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Comment by drewdevault | Hacker News Reader

Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and the distribution system, not to this. If everyone who uses this software were to use Spotify direct, ads and all, in the long run it would make pennies for the artists at best. You're better off listening to music however you please and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists; a lifetime of spotify listening will make less money for an artist you like than buying a single album from them on Bandcamp.

Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify.

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> a lifetime of spotify listening will make less money for an artist you like than buying a single album from them on Bandcamp.

This is false. And I mean, dramatically.

> Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify.

It's roughly 200$.

Number of songs per hour: 60 minutes / 3 minutes per song = 20 songs

Total listening hours per year: 8 hours/day * 365 days = 2,920 hours

Total streams per year: 20 songs/hour * 2,920 hours = 58,400 streams

Total earnings: 58,400 streams * $0.004 (average pay rate) = $233.60

How high do you think that number should be, to be non-"whopping"?

I am seriously confused about what or who anti-streamers think they are zealoting for, what alternative fantasy they are defending.

As someone who has worked in the music industry (i.e. the people actually making a living through music) I witnessed Spotify/YT and the likes as an absolute force of creation of a new class of musicians, that would never have existed before.

You and I did the same back-of-the-napkin math and arrived at slightly different numbers; I used a 5 minute average song duration and $0.003 average payout. See my other comments for elaboration on why the Bandcamp model is ultimately better for the artist.

I don't deny that Spotify has improved the situation for many artists, but rather that it hasn't done enough and other approaches do it better, and I believe this is factually true.

Yes, Bandcamp leaves a bigger percentage to the musician - from nothing/less. For a variety of reasons, Bandcamp is not actually being used and thus not doing for artists what Spotify has. You can start a personal crusade to combat that, but as long as you do not actually make it work (and I think there is good reasons rooted in what Spotify does well over Bandcamp and the service the former provides that the later won't), this is what is actually factually true.

Let's just skip the part, where we imply it's somehow okay to circumvent fair use, because nobody is making money off of streaming anyway or any such nonsense. Streaming as intended is fine for now. People can just use Spotify, or any of the alternatives, as they are intended and that's fine and on the whole better than anything we had before.

I didn't actually make that argument, though. I said that a user who circumvents ads on Spotify and buys albums from Bandcamp is more profitable for the artist than someone who just listens to Spotify ads, and I believe that this is factually true. A quick review of Google will turn up endless testimonies from artists who make more money from Bandcamp, usually by an order of magnitude or more. Spotify may be better than anything we had before (I don't believe this is true, but assume it for the moment), it is not better than anything that came after.

For the record, I am steelmanning a position in which abject piracy is a social negative, which I do not actually believe, but if we take that at face value my arguments still hold.

1. If you _really_ like an album, buy it on Bandcamp, because it gives more money to the artist.

2. If you just listen to the occasional song, listen to them on Spotify. Artist gets _some_ money, but nowhere near as much as #1.

3. If you don't care about the artist getting anything at all, then use workarounds like this tool, or download on torrents.

Most people used to do #3, and are now doing #2. #1 is just not going to happen, because there's too much friction.

0. If you really want to support an artist, just ask what is the best way to just send them some hard cash every month? Patreon, ko-fi... even straight wire transfer (isn't FedNow already working?).

Why do we keep insisting on having middlemen?

I don't believe most people care about a lot of the artists they listen to enough to seek them out and send money this way.

Not that I believe it's good or bad either way, it's just cumbersome. People want easy solutions. A few of my long distance friends are artists, and it makes them happy to see that I have bought their new cassette or vinyl on Bandcamp above the regular price, and send nice notes with it.

I can do this for more people more easily thru Bandcamp than figuring it all out myself.

> most people (don't) care about a lot of the artists they listen

Fair enough. Then don't pay anything?

> it makes them happy to see that I have bought their new cassette or vinyl

On the other hand, I do not want to buy merch, I don't care about physical media and I flat out refuse to buy something with DRM and/or through exploitative middlemen.

Interesting to know. What are the comparative figures for youtube and TikTok videos?

What's the median payout? i.e. is it skewed by some very high earning artists?

$0.

13,400 bands (not artists) got paid over $50K by spotify in 2020:

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/how-many-artists-are-...

There are 8 million artists on spotify, and over 80% had under fifty monthly listeners:

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on...

Put another way, 0.16% made over $50K. That's median income in the US. If you assume the money gets split across 5 band members, that's median income in Indonesia.

