'Weird Al' Roasts Spotify's Artist Payout System in Year-End Wrapped Video | Hacker News Reader

'Weird Al' Roasts Spotify's Artist Payout System in Year-End Wrapped Video

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98 pointserellsworth135 comments

I think a better payout structure for Spotify would be to go per-user. For example, for each subscriber a given amount from their subscription plan is earmarked for payouts. Let's say about 4$ per user. We divide that amount by the number of streams the user had that month, and we simply pay that amount to the artist.

Examples:

- I only listened to one song this month? The full 4$ go to that artist.

- I listened to 2 albums by 2 artists this month, on repeat? 2$ each (assuming the same number of plays for each)

- I listened to 399 tracks from one artist, and one track for another? 3.99$ to the first and 0.01$ to the second.

- The gym next door is streaming Mariah Carey's Chrismas album on repeat? Their 4$ goes to Mariah Carey and mine still goes to the artists I enjoy.

I think the current model of per-stream across the whole platform distorts the playing field towards more popular artists that play in commercial settings.

> I think the current model of per-stream across the whole platform distorts the playing field towards more popular artists that play in commercial settings.

Which is very much in favor of the actual people (Major labels) who needed to be convinced to license all their artists to Spotify in the first place. So not really surprising.

I'm sure that smarter people than I will point out flaws in this model (aside from Spotify making less money lol) but I love it.

It would be split into tons of artists for most people but a guaranteed chunk of the monthly would be nice.

It does create weird incentives though. You make more money not by people listening to your music more but buy the people that do listen to you listening to other artists less.

I can already see the internet:

"Don't listen to your discover weekly or new music friday it hurts the artists you like."

And so the diss track is finally justified.

I think you can fix that incentive issue relatively easily by allowing people to choose the allocation arbitrarily after some sort of minimum tax, e.g.

The first $4 of your monthly sub is divided amongst all artists you listen to based on time spent listening, and any additional money you decide to add to your subscription is distributed to artists as you see fit. You can elect to use the same distribution algorithm as the first $4 of your subscription, use the same algorithm with different weights (e.g. your favorite artists listen time is doubled before payout is computed) or you can choose to have an arbitrary percent of it go to whatever artists you want, even if you don't listen to any of their music. Spotify already has to have a payment engine to support paying all the artists anyway, generalizing it beyond fixed subscriptions seems like an organic way to address the issue of unfair income distribution if they were interested in doing so (I don't think they are).

In the above system, the issue of "don't listen to other artists" only comes up if you don't have enough money to give to the artists you want to support, no different than the incentives of "don't buy the CD of artist A or you won't be able to afford the CD of artist B, who you like and wish to support more."

I think your last bullet point is the one that sticks for me the most. If I only listen to independent death metal then why is my money going to Taylor Swift or Joe Rogan or whoever.

With per-stream pricing, it only does if you don't stream enough songs. If you listen to much more music than the average Spotify user, then all your money will go to independent death metal, plus someone else's will also go there even if they only listened to Taylor Swift and Joe Rogan. Of course, there's still the the fact that big labels have better per-stream-rates than indies, so you'd have to stream two-ish-or-whatever times the average amount.

And honestly, I don't know if that's bad for indie? I mentioned this elsewhere on this thread but anecdotally my friends who listen to a LOT of music mostly listen to indie, not big label. Maybe I'm wrong/my bubble doesn't generalize? I'd love to see numbers if anyone has them.

For a while Deezer was pushing a model similar to this, they called it User Centric Payment System: https://musically.com/2019/09/11/deezer-steps-up-its-efforts...

Here's another article on it: https://www.engadget.com/2019-09-11-deezer-royalty-system-sm...

Unfortunately, they've since changed it to a model that the labels wanted.

This would incentivize artists to release more, shorter tracks.

And if that is what users want, then those tracks will get a lot of plays, and by extension payment.

Shorter tracks would also mean users have more opportunity for listening to a variety of songs/artists. A single user can only listen so much in a day (capped at 24 hours, and more likely 12 hours if they aren't doing some kind of phantom streaming). This would then ultimately dilute the payments to artists releasing a large number of shorter tracks.

Could use minutes played instead of tracks played then.

As far as I know this is more or less the payout structure Tidal uses.

This seems a better approach, but in reality I don't know if it is actually better.

If I understood their plan correctly, it was only the higher $20 tier that did it, and I think only $5-10 was actually split between your top 2 artists for a given month. They ended that program a few months ago.

