Comment by crucialfelix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crucialfelix | Hacker News Reader

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> If the customer are crazy about it the musician would most likely earn more if he listened through spotify rather than buying it.

Estimates vary, but $0.0033 is quoted as a possible pay per stream from Spotify. I had some plays on one invoice from a label but it was less than a penny. [for comparison: I've gotten $75 for a single play on BBC]

So for a 99 cent track you would get 300 plays for that price. That means 10 times a day for 30 days if you are really crazy about it (you are either a teenage girl or you are trying to piss off your neighbors). Or 3 times a day for 100 days. Or 10 times a year for 30 years (let's just guess that its highly unlikely that you are still on Spotify or that you are using the same mp3)

[edit: calculator fail]

For a 5 minute song that's 1500 minutes of stereophonic pleasure. 25 hours.

Let's assume you bought the entire album. 10 tracks. That's 250 hours total listening time.

This is what you'll have to do in order for the artist to earn the same amount as your $9.99 album purchase would have brought in.

> Musicians get waay more money from me thanks to spotify than they ever would get otherwise.

By which I'm guessing that you aren't a music collector and you didn't really buy music anyway.

Purchasing music, especially vinyl or nicely crafted packaged CDs is about building a collection that expresses who you are. People come over and you get out the records. They look through your CD or record shelf while they are at your place. This ritual is how people connect, find out about the other person and it opens up conversations. That era is gone.

Digital weakened that and selling digital is just a fake simulation of the era of buying physical recordings. We know its dead, it was transitory and the era of replication is over. Its not just the economics, its abundance.

Still, buying music (even if its a dead art form) is not to obtain a utility value. Its purchasing a signifier of self identity.

I've had Spotify beta since 2008 and I've loved going through the massive back catalogs and listening to stuff. It was insane how much music they loaded into the system back then. Once they opened it up to the public they had to axe most of it when they couldn't get deals with the labels.

You (and thirdsum), as well as most others, make the other big mistake and looks at what the artist makes. Which is kind of irrelevant. Look at what the record label is making from spotify streaming.

Also I don't get your BBC-comparison, did BBC broadcast it to one person?

Spotify can hardly be blamed for the artist having a crappy deal with his/her record label.

And the reason for why it is sooo bad is of course because it hasn't matured yet. But the only problem in the equation is the record labels.

The reason for why I didn't buy albums was because I didn't enjoy listening to albums. I enjoy listening to tracks and I don't feel like buying twenty when I only like two of them.

It doesn't help that buying an album and having it in my shelf "says something about who I am" when I really didn't want the album to begin with.

Not to mention how inconvenient a pressed CD is for someone like me.

> the other big mistake and looks at what the artist makes.

Actually I'm calculating only what the rights holder gets and doing the comparison between sales and streaming income.

Its completely irrelevant to the discussion what the artist/label deal is, only what the spotify|iTunes/payee deal is.

> Spotify can hardly be blamed for the artist having a crappy deal with his/her record label.

No, the stated payout rates are what the rights holder receives. That is the publishing company or sound recording copyright holder which is usually but not always the label. In many cases indie labels are owned by the artists. I get 100%

I'm not fond of this demonization of the labels as though they were the whole problem. The music industry has gone through dramatic changes and its not really useful to try to identify a bad guy. The musicians certainly are getting fucked though, that's always how it goes.

> Also I don't get your BBC-comparison, did BBC broadcast it to one person?

But that's the thing: a Spotify streaming play requires a large number of people to actively select to listen to your track. Radio plays to a huge number of people who are mostly passive (after they've selected to listen to the radio or not). Its vastly more difficult to achieve that kind of focused high traffic streaming income in the super fragmented world of streaming.

So comparing the payout rate to broadcast royalty rates IS completely irrelevant, yet that is what everybody is doing and that's basically how the payouts are being calculated.

And yet its sales that they are replacing. For the user its play on demand. It looks like iTunes. I pulled up tracks the other night on Spotify while making dinner for my girlfriend. Its just like owning the tracks.

So for the rights holder its an awful disruption.

> And the reason for why it is sooo bad is of course because it hasn't matured yet. But the only problem in the equation is the record labels.

Because Spotify was designed as an alternative to P2P/piracy. So the price point is in comparison to that, not in competition with sales. Its accidental that its cannibalizing sales, and in fact Spotify would love to be resulting in large amounts of sales (with their buy buttons). The problem is that the music is available on demand, so the incentive to buy is very low.

> The reason for why I didn't buy albums was because I didn't enjoy listening to albums. I enjoy listening to tracks and I don't feel like buying twenty when I only like two of them.

iTunes disrupted that back in 2001, so I would say that's pretty irrelevant to the Spotify vs. digital sales discussion.

Numbers for an iTunes single: Best case is generally an indie artist who has a 50/50 split with their label. So for an iTunes single, the label gets at most $0.70 (and if they use an aggregator then say $0.63). Divide by two and you are at $0.32-0.35/track. So basically you need to divide all of your equivalence numbers by 3. Instead of 300 plays, it's one hundred plays. 3 times a day for ~30 days or once a day for one hundred days.

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