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Comment by jamesbritt | Hacker News Reader

This was linked from some Twitter posts from cellist Zoe Keating, who makes some interesting modern music. I'm impressed that she's making here numbers public.

She gets more from Pandora than Spotify. https://twitter.com/zoecello/status/231126328924061696

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The music industry has negotiated really hard with Pandora over the years and came close to killing them off a few times by raising the rates to more than Pandora could pay. At this point the music industry is basically taking all of Pandora's profits leaving them razor thin margins. I don't know why Spotify has gotten such a better deal except maybe through the influence of Kleiner Perkins.

What I find most interesting is someone with 1.3m Twitter followers is having so little of her music streamed, I assume that this is because the majority of her fans purchase her music? I notice she has a Bandcamp account. I think it would be great to see her Bandcamp sales figures too as a point of reference, and ideally an explanation of how being available on Spotify / Pandora affected her sales figures.

She's also posted some more stats here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkasqHkVRM1OdEJ...

How many of those followers aren't fans, but:

1. bots

2. People who want to set up a business deal (everyone from major label agents to real estate agents)

3. Random people that follow others in the hopes of gaining more followers

Her Bandcamp sales figures are in the spreadsheet.

oh, the spreadsheet has changed since posted. Thanks!

Also, there are tabs at the bottom to view different pages of the spreadsheet. (Sorry if I'm saying something obvious; I didn't catch it at first myself.)

Maybe people who listen to her are more into CDs and buying from iTunes / Amazon?

FWIW, I've got both her albums and her EP on CD, one of those albums on vinyl as well, and an iTunes copy of the other album (since the CD didn't arrive quickly enough).

I also buy concert tickets at every opportunity: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigiain/7325677270/

I'm a bit of a fan…

If you've not heard her music (or want to hear more) there's a free (legal) download here: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/soundquality/sq...

She's a bit of a geek/hacker too - she runs a laptop with Ableton Live, sooperlooper, and a bunch of custom applescripts (which don't always play nice when the laptop sleeps, she sometimes needs to reboot on stage), and she was talking about building some custom microcontroller hardware to give her easier/different control compared to the midi footpedal she's using.

$80,000 (net after fees) of downloads/physical sales in six months (without label support, which is pretty impressive to me) - that's presumably something like $120K gross sales (before iTunes/Amazon's 30% cut and credit card fees).

If you attribute _all_ of that to twitter (big assumption!), then it values her twitter followers at ~$0.18/year. I wonder how many twitterers beat that?

She gets more from NPR than Spotify.

Why are there different "unit" rates for the same song on the same day on Spotify? Weird.

My best guess is that payment is based on some sort of revenue sharing agreement. So Spotify takes a portion of it's revenue for a certain time period and divides it equally among the artists based on the number of times their songs were played.

Different payout rates for free versus paid users, which also varies from country to country based on negotiated royalty rates. I'd also assume exchange rates come into play.

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