While I've also always thought about this model, I'm curious as to why Spotify doesn't do it? Is it hard to calculate the revenue from a single user? Or is just in their interest that it's complicated? (Btw it should probably be listening time and not nr of tracks, or we only get 30s tracks going forward).

Also, would law of big numbers make it so that this kinda evens out like this anyways with today's system?

>I think a better payout structure for Spotify would be to go per-user. [...] - I only listened to one song this month? The full 4$ go to that artist. [...] I think the current model of per-stream across the whole platform distorts the playing field towards more popular artists

Your idea has been suggested many times but as other sibling comments already noted, Spotify didn't have the leverage in business negotiations to implement that type of payout.

In other words, Spotify needed the vast song catalogs from the Universal + Sony + Warner -- more than those Big 3 Labels needed Spotify.

Your idea has higher payouts (i.e. "more fair") for independent musicians at the expense of less payout for the Big 3 Major Labels. In contrast, the current payout system favors the Big Labels at the expense of independents. Why did this happen? Because the Big Labels have more leverage.

Some factors leading up to the Big Labels negotiating from a position of strength to get more favorable treatment from the "weaker" Spotify:

- 2000: Napster lost its case against Metallica and RIAA

- 2000: mp3.com lost its case for "users CD-ownership-verify-then-playback service"

- 2003: Big Major Labels felt they got screwed by Apple & Steve Jobs iTunes deal with the flat 99 cents pricing.

By the time of 2011 licensing negotiations, they were already winning their lawsuits against the internet "stealing" their music. They were in no mood to give Spotify a sweet deal for access to their song catalogs.

This is why the no-name artists get fractions of pennies adding up a few dollars while Taylor Swift gets millions from Spotify. This unbalanced financial arrangement was the carrot to help get the Big Labels on board. To add to this, Spotify also gave the labels part ownership stock[1]. In contrast, smaller independents like CDBaby and TuneCore didn't get offered Spotify stock. Examples like that should give an idea of how much leverage the Big Labels had.

[1] https://thehustle.co/the-economics-of-spotify/#:~:text=The%2....

> In contrast, the current payout system favors the Big Labels at the expense of independents.

Is there an actual statistic around this? The linked article you provided doesn't have it. I'm curious:

1a) What is the average per-stream rate for a song from one of the Big Labels?

1b) What is the average per-stream rate for a song from one of the Big Labels, that is then passed along to the artist after the label takes their own cut?

2) What is the per-stream rate if you self-publish your song via DistroKid instead (that then publishes it to Spotify), that goes directly to the artist?

It's not obvious to me that 1b) is larger than 2). Maybe it is -- but are there actual numbers here? Especially for "average" or "median" artists at a label, not Taylor Swift.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, I'm wondering something similar. Anecdotally (and maybe incorrectly), I'd expect people who listen to a lot of indie music to stream more songs per month than those who listen to pop & big label music, which means that big labels would be making less money if they get paid per stream than per user? Obviously there are probably many other factors, I'd love to see the numbers.

I find the explanation easier to believe that "per stream" is a much simpler & transparent system for the artists that causes less outrage towards Spotify[0]. And to cater to big labels, Spotify just increases their specific per-stream rate (as parent's article explains).

Still, it causes issues like the botting ones in the OP. I don't know, it's really hard to make a conclusion here without the actual numbers.

[0] Imagine you get more streams but less money than your friend with the same indie deal, just because his listeners listen to less music overall. You could convince ME that it's fair from an outsider perspective... but probably not an artist who's trying to make a living.

I don't think this matters at all.

Whether royalties are calculated per-play-per-user or per-play-per-all-users, I don't see any evidence there's any meaningful difference at all.

Most people who subscribe to Spotify listen to lots of different stuff -- that's the entire point of streaming. Virtually nobody is listening to one song a month, or 2 albums per month. They listen to playlists and radio and their 8,000 liked songs on shuffle. None of the examples you give are very realistic. (Somebody who only listens to one album is just going to buy the album, not subscribe to Spotify.)

In the end, the two models are going to average out to essentially the same.

If you don't think they do, that means you think there's some correlation between the amount of music listened to per month, and whether a person's tastes skew more mainstream or niche. Can you show that's the case, and in which direction? Because that's entirely non-obvious.

(And commercial settings like stores are a drop in the bucket of Spotify subscriptions, they just don't matter. Big places like grocery stores and department stores and fast food don't use Spotify, and coffee shops or clothing boutiques are just as likely to be playing niche stuff.)

"Rounding errors" like these always favour the larger players. It's a form of slowly extracting money that should have gone to smaller artists and instead gets funnelled into the pockets of major label artists who arguably don't need it, at the expense of smaller artists and especially niche genres that don't have the same mass appeal as pop music. That's a group that's severely lacking representation in the discussions around how to pay fairly.

