a rope. If you are a musician, my strong advice to you is to get comfortable with doing it for a reason other than money. Otherwise, you're in for inevitable disappointment.
And as a consumer of music, I am very happy to be paying $14.99 a month for access to a collection that would have been virtually impossible for an individual to assemble 20 years ago. Music has been opened up to people in a way that did not exist before Spotify. Also, a good deal of the music I listen to is stuff I had already bought on CD or vinyl years before, so those artists are getting paid twice for me listening now.
Bottom line is it's always been hard to break through into making money from music. Nothing has changed except the way it's distributed.
I think independent video game dev is good for people who want to write the game anyways, and want to monetize to allow them to keep working on it. But, it is very unlikely to make you significant wealth.
https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/ https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d/index.html
Exactly. And we have finite amount of time and attention. Just like the head of Premiere League in UK said E-Sport ( Gaming ) and other entertainment like Netflix are their competitors. And we have less time for music. It is not only an abundance of music, but also in other entertainment.
K-POP essentially made their music and MV for free on YouTube. While making money on tours, merchandise, and show appearance.
I sympathies for them. But their problem has nothing to do with Spotify at all.
Creative works are a very strange market, because they don't fit any semblance of a demand curve. For instance, there's no such thing as a song that's slightly cheaper than a Taylor Swift hit, with slightly higher sales. You can't compete with Taylor Swift on a price/demand curve. Also, you can't compete with free.
There's still a bit of a demand curve for live music. For instance you can pay less to hear my band than to hear Taylor Swift. This may actually be why playing live is still a better economic deal for most rank-and-file musicians. It's one reason why I'm presently un-recorded. I have no need to know how much my music is loved by people who think I don't deserve to get paid.
Thank You. I need to copy this down in my book.
Let's imagine a radio station. Something medium sized, about a million listeners. They play a track. Are they paying 10,000 per play, which would be the equivalent rate? I suspect not.
I understand the need to get paid more, but I am not sure killing Spotify is the solution.
If Spotify doesn't compromise, killing it would be the only solution, but this union doesn't have the power to do that initially. But this will never work because you have a infinite stream of new musicians wanting to be listen without receiving money for that.
New musicians want their work out there....without Spotify(or similar) it will be back to just blasting out your music for free online everywhere so you can get bug.
Spotify at least gives them some revenue while they increase their fandom.
For a moment in time, piracy of movies and series was at a low point. Recently, with the fragmentation of all the different streaming services it's rising again.
They just simply ”want more”, and who wouldn’t, but free market and supply/demand disagrees with them. If artists don’t like Spotify’s offering they can pull their music out of the service.
Just kinda how the market is setup. I don't think it is unsustainable for artists.
I fucking hate "exposure", but that is literally what radio/streaming is is.
It is never a substantial revenue stream until you hit big.
And with today's tech, radio had to become streaming.
Paying a penny per stream is highly unsustainable for everyone.
What would you suggest to fix it?
I think the system is pretty decent all things considered. Now, Spotify could definitely be better at hyping and pushing new music/low creators....but other than that I don't think they're the enemy here.
The difference is that every artist has a choice if his music lands on Spotify or not - and if he accepts the conditions offered. The main problem of many of these artists is that they signed bad distribution deals with their labels and are giving away a big chunk % of streaming revenues. That isn't Spotifys fault.
Also, according to Spotifys latest financial statement, they are expecting a $200-300m operating loss for 2021, so i find it hard to argue that Spotify is being "too greedy" when they aren't even profitable.
There seems to be some idea of what musicians "should" make that other professions don't benefit from. I would like to make the same money from making furniture as I do from writing code, but I can't. I could blame the furniture stores for not promoting me or taking too big a cut or any number of other factors, or I could accept the fact that I'm not an amazing woodworker. But I still make my art/craft because I enjoy it and it's important to me.
There are plenty of ways for musicians to make a living, but I don't see a problem with the fact that spending a month or two a year recording an album is a privilege available to only the most talented subset of them.
not only could you but you should. Of course workers over the last few decades have internalised the mindset that they cannot use their power to bargain and that whatever they get is fair and they should just shut up, which is why we tolerate corporate middlemen eating our lunch.
I don't know if a penny per song is realistic or whatever, but going up against Spotify and record labels and trying to negotiate as much compensation for artists as possible collectively is exactly what they ought to do. Also, on the other end, as consumers we need to stop whining when we have to pay twenty bucks instead of ten bucks per month to compensate artists who we spend listening hours to every single week.
It's also absolutely ridiculous that you champion those who want to make more money while also saying that everyone on the other end who wants to spend less should "stop whining".
It's long overdue that we move away from this sleazy consumer mindset and start valuing creators.
Not really. We are just being paid enough so that we do not leave for somewhere else.
The ones who really benefit are the shareholders.
Coincidentally, the same people who didn't do any of the work.
This is how capitalism works though. There's no way Spotify can be expected to fundamentally change the economic system they exist in. Reversing that is heading into the realm of revolution.
Yes, I'm a highly paid software engineer. The people who created the company I work for are, however, far better paid.
There's nothing stopping me from quitting and building my own business and selling the software I produce. I have the funds to seed my own startup, so that's not even an issue. That's a shitload of work though, even if I hire people to handle the individual parts. Very quickly I'll be spending more time running a business, finding customers, marketing, dealing with legal crap, etc, than I will producing software. I can also produce software, stick it on github and hope for the best, but there's countless people who do that for shits and giggles (and for free).
