Hacker News Reader

Comment by yreg | Hacker News Reader

The way this should work is that there can be some minimum earning threshold the seller has to achieve to be paid out by the platform. But! once the seller achieves it, they should be paid in full for all the units sold/streamed before achieving the threshold as well.

E.g. App Store requires you to earn $100 equivalent to pay out earnings in Colombia. In many countries the threshold is currently $0.02, but it used to be much higher.

https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/reference...

View on HN

Why is this desirable?

Wouldn’t it be more desirable to pay artists for everything? The implied comparison is with the status quo, and both Spotify’s and your proposals frankly kinda suck

Well, because at some point the processing fees are so high it makes no sense to distribute the earnings.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect to get "peanuts" paid out. Google AdSense is the same; you have to earn at least $100 to get it paid out, until then the earnings just accumulate in your account. Same goes for YouTube. I don't see it as unreasonable.

To be honest, I wouldn't care as a creator/a seller, unless the threshold is set high.

What processing fees? This is a digital platform. It's not like there are dozens of bureaucrats stamping tonnes of papers here.

Moving money around is way more expensive than you think it is, even digitally.

Instead of being incredulous, assume good faith the other person is speaking with best intent. Try to understand first.

There are no free payment transfer mechanisms. Whatever is free is a loss leader.

If you don’t know anything about payments, start by reading stripe.com’s documentation to understand how complex this is.

Pymnts.com is the industry blog if you want to go deep.

Going back to the App Store Minimum Payment Threshold Table[1], it shows how highly effective Apple became at dealing with money transfers in a large part of the world.

Of course, they don't need to base their threshold on worries about spam/fraud/etc, because they have another hammer for that -> the $99/yr. developer programme.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/reference...

Isn’t that just part of the cost of doing business? Not all transactions need to be lucrative. The only reason Shopify thinks they can get away with it is because they’ve grown enough that small artists don’t have a choice but to suck it up.

There is nothing to get away with. Hosting small/shitty bands is not a money making proposition for Spotify. Most bands will never make money on Spotify, in spite of Spotify enabling them to do so. They just suck. And I think it is so cool that anyone can suck and still have their music be ubiquitously accessible on the premiere music platform, without real hurdles and at no cost, in (roughly) the same way that any big artist can.

the Beatles sold their first thousand records, at one short time in history.. and there will never be another Beatles due to "long tail" modern distributions.. casual ill-will and indifference to new projects must not be confused with reasonable, or even legal contractual behaviors

Well I'd say that if Spotify were forced to, they'd instead just remove small bands from Spotify entirely.

Honest question: have you ever run a business? You're talking about setting up millions of accounts to pay them $.02 or $.20 or even $2.00. ACH payments cost an average of $.29/each https://gocardless.com/en-us/guides/ach/ach-fees-how-much-do...

You're dealing with a bunch of people who will try to rip you off, so you need to have anti-fraud protections. Then you need to be able to override the anti-fraud protections because Alex, Alex and Bob, Alex, Bob, and Curt, etc. are all legit performers who want the payments to go to one common bank account even though you'd like one act == one bank account. Etc.

SEPA seems to have no problem moving sub-euro amounts. I am not an entrepreneur, but I did send single euro amounts to my friends. Is it more difficult in USA?

My impression from Germany is that while private accounts often have no transaction fees (and are either completely free, or charge a flat monthly fee), with business accounts it's not that unusual to have transaction fees of up to ten or even twenty cent per transaction.

It's the cost of doing business for the seller on the platform.

I'm not sure what's the problem here, to be honest. Alternativelly the platform could also charge withdrawal fees, making small withdrawals pointless.

Afaik this minimum withdrawal concept has been the standard way of doing business when reselling digital goods. See e.g. the aforementioned AdSense which has been set up this way for 20 years now. The same goes for Steam, once again you have to sell $100 worth of stuff to get paid.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com