The fundamental problem isn't streaming, as much as it is that natural systems follow power law distributions. There will always be superstars that make the majority of the money, and tons and tons of wannabe artists that make almost nothing. That was just as true 20 years ago as it is today. If anything, streaming makes it possible to find those smaller artists and sample what they're making without having to go to some esoteric store and pay $20 for an album that you've never heard before.
The system may be broken, but I'm not sure going back to the old system is the right approach.
The new system only works because smaller bands are subsidising the bigger ones.
For example. I only listen to smaller indie bands on Spotify for a month. I give Spotify my £10 for the month.
Does my £10 go to those smaller bands? No. It gets given to Lady Ga Ga because she got 100 bazzillion listens that month. Even though I never listen to her music.
Spotify should work out who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays.
It would be fairer, but it would mean the bigger bands earn less, and expose the fact that streaming really isn’t making anyone enough money.
How could it when I’m now paying only £10 a month for what used to cost hundreds?
If you listen to smaller indie bands more than the average person listens to Lady Ga Ga, the indies artist you listen to actually get more than £10 worth and Lady Ga Ga gets less.
Some people think it is less fair than a "one subscription one vote" system. It is up to debate, but the payment system does not favor celebrities, network effects combined with good marketing do.
> Spotify should work put who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays.
Representation based on number of plays
Problem is, suppose you listen to almost nothing but some indie band all month, and you happen to land on Lady Ga Ga just once or twice by accident somehow. Now since proportional representation by number of raw plays has been replaced by number of deduplicated plays tabulated to the artist, £5 goes to Gaga.
Squashing repetitions probably won't make much difference, because some people who like unpopular music listen to it repeatedly like crazy, just like people who like popular music. The big stars are not winning due to more plays; it's really due to just being more popular.
Suppose every Spotify subscriber streams music 24 hours a day. Then is it still unfair to go by plays?
By the way, no mater what, I suspect out of any £10 subscription, something like £9.95 goes to Spotify itself.
> Spotify should work put who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays.
I'm not sure this is really fairer, or practical.
Listeners that listen to less music (well, fewer artists at least, but that feels like its often going to correlate) being more valuable feels like it creates weird patterns and incentives.
If you only listened to one song in a month, should that band get your full subscription cut? What if you listened to no songs, but didn't cancel?
In any case, I imagine there's an aggregate effect where the whole pool of spotify listeners habits ends up being something that approximates a normal distribution and paying per-user vs paying per-stream would end up basically the same. You listen to 40 niche artists one month, 10000 other people listen to 40 popular ones, the popular ones get 10000x the revenue... There are bands with thousands of monthly listeners, and then ones with tens of millions of monthly listeners. The few in the latter bucket are gonna dominate the payouts.
User centric payments are a big debate in the industry just now. Deezer has been trialling this. As some people below have said it may or may not be the answer - the jury is out. Chances are it would have a smallish benefit to smaller musicians, very little impact on the revenues of globally recognised superstars, and almost no change for those in the middle.
>Spotify should work put who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays.
I think this is what YouTube does with their premium subscription service for content creators. You get a chunk of the YouTube premium revenue based on how much people with the premium subscription watched.
sorry, but I don't think what you're proposing makes sense. The same way you're listening to small bands, millions of people are listening to the #1 hits. The result would be the same, the big names getting millions and small bands getting a few bucks.
It's funny you mention Lady Ga Ga, there was an uproar around her back in 2007, that she only gets 170$ out of a million plays. I'm not sure how many millions are there in your "100 bazillion" listens, but it could be she is also not earning a significant percentage of her income through Spotify
In a similar vein, I'd like to get my company to give money to OSS projects. I'd love to send a minimum of $20 a year to every project we use, and a far larger amount to 1) the ones we enjoy using and 2) the ones that save us the most effort.
But that would be writing a lot of checks and a pretty big total overall. What else can you do? A lottery system? Round Robin? 3 years is a long time. Ultimately I think you need a bigger pool, and I have only suspicions what that might look like.
Isn't that just a truism of the Pareto principle? Is there any field where that's not the case? 20% of lawyers make 80% of the money. 20% of doctors make 80% of the money. etc etc.
The difference I think is if 80% of professional musicians can't make a living & it's not clear that's actually the case (i.e. streaming isn't the only source of revenue). Similarly, music may have a higher "stickiness" for tenacity where people see it as a higher calling for them even if they're not making money (vs someone not cutting it as a lawyer/doctor to even pay the bills is going to quit & find something else if they weren't even weeded out during school).
Perhaps the problem is there are simply too many musicians all fighting for the same fixed size pie. I'm guessing the reason is there are a lot of people willing to work for a very low pay because they want to be a musician and not that they see it as a profitable pursuit.
> 80% of professional musicians can't make a living
It might hurt people's feeling, but most of those are not professional musicians.