Another way they're screwing smaller artists is next year they'll be requiring each song to have 1k streams _per year_ before qualifying for monetization. They estimate that'll steal another ~$40M/year from smaller artists to help line the pockets of majors. It's actually sickening to watch from the sidelines.

> "Rounding errors" like these always favour the larger players.

I don't see it -- how?

> requiring each song to have 1k streams _per year_ before qualifying for monetization

Each stream is ~$0.004. It doesn't seem unreasonable at all to require a song to hit $4 per year -- or $0.33/mo. -- to qualify. There is some level of overhead involved here, after all. These are ludicrously small amounts of money.

Also how does this "help line the pockets of majors"? It's all just going back into the same pot of revenue that gets shared the same as before. So proportionally it's helping the artists with smaller songs still over 1K streams just as much.

And even if it's $40M, that's just 0.3% of Spotify's overall revenue. Proportionally, it's pretty irrelevant.

This isn’t per artist, it’s per song, which means an artist might put out an album and only the single gets widespread play and if the few thousand plays the rest receive all fall just under 1k they’d be discounted to unpaid plays. Remember, for smaller artists every dollar counts. Most have already seen their revenues from music drop by 90-95% since Spotify ate the industry, so why should they be so willing to accept that the first 1k plays are worth $0.00 and the next are only worth $0.003 or less.

This is also compounded by their refusal to adopt a user-centric payment model where the artists you actually listened to that month are the ones your money goes to. Look at comparisons others have published and you’ll see how their current model siphons money from smaller artists towards major label artists (I’m discretely typing this in bits from our local chamber orchestra’s AGM and can’t look up facts for you atm).

With this change, it ensures that even moving to a user-centric model they’ll still be able to underpay smaller artists. It’s not so alarming on its own, but it ensures they can continue to keep the status quo even if they give in to pressure and adopt a user-centric payment model by being able to not have to pay for much of their catalog.

But the artists never made any money in the first place. Spotify allowed for the insanely long tail of no-play artists to get a platform to begin with, paying a nominal fee seems like not that big of a deal, considering the same folks would never have gotten any exposure.

Artists had plenty of thriving platforms to get their music out digitally before Spotify came along. The difference is almost every one of them paid better or let you sell your music. Spotify has accounted for artist music revenues dropping by ~90% and has done almost nothing to help smaller artists that they weren’t already getting elsewhere. They grew in popularity due to offering listeners endless playlists. Sadly, Songza was killing it in this area too and could have been a serious Spotify competitor until Google bought it and ruined it almost overnight.

> Most people who subscribe to Spotify listen to lots of different stuff -- that's the entire point of streaming. Virtually nobody is listening to one song a month, or 2 albums per month.

Considering the asks you're making, I imagine you'll have no problem substantiating this?

The question is who decided this payout structure? Is it Spotify (I clearly don't know why they would care any other way) or the big artists (I can see why they would want to be paid more as a condition of their presence on the platform, because of greed but also because of legitimate reasons).

This solves one problem, in that I the consumer can be confident that my money is going to the artists I enjoy. I don't think it solves another problem, which is that you have a flat-fee being split many different ways. Most people don't listen to just one artist, they may shuffle their favorite songs or listen to a discovery playlist to find new favorite songs. Such a system isn't going to send $2 to 2 different artists per customer, it's going to send fractions of pennies to potentially dozens of different artists. Worse, the more music a person consumes, the more diluted their subscription fee becomes.

It doesn't really address the problem of paying artists per stream, it just means that the per stream rate is variable and dependent on how willing your fans are to play your music on repeat each month.

It's still probably better than the current model, but the only way I'd really be comfortable with it is if we cut out the middle-men. For example, a service owned and operated as a non-profit (or profit-capped) organization owned by an artist collective. The artists set the monthly price based on what makes sense for them to make a living, and the cut given to the service can be minimized to what it takes to run and build the service rather than what it takes to make a profit on top of the work of the artists.

AFAIK Spotify doesn't pay per stream. They pay a percentage of revenue to artists that is divided based on streams of their music. Record companies and big artists negotiate these deals with Spotify. It seems like artists should be more angry with their labels about the deals that are negotiated than mad at Spotify.

There's plenty of anger going around, especially when you consider the major labels own almost 20% of spotify.

Most artists these days self-distribute via platforms like Distrokid, not via a label. Distrokid just passes along streaming revenue, so they don't have any incentive to fight for it. And obviously, artists aren't in any position at all to collectively negotiate - you publish on Spotify, or you're unknown. The fault does, in fact, lie mostly with Spotify here.

