Comment by andytheant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andytheant | Hacker News Reader

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Probably an unpopular opinion but...

Making and distributing music to masses of people has never been cheaper / easier. Making music is easier due to availablility of software and equipment. Distribution is easy because of platforms such as Spotify, Soundcloud... and so on. Musicians struggling to make money from people listening to their music digitally might be related to the enormous available supply. If I never get to listen to X bands / artists music, then I'll get to listen to someone elses and will likely never even realise X band or artist existed.

Most musicians I listen to have been introduced to me via the mediums I use to digest music. When I was younger, TV and radio, now mainly Spotify and different playlists I subscribe to.

Just to clarify: you think it's fair that less than 20% of what you pay to Spotify goes to artists?

Isn’t that the highest amount ever paid when compared to radio, cd, etc. I think the difference is that it’s distributed uniformly to all artists as opposed to CDs where Paul and Kate got high percentages but almost all others got zero.

So the percent paid is higher as far as gross in, gross to artists. But the outlier rates are lower because there’s no special contracts.

I guess an equivalent is how much is the total ad revenue for radio vs what’s paid to artists (not labels).

Or the total revenue made from music retailers CS what’s paid to artists.

The novelty with streaming is there aren’t tons of steps and indirections.

How much money was Jay-Z's Tidal paying artists? I think music streaming is a low margin business that is only successful at a large scale.

Why doesn't Paul McCartney, who's extremely wealthy, spin up a music app to stream his stuff and ask people to pay for it? Because he wouldn't make any money from after setting up the infrastructure, marketing it, paying people, etc...

Phish did that. I pay them. They're objectively the highest paid independent artists ever.

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