Distribution, logistic, and those "middlemen" actually do a lot of work to link the product with the customers. Sure, there's parasites in the middle, organizations that just take licenses and shifts them around without doing anything. You can absolutely make a case to cut those off. But the orgs/software that link products directly to customers who want said products generate tremendous value, and it's often a lot harder to do than produce the good in the first place.
But you know what I did last week? I didn't mope around at some job I hate complaining about "Big Furniture". I made a bookcase. I also wrote a bunch of software. I can call myself a woodworker, I paid my mortgage, and IKEA sold thousands of Billy Bookcases. All is good.
Only for those who sign with them. So this brings the question as what's stopping these musicians to make music independently and market using internet along the way avoiding these labels. It is not even the case that music can be listened only via monopolistic mobile app stores.
I have used small independent service providers for tax filing, lawn mowing, cleaning and myriad other services by finding at internet. They are not backed by big corporate chains. Why music has to come from big labels.
I think generally the point of cartelization is to make it very challenging NOT to sign with them. Clearly many independent labels can thrive, and I can't imagine that it's impossible for an artist to start their own label. Nevertheless, when eg. sound and recording engineers can be aggressively poached by a major studio it's got to be challenging to go it alone.
Piracy set the price at 0, Spotify pulled the price up from there, but there is literally nothing stopping consumers today from paying more for music except that they don't want to.
I think you're missing my point. The opportunity to market direct to consumer does not negate the massive wage-setting power of a cartel which can buy up rivals, production talent, leverage radio, venue, and streaming contracts, etc.
Ex: wired.com/story/opinion-big-music-needs-to-be-broken-up-to-save-the-industry/
'''
Live Nation’s consolidation of the industry was rapid and aggressive, spending around $1 billion in just 18 months in the late 1990s buying independent concert promoters and venue owners. By 1999, when radio titan Clear Channel paid $4.4 billion for the company (then called SFX), it was the largest music venue owner and concert promoter. Antitrust enforcers took no action to stop the deal.
By 2005, Clear Channel had spun off its live music division into a new, standalone company: Live Nation, the country’s largest artists manager and concert promoter and second-largest venue owner. Today, Live Nation is once again part of a massive broadcasting and live music conglomerate that wields immense power.
Live Nation has since combined with the ticketing monopoly Ticketmaster, satellite radio monopolist SiriusXM, and online radio leader Pandora as part of media mega-conglomerate Liberty Media. Last year, Liberty Media was approved to take control of iHeartMedia, the largest radio station owner in the country; prior to 2014 iHeart was known as Clear Channel. The proverbial band was back together, antitrust concerns and all. Competition and consumer advocates stridently opposed every corporate tie-up along the way; my organization was part of a coalition that argued against the Liberty/iHeart deal last year. Antitrust enforcers permitted every one.
'''
Further down:
'''
The company’s power to steer business away from rivals is not theoretical. In late 2019 the Justice Department found that, for years, Live Nation had abused its monopoly by steering its artists and tours away from venues that refused to use Ticketmaster. The government could have sued for monopoly violations but instead simply amended the agreement it struck with the companies when they merged a decade ago.
'''
Actually, now that we're digital, the economies of scale of music are similar to software, in that they are massive (and Spotify is a key enabler of that).
> It seems weird to me that your pro-market ideology leads you to support what (to me) seems to be more or less wage-fixing for a labor supplier (musicians)
Musicians have been largely entrepreneurial for centuries. The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few. There is now far more opportunity for success and distribution without labels than there has been since they started.
Is this the case? It seems that there's the fundamental limitation of 10 musicians not being able to record a song in 1/10th of the time. Certainly there are SOME economies of scale, but it seems a little incredible that music would be as "factory producible" as something like a bookshelf or a car.
> The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few.
This seems incongruous with the rest of what you are saying. Yes clearly there is an entrepreneurial component of music, and absolutely eg. SoundCloud and BandCamp is enabling independent artists in new and important ways. That doesn't change the fact that massive financial institutions are rent-seeking the bejeezus out of the bulk of the industry in a way that (to me) would appear to hurt competition.
Any normal people, has a pay rate (minimum $0.77 USD/hr where I live). Someone goes to work, works for 8 hours, and gets their 8hr equivalent salary.
But then you have "artists" who work to produce their product for say 80 hours, and then they want to be perpetually paid... not only that, they want to be paid enough to live a lifestyle similar to the person that get's paid for 40 hours a week job, for 30 years.
The fact that slapping some ads on my music on youtube made me earn more than being on Spotify says everything about how bad that deal is for any artist...
Because of contracts the _artists_ signed, not the consumer.
Let's say people stream for 4 hours a day on average.
4 * 60 = 240 minutes
Let's say a song is 3 minutes.
240 / 3 = 80 streams == 80p/day
80p * 30 days per month = 2400p
2400p == £24
So that would be ~2.4x increase in price for end users without including Spotify cut or taxes.
Doesn't seem possible to me.
Spotify was an increase in artist revenues as prior to that most people were paying nothing for their music, be it bittorrent in the 00s, cd copying in the 90s, or recording radio to tape in the 80s.