> Most artists these days self-distribute

Not the artists with "most" streams. Record labels still dominate the market.

According to the data I’ve looked at from Spotify, the big 3 labels are about 63% of their music, Merlin (which includes some actual small labels but also things like distrokid) is about 15%, and then there’s the rest. So the majority is the majors, but the other artists certainly could negotiate collaboratively if they wanted to.

Spotify literally has never turned an annual profit because labels extract all of the $ due to the monopoly they have on content.

Artists should be mad at the labels THEY entered into contracts with, not spotify.

From what I have heard this is because Spotify has many people on their free tier, versus profitable competitors like Apple music which give a trial but are paid-only. If I understand it correctly Spotify's ads on the free tier don't generate the $10/mo revenue they get from paid users.

Apple doesn't break out revenue for Music and it's highly unlikely they are profitable, or if they are, it ain't by much.

The labels have a monopoly on talent and content, It's impossible for anyone to make significant money in the streaming game when they have a stranglehold on the supply.

This is correct. While many of the exact details aren't public, Spotify's royalty model is aggressively hostile to the artists. Tidal, YT Music, and Apple all pay artists an order of magnitude more per stream than Spotify. Apple even lobbied to enforce a new royalty payment for artists of 1 cent / 100 streams [0]. Apple music effectively pays this rate to artists right now. In Al's case, those 80 million streams would have netted him about $800k.

[0] https://pitchfork.com/news/apple-music-in-contrast-with-riva...

That's kind of a technicality here though isn't it?

It certainly pays per stream in the sense that if an artist has 110K streams, they get 10% more money as if they got 100K streams.

It may be the case that the amount per stream varies a bit depending on which label you're associated with, or what Spotify's subscriber numbers are that month. But that still doesn't change the principle that your revenue scales linearly with streams -- that you're paid by stream.

Or am I missing something?

I have a hypothesis I'd like feedback on:

Per-stream rates are actually similar to the per-listen equivalent for CDs, and the revenue difference is because listeners have different behavior now that music is less scarce and is a la carte.

In the CD era, artists earned more revenue because listeners had to buy whole albums, even if only a few of the tracks were worth listening to.

People also listened to fewer artists, because listening to something new was expensive.

Some napkin math:

Say a CD costs $18, the artist gets 6.6% of that, it has 12 tracks, and you listen to the whole CD 30 times while you own it. That gets you $0.0033 per track listen.

(Thinking of how I listened to CDs twenty years ago, an average of 30 listens feels like an okay estimate. Some albums more, some less.)

Gizmodo reports Spotify pays $0.003 per stream.

While there's some wiggle room in my CD calculations, I don't think they're off by e.g., 10x.

In that era (when I spent some time in the music industry) it was common for labels to tell artists to not release 12 "Good" tracks. It was more like 3-4 Good tracks and then basically Filler tracks/B-side quality. But if you wanted the Good tracks, you had to buy the whole CD, and you might listen to the Good tracks 30 times, but the Fillers a lesser amount.

This makes the per-track payment extrapolation from CDs somewhat challenging as these days users have more control over specific tracks, and artists can also do a track-only release as easily as a full album release if they want.

Then they'd immediately undermine themselves and release a "Greatest Hits" to double-dip.

Everyone that would have bought the album already has it

The funniest thing about Spotify was that so many people stopped downloading illegal content because all of a sudden they could legally pay for it and support artists. Now it looks like that supposed deal was a sham and the money doesn't make its way to the artists just the distributors and middle men (classic tech move).

And yes, best way to support artist is live shows that aren't run by Ticketmaster.

tech companies are parasitic cancer

Read it wrong, "Weird AI." Too much HN.

https://twitter.com/alyankovic/status/1670113967497433090

I want a streaming service with following business model: I pay 10 dollars for unlimited streaming. Spotify gets 1 or 2.

I listen only to taylor swift on repeat - she gets 8 I listen to only one song the whole month - then some obscure metal band from Finland gets 8 I listen to 40 bands equally - they get 20c each I listen to 1 band as 20 other combined - the band get 4$ all the rest split 4. Thats it

Here is the kicker - no aggregation and averages for millions of users - my money goes only to the people I listen to in whatever ratios.

What practical difference does it make with aggregation / averages for millions of users compared to your system?

