Hacker News Reader

Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

The alternative is that artists get nothing from these customers.

It’s not like Spotify is getting rich. They keep 30% and give artists 70% (although much goes to labels, but the point is that Spotify only gets 30%).

The market isn’t there for people to pay so much for music. It’s not unfair as much as a busker not being a millionaire isn’t unfair either.

How much money should someone get for a million people listening to their song? What’s the fair amount? I’m not sure, but I think Spotify is the closest artists have ever gotten given the historical payouts for radio, album sales, etc.

I think most of this is just people not understanding and naturally wanting more.

View on HN

I have a musician friend that had a fairly successful (locally) independent band from around 2008 to 2012.

I've talked to him a couple of time about the business side of it - when the band started they managed to create a nice community of people that liked their music, even before they released their first album. People would go to concerts and buy a lot of merchandise and their CDs and even vinils when they recorded and released their music.

He shared that with the popularization of streaming services, they lost a lot of their identity and this community lost a lot of force. At the same time, a lot more people were listening to their music (and still are), but the return to them was really low, both monetarily and in the sense of accomplishment of the band.

> At the same time, a lot more people were listening to their music (and still are)

This is true, but only because their music is cheap/free. If it cost more, they would not be listening.

The community part seems real, but that’s a function of streaming and digital music in general and not so much the payout amount. I think Spotify could triple the payout (by tripling the price to customers) and your friend would still make less.

Tend to agree here. Maybe artists made more money back in the day on radio time and sold albums. From all the anecdotes you hear, it was the producers/labels that took the majority of the revenue.

I think it’s fine for artists to want more, it’s a free market after all, they might just not get it.

On top of that, the "average" payout to artists feels less important to me than the "median" artist payout.

In other words, are there now more artists making money than before, even if the big hitters are making less off album sales? That matters a lot

Reply on news.ycombinator.com