Even if it's 2 hours a day it would still represent an increase in costs.
Another poster put it better: for $9.99 per month you would be able to pay for 999 streams, I am sure a typical user can easily exceed 999 streams in a month.
If the prices increased enough to offset a 1p/stream, I'd jump ship and buy used CDs again, since that would become more cost effective, even with buying a CD a month or so. There are cheaper substitutes to music listening, even if it would be less convenient to discover new music.
(All figures in million euros)
Revenue Cost of Revenue Profit
Premium : 7135 5126 2009
Free (ads): 745 739 6
Overall : 7880 5865 2015
For spotify free that would mean that they just have to include 2.63x more ads, this is doable but I'm sure it would hurt adoption and maybe people would move from the platform.
For spotify paid they could cut down their profit margin and pay 39% more per stream than they currently do (ignoring that they have more than 2B eur in other business expenses currently). But even after that they would still have to raise their prices by a multiple of 1.91.
This would mean they would have to charge about $19.10 a month to not loose money on licencing in the US market.
This assumes, like the post two levels above me, that Spotify don't need the profits for anything and just need to break even.
Isn't one of the strengths of the internet the fact that it's easier to scale and reach a wider audience, thus having more money in the end?
The unfortunate part is that the artists have basically no power when bargaining with the record labels.
In contrast, take the rapper Tom McDonald, his music actually hit the top 100 charts[1][2] and he's not signed to anyone. Just him and his girlfriend creating music. Was trending as the #1 download on iTunes for a couple weeks, etc.
Artists make a deal with the devil, make more money, then complain. Yet, with today's ability to distribute - it's not required.
I do think there should be an update to the spotify payout system, but Spotify doesn't have negotiating power; they need the record labels. With the record labels Spotify can get improved music, etc. Spotify is paying for the privilege that's why the smaller artists aren't making very much (the premium payments go to record labels).
I've seen a big rise in conservative rappers on YouTube. I've got a conspiracy theory that the GOP is funding them like a record label. If so, it's a sweet deal for artists. The GOP cares far more about cultural effects than they do the money from the music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUNuNilqrDQ
It's hard to find a reliable source here but there was right wing folk music being made to combat the threat of communism in the 60s.
However, the major point is that you don’t need the distribution.
Louis CK famously released a comedy special online with a download and just asked people to pay and not copy and share. He said he made more money off that than any other special he’d done.
Courtney Love realized this over 20 years ago: https://www.gerryhemingway.com/piracy.html
I think that they currently use a global split, which over-represents "users" like stores, gyms, etc.
https://cnm.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CNM_UCPS_SyntheseF...
Allocate peoples monthly membership in accordance to their listens.
If one month I listen to 100 streams of Bob Dylan and thats it, then he should get my entire $7.00 instead of just a few cents for my small amount of streams.
https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-...
https://cnm.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CNM_UCPS_SyntheseF...
Proof: Soundcloud is doing exactly this, so it's absolutely possible.
https://community.soundcloud.com/fanpoweredroyalties
This is all so they can keep major labels happy (several of whom own a stake in Spotify) because the labels don't want to lose the free money gravy train they're making on the backs of artists they don't even represent, and Spotify doesn't want to lose the majors.
> The research found that in the current system the top 0.4% of artists get around 10% of all revenue, but they would only get about 5.6% of revenue under a user-centric system
If I stream a record twice I cover my spotify premium fee (US is more expensive than Argentina or India, because people can pay more).
Copyrights create artificial scarcity, if you don't like it, just don't put your music on the platform, you have an effective monopoly.
Most music is not that valuable, prices used to be high due to cartelization of the publishers and because the media was difficult to produce (records, CDs).
Cassettes started changing that, and the internet completely destroyed it. There's no going back. If prices go up, piracy will too, and you'll likely end up making less money.
There is financial innovation that could happen to improve the outcomes for artists.
Many asset classes previously unavailable to the public (private reits, real estate syndications, art investing, wine investing) have been brought downmarket with crowdfunding.
There is green space for a music royalty fund that optimizes for artist benefit over profits and is available to the public.
1. I buy the CD release of music because I like to collect them, and the art is cool (I listen to folk metal and they usually do some cool stuff with album art and the front of the CD).
2. I rip them to FLACs and store them on my plex server
3. I stream them to my phone/etc.
So I'm really used to paying something like... {cost of cd} / {lifetime play count}. Which honestly is probably a lot higher than what a single stream of music earns the artists but a lot lower than 1c per play.
Just as an example, let's take Sonic Firestorm by Dragonforce. I probably started listening in 2007 or so. 14 years. I listened to the entire CD probably at least 3 times a week for the entirety of high school. So 4 years of high school times 52 weeks a year times 3 plays a week times 9 tracks per play is 5616. I'd guess I paid 12 bucks for the CD (it's 10 on amazon right now). So that's 0.00214 dollars per play. And that's just high school. Though admittedly that's one of my favorite albums, but I do think Alestorm and Ensiferum and several other bands are up in that play count too for my 4 years of college.
And I don't think many bands want to make the argument of "yeah but we're one of those bands you're gonna buy our CD for 12 bucks and listen to 3 times and then we end up in the back of your CD holder because every time you flip through you're like 'nah not really feeling them right now' for weeks on end".