That then smaller artists would be drowned by the popular ones. If I listen only to Vision Of Atlantis this month for 1 hour - I want them (or their label) to get all of my money after the Spotify cut. if you aggregate them in a huge pool with teen girls that listen to Tylor swift on repeat - there is chance that the minutes I have listen to them probably won't be enough to get that.

I think it makes a big difference for the "long tail" who get almost nothing now, but could get a reasonable share of the dough if they could attract even a few hundred avid fans.

For example, I listen to <1hr of music a day, but it's a lot of Canadian Indie bands. My plays are completely swamped by teenagers listening to T.Swift or whatever on repeat for 8hrs a day so the bands I listen to get $10/month from Spotify as a whole.

The difference is that your streaming actually has an impact on payouts. If you listen to 10 hours of an obscure genre with small and up and coming artists, they will currently micropennies, since your streams are dwarfed by the kid that listened to 150hrs of Taylor Swift a month.

It’s stacked against indie artists, towards large artists that get the vast majority of plays (and who probably have record deals ensuring that the labels get their blood)

If the pot size stays the same, you are just shuffling around between artists. So artists who are listened to by people who only listen to a bit of music benefit, and those listened to by people who listen to a lot of music get less.

I guess there are two groups of people who listen to a lot of music:

1) young people

2) people who like music a lot.

So bad news for Taylor Swift AND obscure bands only interesting to enthusiasts. Not sure that's better overall. I would prefer a system that is regressive, that pays more for the first 1k listens than the last 1k - but that's definitely not fair :)

Look - I don't pretend I have the perfect formula, but as long as the money I give spotify go only the people I listen to in ratios that could be considered as just I am fine. There are many ways to tweak the payout, but it is the ideology behind it that seems to be fucked up right now.

Spotify would totally collapse if they were only earning $1 per user for unlimited streaming. I have no idea how I could make that profitable on any platform or with any hardware I know of. It’s not as though Spotify is practically free to run.

I'm not familiar with the structure of stream payouts on Spotify, but if 80 million streams gives 12 dollars, that means Taylor Swift's 26.1B streams give ~4k?

I knew the rates were bad but damn...

I'm pretty sure it was hyperbole.

Wait, hold on, you're telling me Weird Al was doing some sort of joke here?

An artist with clout no doubt negotiates a much higher rate.

I guess if spotify sues him for libel, then it will be documented the actual payout... which is probably higher than 12$ but lower than 80M$...

> I guess if spotify sues him for libel

Obviously this would be a terrible case against a known humorist making an obvious joke, but can you imagine how horribly that would backfire?

Trying different calculators online, 80 million streams estimates to about $200k in royalties paid out. Probably wildly inaccurate based on different deals etc., but probably in that order of magnitude instead of nickels. How that is distributed to the artist I guess is up to the label.

it's not possible to calculate exact payout because the payout is 70% of every dollar spotify generates so that obviously fluctuates day to day, then you have ad tier vs premium tier and then i read that the payout goes through another calculation based on what total percentage of streams you have out of the total and then depending on the label how much they pass on

From a different article:

Not 3 cents, a third of one penny per stream. By that metric, Weird Al would have earned a little more than $12, more like $350,000 but his point stands.

https://gizmodo.com/weird-al-spotify-wrapped-artist-pay-1851...

If that's how much he earns, I'm not sure his point does stand.

If he's making $350k from Spotify, I'm guessing he makes about that much from all the other streaming services combined. $700k in income from what is essentially an advertisement for your tours and merch feels like a pretty good deal.

$700k regardless is a good chunk of cash, but can you blame an artist for asking, "Whoa what the fuck?" if that's still a lot less than they would've made in a time before Spotify existed?

Is it though? Someone might listen to your tracks on Spotify because it’s included in the flat rate, but would have never bought a CD or record of you.

And then those records had production costs and needed to be put in stores etc.

Yes, at the peak of CDs, there was more money to be made. But I’m not sure if the difference is really that big.

>Is it though?

>But I’m not sure if the difference is really that big.

I'm struggling to understand why so many musicians - countless numbers, from nearly every genre, with all different sizes of fan bases - have been complaining about Spotify reducing their income if the difference wasn't "really that big".

I am a musician (ambitious amateur) with some tracks online and I also had a record contract in the 90s. I earn more today. Which is still very little, but it’s more than with CDs.

Would I like to earn more? Sure! But I can’t see that happening with all the competition in the entertainment space today. Mind you, people have many more places where they can spend their money now, so it’s not only music business today vs music business 30 years ago, but also music business vs gaming vs movie and tv show streaming etc.

>I am a musician (ambitious amateur) with some tracks online and I also had a record contract in the 90s. I earn more today. Which is still very little, but it’s more than with CDs.

