Hacker News Reader

Comment by pinkgolem | Hacker News Reader

>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?

View on HN

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com