So... I dunno. I'm all for paying artists more. But I would really prefer the way we do that is decrease the (massive) cut that goes to the labels and send more to the artists.
I've been buying my CDs on bandcamp as much as I can recently because as I understand it, bands capture a lot more of that sticker price that way. At least it seems like they do. I get CDs from residential addresses in Norway, anyway.
Maybe Drake's label demands a penny per stream for his new album or they pull it. And then somebody else who's on a tiny label gets 0.00000000001 cent per stream because that's all that's left.
They really need transparency, the labels will never be transparent so Spotify has to be. If nobody's transparent about these deals then there probably needs to be legislation.
That would be obvious anti-competitive behavior on the part of music labels if that's what's going on, and knowing them it probably is.
As for your actual question, no I don't think they are. They seem more like an advocacy or lobby group
Stealing from children to complain about theft.
365 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes = 525600 minutes 525600 / 3 minute song = 175200 streams 175200 pennies / 100 = $1752
So I could pay 120 bucks a year and make 1752! I like the sound of that! And with the family plan, I could pay 1.5x the cost a month but get 5x the revenue!
It doesn't matter if it can save you money in the long run. Remember, we're dealing with the masses here- the same lowest common denominator that caused A&W's 1/3lb hamburger to fail because people thought it was smaller than McDonald's 1/4lb hamburger.
If I record the sound of myself taking a crap and upload it to Spotify, do I deserve to get a perpetual minimum wage for being an artist?
the solution would be to remove all indie artists, and most of the rest too, and only keep the top 1% of pop/rock musicians.
I totally empathise with their demand for a cent per stream, but they could be asking for a share of revenue that doesn't exist. And if the median artist is making more now than they did before Napster, they could be asking for a cut of revenue that has never existed.
Here is a great source for learning more: http://copyx.org/lectures/
> Spotify generally pays between $. 003 and $. 005 per stream
Is Spotify making so much money that paying 3 orders of magnitude more money per stream is a realistic option?
That said, apparently most of Spotify's revenues already goes to pay artists, so it would not be achievable without significant increases in Spotify's fees. This would in turn reduce user numbers, leading to fewer streams, more users turning to piracy, etc.
> Spotify generally pays between $.003 and $.005 per stream
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-does-spotify-pay-pe...
> Spotify paid the artists $0,0032 per stream
https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts
It's also worth noting, we're not talking about the total amount payed per stream, we're talking about the amount that makes it specifically to the artists. From the article being discussed
> To pay the median American monthly rent ($1,078) an artist needs to generate 283,684 recurring streams monthly.
Those number directly align with 0.38c per stream going to the artists (283,684 * 0.0038 = 1078). And since everywhere else seems to indicate that somewhere around 3-5/100th of that amount actually goes to artists, I'm curious what the disconnect it.
This seems consistent with the 0.38c suggested in the www.unionofmusicians.org website. "$.003" = 0.3c, right?
Thank you for taking the time to make me go back and look at my numbers. My apologies for wasting _your_ time.
And frankly, I don't know what UMAW expects to get. Can really Spotify support the $0.01/stream without going out of business? Why are they making non-bilateral demands to Spotify (e.g. reveal business contracts)?
And who are UMAW anyway? From a quick check of their page, the only names I could find were the steering committee, and it took several tries to find members with >1 albums on Spotify. With that level of opaqueness, it's hard to see them convince the public to throw their support behind them. And what's with the sub-committee mania?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_News#EU_copyright_and_d...
Except when I listen to an album, I'm often listening to 15 "ads" (tracks) in a row so I'm not really seeing the equivalence. Especially when there are albums I listen to in their entirety multiple times a month.
At least I use Tidal, which may have its faults but has historically paid out the most to artists.
That means the added incremental value of a new unit of art/etc. will asymptote to zero.
This is one negative downside to the many upsides of digital technology.
Help small artists by listening more to their music.
"How do I find small artists on Spotify" you ask? That's what I did build https://tastemaker.cc/newcomers for.
It is a playlists showing you 6 new small (I call them newcomer) artists every day :D
I sincerely hope people take my question at face value, I am aware it's a big world.
I bet if Spotify adopted it, the publishers would still want a cut of that.
If I had to guess at what's going on here, I'd bet this is driven more by publishers than artists. Music publishers are becoming increasingly irrelevant as platforms like Spotify enable artists to distribute their work more directly at similar margins. Artists are probably just the poster child used to garner sympathy for the cause from the public.
Spotify has to deal with the record labels because they own the licensing rights, there isn't much Spotify can do about it themselves.
The only thing I could see Spotify doing is to become a label themselves, and giving a bigger slice of the piedirectly to artists under them. But that could also bring some consequences, like becoming Spotify-exclusives, etc.
There are a lot of comments saying Spotify can't raise prices - but Netflix has repeatedly raised prices successfully. I'm now paying them double what I originally did when I signed up.
Looking at my local pricing, the lowest plan (€7.99) is $2 cheaper than the single plan that was available when I signed up (€9.99), and the equivalent plan to what was available then is (€12.99). So that's a 33% increase in 5 years, which is much less dramatic than the 100%-200% increase spotify would need for the suggested payouts.