I don't think it is judgemental to say that to claim oneself as professional, one need to demonstrate that they could make a living out of it. Otherwise, it is no different than a hobbyist, albeit much more time is dumped on it.
In case of streaming, now more people can declare themselves as musicians, since the barrier of publishing has been significantly lowered comparing to physical CDs. But that doesn't mean profit would follow.
To produce hit music isn't easy, and luck is certainly a factor of it.
If you fail MCAT or LSAT you can't even study for a medical/law degree. If you throw random samples into FL Studio and publish the result on iTunes or Spotify you can claim to be a part of the oppressed 80% that earns less than £200 a year.
Law and medicine aren’t winner take all fields so that’s not a fair comparison. Should 80% of authors be able to make a living from their book sales? Athletes? Social media CEO’s?
Fair or not fair is subjective. In my opinion you shouldn’t go into fields with heavy power law dynamics unless you’re comfortable with a very high likelihood of coming out a ‘failure’.
At least it’s gotten more meritocratic than in years past.
No, the fundamental problem is not Pareto / power law. The fundamental problem is simply a huge supply of musicians. There's only 8bln total revenue / year in total to be divided. That's just not much for more than a million artists, even without any other middle men. No change in distribution will change the fact that only a small fraction of the artists can hope to make a living from it.
Actors are paid very well, on union scales, when they do get gigs. I suspect well over 80% of actors who get at least one gig per year are going to make at LEAST 10 x $200.
Startups are a different situation, but in fact so different it seems silly to compare.
But the real reason this is on HN is because this is the consequences of applying technology (smartphones, cellular data, cloud scale web services) to an industry (music sales).
There are many places in between the place we are headed, aka "everything is streamed, streams pay basically nothing" and where we used to be.
A collective action by artists to force streaming services into a better deal seems like what is required, tho the general appetite for collective action in 2020 still seems a little lacking.
Think about how weird the past 100 years have been.
Musicians have existed far, far longer than recording technology has. In the past musicians got paid For performing. Maybe the odd thing is expecting to be paid for decades for a few weeks in a recording studio.
Wouldn't negotiating a "better deal" for the 80% of artists earning less than £200 likely just raise costs on the already-expensive streaming platforms to help pay for it?
But then if you look at Spotify's earning report, they are losing money. A large percentage of the cost is music licensing. I think the solution is the streaming services like Spotify either 1) comes up with more revenue streams 2) Raise prices on their core business, the subscription prices higher than $10 a month. If the second option is happening, I am sure we will get another HN discussion post, with some people complaining its too expensive. So we have to think, are we the consumer, by demanding that we want cheap "all you can eat" music subscription, we are hurting the musicians? If you think about it, $10 a month is two cups of Starbucks coffee. I drink more cups of coffee a month than that. And how much effort is it to make two cups of coffee and the coffee beans are industrially produced? Versus a musicians writing a song and perform the song? I claim the latter involves much more effort.
Also lets remember how we ended up with the $10/month all you can eat subscription. Pirating, CD rips, online MP3 sharing, Youtube music videos, etc. The majority of the people don't want to pay for music anymore. I feel people are more likely to value a physical good. For example: I feel somewhat balanced for paying $5 for that Starbucks coffee because I get a physical thing in the end. In the early 2000s, the computer and internet was the new thing, not everyone used it, and it was a bit complicated. So using it made me feel like I am "smarter", more frontier chasing, more elite than others. And there were ideals like internet freedom, free access to information. And then when I discovered there is MP3s, copy and paste, BitTorrent and Napster, I felt like I have just been bestowed special powers. Through my "hard" work with computers, I gained the rights to listen to music for free. I actually felt I was righteous to download music from the Internet and listen to them. Had content locked behind a paywall, had to pay for that? It was against internet freedom, it was an outrage. Then I remember when Steven Jobs later came out with Itunes and every song is 99 cents. I felt, 99 cents? alright, it's only a dollar and really not that much. That was the first time I started to actually pay for music. But the music industry and musicians were outraged because Steve Jobs is making their work worth only a dollar. Job's point was that if you charge people more than 99 cents a song, people would just pirate. I agree with him. The later "all you can streaming" subscription came out with the competitive advantage being even cheaper than Itune's a dollar a song purchase scheme.
But then everyone as the desire to seek for cheaper prices and better access. Maybe its just natural progression of things and we can't fault for that. Stakeholders have to adapt for change in behavior and landscapes. I believe the advantages nowadays for a musician is that "getting yourself known and advertise yourself" is cheaper than ever. And there are so many people out there that you can easily reach that even a niche artist can find audiences. Its much easier now to create a fanbase and consistently communicate and maintain a fanbase. And when you have a fanbase, you just have to figure out how to monetize that. Concerts, fan items, album sales, even sponsorship and advertisement, a Youtube channel makes you a lot of money already. Look at the amount of fans a Youtuber and TikTok star has and how much they earn money from the fanbase and popularity, they make a lot. Justin Bieber became a star on Youtube and that jump started his career. Lindsey Stirling became a star because of Youtube. Without the internet and "free access" to content the internet is providing, I don't think both will be as well known as they are now. Not sure if they would even stay as artists.