This will also roughly be true for Bandcamp (albeit for each commercially failed band there's at least 3 friends and a mom, who will buy something off of the store and at a show, once when given the chance but I hope no one is cynical enough to argue about that being a lot better than $0).

The fact that every creative endeavour or sport is a mix of a few pros and a lot of amateurs (in the sense that they do not make a living) is not an issue.

The value of Spotify and the like to most artists is enabling them to publish to everyone for basically free, no matter how fringe or bad, and to do it all the time. I think that's wonderful.

They don't break down the distribution of how many artists got paid at all, but it looks like they're probably close to the estimated 15K bands that got non-trivial payments from Spotify this year:

https://bandcamp.com/about

> In the past year alone, they’ve spent $194 million on 14.2 million digital albums, 10.4 million tracks, 1.75 million vinyl records, 800,000 CDs, 350,000 cassettes, and 50,000 t-shirts.

Note that $194M is less than 10% of Spotify's revenue.

I'd love to see a breakdown by percentile income per band, but one thing's clear: If I buy something there, then more of my money goes to the artist I'm trying to support than they get from me streaming their album.

This computation is assuming streaming fraud though. If they see an account doing that, they'll flag it.

Assume the album has 10 songs, is one hour long and costs $20. Ten songs means they get $0.04 each time you listen to it. So, you need to listen to the album 500 times for the artist to be paid for the album. I mostly listen in the car; call it under 2 hours a day, but lets assume 4 hours a day of listening to Spotify.

A Spotify subscription is $11 a month. I can fit 4 non-fraud plays of the album into each day, so that's 4 * 30 = 120 streams. It'd take 4 months of listening to nothing but this one album for the artist to break even, and it'd cost me $44.

Bandcamp + bittorrent would give the artists about twice as much money on average. Buying merch also pays artists more, assuming the cost of the item plus shipping is under half what they charge.

That creation of a new class of musicians is not due to their ads model though, but due to offering a platform for discovery and distribution.

The problem is with streaming really. Come to a shop where physical works of music are sold, everything is free for listening there. Come to bandcamp – where you can buy and own a digital album, everything is free for listening there. Come to spotify - here you pay to a middle man, who decides whatever crap cut he will pay to a musician per play button pressed – it is instantly visible the whole model is not viable and only makes the middle-man really profit

> If everyone who uses this software were to use Spotify direct, ads and all, in the long run it would make pennies for the artists at best.

I'm not sure that "they get paid so little that we may as well stop paying them anything" is an argument you really want to make here? Yes, Spotify pay is crap. Not paying anything is crap too. Two wrongs don't make a right.

I'm not making that argument. I made an argument that you have better options in which the artist is paid more.

You said "Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and the distribution system, not to this." but that's not the problem this specific software can solve. However the authors of this software can work on adding reporting the plays back to Spotify. (And I believe they should)

This software is not trying to solve the problem of getting artists paid, and the suggestion that people should listen to Spotify ads and all is not really going to solve that problem, either.

Taking the music without compensation and pretending that you're totally going to buy some music or merch from some other artist doesn't actually lead to artists being compensated. While in the plan where you buy music and only listen to the music you bought you don't need this app at all.

I've spent thousands of dollars on Bandcamp over the past several years, attended many live shows, bought merchandise, etc. Suggesting that one is "pretending" to do these things when making this argument is a hell of a strawman. I feel like pretending that you're supporting your favorite artists by listening them on Spotify is a bit more of an appropriate comparison.

> attended many live shows, bought merchandise, etc.

I don't understand what does attending live shows have to do with how you listen to their music. Ppl who do listen on spotify also do that.

Live shows are generally the largest source of revenue for musicians.

So what? You think only ppl listening on bandcamp go to live shows? How is it relevant to the current topic.

If the purpose of Spotify is to pay artists, then it's objectively a failure.

If you want pay musicians for their music, then you'd be better off buying albums on bandcamp or attending concerts. Paying Spotify is marginally better than just lighting your money on fire.

If the purpose of Spotify is to allow you to listen to music with minimal effort and cost, and don't care if the bands get paid then it does a middling job among paid services. It's probably more convenient than piracy, but I don't know what the state of modern music piracy is (I could imagine a gray-area Internet group that does a better job with metadata and recommendation algorithms than the paid sites do, and that links to a popcorn time style torrent thing.)

I meant the generic "you" of an user of this app. I'm sure you specifically don't actually use this app, and just listen to the music you bought.