There's a lot of account sharing or rotating streaming service or plain old fashioned piracy (the "dodgy box", formerly a pirate satellite receiver and now usually a kodi box with a frontend to some pirate stream provider, has been more common in Ireland the last few years than since digital TV was just coming in and competing with free to air broadcast TV).
The public valuation of music is that it is a commodity, and yes while it would be nice to make a living from art it would then be a product.
It has always been like this but I think the gap is bigger now.
I'm asking this because it could improve the artists situations if they could get the royalty directly without a middleman? Probably someone already did a research in this direction.
Yet we pay roughly the same per month for a Spotify subscription as we do for Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Is this just because when it comes to music, the revenue is spread much more thinly, amongst more artists?
I pay $10/mo to spotify, lets say $7 makes it to artists. If I do 100% of my streams for Obscure Band X, shouldn't 100% of my $7 go to Obscure Band X?
Right now, I end up a large fraction of that $7 to Taylor Swift, the weeknd, drake, etc, and not the actual performers I listen to.
In the end, if Spotify is not a sustainable business model for you as a musical artist, maybe it is time to look for alternatives, especially those where they do not directly compete with mega-acts?
Not everything needs to be “justice”. Quit diluting words and actions.
The "average observed per-stream payout on Apple Music is $0.00551 vs. $0.00318 for Spotify."[0] That said, a lot of that is because Spotify has free users, while Apple does not.
0. https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts#a...
Spotify is a recent creation and it was nothing without musicians yet they willingly went forward with it even though it was obvious what would happen and now the obvious has happened they want a better deal.
It's hard for me to muster up sympathy, they could have collectively stopped Spotify from happening but they willingly became part of it.
DO make noise. We are musicians after all.”
Recommending people to do something illegal is also illegal, so it seems that the creators of this webpage is already breaking Norwegian law.
And Tordenskioldsgate 2 in Oslo/Norway is just a coworking space, so you only find employees from Spotify there a couple of times a year on events or meetings.
The people fighting for 1p per stream want to focus on the killing of the album because in that way they look like poor mistreated artists who are just asking for crumbs considering what was taken from them.
And spotify etc. want to argue they are the ones who killed the radio, and thus it should cost them hardly anything and they are already paying way too much.
But at any rate 1p per stream is actually quite a significant increase in price considering what the user gets.
With an album one got album art etc. Lyrics / liner notes. And a number of songs - let us say 16 songs.
Nowadays you have to do your own work for the album art and lyrics, and could conceivably be asked to pay separately for them.
This is all a long time ago but I would think it was $10 dollars per average CD during the heyday. (somebody here surely knows the actual number)
So 62.5 pennies per song if 16 songs.
Perhaps it should be 1p per stream, max cost 63p per song per user?
that of course still means spotify eats the part of the market that buys more than one version per year, as someone with ADHD I have had to buy London Calling about 20+ times in my life. At some point I think I should get it for free.
so 1p per song streamed, max 63p per person per song every two years. If they asked for that I would think that is maybe a bit more than its worth, but also approaching fairness.
But they aren't asking for that, even though they should be able to think these things through easier and quicker than I can - so until they start asking for something resembling an actual fair deal I say screw them.
Take the first demand for instance, pay $0.01 per play. on the face this sounds fine, until you look at the economics of this. Spotify Premium is $9.99, that means for every premium user there is only 999 plays per month at BEST if you don't consider any other overheads, before that payment is exhausted (not including things like discounts for 12 month plans, student and family pricing).
This is not to say artists shouldn't get paid more, but how many people would take say a 10x price increase to fund this level of payment?
That's not to mention they also want to remove the income stream of artists paying for increased plays on the platform (pushing more cost to the user)
again, the demands may be well intentioned, and many should just be adopted such as crediting all labour for a recording, but obviously no-one has looked at the economics' it would take to actually realise the level of payment being asked for here and thought about if consumers would be willing to pay that price.
Tech VC is an analogy for the risk model of record companies, where you have money from investors that needs a productive asset, and your risk/return appetite is being willing to accept that most of your bets will return zero, with just 2% of your investments yielding huge (10x+) multiples and 80% of your returns.
Whether you are investing in bands making albums or entrepreneurs building startups, there seem to be direct similes for record sales, publishing rights, merch, side projects, and intellectual property. The point is artists make their money touring with shows, which is basically a job, where the record company/investor makes their big money because they get the benefit of having risked capital with leverage. A founder working for investors is analogous to a band touring in support of album sales. Your upside is probably a job with a lifestyle and a bonus.
Which comes to the question of what a good price for a recording could be. Musicians generally don't take very much risk or use leverage that would yield investor-size returns. 99.9% of music is crap. The distribution curve of quality is really steep and long tailed, so if you invest in a given band, you are taking a <1% chance of ever seeing your money again. That's why record companies and VC make money. They're the producers. They're creating a portfolio spread over a wide pool of risk. If you write some songs, arguably, you have ventured nothing of value until someone discovers it. The music platforms provide this discovery. Sure, I wish I could earn the an equivalent living making music or writing as I do in tech, but since I'm not a superstar talent, I manage that expectation and accept comfortable mediocrity. As the amortized capital risked by a musician averaged across all the other musicians in their genre on a given song, the price of a stream above tiny fractions of a penny is generous. The missing feature seems to be a way to sell the licensing and publishing rights, where I can pay $100 to use it in a video.