I object to the description of lesser-known artists as "wannabe". Mainstream commercial popularity results from a combination of luck, connections, and palatability for mainstream tastes. Vast numbers of talented, passionate artists will never achieve mainstream popularity because they don't strive for it or because the selection process is mostly arbitrary.
Eh, when I started playing and recording with my first serious band some 20 years ago, our physical EP that sold around 1000 copies made considerably more than spotify would give us today, for 1000 listens.
Of course, Spotify (and the likes) would give us much, MUCH more exposure to listeners all over the world - but buck for buck, it's a worse deal on the scale a lot of amateurs are operating.
The best way to support smaller acts is:
1. Go to their shows.
2. Buy their physical or digital copies.
3. Buy their merch, if there's any.
4. Donate.
Digital streaming services will pay them pennies. So one needs to actively support artists.
> The fundamental problem isn't streaming, as much as it is that natural systems follow power law distributions
I think that's an important truth to keep in mind when discussing this.
> That was just as true 20 years ago as it is today.
Hmm. Let's consider 3 different periods of time.
1. Olden times before radio. To listen to music, you had to play it yourself, or go see it in person.
2. Radio and Records exist.
3. Internet streaming.
Each artist has a problem along the lines of: how much of my time do I spend figuring out how to make money, and how much making music or performing?
Obviously, after a certain point, it is way more efficient to let Warner Bros. do the marketing, etc.
However, the power dynamic of this new business model means that that "natural" power law (if each musician were doing all the business stuff themselves), is more like a power-power law. Each step above increases the max payout to the Mozarts and the Jay-Zs, but more importantly, it concentrates power in the hands of the rights-holders.
Among other things, now your cost of entry to the super-star lottery is to give up rights that would otherwise give you a better chance at a lower, but more certain return in another system.
I agree that we can't go back. But the fact that someone twice as good may get 10 times the attention is not the only effect at play.
In an ideal society, we get to choose how the market works. And it should probably work differently for businesses that have different functions in society. For example, some different classes might be Entertainment, the Internet, Power & Water utilities.
> There will always be superstars that make the majority of the money, and tons and tons of wannabe artists that make almost nothing. That was just as true 20 years ago as it is today
I partially disagree. The power law dynamics were present 20 years ago. However the DEGREE of inequality between the 'superstars' and average musicians has skyrocketed, possibly due to technological changes.
On one hand, ease of access lets a wider demographic become musicians (think of the proliferation of SoundCloud rappers and YouTube singers). On the other hand, popular artists are able to reach a wider audience and grab a wider slice of aggregate 'attention'.
>The fundamental problem isn't streaming, as much as it is that natural systems follow power law distributions. There will always be superstars that make the majority of the money, and tons and tons of wannabe artists that make almost nothing.
Well, for millenias it wasn't that way. So not 100% "natural".
It happened because of the extra distribution power recorded and now streaming music allows.
When you didn't have recorded music, musicians all around the globe could make a living in their local communitities.
> The fundamental problem isn't streaming, as much as it is that natural systems follow power law distributions.
I disagree. The fundamental issue isn't power law distributions either, it's the fact that £200 won't even pay for a new guitar.
It's not hard to imagine that the distribution of earnings in other fields is lopsided too, but even average-earning teachers, corporate lawyers and secretaries make a wage they can get by on. Music as a whole might just undervalued.
Music is also very unequal. I haven't heard of teachers earning less than £200 a year, nor of teachers earning as much as say, Taylor Swift. The parameters of these two earning distributions are widely different.
It's interesting, since Music is and has always been very valuable in every culture since time immemorial. Is it undervalued because the post-industral world just tends to undervalue creative work in general? Is it not really that undervalued, and we just get that impression because such as small part of the industry captures such an insane percentage of profits? Could be both to be honest.
There is a fundamental difference here though. Being a teacher is a form of employment, where at least theoretically there is a match of supply vs demand.
Music in this context is more like a business, where there may not be demand. You don't get to create a random business and expect a livable wage from it. Music as a whole may be valued, but music from any particular band may not be.
In Spotify, Youtube and a great deal of content platforms you don't necessarily make money on it. You generally make money on conversions to buy merchandise (which you can easily increate profit margins) or going to shows (which also gets people to buy merchandise.
An other problem is commoditization of music. With modern DAW software, a good autotune, youtube tutorials and some time you can make commercial-sounding music from the comfort of your home with a shoestring budget (especially if you pirate said software).
