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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

"Additionally, Spotify now requires a minimum number of unique listeners for royalties to apply. This attempt to stop "further manipulation by bad actors""

What a load of manure. The only reason manipulation of royalties even works is that they pool the streams such that the consumer wont pay the artist he listens too.

Just tie the royalties to what each user listens to and what they pay. Solved. No abuse possible.

But no. Have to have an opaque algorithm and do hacks upon hacks to obscure its funamental flaws.

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If this is true, I demand that I only pay Spotify if I listen to more than 1000 songs a month

I've recently learned how extraction of funds from gift cards and hacked accounts works. What I've come to understand that obfuscation of monetization model, with simple info for the creators "beyond this many discoveries, we'll pay you some portion of general activity" is actually a good way to avoid abuse and allow for easier management of apps funds in general.

If that's all they wanted to achieve, then maybe they can pool that "demonetized" money and raffle it to the smaller musicians. If the outcome is only that Spotify stops paying out on something they used to pay for, by unilaterally changing the terms for the users without any bargaining power, then it feels like any effect other than increasing net profit is just the cherry on top.

You can't just say "in order to improve your experience we've decided to stop paying you" and expect people to trust your motives.

Something like 15% of spotify's revenue is from ads, and so even if you do that you have to address the ad-fraud problem.

You also aren't even addressing one of the issues here, which is functionally "listen-time" related fraud on Spotify, but simple solutions don't really work, since yt has the same issue in reverse.

As a general rule, if you think something like "No abuse possible.", you are unfamiliar with the problem space.

> As a general rule, if you think something like "No abuse possible.", you are unfamiliar with the problem space.

Ok. The gains for the abuse is capped at the subscription fee minus Spotifys fees, per account.

This is, functionally, already true.

The gains from a lot of the abuse vectors they've mention are either ad-fraud related (your suggestions don't help), or are ways you steal from other creators by taking a larger than intended share. That is true whether the pool is $N,000,000 dollars statically, or a larger fraction than intended of 10000 $2 pools per user.

The other alternative is a pay-per-listen business model, but this kills the company.

I am not concerned with ad fraud, since it is more or less futile to prevent fraud in pay per impression setups.

My suggestion would however work, if ad money were distributed for plays proportional to how paying users listen, as long as Spotify's fee is larger than the ads share of revenue. I.e. each paying user don't "decide" more than a dollar of royalties per dollar paid.

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/great-big-spotify-sca...

They argue a guy in Bulgaria set up 1200 premium accounts. However, they don't have proof.

> I.e. each paying user don't "decide" more than a dollar of royalties per dollar paid.

Yes, you still run into the issue where 30 second whale songs get a larger than intended share of the royalties from whale-song-listening users.

I'm not sure where the disconnect is here.

Free Users don't pay anything. But Spotify still wanna money from ads. So tying royalties to what users pay would be unfair to the musicians.

Put a dollar value on the free accounts then? You could even base it off the amount of ads played per account. This is such an easy problem to solve. The pooling of streams is the main main incentive problem, like parent says.

You could just listen to your buddie's streams on loop while your asleep so they get a portion of your fees.

Yes, but it would generate less than the current system. Today you can generate more revenue for your friend than your account costs, ie a pure financial arbitrage opportunity. This has been successfully exploited already, and I assume they anti-abuse systems in place today.

Wait, what. Are you saying that the costs of using the service should be tied to how much listening one does? Because if you're not, then what you are saying should have no bearing at all on how much royalties anyone gets.

Assuming a fixed fee, it's a tradeoff. Do you let the people with more plays steer everyone else's money, or do you let plays from different people be worth different amounts?

I think the first option is worse.

Neither option pays a fixed amount per play, so that factor doesn't favor either choice.

I read this as splitting each user's monthly payment only across the artists they themselves listened to (like how YouTube premium works) instead of pooling everything together. So artists with more paying listeners would get more, while artists who only get listened to by free bot accounts wouldn't get anything.

how would this work if i listen to 1000 bands? the split would be miniscule.

If you listen to one or two songs each from a thousand bands, the amount each band gets is minuscule with either method.

this was basically what I was asking. would this scheme actually make more money for the musicians? thanks for a reply.

The total amount doesn't change, but I think it would be fairer.

The split would be fair, and if the same algorithm applied to every subscriber, popular musicians would get paid more.

Do you mean, how do you handle $0.001 monthly payouts? Spotify could set a payout threshold. If the threshold is not passed in a given month, the balance carries over to the next month.

One way it could work is if Spotify divided say $8 per user across all the streams that user listened to that month. So if a user only listens to Justin Bieber this month, he'd get the full $8 in stream royalties, while someone listening to more artists would redistribute their $8 across all of them.

No I'd like my subscription (which I canceled due to the new UI and new ToS) should go only to the artists I listen to, proportionally to the amount of minutes played.

Search for white noise and you'll understand why this is not a great idea.

If that is what the user wants to listen to?

How big share of users play white noise on repeat really. One in 100?

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