But the main selling point of this app, i.e. the actual submission, is to get the music for free and no ads. The target market of it is not going to be paying a cent, because the entire reason the app exists and was submitted is to avoid paying much smaller amounts for music than what you're paying.

This is perhaps true (but I'm not sure it is), but consider the context of this thread: we're specifically making arguments to an audience of people who care about artists being paid.

There's also the artist's point of view in this thread, multiple people saying they made many times more money from Bandcamp than steaming services.

> multiple people saying they made many times more money from Bandcamp than steaming services.

While it might be true that they get more money on bandcamp. They get exposure through streaming websites like youtube, spotify that brings ppl to bandcamp.

You're supporting the artists you listen to more uniformly (via spotify) though.

If you and I listen to 1000 artists over the course of a year, and you spend $1000/year on album purchases (let's say $10 each) while I subscribe to spotify, I pay $90 a year while supporting all of the artists I listen to, loosely based on how much I listen to them, while you much more significantly support up to 100 of the artists you listened to.

I think what you're doing is better, don't get me wrong, but I can only afford $90 a year anyway.

In your case though, you could support all the artists you listen to by paying for a spotify/itunes/whatever subscription and using that as your primary listening service, while also purchasing their music via bandcamp. You probably won't feel the additional subscription price.

And I think most people who can afford $1000/year for music are not going to be using YouSpot, so I'm not sure why you're pointing out that people can leech off of spotify and then support the artists directly, when the above person said "please also support the artists"

> You're better off listening to music however you please and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists;

Yes, but most people can't afford this. It's good that YouSpot is available for people who can't even afford spotify (no one upthread said otherwise), and many people aren't going to be able to pay bandcamp $1000 per year to support maybe 10-50% of the artists they listen to. So please save your thesis for somewhere it's relevant.

For the average person who can maybe comfortably afford $90 per year, a subscription service is a much more viable way to support the musicians they listen to than buying 4-9 albums

You say that it is better to pay 90$ for 1000$ worth of goods than to pay nothing. This is a false dilemma, there is a third choice that is paying only what you can afford. Paying only 9% of a physical good wouldn't make anyone less of a robber.

A lot of people here would rather blame those who steal better than they do, than question the industry that allows artists work to be sold off.

Furthermore, I would say that most people using Spotify and alike services do it only for convenience, but certainly not to "support the artists".

These aren't physical goods, and (my issues with the categorization of piracy as theft aside) given that we're talking about legally listening to music you have access to through a service you pay for, I don't even know how to engage with the suggestion that this is theft (on the part of the consumers anyway).

If you have the means and inclination to pay more I strongly urge people to pay more also. There are issues with the intermediaries, but there is no practical way for people who can't afford $1000/yr to support the artists they like legally, while still being able to listen to them.

So if your suggestion is that someone who can afford $90/year should only have access to the albums they can afford to purchase through bandcamp because those support the artists more directly, I strongly disagree. This just further creates a wedge between the wealthy and regular working class people.

Are you suggesting poor people make do with the few albums they can purchase from bandcamp and then whatever they can listen to on the radio? On youtube? Because I fail to see how those are any less 'theft' than just paying spotify and listening there.

edit: I'm actually legitimately confused about what your idea is here and I'd like to understand. It seems like we're both coming at this from an anti-capitalist perspective, but your idea that poor people should have reduced access to the arts doesn't seem to align with any anti-capitalist ideology I'm aware of.

Or are you just opposed to the consolidation of the distribution channels which exploit the working class (artists in this case) but somehow haven't drawn the connection that this is a condition of late-stage capitalism?

If so, I'd recommend listening to some content by the wonderful Cory Doctorow

Also, if, once a year, every spotify listener picked one band they liked at random, and paid them the amount of an annual Spotify subscription ($132), there'd be a hell of a lot more money in artist's pockets than there is currently.

There are 8 million artists on Spotify, and 551 million monthly active users. That's $9000 per band on average per year. The 99.9th percentile band on Spotify makes $50K, and the 80th percentile artist makes $0. If we split the money across the 20% currently making any money at all, that's $45K per year per band. Therefore, the "pirate + directly pay one band at random" strategy would fund ~100 times more artists then Spotify does.

Also, if Spotify went bankrupt tomorrow and 100% of their users switched to pure piracy, we'd only lose roughly 15K below-minimum-wage jobs globally. There are currently 36,000 Spotify listeners for every band being paid what would be a median income for one person. If a tiny fraction of them decided to go to concerts or donate to appropriate non-profits, etc, it'd be a net gain of jobs for artists.

