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Comment by t0 | Hacker News Reader

But companies like Pandora and Spotify aren't profitable even at these numbers. If this artist made 10x as much, he'd still be upset at only making $40 for 14,227 music plays and these streaming companies wouldn't be able to function. This is also a barrier to entry for new startups that want to offer music streaming.

There doesn't seem to be a number that artists would be happy getting and that music streaming companies could actually offer them.

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Artists who look at these services as anything but free advertisement for themselves so that they can get media sales, increased concert attendance, or notoriety that can translate to other gigs (like Armen Chakmakian who claims that his real job is writing music for television) are going to be perpetually disappointed.

That point gets brought up to imply artists are in the wrong, when it actually supports that Pandora/Spotify are in the wrong.

Pandora/Spotify are debt-financed. They literally cannot afford to offer their services at the royalty rates they are paying now, and are pressuring musicians to take less.

You can definitely create a service that is popular with consumers if you are debt-financed (see Napster 1.0). That doesn't mean that the service should exist, or that the songwriters should make financial sacrifices to make the service viable.

If artists think that (immensely popular) streaming services are worthwhile, then they're going to have to accept lower royalties. These legal streaming services are responsible for as much as an 80 percent reduction in music piracy. If artists kill off these services, then they better be prepared to accept the rampant piracy of the 2000s.

http://www.digital-digest.com/news-63709-Music-Piracy-Down-b...

I'd be interested to see whether it works out better for the artists if they were to remove their music from streaming services but offer it free to download on their website one change for an email address. If they have to make money through merch and concerts then a direct line of communication to their fans might be better than the pittance they receive from streaming.

I think artists need to consider streaming as advertising. It's a good way for your music to be discovered by users looking for new music. If you remove your music from Spotify et. al. then you'll be missing out on new listeners.

With fewer and fewer people downloading music these days, I'm not sure how valuable free downloads even are as promotion any more.

I'm just surprised Spotify hasn't done more to let artists create brands. I'm imagining something like Facebook pages, and you have a custom newsfeed on your home page that artists could post to including stuff like "new t-shirts are available" and advertising concert tours. It could be based on who you listen to the most/recently instead of explicitly following people.

Apple's Ping tried to do that stuff, but it was a massive failure due to other reasons (everyone hates the iTunes app).

As far as I know (at least that was the case ~2 years ago) Spotify would be profitable if they chose to, but reinvested as much as they could into a higher market penetration insetad.

Also, about spotify and finance: http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/5070561/spotifys-finan...

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