I get the sense that organizing spotify artists to complain is yet another way to hustle and exploit them, but this time for political ends instead of financial ones.
edit: there is probably a producer/product-manager analogy to be made as well, but will leave it there.
While no party is without concern, I don't think either Spotify, the artist or the consumer is the problem here. There's a 800lb gorilla standing over there.
now a non US company is #1, they start to yell
you should have complained before
How about movies? They'd cease to exist (barring a few youtube-quality productions).
Patreon, Twitch, Cameo, OnlyFans, et al, are providing ways to connect with your community and earn a living through their support, which is not only very important during shutdowns when live events are harder, but will be a long term trend.
On the production side costs continue to drop, and if we #abolishcopyright cost of living across the world will drop dramatically, so will be easier to balance the budget.
I sincerely doubt that. Food and shelter won't magically cost less because there is no copyright.
I suppose, in reality, this has been the case for around 3 decades now. Unless you have the marketing department, you don't make money from music sales.
I could scale back my contribution to each artist to pennies each (which doesn't actually work, given the $0.30 cent/3% CC cut), but then we're back to where we are today.
Patreon (and their ilk) is not tenable at scale.
You don't want to use that line of argument, since authors and musicians are among the very few categories of workers with that privilege. As much as I agree with you (and actually think that privilege to be expanded to all workers), you won't find any solidarity from the common public on that line.
Don't forget software developers. All of our various licenses (and even our work-for-hire for various companies) relies upon copyright as well.
There's also reporters, photographers, journalists, YouTube content creators, TV, and movies, just to name a few off the top of my head.
So we built a fake framework on top of something plentiful and cheap to copy, to make it more expensive so some people can make money out of it.
How do you suggest an author (artist, musician, etc) make a living, if it takes them 6 months of normal working hours to produce a book and they get an expected $0 of revenue from that book?
We need to stop assuming that having no copyright means that the work cannot be monetized. It just can’t be monetized as if it was a physical object or service rendered. Vinyl records, tee shirts, patronage, book signings, lectures, anything that isn’t copyright dependent can be monetized easily.
The fans of art are aware that paying for it will help create more art they like. This is a personal connection that the fan has with the artist and keeps the art accessible for the casuals.
Copyright also allows more creators to create without requiring them to be a live personality as well; to split their time between creating and hustling for money.
I'm not sure I follow, my understanding is that patronage, say from the Medici family, led to a proliferation of art.
What hit album have you (and your band-mates) written and performed for free?
What feature-length, CGI enhanced movie have you produced, cast, and distributed for free?
What TV show have you produced, cast, and distributed for free?
I'm not trying to call you out specifically, but your post uses "I", so I'm responding appropriately. For better or worse, garage bands, open source developers, and patreon writers are the vast minority of copyright users.
The difference is that the original instance of the work potentially required considerable time and money, whereas its copies are essentially free to produce. There's no difference between the bits of the "original" and the bits of each copy, but concluding that copies of a work should be free for all because the act of creating that copy is free, is fallacious and intentionally misleading.
There's a really happy medium that neither side ever talks about. Just dramatically reduce the legal length of copyrights. One year maybe?
I think artists would not be dissuaded from working and would monetize the roughly the same with 20-30 year copyright terms.
The promise of fame and fortune is a product of an industry that is based on physical media being the only way to share information. The bit has liberated music for everyone yet we cling to the past.
Most artists with regular output do not. The problem with a day job is it takes away from what a person can produce. For example, a content creator (i.e. YouTuber) with a day job is lucky to get out one-two videos a week. A full time content creator can produce one to two videos a day, often with better quality since they can focus on the work.
Youtube content creators are a good example of people monetizing art without the need for copyright. Donations and voluntary funding are key parts of the content creator world already. Copyright is not particularly important unless they are getting strikes from a copyright troll.
This already happens today (Linus with his tech tips is only one example); without the ability for creators to fight back, it would only get worse.
EDIT: That this is unpopular doesn't make it wrong. Even beyond the (currently) illegal reposting, there are lots of rights aggregators who pay viral content creators, and re-sell their content to TV channels (Chive TV, anybody?). The "pay creators" part goes away if you take away copyright.
After that much time, it's a crime keeping the copyright monopoly: it's either exhausted all possible profit, so there's no point, or it's been around long enough that everything after it is influenced by it, like season 4 and earlier of The Simpsons, and the original Star Wars movies.
In other words, that seems like a decent cut-off point to say that if you still want to hold copyright on them, then you're rent-seeking off of stuff that has kinda become "cultural identity" stuff, specifically because it's what people grew up watching and influenced by.
No, that's not correct. 14 years was the original term set by law not the Constitution, and the difference is important. Copyright and patents do not formally exist in the US Constitution, because IP was a contentious issue even then. Instead there is a clause that empowers Congress to decide to do so if they wish, but there is no requirement. Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8 says Congress shall have the power:
>"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
But there is nothing specific set out in the Constitution. If there was, it'd be near impossible to change at this point, for better or worse. On the one hand that might mean we'd have much shorter terms then now. On the other hand, it would also mean that if the courts had gone similarly badly in deciding stuff like software patents it'd be near totally hopeless, rather than merely very difficult, to reform. But since it's all down to "merely" legislation Congress could completely change things around on a dime through normal law if there was the political will for it. Though note another complexity is that the US has signed treaties around certain parts of IP as well, including minimum terms. While those too can be renegotiated, or revoked by Congress, it's a higher domestic political and geopolitical bar.