Interesting! I'm also a musician, though mostly just for the fun of it (but I do love whenever I get the chance to play out!) and have been heavily active in my local scene for a few decades, and my anecdotal experience with other musicians who actually try and eke out some cash from it seems to differ from yours, and I've heard nothing but complaints. But that's anecdata for ya! Glad you're seeing the opposite effect!

>But I can’t see that happening with all the competition in the entertainment space today.

This has been a point I've been making with my music friends for some time now. A common argument you see is that, well, I put work into making this, it deserves to be listened to/looked at and I should be compensated for it. I just don't understand how people can take that perspective when you step back and realize that there is more art being made than there are eyes or ears for it all.

The only reason they would have made more is reduced competition. Streaming allows historical catalogs to be infinitely available, and vastly lowers the bar for smaller musicians to add their music to the catalog. There's also more foreign music available then ever before. The supply of music is vastly increased thanks to streaming, but demand really can't increase, so obviously the price is going to fall.

It's not income directly for him, it's paid to his label, and that label will take their own cut. My impression is that the label takes the largest cut of all the people involved, but I'm happy to be corrected on that.

Not to forget that Weird Al is doing a lot of covers - so he is not the original composer of the song. Performers usually get paid way less (everybody can perform a cover of any song out there), but the composers get paid the lion share. I also doubt he gets $12 but probably lot more, the video is just intended to draw attention to Spotify's payout schemes.

Weird Al does not do covers. His albums are a mixture of parodies and fully original pieces. The parodies often use the same melody as the source work, but with original lyrics. Sometimes the music is itself parodied, and performed using an accordian or some other unique instrument.

In terms of creativity, artistic vision, lyrical difficulty or any other metric, Weird Al should be understood as an incredibly talented musician.

Sometimes the music is itself parodied, and performed using an accordian or some other unique instrument.

For this conversation, that is completely irrelevant and he still has to pay royalties to the original composer. Furthermore, while Weird Al does have many completely original songs, looking at his streaming numbers that isn't what most people seem to listen to.

The fact that he is both very talented and very creative is both true and irrelevant.

Weird Al doesn't do covers, aside from a few exceptions. He does parodies. Parody falls under fair use, so legally I don't think he has to pay royalties, though he may anyway.

I'm not a lawyer, and most of my knowledge of copyright law comes from Tom Scott's video on the subject [1], but it's worth noting that it's not universally agreed on that Weird Al's parodies fall under fair use. Again, I am not a lawyer, at best I'm a novice when it comes to copyright law, but what I do know, I agree with what Tom says: I wouldn't expect Weird Al to win if he was taken to court (if he didn't ask permission).

[1] https://youtu.be/1Jwo5qc78QU

IIRC Weird Al treats his parodies more like covers (even going so far as to get permission), and there are credits for the composers, etc. So I wouldn't be surprised if they pay out more like covers than parodies.

He likely doesn't want to be in front of the Supreme Court someday having to defend the parodic aspect like the famous Barbie Girl case, especially as it is not clear that all of his songs are parodies of the song and not some other aspect in the format of the song.

Not disagreeing, but you have to look beyond US copyright law. Fair use is less of a thing i.e. in Europe, and his streams clearly come from all over the world. I would just assume his label made deals with the respective copyright holders covering several jurisdictions and markets just to be on the safe side. That doesn't necessarily mean they had to do those deals.

The parody aspect is only relevant for the lyrics side of things, he still has to pay royalties to the composer for the melodies.

> Spotifies

Spotify's

Edited (not a native speaker).

> from what is essentially an advertisement for your tours and merch

Isn’t the whole point that this part is not the way it should be?

That 0.003/stream is paid to the label of the artists with the most advantageous contracts. The label will forward some part of that to the artist, and if the artist has an advantageous contract that may be a large part.

But if the label was good at negotiating with Spotify, maybe the label was also good at negotiating with the artists, and the artists's share is capped at $12?

Sure, but it's not all to keep. He is a business (or his label is). He has personnel expenses, production expenses, studio expenses, expenses, etc.. If he keeps 1/4 of that $350k, he's doing well. Multiply by a small number, maybe 3 or 4, to account for his other income streams.

He's a pretty well-known artist, one of the top X. He ought to be making a good living, and maybe he is - but I doubt he's getting rich.

Taylor Swift is also a fun example as she refused to be on Spotify for some time because of “artists get paid pennies” reason. But then she signed some deal eventually to increase payouts basically for everyone. Now it’s been a while, and Spotify is way more used nowadays, so I’m not sure where the power balance is anymore.