Even if the music industry dies, music itself is going nowhere. It sucks for people who really love making music and want to live from it but from a purely capitalistic perspective it just doesn't add up: there's a massive amount of offer and a fixed amount of demand. You can find dozens of incredibly gifted artists on Youtube, Twitch or elsewhere who'll never manage to live from their craft.
It's like becoming a pro footballer, it's amazing if you make it but it's not a reasonable long term career prospect if you're not incredibly gifted and incredibly lucky.
I used to be a performing pianist in the limited gigging world. I got paid to play cocktail hours, charity events, contra dances, and folk festivals. These were once in a while gigs, netting me usually 100-150 on average. I took home 3k total over years of doing this.
To record would've been a whole new world. Either shell out a years' plus worth of performance wages to get an album made, or use my coding gig to prop it up. I decided I am only good, not great, and meager streaming revenue and occasional $20 buys couldn't be worth it.
In summary, play music for fun. If you see anyone making a decent wage off music, great for them, but unless you're prodigious or attractive or well connected, it's a 1% craps-shoot.
Yeah, Devin Townsend (who I would consider a successful musician) recently discussed how much he makes in an average year - and it was something like (going from memory) 70K per year before you factor in all the expenses associated with being a musician and creating records (which are quite large!). Touring is where much of his income comes from and he had recently “invested” in creating a new album and setting up a tour, but COVID wiped that all out putting him in a less-than-ideal financial situation.
I think that much like working at McDonalds or dealing drugs most people don’t make much - the financial rewards are fairly concentrated to a few individuals.
I have friends that love pottery, knitting, photography, painting, and a million other creative pursuits. But they also have day jobs because it's difficult to make money in the arts unless you have millions of fans.
With any other job we would say, "well, if you're only making £200 a year, maybe you should get a better-paying job." I'm not sure why this is different.
There isn't an industry with a handful of corporations like Spotify making billions of dollars off your friends' pottery while millions of people spend hours gazing at it.
>There isn't an industry with a handful of corporations like Spotify making billions of dollars off your friends' pottery while millions of people spend hours gazing at it.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Etsy...? What are social media sites if not just the Spotify for your eyes? Every time you post anything about your pottery to try to drive a sale (or not), the platform gets more free content that directly influences literally billions of their own profits -- and all you get are people spending hours (if you're lucky) gazing at it.
Surely you could say this about almost anything? 80% of an unspecified group of self-identified musicians don't make a lot of money in music isn't a very interesting statistic.
This just in as well, "over 80% of basketball players make less than $200 playing basketball" if you count recreational leagues.
There was also a line "Including some that have millions of streams" but it looks like those are the ones in the 20% that didn't earn less than 200 in the year.
Maybe someone with more knowledge can answer this for me but what exactly is a label for these days? You don't need funding to distribute CDs these days so why can't the artist just put the content on Spotify and Youtube themselves?
A label will often pay to record your music, including hiring the best producers or session musicians, getting other established artists featured in your songs, getting the best people to mix and master it to make it sound great. Then they pay to market it and put it on the radio (which is just one big ad network these days).
Really it's very similar to raising venture capital. You don't need to do it, you can bootstrap a company with almost no money and people do it all the time. But if you have the chance to work with an expert who's willing to put in a lot of money upfront, it can really accelerate your trajectory.
AFAIK you still need to have a label to publish on streaming services, but there are now services that will act as your label and publish for a very low membership fee (<30/yr).
I spent 2018-2019 making a puzzle game in my spare time. Revenue model was opt-in ads. Released for iOS and Android. Didn't do a ton of marketing, but that's okay, it was just a little passion project that I hoped might gain some traction.
Got up to around 70 installs peak, made $6 my first year on Android, and $14 my first year on iOS. Which is to say I made -$80 total since I had to pay $100 to publish in Apple's App Store. I cancelled the iOS app since it wasn't making enough to pay the annual $100 fee, but the Android one is still up[0] and makes ~$1 every couple of months.
Now I'm just waiting for a twitch streamer to pick it up and turn me into an overnight millionaire like "Among Us"!
I would reconsider trying again with a larger budget and try to do some targeted marketing. I wanted to buy it just from your description on the play store but I’m IPhone only unfortunately. If not maybe there is a marketplace for selling your game (the rights to it not copies) like there is for selling businesses. This completed project would likely be an easy buy for someone with more capital than products.
Either way congrats and finishing and shipping, that’s a serious battle in and of itself for a side project!
Except how hard is it to learn to code, write a actual app, pay money up front to even get in the exclusive store and have your stuff vetted, versus just record and upload an mp3 to some music service.
The distribution might be much worse in music land than in commercial software repositories.
(Edit: changed "spotify" to "some music service" because apparently it's not so easy to upload to spotify as an independent artist. It was more about the general idea.)
Edit 2: y'all are making a good point about making music not being easy either (I did underrepresent that), but there is no point posting the same reply five times. The subthread where I replied to that is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25352484
A better metric is to work out if that 20% is bigger and better off than the previous generation of artists. I'm willing to bet streaming has made the industry better when looking through that lens.
