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Comment by chipgap98 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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?

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.

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