Artists of TS' popularity can cut side deals with Spotify, same way Spotify cuts deals with Google Play to play less than what other app developers pay. Also, I think TS owns her record label and the master tapes, so royalties would accrue directly to her company.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23969690/google-spotify-...

Weird Al is something of a commedian, so when $12 was probably an exaggeration for commedic affect. Like a joke.

The numbers are obviously not accurate.

I'm a completely unknown artist with 4 songs on Spotify, mostly released during 2020. In total I'm at 54388 plays, which has earned $42.41. This is across all platforms, though Spotify is 95% of the plays.

I'm not sure if Spotify has dropped their payout per play since 2020 but I'm likely at the lowest payout rate and I'd say it's not terrible (although it's not great). You also get paid more for Spotify premium streams, which afaik was the majority of my streams.

If he's mad he should pull his content like Joe Rogan and then come back only if they offered 300 million dollars.

Spotify actually has (at least) a few hundred pools of money; one of the pools might be "Free listeners in the US", one might be "Moldovan listeners who have Spotify as a bundle with this particular cell phone provider". A fixed percentage of that money is set aside for the rights holders for the performance (master rights) and the rights holders for the music (publishing rights).

The allocated money is then passed to the rights holders, based on the percentage of listens they received within users in that pool. Individual rights holders can negotiate additional bumps, and Spotify has some exceptions for what needs to be counted.

I know that the idea that money should go from a listener directly to the bands that user listens to, instead of splitting up the pool, feels like a pretty interesting one. Unfortunately, folks who listen to a lot of music tend to listen to smaller and more interesting bands as well. This change wouldn't necessarily result in more money in the pockets of smaller artists; it's not inconceivable at all that the rich would get richer.

It's also worth mentioning that the average person who spent money on music at all, prior to the invention of streaming, spent far less annually than they spend on streaming now.

I think artists are reacting to a lot of issues. The entire music industry is built around signing absolutely disgusting contracts with deeply talented and fundamentally naive 18 year olds who are effectively replaceable by the next new thing. This is compounded by the fact that most artists don't have a relationship with Spotify; they have a relationship with their record label who has a relationship with Spotify, and the label isn't really interested in giving an artist a full accounting of what they've brought in from Spotify.

Finally, and most importantly, there is a real disconnect between the social impact of music and the actual size of the industry. There's a lot of money there, sure, but the music industry is like a professional sports league in terms of total revenue. A few superstars are going to suck up a lot of the money and not leave much for the bench players, let alone the folks three leagues down from the "show".

Seeing megamillionaires complain that the common man only has to pay $10/month to listen to their music is getting pretty old.

I’m sure he’s not hard pressed for money but i doubt he’s a mega millionaire. This should be seen as using a platform and audience to speak for those much smaller than him.

He seems to have a net worth of ~$20M.

That’s still 980 short of “mega”.

I assume you're quoting ~$20M based on a search like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=weird+al+net+worth

Every one of those pages is absolute bunk with made up numbers. They're trying to drive clicks. Take a look at any of them and you'll notice quite quickly that they never cite any source.

Looking at the first result (https://www.celebritynetworth.com/about-us/), they claim to:

> take into account known salaries, real estate holdings, divorce records, royalties, lawsuits, and endorsements. Our estimates incorporate a proprietary formula that removes estimated taxes, manager's fees, agent fees, and lifestyle expenses. The results are fact checked and confirmed by a team of editors and industry insiders.

No idea how truthful or accurate this is, but $20M does not seem unreasonable. Are there any better sources you know of?

I'm pretty sure only a tiny fraction of that comes from Spotify though.

Seeing multimillionaire corporations rip of the consumer is getting pretty old too.

> which is notoriously bad at paying musicians.

The only thing I ever see are people comparing against the money that 90's rockstars used to be able to bring in from album sales.

That ship sailed a long time ago, Spotify take everyone's money, substract a percentage for themselves and distribute the rest based upon number of plays.

If you were a big artist it's probably worse because you aren't getting a sweet deal to pull you onto a label (which we would then have you bitching about in the music press every week), or your a smaller artist and don't make much off it because you don't get the plays but you would have never seen the big money from tape/CD sales anyway.

I've also seen people argue that they never see the sort of money that they would get with a single play from BBC Radio, completely misunderstanding that BBC radio would probably never play their song, there is a much smaller bandwidth for playing music. Per person listening to your song, it works out not far off a play on Radio 6.