Overall revenues are still below 2000 levels[1] and split between more artists thanks to streaming. It's probably worse for the "middle class" who are not getting millions of plays per month but also losing some of the potential income to the "long tail" of artists getting a few hundred plays each.
It hasn't. I've seen numbers for folks like Dolly Parton. She makes less in a year than I spend on coffee in streaming revenues. It is several orders of magnitude less than she makes in music sales.
Would you control for population growth? It's always tough in these questions. Do you need twice the music for twice the people? You sure need twice the music jobs, from the artist side. So even if the 20% is bigger, it might be relatively smaller.
Anecdata: I make music with a friend of mine [1]. It's mostly a social thing, but we release music fairly regularly, and have done for about 9 years. When sales were a thing, we used to make some money. Not a lot, but every year or so, we'd break the payout boundary, and get £60 or so. Always a running joke between us about 'phoning Sunseeker' or whatever.
Since streaming became the thing, we make almost no money, and it's a tiny fraction of what we used to make.
In 2013 Q2, we made £29.49
In 2020 Q2, we made £3.00
Don't get me wrong, I know we're nobody, but I'm sure it scales in the same way for a lot of people who are taking this more seriously. Unless you're doing a lot of streams, then you make no money, and certainly not the money you did from sales.
Another bit of info, looking in a recent statement.
723 streams of a track earned us £0.0236.
1 sale of a track earned us £0.4297
Looking at the data, I'm pretty sure that people who listen to our tracks do so multiple times (if you filter by area, demographic, etc., you can pretty much tell that the same person in the same area likes a track and listen to it a lot - say 20 or 30 times) - exactly what you would do if you bought it. But now even if someone listens to a track 100 times (which, let's face it, you probably would in a lifetime), it will earn a tiny fraction of what a sale would for you.
In almost every discussion of musician income and Spotify that I've, two entirely different questions seems to get conflated together:
1. How big is the pie?
2. Who gets what share of it?
Here in this thread, almost everyone is saying that the total pie for music isn't that big compared to the number of people making it today. As production costs get lower and lower, more and more people can be become musicians and that pie gets sliced into smaller and smaller pieces. Meanwhile, there are only so many hours in the day one can listen to music, so demand is relatively fixed. I agree with others that this is maybe unfortunate, but is basically just reality. Just like writing and working in zoos, occupations that have massive intrinsic reward are rarely compensated well financially.
But there's an entirely separate question. Given some pie of whatever size, are companies like Spotify getting a fair share of it relative to musicians? It's sad if musicians can't make a living can't make a living off their music. But theatre actors and poets rarely do either. But it seems wrong that at the exact same time, businesses are raking in billions of dollars off that exact same music.
We aren't outraged that poets are underpaid because there simply is no money there. There isn't much money to go around in music, but even so, the distributors are taking almost all of it and leaving little for the actual musicians.
Absolutely right. It seems almost every other thread here is missing the crux of the article, which has nothing to do with some alleged musician-listener supply-demand issue. Rather:
Graham Davies, CEO of The Ivors Academy said: “This survey is further demonstration that the song and the songwriter are undervalued. Too much streaming money is going to the major labels, this is an outdated model and needs reform.”
The survey results come amid an ongoing government inquiry into the impact of “the business models” operated by the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Google Play.
It doesn't sound like musicians are (necessarily) arguing that we should pay more than $10 to stream their music. Or that they should get more than their share of the pie relative to other artists.
It's that musicians' share of the $10 as a whole should be way more than it is now, and Spotify + labels should get less. And that's a fair claim to make that's worth talking about.
Actually, that quote is "musicians" fighting over share. In this case, a songwriters' group (Ivors Academy) is complaining that performers (via labels) get too big of a share. This fight has been going on since recorded music began and has nothing to do with Spotify or any recent development.
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The system may be broken, but I'm not sure going back to the old system is the right approach.
For example. I only listen to smaller indie bands on Spotify for a month. I give Spotify my £10 for the month.
Does my £10 go to those smaller bands? No. It gets given to Lady Ga Ga because she got 100 bazzillion listens that month. Even though I never listen to her music.
Spotify should work out who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays.
It would be fairer, but it would mean the bigger bands earn less, and expose the fact that streaming really isn’t making anyone enough money.
How could it when I’m now paying only £10 a month for what used to cost hundreds?
But it’s better than piracy!
If you listen to smaller indie bands more than the average person listens to Lady Ga Ga, the indies artist you listen to actually get more than £10 worth and Lady Ga Ga gets less.
Some people think it is less fair than a "one subscription one vote" system. It is up to debate, but the payment system does not favor celebrities, network effects combined with good marketing do.
