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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

For reference: Radiohead's pay-what-you-want model for In Rainbows was the first of its kind, and groundbreaking. It's entirely possible this starts a trend.

On the other end: I don't like the idea of new artists not getting paid (I try to go out of my way and buy tickets for indie musicians I like or, failing that, purchase swag), but as a consumer I like Spotify a lot. It's also hard for me to conflate the ideas that new artists are being trampled by Music 2.0 with success stories like Karmin and Chance the Rapper, who put out free material (via YouTube and a free mixtape, respectively) and the massive coverage launched them into the national spotlight.

You know what would be awesome? A Flattr-esque system for music. You pay $XX/mo, can listen to whatever, and your money gets divvied up to artists based on play count. (if half of my play count in July comes from Blind Pilot, for instance, then they get half my money.)

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I created something like that: http://musiclove.rs

You hook up your last.fm profile and each week you get to divide an x amount of money between the artists you listened to. I've been using it myself for about a year now.

The only catch is that you need to find the email addresses of artists you want to pay to yourself, so they can be paid with PayPal.

This 'catch' allowed me to use it as single user for a year though so its very usable for me in this stage. Feel free to try it! Let me know what you think!

And this is why I love HN. I just came to the conclusion that I really should think about doing something like this and pondering if there was a way I could automate it as I wrote my comment(1). And here it is. Awesome.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6044279

Thanks! Would be great if you'd try the app for a while. Let me know what you think!

Awesome! A gittip.com for music. This "only catch" seems like a big one though. I guess it will get better when/if the user base grows significantly.

Thanks!

I know. But I couldn't think of another way to start small.

If usage grows hopefully artists will actively promote their desired 'fund receiving' email address.

The next step would of course be that artists can signup and the whole email address finding step would be dropped

Did you take a look at the way gittip does this ? You basically donate to a twitter handle and its owner can 'claim' the account whenever they want. No money is actually transferred until the account is claimed. I don't know if it can be applied to artists/bands though.

I was also wondering: is there no transfer fees with paypal ? Don't they make small amounts transfer useless ?

And one last thing: is it not weird for bands/artists to suddenly receive money from people without being informed about the site and all that ?

Good points!

'the way gittip does this': I naively assumed Gittip was sitting on the money until it was claimed, but charging the moment its claimed is probably better. I'll have to look into it!

'transfer fees with paypal': Yes and yes. I'm currently spending about 8-10 dollars a week divided over 5 artists. So the slice Paypal gets is significant but bearable. This of course isn't ideal and I've been thinking about other ways of doing this. Bitcoin maybe?

'receive money (...) without being informed': I've got this covered! When an artist receives money they also receive an email explaining why they receive it and how many times the listener played their songs.

Hey!

I think you have a phenomenal idea.

I worked in the bitcoin space for a while (cofounded an exchange), and this was a proposal that often came up. so awesome to see someone actually building it. Could I convince you to send me an email: Jordanbirn at gmail.com ?

Just subscribe!

Nice! Let me know what you think!

This is brilliant. I've been thinking about making this for a while. If I add a band's email address, would that then be available to other people who listen to the same artist? How would you stop wrongly donating to artists with the same name?

Thanks!

Artists' email addresses aren't shared right now (bc then it would be easy to pollute with wrong addresses). So this also answers your second question (Unless someone listens to two bands with the same name). It remembers for your own account though, so you don't have to fill out the same address twice.

That hurts somewhere to say this, but I've been thinking about this subject, and that's better that the idea I had. I'm going to use this, and this will get me back on Last.fm, which I kind of abandoned.

That gittip suggestion down there is also great. I'm in touch with a bunch of artists who would totally love that.

Please keep building this.

$10/month for infinite access to all music ever created just isn't reasonable. And the ad revenue from a majority free user base for infinite access to all music ever created is definitely unreasonable.

It's hard to argue with th connivence factor. However right now Spotify is destroying an existing model, not paying artists, and losing money hand over fist. It's lose/lose/lose. I'd rather consumers just pirate the music that way they at least know they aren't supporting the artists.

> $10/month for infinite access to all music ever created just isn't reasonable.

