Taylor Swift may argue that she's entitled to a better deal since she drives traffic, similar to how Apple Stores can negotiate better rents in shopping malls.
All the money from a small percentage of people or a small percentage of money from everyone is the same.
Yes.
> All the money from a small percentage of people or a small percentage of money from everyone is the same.
Only if you assume that people with lots of hours listen to the same mix of artists as people with few to medium hours. If accounts that are left on all day have a bias, then they will steer everyone's money in the direction of that bias.
That's the big assumption, which is most likely false. Even though it's not allowed, entities like gyms or bars have the top40 on repeat throughout the day.
Although there is a problem that "money paid per user per month is fixed", "per-stream payout is fixed", and "money allocated to recipients matches in proportion to plays" cannot all be true at the same time.
Are people asking for (in the limit case) paying £10 to spotify for a month and listening to exactly one track once by Taylor Swift to result in a single royalty payment of X% of £10 to Taylor Swift?
Is it fixed? I thought the article gave an average per-stream payout by a simple division of royalties and number of streams.
I got Spotify, but it's a family plan due to my SO. I buy just about all the music from Bandcamp anyway.
As an example; big music aficionados might listen to 75 different bands in a month, which will mean 1% of their subscription money will go to each of them.
The large majority of music listeners though listen to 5-10 big-name artists only.
Distributing money fairly after what each premium subscriber listens too thus would end up favouring the big name artists much more than the current model they have.
I have no way of knowing whether this is true, but thought it was an interesting perspective...
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25024552
Clarity edit: I mean a tipping system on top of the existing system.
Anyway, under this system, there are a lot of inequalities. According to official SACEM statistics, about 2/3 of their registered artists (who pay for membership) never earn a single cent every year. And in 2011, only 150 artists (less than 1%) earned over half of all redistributed revenues... then again, the amount that is being redistributed has been severely punctured by the execs/administrative types who get paid no matter what. The highest french financial authority, la Cour des Comptes, has many official reports over the years about the misbehavior of SACEM & friends and how they swindle artists through legal though dubious schemes (moving money around many orgs, each applying administrative fees until there's nothing left). So that's for "independent" artists under collective management.
Then there's artists giving away their rights to publishers/editors. They will be pressured to accept a small percentage in exchange for having their album/book/movie published "for free". But they've essentially sold their soul to the devil. If their art doesn't bring a lot of money, the publisher has essentially lost nothing. But if it does, then it's making tons of money, some of which will pay for the same kind of capitalist bloodsuckers (execs/investors), and the rest will pay more well-known artists who had a position to bargain for better contracts.
But even if your art fares well, your publisher may decide to stop publishing it, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Under some jurisdictions you can bargain with the publisher to buy back your rights (that's gonna cost you some serious €€€), but under others you're simply left powerless because distributing your own production is now a violation of the publisher's copyright. How fucked up is that?
Then there's live performances. If you're a more-or-less unknown artist, all the money you're gonna make is with a live audience. But once you've sold the rights to your music, movie, or theater piece to a copyright vampire, then you have to pay them off to play your own works and you'll only retain a portion of whatever should have ended up in your pockets.
There's plenty of other aspects to consider and i'm not familiar with all of them as i'm not an artist myself, but i have enough artists in my close circles who've made the mistake of dealing with copyright, editors and such nonsense and will never do that again. I don't personally know a single artist who plays by the capitalist rules anymore because they were all fucked by the bigger fish. Now my friends all either publish free art (copyleft) or do pirate art (zero fucks given for copyright).