Note: There are only 220M premium subscriptions, so my numbers are a bit inflated. Ignoring the 330M ad supported listeners would lead to numbers that are too low. Also, I assumed people would pay for a spotify subscription which is more than the assumed $90.

Maybe divide everything I said by two?

Link to subscriber numbers:

https://www.statista.com/chart/15697/spotify-user-growth/

I think you're missing a few relevant things:

An annual spotify subscription in the U.S. is $99 (possibly less with boxing day deals and such), but I'd assume the majority of subscribers are outside the U.S. where prices are lower across the board.

But 6M of those artists may be AI-generated filler content, possibly published by bots. I don't think the correct idea is to divide the potential money people can spend by the number of artists. There should be some connection with what people are actually choosing to listen to, anything else would reward opportunistic publishers of low-effort, uninspired music (and encourage people to do even more of this).

Which then brings up the problem: If people were to fund one artist they listen to (lets say an artist they choose to listen to rather than an artist they accidentally listened to a song by once), are they going to choose at random from their list of such artists? How do they then get that list to pick from? How do they discover new music to potentially listen to more of in the first place

Apps like Spotify, (or OSS like YouSpot that piggybacks on Spotify) are both valid answers to those questions.

Then you have the dilemma of who's paying the cost of the bandwidth, and the development costs.

If you want to be fair, I think people should be encouraged to pay what they comfortably can with their budgets. They're using the infrastructure and platform of spotify (or similar) for discovery, so Spotify or similar should reasonably expect some money to cover costs and pay their devs. Then they can also pay any number of random artists whenever the mood strikes them.

If they can't afford spotify, they can still use YouSpot, kick the YouSpot devs one or several dollar per year, and then purchase music from their preferred artists up to the amount comfortable for them.

Using YouSpot is the closest actual thing to 'stealing' btw, because they're actually consuming a resource (bandwidth and server time) that's intended for subscribers, from a company that pays for it. Add to that, by using their software (and spotify's upstream), if they're not financially supporting the YouSpot devs and the Spotify devs for the work they're consuming then we're back to the initial claim (which I already said I disagree with) that consuming something that can be 'copied' ad infinitum without paying the producer is theft.

But I think any of the above are reasonable options for people who want to maximize the support of creators of the things they consume while staying within their means

I mostly listen to long-tail artists, so if I were to pick one at random, it would probably be in the 80-99.9th percentile group. (Assuming 80% of Spotify's catalog is spam -- that could be, but I don't use Spotify, and have never encountered spam any of their competitors).

This would pull some revenue away from the > 99.9th percentile artists, but that's OK with me.

I'm more worried that, even if we count jobs that are way below minimum wage, Spotify is only supporting 15K bands worldwide. That rounds to zero when compared to their listener base and their revenue.

Anyway, I pay more than just a streaming subscription annually, but I went with an estimate of what's going into just Spotify for my calculations. I'm not convinced there'd be much societal impact (in terms of artists not being paid) if they disappeared tomorrow.

Then you're probably the rare exception who would likely benefit independent artists more by just randomly picking a few every year.

If everyone just pirated and picked a few musicians to support directly every year, the overwhelming majority of people would pick from the 16,000 in the 99.8th percentile on spotify, and the majority of the hundreds of thousands of artists in the 80th - 99.8th percentiles would see no income whatsoever from digital distribution.

> These aren't physical goods, and (my issues with the categorization of piracy as theft aside) given that we're talking about legally listening to music you have access to through a service you pay for, I don't even know how to engage with the suggestion that this is theft.

It being legal doesn't do much about its unfairness.

> For the average person who can maybe comfortably afford $90 per year, a subscription service is a much more viable way to support the musicians they listen to than buying 4-9 albums

The option that you describe as the best for people who can't put more than 90$ a year on music (which is perfectly fine), is going through a subscription service, because even if a lesser amount of that money goes directly to artists, more of them get to see a bit of it.

I disagree with that, because you don't know for sure where your money is going, as all of this distribution system around streaming services is pretty opaque. As far as I know, the money from subscriptions on Spotify is not equally distributed among the artists that a user listens to. Bigger artists tend to get more per play than smaller ones.

The other option would be to spend that same amount on buying albums each year on a service like Bandcamp, which is known to distribute the money in a more direct and transparent way, and where artists actually have more control over what and how they want to sell.

It definitely means making a choice about what to buy, but it is still better than letting an obscure algorithm make that choice for you.