There are lots of interesting reform proposals, within various bounds of feasibility. Hopefully one of them can take off at some point and momentum can slowly start building to go in the other direction then the maximalist positions taken for the last few decades.
Yes to this. Having an imagination means you can think of different ways to monetize your work that isn’t trying to put an imaginary wall around ideas and information.
Patents and copyrights are literally ideas put on paper that one is claiming legal dominion over. Unless you are making physical media, your products are your ideas.
It’s a tradeoff, not a cure for problems artists face. The current system favors wealthy institutions over artists. No one is willing to donate to a giant record company but fans of the work will readily give money to the artist just because they like them. Patronage is a better system for artists.
None of those scale. I pointed this out elsewhere, but how much money would a creator on Patreon make if all creators were on Patreon, hoping to make at least $1 per month per follower? Musicians alone would push me into the hundreds of dollars (which really means a vast majority of musicians would make nothing from me; less than they're getting via Spotify).
How much are you willing to pay for tickets to the 20th tour in a week that's in your area? For their merch? As for myself, precious little. Probably not enough to even cover their tour costs, let alone the cost of producing the music (and merch) in the first place.
> Patents and copyrights are literally ideas put on paper that one is claiming legal dominion over.
Patents and copyrights make it practical to cover the costs of realizing those ideas in the first place. Ideas aren't worth anything until they're realized, be it in writing for a book, or a performance for a song.
Books often take a minimum of 6 months of full time effort to produce. There's multiple people involved - the writer, the editor, the proofreader, the typesetter. How do they pay for it if they can't make any money from actually selling the book?
Music takes weeks or months of effort in a studio to produce. How do you recoup those costs if you can't sell the output?
Same as it is currently and ever was.
The main point is that every avenue of monetizing art is create something that isn't your art that is scarce and then sell that. Why not just have a system where you can make the art itself scarce?
That's the poster's modus operandi here: he doesn't miss an opportunity to advertise his two favorite topics – abolishment of intellectual property and his own whitespace-based data notation – whether it's on-topic or not.
The correct term is #ImaginaryProperty
Yours truly, Breck Yunits
This isn't Twitter. I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish by using hashtags on HN, but it makes you look like an immature child – similar to writing "M$" in the 90s and early 00s.
This is particular to creative works. Free Software gets around this with lots of subsidies, commodified complements, corporate investment, and occasional labors of love. The fact that software is highly collaborative and that licenses like the GPL exist helps. A handful of collaborating developers can produce a spare-time project that is actually useful to other people who will sponsor development of further improvements to the project. Music does not work that way.
If you want music to be libre, someone needs to subsidize the cost of creation: The wages for the musicians for one-two months, the wages of the technicians, the rent for the studio, and also subsidize the cost of writing the song in the first place.
The current paradigm amortizes those costs among all listeners of a song, with some profit for the facilitators.
Entire genres of music have been created from inexpensive musical equipment and free software. Art has never been more accessible to the people than it is now.
Then we simply never get their work. Some people would absolutely continue to create for the fun of it, but they'll remain the minority.
Movies you'd watch in a Theater? Completely gone. Commercially funded TV shows, gone. A vast majority of books, written by full time writers and researchers, gone.
And I'll also posit that most music would go away too. Even the amateurs I know expect to be paid for a gig. Most musicians are not willing to busk for a living.
And, don't forget, software development relies heavily upon Copyright as well (licenses, your work-for-hire, etc).
The idea that people would stop creating is absurd. I work in Cancer Research and the absolute least contributing people in the medical industry are the ones obsessed with patenting and copyrighting their work, which is usually garbage and of frivolous value compared to the hard grunt work of millions of unsung heroes grinding it out for non-monopoly wages.
I was an engineer at Microsoft and the average code there was total garbage compared to the open source code powering top public domain projects.
And no modern epic is significantly better than Ἰλιάς.
Every letter we are using; every word; every bit of tooling; was made by other people in a long pyramid stretching back tens of thousands of years and billions of people wide. All of us are putting grains of sand on top.
Really? Sounds pretty terrible to me. Few books. Few videogames. No movies. No TV shows. Most of the internet obliterated. Any content that is created is copied and regurgitated so much you'd be hard pressed find out who actually created it.
I personally like consuming entertainment. I work with the creative side of my brain all day long, and being able to go home and turn it off with some relatively mindless entertainment (my form is a combination of books and videogames). I'd hate to come home one day and only have a zero budget, poorly tested, game to play, or a book that I've already re-read enough to quote it by memory.
> And no modern epic is significantly better than Ἰλιάς.
Pure opinion. And in any case, there's only one Iliad. There's hundreds of other "modern" epics out there - many of which I find more entertaining, though they are not as literarily significant.
> the open source code powering top public domain projects
Is it worth re-iterating that all of the open source licenses is supported by copyright protections?
> All of us are putting grains of sand on top.
Which obviously has its own value, as aptly demonstrated by the entertainment industry as a whole being valued in the trillions of dollars.