Representation based on number of plays
Problem is, suppose you listen to almost nothing but some indie band all month, and you happen to land on Lady Ga Ga just once or twice by accident somehow. Now since proportional representation by number of raw plays has been replaced by number of deduplicated plays tabulated to the artist, £5 goes to Gaga.
Squashing repetitions probably won't make much difference, because some people who like unpopular music listen to it repeatedly like crazy, just like people who like popular music. The big stars are not winning due to more plays; it's really due to just being more popular.
Suppose every Spotify subscriber streams music 24 hours a day. Then is it still unfair to go by plays?
By the way, no mater what, I suspect out of any £10 subscription, something like £9.95 goes to Spotify itself.
I'm not sure this is really fairer, or practical.
Listeners that listen to less music (well, fewer artists at least, but that feels like its often going to correlate) being more valuable feels like it creates weird patterns and incentives.
If you only listened to one song in a month, should that band get your full subscription cut? What if you listened to no songs, but didn't cancel?
In any case, I imagine there's an aggregate effect where the whole pool of spotify listeners habits ends up being something that approximates a normal distribution and paying per-user vs paying per-stream would end up basically the same. You listen to 40 niche artists one month, 10000 other people listen to 40 popular ones, the popular ones get 10000x the revenue... There are bands with thousands of monthly listeners, and then ones with tens of millions of monthly listeners. The few in the latter bucket are gonna dominate the payouts.
I think this is what YouTube does with their premium subscription service for content creators. You get a chunk of the YouTube premium revenue based on how much people with the premium subscription watched.
Imagine Spotify only has 2 users. Both pay their £10 a month.
One listens to 2 hours a day of their fav band on their commute.
The other listens to Taylor Swift on repeat 18 hours a day.
Current system, Taylor swift gets £18 and the other band gets £2.
Use centric version I’m suggesting, both get £10, just as they would if it had been a CD they were listening to.
This seems more fair to me.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/...
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But that would be writing a lot of checks and a pretty big total overall. What else can you do? A lottery system? Round Robin? 3 years is a long time. Ultimately I think you need a bigger pool, and I have only suspicions what that might look like.
The difference I think is if 80% of professional musicians can't make a living & it's not clear that's actually the case (i.e. streaming isn't the only source of revenue). Similarly, music may have a higher "stickiness" for tenacity where people see it as a higher calling for them even if they're not making money (vs someone not cutting it as a lawyer/doctor to even pay the bills is going to quit & find something else if they weren't even weeded out during school).
It might hurt people's feeling, but most of those are not professional musicians.
I don't think it is judgemental to say that to claim oneself as professional, one need to demonstrate that they could make a living out of it. Otherwise, it is no different than a hobbyist, albeit much more time is dumped on it.
In case of streaming, now more people can declare themselves as musicians, since the barrier of publishing has been significantly lowered comparing to physical CDs. But that doesn't mean profit would follow.
To produce hit music isn't easy, and luck is certainly a factor of it.
Fair or not fair is subjective. In my opinion you shouldn’t go into fields with heavy power law dynamics unless you’re comfortable with a very high likelihood of coming out a ‘failure’.
At least it’s gotten more meritocratic than in years past.
Startups are a different situation, but in fact so different it seems silly to compare.
But the real reason this is on HN is because this is the consequences of applying technology (smartphones, cellular data, cloud scale web services) to an industry (music sales).
A collective action by artists to force streaming services into a better deal seems like what is required, tho the general appetite for collective action in 2020 still seems a little lacking.
Musicians have existed far, far longer than recording technology has. In the past musicians got paid For performing. Maybe the odd thing is expecting to be paid for decades for a few weeks in a recording studio.
Also lets remember how we ended up with the $10/month all you can eat subscription. Pirating, CD rips, online MP3 sharing, Youtube music videos, etc. The majority of the people don't want to pay for music anymore. I feel people are more likely to value a physical good. For example: I feel somewhat balanced for paying $5 for that Starbucks coffee because I get a physical thing in the end. In the early 2000s, the computer and internet was the new thing, not everyone used it, and it was a bit complicated. So using it made me feel like I am "smarter", more frontier chasing, more elite than others. And there were ideals like internet freedom, free access to information. And then when I discovered there is MP3s, copy and paste, BitTorrent and Napster, I felt like I have just been bestowed special powers. Through my "hard" work with computers, I gained the rights to listen to music for free. I actually felt I was righteous to download music from the Internet and listen to them. Had content locked behind a paywall, had to pay for that? It was against internet freedom, it was an outrage. Then I remember when Steven Jobs later came out with Itunes and every song is 99 cents. I felt, 99 cents? alright, it's only a dollar and really not that much. That was the first time I started to actually pay for music. But the music industry and musicians were outraged because Steve Jobs is making their work worth only a dollar. Job's point was that if you charge people more than 99 cents a song, people would just pirate. I agree with him. The later "all you can streaming" subscription came out with the competitive advantage being even cheaper than Itune's a dollar a song purchase scheme.