We should also consider that we can favor artists who are in need over those who are already earning large amounts. This is the opposite of what streaming services seems to be doing.

> your idea that poor people should have reduced access to the arts

This is not my idea and I didn't say that. I criticize those who waste their time chasing the "theft", who they blame for being the origin of the artists being poorly paid, when the subscription model being proposed as the best solution is actually far from it and could also be considered as theft when you put out the numbers of how much artists are asking for their work.

> This is not my idea and I didn't say that. I criticize those who waste their time chasing the "theft", who they blame for being the origin of the artists being poorly paid,

Oh well if this is truly the point you wanted to make, then we're in agreement.

Earlier I was responding to:

> > jsnell: In the plan where you buy music and only listen to the music you bought you don't need [YouSpot] at all.

> drewdevault: I feel like pretending that you're supporting your favorite artists by listening them on Spotify is a bit more of an appropriate comparison [to not supporting the artists]

I wasn't saying either of these things are better, simply pointing out that paying for spotify is going to support a broad selection of artists a little bit, while paying through bandcamp is going to support a narrow selection of artists a lot, and that both are desirable:

> You're supporting the artists you listen to more uniformly (via spotify) though ... you could support all the artists you listen to by paying for a spotify/itunes/whatever subscription and using that as your primary listening service, while also purchasing their music via bandcamp.

Aka both is better than just buying the music of a few artists through bandcamp while listening to everyone through piracy or YouSpot. That doesn't mean I disagree with anyone choosing to go the piracy + focused bandcamp patronage route.

You jumped in with:

> Paying only 9% of a physical good wouldn't make anyone less of a robber.

Which I took to mean "no actually, just paying Spotify is theft".

If the 80% of people with a limited entertainment budget pick their top 5 artists to support every year, the virtuosos of music are going to benefit, while the "B-tier" and "C-tier" artists who people still like to listen to are going to suffer a lot more.

Paying for Spotify, or more aptly, Tidal (which seemingly pays artists the most) is probably the most realistic way that's accessible to a lot of people, to support the artists they listen to in a way that tracks their actual listening preferences. Yes, buy music in addition to that if you can, but if everyone chooses a few artists to support directly, it's still going to result in many musicians getting unfairly compensated despite lots of people enjoying their music, so I disagree with the idea that it's better to spend $90 on bandcamp in a year vs. $90 on spotify in a year, if it is a choice of one or the other.

Better in some ways sure, because you're disintermediating the streaming platforms, but worse in equitable distribution, which will disproportionately impact artists who are liked by many but "top-10"ed by few

I spend quite a lot on bandcamp and amazon's mp3 store (couple of hundred bucks a year maybe?)

I am very very happy to pay for DRM free music

however this getting increasingly difficult as companies don't even seem to want to provide it for sale at all

under no circumstances am I going to pay a monthly subscription for a digital product that can be delivered as a one off download

I know people that still buy CDs.

I've been meaning to dump my Tidal artist list to a spreadsheet or something, and figure out how to pay a few dozen artists directly this year.

One possibility is to buy their albums and copy them to my NAS. Paying for DRM-free downloads seems easier / better, but I'd want to make sure the artists' cut is higher than with streaming.

For what it's worth, iTunes is apparently DRM-free these days. I don't want to figure out their terrible GUI, but presumably there's some tool that'll copy the songs out of it and into a filesystem.

I would buy CDs and rip them up until about 5 years ago at which point the stuff I liked vanished

> For what it's worth, iTunes is apparently DRM-free these days.

I'll try this!

If you care about the artist here pay them directly either through bandcamp, by going to the physical shows and buying merch, ordering physical copies of their music at the label, patreon, or whatever form of direct support they have set up.

Spotify is just leeching of the culture and as drew pointed out you will be 10000 times more effective if you use one of those options.

Spotify is more or less just a signal booster nowadays - because you have to be on there since everyone uses it.

I for one would never put my music on Spotify, even if I get what like 20$ out of it, what a horrible company and service.

> If you care about the artist here pay them directly either through bandcamp

Not everyone is on bandcamp. Seems like some sort of north american website.

I listed four other concrete options and closed with “or whatever other direct support method they have set up” — I assure you that every artist that wants to make money will have set up _something_ besides Spotify since it’s practically impossible to make money through them.