Copyright criminalizes remix culture and leads to evils like Youtube arbitrarily giving strikes because 5 seconds of a taylor swift song was in the background, suppression of criticism, and depriving the poor from access to modern culture.
aren't*
Might have lower production quality and less glitzy marketing, but the vast quantity of free music out there is proof that many will continue making music regardless of financial incentive.
I'm wondering if you knew that Karl Marx summed up the desire of communists in one sentence [in The Communist Manifesto]?
"...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." [1]
That's it.
That's what all the fuss is about. It was a revelation to me because it seemed too simple at first, yet that's all that communists desire to bring about. This desire includes abolishing 'intellectual property' (trade secrets, copyrighted material, patented processes etc.). As you rightly described, any human knowledge originates socially to start with: “We are all putting grains of sand on mountains built by our ancestors”. This inheritance is what we aim to communize. Even though the communist manifesto is over 170 years old, Marx' critique remains as relevant as relevant as ever: capitalist firms caused the opioid crisis in the US; all over the world there's a landlord crisis - with many suffering homelessness (despite there being vacant buildings) [2]; capitalists have moved much of the industrial production to the global south - e.g. clothes are produced in sweatshops in China/Bangladesh/Eritrea; Playstations are causing wars in Congo [3]; our smartphones are made with conflict resources [4]; and we have a toxic e-waste crisis that is blocking us from re-using black-boxed hardware/components (as well as trade secrets and patents stopping many from being able to learn about technology and science in the first place - artificial scarcity of expertise created by capitalists) - as well as well as this e-waste leaching chemicals and poisoning the land, predominantly in the global south [5].
With 'abolishing private property' we don't mean that we want to get rid of the idea of all property systems. We want to get rid of today's bourgeois property system, as it has allowed a small minority to exclude others and plunder the commons [6], resulting in the division of labor and alienation. It's not about having a big or small capitalist government (capitalist governments are the ones who grant monopolies in the first place). We want full democracy in the workplace. That is what we call socialism, communism, or a communist production system. We also believe that this system, communism, is humanity's true nature.
The reason we have been persecuted is because many capitalists are very happy with their 'haul' (and the power-over others domination that comes with it), and because we communists want to continually ask the question: "how we can constantly expand who benefits from new science and technology?" (which we refer to as communizing/socializing the means of production).
I'm a bit scared this might be something you already know, so please do let me know if I've overstepped. My yearning by writing this is to meet my needs for connection, clarity and cooperation, yet this might not be the best strategy.
I also want to share with you this awesome video I watched a few days ago, in case it interests you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U
[1] The Communist Manifesto (chapter 2), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...
[2] Push (2019) - a short new documentary about venture capital and the financialization of housing. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iLWpuZrd-I, full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4 (you can easily download with yt1s.com if you're not currently in the US/Canada, if it's geo-blocked)
[3] Inside Africa's 'PlayStation War', https://www.wired.com/2008/07/the-playstation-2/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J7efsz_Y-c
[4] Blood in the Mobile, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv-hE4Yx0LU
[5] Agbobloshie, Ghana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I
[6] Professor Guy Standing on 'rentier capitalism', https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
If you have copyrights and patents, you do not have property rights. Once you implement those, you then remove the rights people have over their atomic property, like computers and paper and printers et cetera.
You cannot have a logical conversation with anyone who uses the term "intellectual property", because at that point it would be like trying to talk to someone about "fire water". There is no such thing.
The reason why that term became so big is that because during the Cold War capitalism and property rights were all the rage, so the proponents of copyrights and patents jumped on the bandwagon and rebranded their issues to be about property rights, even though they were the opposite. It was a very shrewd move, and I'm amazed at how effective it was. It would be like the cigarette industry was able to convince people that cigarettes were actually "health sticks".
That is why you will never see me ever ever use that term, and instead I will refer to them as "Imaginary Property" rights, and encourage everyone else to do so (I read the "Imaginary Property" term for the first time right here on HN).
So all that said, I am a strong believer in property rights. I believe Marx was wrong, and that property rights are an engineering solution to the problem of "how do we assign decision making power over scarce atoms in an efficient way".
I believe the real problem is copyrights and parents. Abolish those and you will eventually unchain the minds of billions of people, and we will be living in a lot more intelligent and prosperous world.
I believe blockchain can be a good remedy for unnecessary middlemen.
Audius [1] is a good example applied to the music industry.
In this particular issue, I think blockchain is a great solution, as it allows to publish content, gather fees from listeners to artists, without the need of an intermediary.
The solution is really to go direct-to-consumer, through things like Crowdfunding (unfortunately Patreon now charges VAT). Though of course this adds a lot of overhead.
Alternatively, petition Governments to be leaner, and to increase retirement ages to 70 (pensions are the single major and fastest increasing Government expense), and to lower taxes (including sales taxes) with the savings.
Pressure on Google and Apple (via regulation) to reduce commissions is another avenue.
The public suspicion is that they do this to avoid paying pension, most of which has been squandered by the government.
VAT is there for everyone, you can't avoid it because you are a 'creator' thats insane.
Also direct-to-consumer hardly absolves you from following tax law. I agree that sales tax is bad, but only because it is regressive and disproportionately taxes the poor. Raise income taxes and abolish sales tax.
How do you go direct to consumer without collecting VAT (while not breaking tax laws)?
Of course, this varies by country, but its possible to incorporate your business in a country where this is the case.