Hacker News Reader

Comment by WilTimSon | Hacker News Reader

> PS: not that many musicians are able to pay bills with their spotify checks, but that's not the point.

What IS the point, though? You seem to be criticising people who don't purchase a Spotify Premium while also admitting Spotify barely pays them anything. Yes, this client gives nothing to the artist, Spotify gives next to nothing, both are bad in different ways.

If anyone genuinely wants to support musicians - buy their merch, go to their concerts, buy their albums on Bandcamp or physical media. No streaming platform pays them their dues.

View on HN

The point is that the musicians still deserve to get paid from streaming. Ridiculous nonsense to say that if something isn't well remunerated, might as well go the illegal route and not pay anything at all.

Not ridiculous at all. If you use the service that pays the artists below the value, you are endorsing that underpayment. You're literally voting with your wallet that underpaying the artists is fine.

Pirating doesn't support the artists, but it's also not weakening their expected rights for future business contracts, which supporting services like Spotify does; after all, if all these other artists are getting paid 'x' much, and all these consumers think this is what it's worth, how is anyone but Beyonce or Swift or Kanye gonna have any hope of arguing against that?

There is no way to inform Spotify that you don't endorse their business practices, except to not subscribe. Subscribing is an endorsement.

Personally, I purchase my music individually on iTunes (and download and convert to mp3). Apple still takes a cut, but it's much lower than the near-100% cut that streaming services take.

> near-100% cut that streaming services take

All the main music services operate on the 70/30 split in favour of the license holders.

If you pay $10 for a subscription, $7 gets put into a pool with all the subscription and ad revenue for your country, and that gets divided out proportionally based on the playback in your country. If Taylor Swift gets 10% of the plays in the US, she gets 10% of the pot.

If you're of the opinion that pirating artists' music is better for them in the long run, that's cool. But at least be informed on what the business model you're complaining about actually entails.

I said "artists". You said "license holders". Those are usually not the same people, and I meant what I said.

And then you can see that the bitrate is 2-20x better. I personally get bothered by anything under CD quality (44.1kHz 16-bit) so all these platforms are basically unlistenable for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com