> I assure you that every artist that wants to make money will have set up _something_ besides Spotify since it’s practically impossible to make money through them.

you are wrong in your assurances( eg: i am listening to this on spotify at the moment Odeon Yılları Album by Nesrin Sipahi ) and your "other options" have nothing to do with how you listen to their music. Ppl listening on spotify also go to concerts they are not mutually exclusive.

Are you saying Nesrin Sipahi, who received a personal award from the president, has nothing but Spotify?

No idea who that artist is. It something spotify recommended and I am into it.

I didn't find that artist on bandcamp or any other non-streaming platforms. only on spotify, youtube, apple music. Are they not equivalent, didn't realize you were making a point specifically about spotify.

And yes I will surely go to that artist concert if they are in my area. Me listening to on spotify has nothing to do with it. If anything I would've never found that music if it wasn't for spotify.

Nesrin Sipahi is a far cry from a small indie artist that relies on support by their fan base.

And there are many options to buy her music as physical copies directly from her labels.

Of course it’s fine to use Spotify to listen to music and find new artists - I’m saying the worst way to pay artists that rely on their fan base for income.

> Nesrin Sipahi is a far cry from a small indie artist that relies on support by their fan base.

Who said this though?

This is what you originally said.

> If you care about the artist here pay them directly either through bandcamp

I responded to this

> I assure you that every artist that wants to make money will have set up _something_

Why did you bring 'far cry from a small indie artist ' into the picture all of sudden when you said 'every' in original comment.

Your original comment was about 'small indie artist' only ? You should've said 'small indie artist will always set up something' if you meant that. agree that might be true for small artists.

The argument is that this artist is only available on streaming, and that that's where most of their revenue came from?

https://www.amazon.com/CDs-Vinyl-Nesrin-Sipahi/s?rh=n%3A5174...

They're selling CDs, Vinyl and MP3s on Amazon, but their SoundCloud only has 29 followers.

Maybe they screwed up when they went all-in on indie digital distribution back in... 1978?

https://turkishvinyl.com/record/57/

Of course a celebrated artist with a 50+ year career that is a national icon won’t be reliant on digital distribution…

I think that would be obvious to anyone that wants to have a conversation in good faith.

I read you comment, looked at what spotify was playing on my speakers and posted that comment because you said 'every'. I really have no idea who that artist was or even what language that is.

Your comment wouldn't have been worthy of a response if you had said 'small artists'. Because thats well known problem with all streaming platforms and not just music.

Now looks like you are not even saying 'small artists' . It only applies arists who are not 'well known' ? No idea what you are even trying to say. Maybe use some precision ?

I would suggest you educate yourself a little bit about the culture you consume. The artist you chose is extremely well known and about 85 years old so I can’t take your example serious.

Of course I can’t give an extremely precise category of artist that is better paid directly than through Spotify - but everyone reading that argument in good faith knows what is meant.

You just choose to read it in the most unfavourable way imaginable.

Please connect to reality.

If that implies connecting to Spotify, no thanks. If your reality is based on catering to VC funded tech companies I pity you.

Read harder.

Bandcamp is widely used all over the world. My band made 6 times more money from Bandcamp than from all the streaming sites combined. People from all over Europe, USA, Canada and Australia bought our music.

>Bandcamp is widely used in all over the world.

Not really.

My opinion is based on the stats Bandcamp provides me. Care to elaborate on why you proclaim otherwise?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066807

curious how do ppl discover your band on bandcamp?

Through Bandcamp itself, social media, music blogs...

does bandcamp give you this info?

Yes. The free version gives you basic stats, the pro version gives you detailed stats.

Europe, US, Canada and Australia is your whole world? Local metal guys I know is on Spotify and not on Bandcamp. I wonder what you think of that. I’m in Asia btw, largest continent of the world.

> Europe, US, Canada and Australia is your whole world?

Of course not.

> I’m in Asia btw, largest continent of the world.

Those were only a few examples from the top of my head. We also had sales in S. Korea and Japan.

So, instead of interfacing with the actual argument (which is that Spotify pays almost nothing and if you really want to support an artist you actually pay them directly), you decide to zero in that one singular platform of many is not available where you think it should be?

If you didn’t want to support artists you can just say so and cut out the gymnastics.

i support artists in a lot of ways. spotify introduced me to many new artists and told me about their concerts in my area

> If you didn’t want to support artists you can just say so and cut out the gymnastics.

classic projection

And what is spotify?

Seriously, I would rather visit Bandcamp a 100 times than use Spotify, even though the website player of Bandcamp sucks and I need a user script to regulate the volume of it.

