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Comment by kredd | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure how it can affect those artists given it’s like $0.5 for 1k streams. I mean, I guess if they have 100 songs all at like 999 streams, that’s about $50 loss/year if they never pass that threshold. It sucks obviously, but not enough to for artists to pull out.

My understanding is they’re playing a cat-and-mouse game with auto generated content, that syphons away some percentage of the royalties.

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While it might not have a big impact on smaller artists financially, the idea of a multi billion dollar company deciding unilaterally to steal a few cents from you could be enough to drive you away.

Probably if being actively exploited by a multi billion company is a problem for them, it might be better for them to change dream.. or species

>the idea of a multi billion dollar company deciding unilaterally to steal a few cents from you

So, like all the rest of them?

Seems silly. The reason they have that problem is that their logic for funneling subscription revenue to streams is broken. This won't fix that fundamental problem. You can still use Spotify to scam money out of the system.

You can, but the game isn’t to drive the abuse to 0. It’s about to bring it down, and hope abusers find an easier target to extract money from. It’s the same concept as “why would you steal a secured bike, when there’s an unsecured one right next to it”, and hope you’re the one who secured yours.

> The reason they have that problem is that their logic for funneling subscription revenue to streams is broken

Changing it to splitting out a users monthly payment to what they're actually listening to, would make the abuse they're trying to stop easier and not harder (as it would mean all the money they're trying to launder will go to the correct artist instead of just some of it)

Not saying that that's a good argument for the current system, but it wouldn't fix the issue they're trying to solve

Yea there are better ways to fix the problem but the problem is selling that fix to the big labels. The current system gets them a larger share of the revenue so why would they be interested in changing it?

I would much rather prefer that my subscription money gets split between niche artist I'm listening to instead of going to Taylor Swift. I assume it's harder to calculate royalties, you can't keep single counter per track, you have to agregate listens within a month for each user. But that doesn't seem insurmountable. Or maybe it is on Spotify scale?

I don't think any subscriber (i.e. people giving them money) would prefer current model over where your money goes directly to who you listen.

Laundering would be easier yes. But extracting money from the system would be impossible. I was talking about the latter where you pay for an account of 10 usd/month and extract > 10 usd/month in stream revenue.

As a part-time indie artist, one can do a lot with $50 you get on the side from streams.

Also, what is Spotify going to do with these 50$? What if it happens twice, 100$... do they pay you back eventually? Perpetually free access to all their premium services?

That wss an extreme example I think. Most probably end up with less than $5 loss

it's not up to Spotify to decide what I do with that. What if I use it to pay a sub for some app I like and helps me create music? Then Spotify is taking value away from 2 Indies, not just one.

I'll take this bad faith argument, and give you even a worse one - $50 is about 5 drinks or less at a bar with tips nowadays. I genuinely doubt a serious person who makes music on the side will look at that number as a potential loss of income.

And if you have made 200 songs (so loss of $100), all streaming less than 1K each, maybe your current production is not marketable on Spotify, and yeah, maybe you should find another venue. Eventually there will be a marketplace for this type of production, and hopefully willing users to pay for it.

You're assuming every artist lives in a first world country. The problem seems a lot more severe under a more general lens.

Must artists are struggling, so that loss of $50 means picking up an extra shift at McDonald's to pay rent instead of making or promoting their music.

I though labels job was to prevent content like that

Spotify allows people to self publish.

Not to mention people can set up labels themselves, it's just a company like any other.

I'm sure we don't want big labels being gatekeepers. They have their own set of problems, and make streaming even more difficult for everyone but very large artists/groups (and sometimes even for those, as they eat a big chunk of royalties).

Spotify does not allow you to self publish. However, you can pay a distributer like DistroKid an annual fee in order to upload to the platform (and all other majors).

Ah thanks for the correction. I also used DistroKid.

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