Why not? Most people go through a period of their life where they buy lots of albums, then they stop altogether. Flattening that out to be $10/month forever, divvied across artist based on content, would be a net win for everyone.

Exactly.. or, i would say i never had a prolonged period in my life where i bought music for more then 10$/month.

Then how unreasonable is $0/month for radio? I'm happy there's people who can look at services like Spotify and Rdio critically, but I don't think appeals to intuition like "that can't be right?!" help us much.

Because radio is not a substitute for recorded music. The inability to choose what you're listening to was always the stick that compelled listeners to purchase a recording. If you have Spotify, there is no reason to ever purchase that music in a download store.

Fast, reliable, and unmetered wireless is by no means ubiquitous. There is still the benefit of being able to play offline, burn to CD for the car, share with friends, etc.

Admittedly, the incentive to want offline music may continue to diminish over time.

Spotify offers offline access of their $10 p/m plan.

Ah, didn't know that. Guessing they don't allow CD burning, but I imagine that's a dwindling use case.

Well, more importantly, they don't allow sharing. You can have it offline but it's not like they're giving you plain mp3's to do with what you please.

Because you don't have control over what the radio plays, or when ads play, you can't skip over ads (apart from changing channel, etc).

Radio may be far more interesting that you expect. Once upon a time you had Payola[1] where radio plays were designed to influence record sales in a nontransparent way. Now you have the issue of consolidation where you'd have no idea which plays were influenced by royalties etc.

Anyway, my point is that your comment could be interpreted to mean that radio is democratic and it is a democratic way for meritorious music to be elevated.

By democratic I don't mean anything more virtuous than screaming masses, but I don't think commercial radio even rises to that.

Anyway, I have to read more to get an overview of how Spotify and others compensate the talent that makes content, or even cheat them, but I also want to make sure that popular radio isn't treated like something we'd prefer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

Because there is not such a thing like $0/month for radio, as you are forced to hear ads, and the advertisers pay for it, and you are forced the songs you hear, witch some people paying for controlling it.

Yes, in the old days some companies controlled which music was heard and which not, and those gatekeepers were not as cheap as you thing.

Definitively not 0$/month.

That's contrived. I'm not paying anything for radio. $0/month. And the free versions of Rdio and Spotify have ads too.

Radio is like an ad service for the music industry, where you listen to demo tracks and hopefully buy the full album. Rdio and Spotify give you full access to the end product for virtually nothing. It has totally screwed up the perceived value of albums.

If you make a statement, back it up with some facts. Otherwise it's just an opinion.

My opinion is that 10 bucks a month is reasonable because if you charge any more piracy would become a more attractive option.

I would definitely pay $10/mo for a service that had even half the music I want to listen to, but there aren't any.

You need to discover some new music :-p

Exactly. It's also pretty dangerous since their users probably feel like doing the right thing by going with Spotify and ditching pirating. Practically it doesn't really matter though if those two are the only options many users will consider.

I might be a minority, but I'm paying more for music with Spotify than I've ever done buying CDs. (I do pay $16.50 a month, being in Norway). Doesn't seem all that unreasonable given my habits.

All music ever created? I cringe when I read stuff like that.

I'm sorry, but this is not simply nitpicking. We will change our perception of music history and music itself if we fool ourselves that what these outlets carry is the entire history of music. I'd say around 40% of the music that I have on my HDDs are not available on Spotify. That's just guesstimating, it could be even higher.

Especially if you consider performances that didn't get recorded for one reason or another. All music on the four or five majors that has seen a CD release in the US? Yes, this is fairly reasonable.

But its not $10 for all music ever created any more than its $15 for all the food on the buffet at Golden Corral. Its all you can eat, not all the food. There's only so much music that can stream through one set of speakers in a month.

Blind Pilot was half the OP's playlist. They'd get $5. How many artists would kill to get $5/month from their fans?

The real problem is that Blind Pilot might have gotten a whole penny from the OP's month of patronage. That's the part of the system that's broken. The part where fans can choose from all the artists that have ever created is a feature (and a damn good one), not a bug.

I'm starting to think that beyond "not pirating", we have some moral responsibility to make sure that the money we do "pay" for our music actually makes it through to the creator of that music, otherwise we're just buying moral absolution from immoral middle-men along with some (lazy) convenience.