>You're better off listening to music however you please and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists;

Often, the "listening to music however you please" will contradict "buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists" ... because the particular artists the listener wants to listen to are on a big label and thus, their albums are not on Bandcamp.

The "buy on Bandcamp" advice only works if one likes to listen to the type of artists (typically indie) that happen to release on Bandcamp.

On the other hand, if music listeners want the mainstream stuff (Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Rolling Stones, etc)... they're only on the big tech music streamers like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc.

it also sidesteps the whole discovery issue. I would love to know how that person is discovering music that they buy on bandcamp.

Any of the locally-run radio stations in the SF Bay Area are good choices:

https://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/locate?select=city&city=mo...

Here are some that I have found new music on (no particular order):

KZSC, KFJC, KZSU, KSJS, KCSM, KKUP, KSJO, KBCZ, KDFC, KPOO, KALX

There's also SomaFM.

It looks like Pirate Cat Radio finally sold out to The Man, and got a broadcast license for their transmitter. Need to check them out again:

https://kpcr.org/about/

Apparently, there are now a handful of high school radio stations around here too. Does that mean the cool kids have kids in high school now? I must be getting old.

Also, music podcasts are a thing. I like Dark Compass for metal.

I think the "buy on Bandcamp" advise extends to any other of a large number of marketplaces you can purchase popular artist albums from.

I personally want to own music that I like and not just lose it if I decide to cut my subscriptions. I use Bandcamp for smaller acts and Qobuz for everything I can't find on Bandcamp.

> Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify.

Is that not reasonable? I mean, obviously this number represents a market price point: the system has reached an equilibrium where the "aggregate value" of being able to listen to music full time is $100/year (plus or minus all the confounding factors like who bears it and how it's distributed, etc...).

Is $100/year wrong? That is, after all, right about the price of the subscription you're likely paying already. So... it sounds right to me? What's the mechanism you are imagining where customers paying for subscriptions of that order somehow produce payments to the artists that are significantly higher?

I think a lot of the disconnect here is that the idea of "music revenue" is different in today's world than it was in the days of the 70's rock star. People used to pay a lot more for music! But they don't anymore, and all the parties take a hit, not just Spotify/Apple/et. al.

> Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and the distribution system

Spotify pay 70% of their revenue back to the rights holders, leaving 30% for operating costs and profits. What percentages would you recommend, and what are you basing it on?

I would not recommend a different revenue split, I would recommend a different business model. And I did!

If you would pay $0.01 per song on Spotify. Then if you listen to an artist's album of 10 songs for a 100 times, so 1000 song plays of $0.01, that is $10. Spotify takes 30% cut, then the artist gets $7 and Spotify gets $3. Now if 10,000 people listen to the album a 100 times, the artist gets $70,000 and Spotify $30.000.

What the artist needs to do for this is come up with the songs, work them out, practice them with a band, record, produce, mix, artwork, release, promo.

For Spotify to release the album on their platform, they just need to sign a deal with the artist and add the album to their library. And this process is obviously largely (if not fully) automated. Of course they have some infrastructure and costs for this, but I think they're much better off than the artists.

I don't get how this is justification for individuals to pay artists zero with thus bypass. Indie musicians who grow to have 10-100k+ monthly streams are making a nice chunk of money from it.

The lion’s share of Spotify subscription data goes straight to the labels. The labels are the ones not paying artists.

It’s crazy to expect all the music in the world on demand for $12 a month or whatever. Spotify can probably do better in some ways but I don’t see how any of this justifies not giving the artists the pennies your mentioning.

That doesn’t paint the full picture, though. Artists get something from Spotify in return - exposure to listeners (even those that wouldn’t traditionally listen to an artist or never discover them otherwise), global and immediate distribution, marketing, and simple payment handling.

Today, artists don’t need most of the services traditional record labels provide, which treated them way worse over the last half century. And that’s a good thing.

Not to say I think it’s fair how little streaming services pay to musicians, but this is more nuanced than just Spotify exploiting artists.

This Spotify client could autolink to artists on Bandcamp.

Radio playlists often have artist links. Sometimes they work. For example:

http://www.kser.org/content/live-playlist

I'm sceptical that Drew DeVault has a sock puppet account on HN, created 3 months ago, in addition to @ddevault. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I don't like non-satirical impersonation.

>Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify.

i mean, that sounds fair?

Especially considering that Spotify claims over 500 million users. The traditional bottleneck in the music industry and the entertainment industry has been distribution.

