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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

Fundamentally, there is just way too much supply of music for it to be a well-compensated endeavor for most. I don't think any economic arrangement will make it well paying when there are so many people who are happy with doing it for free for recognition.

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Maybe so, but Spotify is especially bad at paying artists a fair share even amongst their peers. If Apple and Amazon can afford to pay artists twice as much per stream, and Tidal can afford to pay three times as much per stream, then the problem with Spotify is... Spotify.

That's not how any of this works, though.

Spotify has the same licensing agreement.

The difference is that Spotify has a free tier (lower revenue from those users), their users listen more, and they may also have more customers in lower-income countries with lower subscription rates.

Which is to say - of you took a specific category of users - say, US-based paying subscribers and kept their listening activity the same - every streaming service would pay out roughly the same amount of royalties per-stream for that group of listeners.

It's quite obvious the CEO being paid reportedly around $300m a year is pocketing money that indie artists generate for the site. Most of these tech sites aren't really interested in delivering value into the communities they serve... Musicians need to wean themselves off of jumping into these types of old "gig economy" schemes, as they really don't provide any return on the huge amounts of time invested in building them up... :/

i frankly do not understand how Apple pays as much as it does - both Spotify and AM pay 70% of revenue to artists, so it might just be that there are far fewer streams on Apple. (plus Apple is a premium only service)

On an AM family plan, if they are really paying out 0.01 per stream... then anyone streaming more than 19 songs/day is a money loser for apple.

It probably helps that Apple isn't carving out $250 million of their subscription revenue just for Joe Rogan.

Spotify has cheaper family and student plans. To my knowledge there’s no way to make AM cheaper. In addition there’s no ad free version of AM that’s being supported by paying subscribers like there is for Spotify - though I haven’t heard the numbers on P&L on these free users.

paying Spotify subscribers don't support the plays from free subscribers. it's two separate pots of money. they explain this in their section for artists

Musicians are already undercompensated. Spotify playing AI music means those musicians aren't compensated at all. Someone who funneled their music into an n-dimensional matrix gets the money, and how much do you want to bet that's Spotify?

Mostly a company called epidemic sound making bank off artists and buying out full rights for pennies

> Fundamentally, there is just way too much supply of music for it to be a well-compensated endeavor for most.

This has been true for at least half a century. Probably many centuries.

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