Deadmau5 Withholding His Latest Album from Spotify
digitalmusicnews.com
digitalmusicnews.com
What's great about Spotify, is that artists get paid per listen, which favours artists which make great, lasting music, and against those who produce one hit wonders. If people continue to listen to your music over a period of time, the artist will continue to get paid, and that's great (and those who produce one hit wonders get paid a lot at the time, and virtually nothing afterwards).
The problem, of course, is that Spotify doesn't pay very much to artists. Spotify says this is because artists have shitty deals with labels (and I'm sure this is true), but independents also complain about the amount passed on. Spotify, however, last I checked, isn't profitable, so they can't afford to pass on more money anyway. I would happily pay more, but I use it near-constantly at work and at home (easily 6+ hours a day on average). I suspect I'm a minority here.
Ensuring artists get paid enough is a problem we haven't solved yet. I tend to think it'll go the way of free-or-near-free streaming (a la Spotify or Youtube), with albums becoming collectibles like Vinyls, and the vast majority of artist revenue coming from live shows. Unfortunately, this is going to mean labels are going to have to negotiate a cut of live shows with artists to cover album production costs (assuming they're not independent, obviously). I don't mind a one-or-two week delay on streaming sites to give people who really want a listen to buy it first. Of course, this helps drive piracy back up, but for artists, their aim shouldn't be minimising piracy, but maximising the profitability of their work.
I don't see any way to keep physical media from being phased out, and if that's inevitable I prefer a streaming model to a rebuy-for-each-new-digital-format model.
Spotify Premium costs $10? We have to assume the average listener listens to less than $10 worth of music. Find the amount each genre listens to, and charge just a dollar over that (but less than $10) for, say, the current top selling 100 albums and the genre of the subscriber's choosing.
Say, $5 for hip hop, $7 for rock, $3 for country, etc. Hulu could do the same with scifi, drama, comedy, film, TV, and documentary packs all at cheaper prices, all along with their current "everything for the top fee" charge.
/edit: Similarly, as they've done with StarTrek.com and SouthParkStudios.com, I can't imagine why every show hasn't offered their full series online. Especially those brands with many shows and fan-bases that could be brought together.
The big record labels have to die. They've been mostly killed, and we're definitely past their point of utility, but they hang on and on and on.
Nielsen's methods of measuring probably favor established record companies over independents. But the fact remains: sales are UP among the big four in 2011.
Price per album has of course dropped like a stone with the switch to digital. But so have distribution costs.
And do you know what happened when the price dropped? The number of units sold went up! This is mad, MAD, I tell you, an outcome never even dreamed of by any economist ever.
Their profits aren't quite as obscene as they used to be perhaps. But they are still making money hand over fist.
This myth that the big record companies are dying needs to stop. It gives weight to their whining about piracy. Which is the real long-term danger.
[1] http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120105005547/en/Niel...
An increase from 326 million in 2010 to 330 million in 2011 is not a recovery. Really, it's just a couple of extra hit albums.
Still, I take issue with your characterization of the big record labels as having "been mostly killed." $4.158 billion dollars in sales is not "mostly killed."[2]
If I owned a significant proportion of a company that had that kind of revenue per year, well, I would not just throw it in the trash and advise they close up shop ;)
[1]http://theunderstatement.com/post/3377858909/album-prices [2]330 million * $14 per album (from [1]) * 90%
The bottom line is that I pay a lot less for music now than I used to, and most people do, which means there's just less money from recordings in the pot that can go to artists.
But neither is Spotify: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/pandora-and...
Personally I think the Bandcamp model is the way forward.
False. The notion that Spotify just doesn't pay very much to artists is simply unfounded. The figure's close to 70% of their revenue.
Relevant: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120622/16193319442/myth-...
To put that in perspective, I know that Deadmau5 usually gets around $100k per gig he gets played (for the bigger festivals anyway), so really after 2 gigs he's going to have made more then his whole album.
And it's the case with most artists now anyway, they make more money from concerts then they do in song sales.
It's kind of nice that some artists occasionally (not always, due to piracy) make money from their marketing (i.e., their song sales, spotify plays, etc).
It's probably true that most artists make more now from concerts than recordings, but don't kid yourself: that's just because most artists can't make anything significant from recording anymore.
By refusing to add this feature, Spotify makes Deadmau5 look like the bad guy to his fans.
The only simple solution I can think of is another level of Spotify membership for early access - like $15 a month. Other than that, Spotify is about volume. Get your name out there, make some money, and make real money by playing shows and selling merch. Making money by sitting back and collecting royalties for 50 years is waaaay too lucrative. Spotify is fixing that.
The artist is stating that they would like you to pay for the download, and just because the streaming service is legal doesn't mean it's fair or works.
The fact that services like Spotify have caught on as of late are proof that many people like the business model. Let musicians see how much more money they make by delaying the release of their albums in these services.
They will figure it out eventually, I hope. It's all about finding the distribution of that arbitrary "fair" price in order to maximize earnings.
I'd love to pay only $1000 for a brand new car, but that doesn't work for car manufacturers. There's no reason a $10 a month service is necessarily sustainable just because that's what people want to pay. Heck, if consumers can demand what they want to pay they'd most likely just go with $0. Why can't they send that signal? It's convenient for the consumer to say $10 because they are comfortable with that. This amount is what labels can squeeze from consumers (because piracy has left them no options), but that doesn't mean it's the final and perfect solution.
If music subscription services end up not being much better than piracy, then all it does is grant a false sense of entitlement to these people who might as well still be pirating.
But, with the exception of Top 100 novels - it's next to impossible to find/download these books unless you try really, really hard. I'm sure many of those people who buy a book on Amazon, would instead download if it were effortless to. (Though, many would also purchase it, in much the same way many of us purchase our TV shows and Music.)
DRM on books, so far, has slowed down piracy of books. It's not 100% effective, but it's certainly not 100% useless.
More likely a lot of this stuff is just less popular so there are going to be less people seeding it etc. I'm going to guess that piracy has a very long tail and the majority of piracy traffic happens with a small minority of files.
There's also the issue that books are generally cheaper.
Books also have some advantage in that it is more difficult to exploit the analog gap there, you need a way to print it out and rescan it. Or take a photo of each page and then use OCR.
Music on the other hand can be pirated by plugging the output from your speaker jack into something else that records it.
And it pays Artists waaaay better than that more popular streaming service, youtube!
The other option, if Spotify is looking to play a little more dirty, is that they can have albums withheld in this manner bypass the "new release" page on the basis that they are no longer newly released. This would reduce marketing, play count, and thus payout to the artist.
(I'm assuming your point was that Spotify probably pays at least as much per listener as the radio.)
I suppose it's much like piracy in a way - would people have bought the album if it wasn't for spotify? Is every spotify listener a lost sale?
I have absolutely no hard facts to back it up, but I see a lot more people attending festivals and shows and supporting artists in different ways. I know a lot of spotify subscribers who use it for work and still buy the MP3s for their ipod, or the CD for their collection.
I have hundreds and hundreds of CDs, all in storage. I buy them occasionally at shows but tend to buy vinyl (if I can) to support a band now. I listen to lots of music on Spotify I would never buy, or never have bought. For a fair few of those I'd probably go and see the artist/band live, though.
During this period its not on spotify, diehard fans will pay for the album through itunes (or other means). After its released to spotify they will benefit from spotify distribution.
$90 a month?
The problem at the moment for music and artists, is finding a feasible business model in a world where streaming music is worth nothing (I'd argue that the Spotify subscription fee pays for convenience, rather than the music itself for most customers).