Maybe I have a different memory of record deals, but I've never heard of a band that made money from album sales. This is why they are always touring. It's not to promote the album, but to make money themselves. That's why there are jokes about bands "coming out of retirement" to do a tour after so many years being because one of the members needs to make a payment for something or other.

It used to be the other way around. The bulk of income was from album sales, and touring was considered advertisement for the album sales. Many tours had to basically sell out completely before they would turn a profit. Arena tickets were $20 and significantly less for smaller venues.

Not surprisingly, the reason it was this way is because the label got most of the profit from the albums and the artists got most of the profit from touring. And since the labels were in control, they optimized for album sales. They loved it when a tour lost money, because then the artist owed them money.

I believe it was the 90s when tours started becoming more profitable than albums.

Most couldn't, there were only a couple like Metallica.

But that's my point, people never made money from this previously. Why is Spotify being demonised because bands have bad contracts with their labels?

Spotify follows the same game-book as the record companies did in the early 00's.

Pay nearly-nothing to the artist, take money for themselves and charge the consumer. Nothing has changed other than an online-internet enabled application than a CD.

You don't even have your own physical copy, once you hit cancel you loose all. So your locked in to a model where if you wish to listen to music you are forced to pay, otherwise unless you head for the sea's and download which IS illegal and where the artist gets completely nothing, you've got nothing. Where at any point is that fair?

If Spotify sent you a CD of your top-listens of the year then that would be something.

> Pay nearly-nothing to the artist, take money for themselves and charge the consumer.

No they don't, they pay out 70% of all their taking.

The problem is that almost all artists work through labels still. Spotify pays the label who then screws over the artist in the same way they always have.

You are misdirecting your anger, just like the RIAA wants you to.

Maybe so, could of done royalty google-fu before hand but still, my anger is more focused at today's subscription models and my point still stands where you own nothing in return.

I don't use Spotify, nor any subscription model for that matter. If I can't own it, then oh well. This goes for consumer products too.

I see your point, but it's mainly this part:

> subtract a percentage for themselves

Streaming platforms (let's not just pick on Spotify, though they also pay worse than others) just do this arbitrarily. They decide how much to skim off for themselves before graciously paying artists. This isn't how it works in basically any other industry where one group of skilled individuals create content that is then sold on some marketplace - instead, the sale price and proceeds are visible to all, and the middleman takes a well-defined, reasonable cut of that.

There's no need to compare streaming platforms to other models of paying musicians, in order to know they're getting a bum deal. This model is not fair in the slightest, and it's perfectly alright to be upset about it.

> middleman takes a well-defined, reasonable cut of that.

Can you cite some examples of this. Etsy perhaps?

Online app stores, craft stores (Etsy), contracting services (Fiverr), even some other streaming services with direct subscription sales (like Twitch). All also marketplaces where skilled creators are selling the actual value that drives it.

Ah gotcha. These are the site where creators don't have another middleman like record labels ? I am not sure how payouts work if you can even publish directly on spotify.

Spotify has never reported an annual profit in its entire existence.

If they were just deciding their cut "arbitrarily" they are doing a bad job of it.

The reality is labels have all the leverage and extract all of the profits because they have a monopoly on talent and content

iTunes had a formal sale price, and it still led a catastrophic collapse in music sales revenue (https://money.cnn.com/2013/04/25/technology/itunes-music-dec...) which only ended when Spotify became big. The point of a comparison is to understand whether Spotify is doing something that could be fixed to get more revenue to artists, or whether the economics of selling songs for money just don’t work very well in a digital world.

Ironically it's widely known that the labels get 70% of all music revenue and Spotify gets to keep 30% for itself (which famously hasn't been enough to even turn a profit). You couldn't be more wrong.

You're right, I didn't know this. I was under the impression that Spotify self-reported its split and that it wasn't really auditable in any way. Can you link to a source?

> The company pays 70% of its total revenue to rights holders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Business_model

The cited source there is some old Spotify PR. Which, if you dive into, eventually states:

> Our current payment agreements lead us to distribute (~)approximately 70% of our gross revenues to master recording and publishing rights (both mechanical reproduction and performance) holders. The precise division between these types of rights holders varies by territory in accordance with local laws and negotiated agreements.

So, 70% / 30% is actually just a self-reported figure, and also just a ballpark based on current agreements at the time. Also, I couldn't find a current version of this page, only the archived one cited. All current versions of this page seem to have nothing but deflection, which might indicate that their self-reported figure has become less flattering.

Capitalism at it's finest.

Okay, I finally don’t feel so bad. I’ve finally seen someone else using a phone older than mine. Of course, this looks like they used a second phone they had in drawer to playback the video while probably recording with their latest gen device

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