Of course, 500 million users does not mean that 500 million potential fans will be exposed to your work.

Maybe, maybe not. If an artist makes up 1% of your listening, that goes down to a dollar, and if you factor in more realistic listening habits that goes down further. Consider that this is paid to the rights holder, not the artist, as well -- the artist usually gets even less. Buy one album on Bandcamp for $10 and the rights holder gets $8.50 (on Bandcamp this is usually the artist directly).

Fact of the matter is that in terms of getting artists paid, Spotify's business model and distribution model is inferior to other solutions and the economic cost of circumventing the ads is little to none, and in fact if you take advantage of Spotify's distribution model for convenience and buy elsewhere for economics then you are performing a net social good.

People are saying about 70% of Spotify revenue goes to rights holders, whereas you're saying about 85% of Bandcamp's revenue goes to rights holders. It really doesn't seem like that much of a difference?

Maybe what you're saying is, you end up spending much more buying merchandise and labuns directly than you would spend on Spotify. (I'm not sure this would be true for everyone though)

Maybe then the solution could be to have a way to just pay more to Spotify (conditional on keeping the revenue split intact).

Something I don't like about Spotify though, is that I don't get to have any kind of say on how the revenue is split. I'd personally prefer if there was an egalitarian bias in payment, and the artists with less revenue would get a greater share of my subscription. But there's no way I can control that, that's the most frustrating to me personally, and I'd gladly switch to a system that pays more (since I currently have the means to).

In fact, I've proposed FunkWhale, the federated (libre-)music streaming platform, should get a subscription service like that, and that I should have some control over the revenue distribution (maybe there would be a minimum revenue split, and the rest I can 'choose my own algorithm', for example one that heavily favors less popular musicians). I agree that meanwhile the best I can do to support them would be paying them directly, and I've found a few have Liberapay (or Patreon) accounts as well.

> People are saying about 70% of Spotify revenue goes to rights holders, whereas you're saying about 85% of Bandcamp's revenue goes to rights holders. It really doesn't seem like that much of a difference?

85% of a bigger number is significantly more than 70% of a much smaller number.

The number I spend on music before Spotify was well below 120 per year. I would even attribute increased spending on festivals/concerts/merch on Spotify

You don’t understand, there is a parallel universe where people don’t pay for Spotify and totally spend 500 bucks per year on merch for each artist they listen to

> Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and the distribution system, not to this.

How exactly do you do this ? What a dishonest comment to support stealing.

>How exactly do you do this

By reading the rest of my comment.

>What a dishonest comment to support stealing.

Copying is not theft.

> By reading the rest of my comment.

I did. You made a silly assumption that all artists put their music up on bandcamp. No one even knows what bandcamp is my area.

Bandcamp is available in more markets than Spotify. Not sure how that's relevant to my argument, though.

Here is an example of an artist not on bandcamp . This is what i am listening currently on spotify( I have no idea who this is)

Odeon Yılları Album by Nesrin Sipahi

So mail her a check? Do we have to think of everything for you?

How do I find an artist’s mailing address? And what is a check?

I’m the only one buying stuffs on Bandcamp in my family. Casual listeners see no reason to be on Bandcamp when they can listen it on YouTube or Spotify.

For the parent comment, it’s better to support artists on whichever platform they want to be in, because parent comment feels like he has an axe to grind on Spotify.

Why would artists not put their music up on one of the most well-known platforms that allow people to significantly support them by purchasing a copy of their music.

I legitimately don't get it.

I don't necessarily believe that Spotify is necessarily worse as a way to make money from their music (I think ad-supported and subscription "bundling" services such as Youtube and Spotify probably result in more money going to artists than all the options for purchasing artists' music piecemeal, like Bandcamp), but artists should definitely make their music available somewhere for fans to purchase regardless

Substitute Bandcamp with Google/Apple music or whatever, the point remains, one can use Spotube and choose to support artists buy paying for their music.

I don't think most people are actually doing this though..

> I legitimately don't get it.

Because its not " one of the most well-known platforms" outside english speaking countries. I assure you no one in Sri Lanka or India know what bandcamp is.

This kind of western arrogance is kind of infuriating to ppl from other parts of the world. Like american tourist demanding that ppl speak to them in english in turkey.

Copying is robbing the artist of their revenue. So you are actually proposing a solution to make life worse for artists.

What a dishonesty.

Copying is not theft, it is materially different.

Moreover, I have proposed ways of engaging with music which makes substantially more money for artists. I am not the one being dishonest here.

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