Edit: 'Egbert' is way ahead of me!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6044140

I'd imagine you could create some "fair" kind of Spotify clone where half the money go to artists and half the money go to the service. The streaming know what music it plays, so it would be easy to bill. It just need someone to do that, and I'm not sure the general public cares about fairness.

Exactly. I've got an Rdio subscription but I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. As a small label owner where we put in more investment than we've ever gotten out, it's crazy to see a thousand streams generating a couple of pounds given that those are all lost sales... but you think 'ah well, at least people are listening to it'.

Also, as a commenter below noted, pay-what-you-want is not new at all. Off the top of my head The Crimea shifted about 100,000 free downloads of their second LP after leaving Warners, quite a bit before In Rainbows.[0] As a second aside, I interviewed a pretty big artist a year or so after whose backing band knew Radiohead and, though this is hearsay obviously, they suggested the reason In Rainbows wasn't toured much beyond festivals was lack of tour support capital. I always sort of suspected that they fudged the numbers on sales/profit for that record, so that could be an indicator, who knows.

[0] http://www.thecrimea.net/products/502351-secrets-of-the-witc...

A little off topic; in the late 70s a popular Christian singer named Keith Green inked a deal with his label that allowed him to give his records away for whatever people could afford - - even free. So while what they did was recognized as groundbreaking, it was only new for the internet age.

The record in particular was So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt, and the Wikipedia article is really cool:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You_Wanna_Go_Back_to_Egypt

I like the Flattr-esque idea, it would make me feel better knowing that my monthly subscription payment was only being payed out to the artist whose tracks I actually played.

> A Flattr-esque system for music. You pay $XX/mo, can listen to whatever, and your money gets divvied up to artists based on play count. (if half of my play count in July comes from Blind Pilot, for instance, then they get half my money.)

This is exactly what I would love. ~30% of my monthly fee to Spotify for running the service, the rest divided to the artist I listen to.

But do you think this is up to Spotify? Could Spotify force these terms to the record companies? I always thought this kind of stuff in the contracts that artists make with the big record labels; "We own your music, we pay you as we please".

This is essentially how Magnatune works. You pay $15 per month, can download and stream any amount of music from the Magnatune catalog and 50% of your monthly fee gets paid to artists in proportion to how much of their music you downloaded and streamed.

>It's also hard for me to conflate the ideas that new artists are being trampled by Music 2.0 with success stories like Karmin and Chance the Rapper, who put out free material (via YouTube and a free mixtape, respectively) and the massive coverage launched them into the national spotlight.

Those stories are BS though. Sure, a tiny minority might get on the spotlight thusly (a tiny minority is ever on the spotlight anyway, by definition).

That doesn't change the negatives for: those already on the spotlight, those not in the spotlight but with a decent-ish following.

> For reference: Radiohead's pay-what-you-want model for In Rainbows was the first of its kind, and groundbreaking. It's entirely possible this starts a trend.

Don't count on it:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/4/4054634/musics-pay-what-you...

I'd like to see a compare/contrast between profit per listener per song on Spotify compared to terrestrial radio.

I have a hunch that, per listener, they get more from Spotify.

side-comment: are you using 'swag' wrong or has now swag apparently become equivalent to merchandise or clothing or something.

I'm pretty sure it's commonly known nowadays to be merchandise related to a label, yeah: http://swag.atlassian.com/

This is hilarious. That was the original definition of the term, before 2010.

Woah. TIL the popular definition of swag changed in 2010. Damn, now I feel old and out of touch :(

I've always used swag to mean 'stuff' or 'gear', based on the Australian "swag-man" who carried all his belongings in a swag (prototypical backpack). Here the word also sometimes specifically refers to a light sleeping mattress that formed part of a swaggies essential kit.

So for me, the #yolo application of swag to mean "has his shit together man" derived as a metaphorical application of the literal "has his gear together". And the OP's use to refer to swag as gear a band sells makes sense in the original definition.

I understood the #yolo version of 'swag' as being a contraction of 'swagger'. The sort of ballsy, narcissistic, uncaring persona that a a rock star or Jack Sparrow might have, for example.

That makes more sense to me - thanks!

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