But then everyone as the desire to seek for cheaper prices and better access. Maybe its just natural progression of things and we can't fault for that. Stakeholders have to adapt for change in behavior and landscapes. I believe the advantages nowadays for a musician is that "getting yourself known and advertise yourself" is cheaper than ever. And there are so many people out there that you can easily reach that even a niche artist can find audiences. Its much easier now to create a fanbase and consistently communicate and maintain a fanbase. And when you have a fanbase, you just have to figure out how to monetize that. Concerts, fan items, album sales, even sponsorship and advertisement, a Youtube channel makes you a lot of money already. Look at the amount of fans a Youtuber and TikTok star has and how much they earn money from the fanbase and popularity, they make a lot. Justin Bieber became a star on Youtube and that jump started his career. Lindsey Stirling became a star because of Youtube. Without the internet and "free access" to content the internet is providing, I don't think both will be as well known as they are now. Not sure if they would even stay as artists.
Of course, Spotify (and the likes) would give us much, MUCH more exposure to listeners all over the world - but buck for buck, it's a worse deal on the scale a lot of amateurs are operating.
The best way to support smaller acts is:
1. Go to their shows.
2. Buy their physical or digital copies.
3. Buy their merch, if there's any.
4. Donate.
Digital streaming services will pay them pennies. So one needs to actively support artists.
I think that's an important truth to keep in mind when discussing this.
> That was just as true 20 years ago as it is today.
Hmm. Let's consider 3 different periods of time.
1. Olden times before radio. To listen to music, you had to play it yourself, or go see it in person.
2. Radio and Records exist.
3. Internet streaming.
Each artist has a problem along the lines of: how much of my time do I spend figuring out how to make money, and how much making music or performing?
Obviously, after a certain point, it is way more efficient to let Warner Bros. do the marketing, etc.
However, the power dynamic of this new business model means that that "natural" power law (if each musician were doing all the business stuff themselves), is more like a power-power law. Each step above increases the max payout to the Mozarts and the Jay-Zs, but more importantly, it concentrates power in the hands of the rights-holders.
Among other things, now your cost of entry to the super-star lottery is to give up rights that would otherwise give you a better chance at a lower, but more certain return in another system.
I agree that we can't go back. But the fact that someone twice as good may get 10 times the attention is not the only effect at play.
In an ideal society, we get to choose how the market works. And it should probably work differently for businesses that have different functions in society. For example, some different classes might be Entertainment, the Internet, Power & Water utilities.
I partially disagree. The power law dynamics were present 20 years ago. However the DEGREE of inequality between the 'superstars' and average musicians has skyrocketed, possibly due to technological changes.
On one hand, ease of access lets a wider demographic become musicians (think of the proliferation of SoundCloud rappers and YouTube singers). On the other hand, popular artists are able to reach a wider audience and grab a wider slice of aggregate 'attention'.
Well, for millenias it wasn't that way. So not 100% "natural".
It happened because of the extra distribution power recorded and now streaming music allows.
When you didn't have recorded music, musicians all around the globe could make a living in their local communitities.
I disagree. The fundamental issue isn't power law distributions either, it's the fact that £200 won't even pay for a new guitar.
It's not hard to imagine that the distribution of earnings in other fields is lopsided too, but even average-earning teachers, corporate lawyers and secretaries make a wage they can get by on. Music as a whole might just undervalued.
Music is also very unequal. I haven't heard of teachers earning less than £200 a year, nor of teachers earning as much as say, Taylor Swift. The parameters of these two earning distributions are widely different.
It's interesting, since Music is and has always been very valuable in every culture since time immemorial. Is it undervalued because the post-industral world just tends to undervalue creative work in general? Is it not really that undervalued, and we just get that impression because such as small part of the industry captures such an insane percentage of profits? Could be both to be honest.
Music in this context is more like a business, where there may not be demand. You don't get to create a random business and expect a livable wage from it. Music as a whole may be valued, but music from any particular band may not be.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JMKSE2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
Even if the music industry dies, music itself is going nowhere. It sucks for people who really love making music and want to live from it but from a purely capitalistic perspective it just doesn't add up: there's a massive amount of offer and a fixed amount of demand. You can find dozens of incredibly gifted artists on Youtube, Twitch or elsewhere who'll never manage to live from their craft.
It's like becoming a pro footballer, it's amazing if you make it but it's not a reasonable long term career prospect if you're not incredibly gifted and incredibly lucky.
To record would've been a whole new world. Either shell out a years' plus worth of performance wages to get an album made, or use my coding gig to prop it up. I decided I am only good, not great, and meager streaming revenue and occasional $20 buys couldn't be worth it.
In summary, play music for fun. If you see anyone making a decent wage off music, great for them, but unless you're prodigious or attractive or well connected, it's a 1% craps-shoot.
