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Comment by basisword | Hacker News Reader

>> Spotify pays out 80% of its money to its creators

This pisses me off every time I see it. It makes Spotify look great and that's why they share it. It completely ignores the fact that they offer a free plan that a large percentage of their users enjoy.

The important figure in my mind is the per stream rate and when I last checked Apple was paying double the rate Spotify does (because Spotify's per stream rate is dragged down due to its free users).

Artists don't have a way to say to Spotify, only show my music to premium users and pay me a higher rate. It's one (of many) ways in which Spotify takes advantage of artists for its own gain. Another being their new policy to not pay artists who get less than 1000 streams on a track in a 12 month period. They just blanket decided they were going to keep that money for themselves.

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Not sure you remember where we were in 2012. We've come a long way from listeners not paying at all to $10B. The system is far from perfect but it is better than it was

Of course, and streaming was always going to be the best solution. But unfortunately it's a market where there are a few big players and they can use that power in an abusive way. Spotify can do better. And puff pieces where they brag bout 'percentage of revenue' or speak in absolute numbers are bullshit and should be called out as such.

I mean this should be criminal given their market power:

> their new policy to not pay artists who get less than 1000 streams on a track in a 12 month period

It may not be much to the individual artists (at most a few hundred $ a year in the extreme cases) but it's a nice chunk of change for Spotify to pocket.

Spotify doesn’t “pocket” the money. Here is their justification, which seems reasonable to me:

> Tens of millions of them have been streamed between 1 and 1,000 times over the past year and, on average, those tracks generated $0.03 per month.

> Because labels and distributors require a minimum amount to withdraw (usually $2-$50 per withdrawal), and banks charge a fee for the transaction (usually $1-$20 per withdrawal), this money often doesn't reach the uploaders. And these small payments are often forgotten about.

> But in aggregate, these small disregarded payments have added up to $40 million per year, which could instead increase the payments to artists who are most dependent on streaming revenue.

> Spotify will not make additional money under this model. There is no change to the size of the music royalty pool being paid out to rights holders from Spotify; we will simply use the tens of millions of dollars annually to increase the payments to all eligible tracks, rather than spreading it out into $0.03 payments.

https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-...

It shouldn't be their decision to make. If someone makes $5 a year and wants to let that accumulate with their distributor until they get $50 why should Spotify get to come in and say "sorry, we're taking your earnings and giving it to someone else"?

Is that Spotify making that decision or the big recording companies?

> only show my music to premium users and pay me a higher rate

Don't forget that alternatives which pay artists and labels zero are forever lurking in the wings.

I'm not sure how much I believe this argument. I think the number of people under 30 that can pirate music and manage to load it on to a phone is smaller than you think. Not to mention the fact that being limited to listening to only the music you have pirated (and have storage capacity for) is probably a bizarre concept to younger people who are pretty used to paying a small subscription fee for access to everything.

In the US, 70% of the population have iPhones and that number is greater for the younger skewing population.

First you have to go through the trouble of pirating the music from your computer since you can’t easily do it directly from your phone.

Even if you could, you can’t download music on your phone outside of iTunes and put it into your music library [1]. That means you have to add the music to your iTunes library from your computer and then sync it to your phone.

Or you can just pay for a streaming service. But even since 2003 when you could buy music from iTunes, pirating just wasn’t worth the trouble. That was even more so after the iPhone and being able to buy music directly on your phone in 2007.

[1] there is one ugly hack using GarageBand.

Yeah, well y'know what? As a former musician, Spotify is where indies who can't get a record deal go because they aren't marketable. And no one is going to start paying $100/mo or whatever it is that would make the millions of nobody artists profitable. You pay $40 and get global distribution. That's a sick deal. If you can't properly promote shows and generate income, you probably don't deserve it. Not everyone can be famous, not everyone can make a living off of art. 0.1% can and it's always been that way. The expectation that you can toss some music on Spotify and make significant passive income is absurd.

>> Spotify is where indies who can't get a record deal go because they aren't marketable

Maybe as a 'former musician' you're a bit out of the loop? But indies don't 'go to Spotify'. You pay $40 to CDBaby or similar distribution services (DistroKid etc) and they distribute your track to pretty much all streaming services and digital music stores. Then they collect the payments for you. Nobody is picking and choosing which music streaming service to be on.

Right, I know. That's what I use. It's a sick deal.

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