I think that much like working at McDonalds or dealing drugs most people don’t make much - the financial rewards are fairly concentrated to a few individuals.
Thanks for playing the music.
With any other job we would say, "well, if you're only making £200 a year, maybe you should get a better-paying job." I'm not sure why this is different.
There isn't an industry with a handful of corporations like Spotify making billions of dollars off your friends' pottery while millions of people spend hours gazing at it.
If you want to blame somebody, I’d say you should blame the listeners who overwhelmingly listen to a small number of popular artists.
Alternatively, blame the record labels who contribute less and less value while still skimming massive amounts of money. See: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110707/03264014993/riaa-...
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Etsy...? What are social media sites if not just the Spotify for your eyes? Every time you post anything about your pottery to try to drive a sale (or not), the platform gets more free content that directly influences literally billions of their own profits -- and all you get are people spending hours (if you're lucky) gazing at it.
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This just in as well, "over 80% of basketball players make less than $200 playing basketball" if you count recreational leagues.
Maybe someone with more knowledge can answer this for me but what exactly is a label for these days? You don't need funding to distribute CDs these days so why can't the artist just put the content on Spotify and Youtube themselves?
Really it's very similar to raising venture capital. You don't need to do it, you can bootstrap a company with almost no money and people do it all the time. But if you have the chance to work with an expert who's willing to put in a lot of money upfront, it can really accelerate your trajectory.
Got up to around 70 installs peak, made $6 my first year on Android, and $14 my first year on iOS. Which is to say I made -$80 total since I had to pay $100 to publish in Apple's App Store. I cancelled the iOS app since it wasn't making enough to pay the annual $100 fee, but the Android one is still up[0] and makes ~$1 every couple of months.
Now I'm just waiting for a twitch streamer to pick it up and turn me into an overnight millionaire like "Among Us"!
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.umvirate.e...
Either way congrats and finishing and shipping, that’s a serious battle in and of itself for a side project!
The distribution might be much worse in music land than in commercial software repositories.
(Edit: changed "spotify" to "some music service" because apparently it's not so easy to upload to spotify as an independent artist. It was more about the general idea.)
Edit 2: y'all are making a good point about making music not being easy either (I did underrepresent that), but there is no point posting the same reply five times. The subthread where I replied to that is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25352484
If the question was worded, what % of apps generate < $200/yr, then I would say ~98%.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272305/global-revenue-of...
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Since streaming became the thing, we make almost no money, and it's a tiny fraction of what we used to make.
In 2013 Q2, we made £29.49
In 2020 Q2, we made £3.00
Don't get me wrong, I know we're nobody, but I'm sure it scales in the same way for a lot of people who are taking this more seriously. Unless you're doing a lot of streams, then you make no money, and certainly not the money you did from sales.
Another bit of info, looking in a recent statement.
723 streams of a track earned us £0.0236.
1 sale of a track earned us £0.4297
Looking at the data, I'm pretty sure that people who listen to our tracks do so multiple times (if you filter by area, demographic, etc., you can pretty much tell that the same person in the same area likes a track and listen to it a lot - say 20 or 30 times) - exactly what you would do if you bought it. But now even if someone listens to a track 100 times (which, let's face it, you probably would in a lifetime), it will earn a tiny fraction of what a sale would for you.
[1] - https://open.spotify.com/artist/6mCvg6sz3K2WfFLaVYvHGl
1. How big is the pie?
2. Who gets what share of it?
Here in this thread, almost everyone is saying that the total pie for music isn't that big compared to the number of people making it today. As production costs get lower and lower, more and more people can be become musicians and that pie gets sliced into smaller and smaller pieces. Meanwhile, there are only so many hours in the day one can listen to music, so demand is relatively fixed. I agree with others that this is maybe unfortunate, but is basically just reality. Just like writing and working in zoos, occupations that have massive intrinsic reward are rarely compensated well financially.
But there's an entirely separate question. Given some pie of whatever size, are companies like Spotify getting a fair share of it relative to musicians? It's sad if musicians can't make a living can't make a living off their music. But theatre actors and poets rarely do either. But it seems wrong that at the exact same time, businesses are raking in billions of dollars off that exact same music.
We aren't outraged that poets are underpaid because there simply is no money there. There isn't much money to go around in music, but even so, the distributors are taking almost all of it and leaving little for the actual musicians.
Graham Davies, CEO of The Ivors Academy said: “This survey is further demonstration that the song and the songwriter are undervalued. Too much streaming money is going to the major labels, this is an outdated model and needs reform.”
The survey results come amid an ongoing government inquiry into the impact of “the business models” operated by the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Google Play.
It doesn't sound like musicians are (necessarily) arguing that we should pay more than $10 to stream their music. Or that they should get more than their share of the pie relative to other artists.
It's that musicians' share of the $10 as a whole should be way more than it is now, and Spotify + labels should get less. And that's a fair claim to make that's worth talking about.