I grew up during the age of peak CD sales, and I still only bought like ten audio CDs in my life, all of them on the secondary market. I essentially didn't spend any money on music before Spotify came along. Now I spend 15 EUR every freaking month.
And it's not just piracy, although it is that, too. Before Spotify came along, I listened to music radio, and I also listened to a lot of free amateur music. And that was at a time when distribution was a challenge; now any artist can create a Bandcamp (or whatever) page in seconds and give away their work.
The entry barrier for making music is just incredibly low. I'm sure only gifted individuals can make exceptionally good music. But most music isn't exceptionally good and loads of people can make music that's good enough to have on in the background, i.e. what Spotify is being used for the vast majority of the time.
I think what may be happening is that we hear loudly and often from the mega-stars who used to comfortably earn millions from each new album release or even single release and now get lower streaming revenue. But we never hear from the hundreds of thousands of "long tail" smaller performers who previously would've earned zero within a couple years after releasing their last CD, but who now get a small but steady trickle of income from streaming. I've got dozens of songs on my Spotify playlist that the world has entirely forgotten about in terms of radio or public exposure, and the performers themselves might be middle-aged realtors or office workers by now who have entirely given up their music careers, but their songs were little earworms to me back in 2003 so I still play them occasionally. Not that the people negatively impacted don't have cause for complaint. But we're only hearing one side of the story.
Revenue is NOWHERE NEAR what it was - you’re neglecting to click on the graph that says “value (adjusted for inflation)”. The graph is a clear indication of an industry trying to transform itself by whatever means having been repeatedly decimated. If the entire US music industry was a company, it wouldn’t even make it into the S&P 500.
This assumes all artists are alike, which patently they are not. Artists that make amazing music that doesn't stream well, are pretty fucked and their revenue stream from recorded music has basically vanished.
Spotify algorithm filters these artists hard.
I call these artists peak experience artists, they make music you might listen to occasionally, perhaps even just a handful of times, but you don't listen to in the background daily / weekly / monthly.
Whereas' pre streaming to listen to it once you bought a CD for £14.99 and the label got £7 and the artist on an indie got ~£3.50. Now the artist gets <0.01p for that listen.
Huge difference and a chiling effect on the sort of music that can be made.
(I've worked for a big UK indie and currently manage musicians and have seen the trends in music distribution first hand since 1992).
Many artists who happily make Spotify friendly music do handsomely if the algorithm is generous. But many do not and can no longer have a full time career in music.
And no, live shows do not make up the shortfall. Not all artists are comfortable playing live and it's harder for artists to reach critical mass where touring is even possible / profitable.
Unless they are already wealthy, which is why you see again and again the same ilk of rich kids breaking out in music (see Fred Again, Fourtet, etc etc).
As a teenager in the 90s and a young man in the 00s, I barely bought a couple of original CDs in those decades. Most of the music I had was pirated (downloaded, or recorded from radio). I would fill my hard drive with 10s of GB of MP3s, then I'd cycle through it via Winamp. And I have no acquaintances with large music collections, unless that music was pirated.
Currently, I'm paying for a Spotify subscription AND a YouTube Premium subscription, which is way more than zero $.
Artists making money are those performing live, and filling auditoriums and stadiums with people. The kind of artists that have dedicated fans, and that make albums that become collectibles. That has always been the case.
> I grew up during the age of peak CD sales, and I still only bought like ten audio CDs in my life, all of them on the secondary market.
This is the kind of anecdote that tries to make an example that proves the argument, but it's so wildly different from the average music consumer in the 1990s that it's completely irrelevant.
You bought 10 CDs at a 2nd hand store in your entirely life and now you pay more for Spotify. But most people were buying 10, or 20, or 30, or more CDs a year, .... and now they're paying _less_ for Spotify.
Not if you adjust for growth in artists and music avaiable.
So in the end the money that goes to artists is worth maybe 10% of what it was in 1973, while serving a customer base that is 58% larger, probably much larger than that considering everybody has access now. And this money has to be split among many more artists than before, including many artists who have been dead for decades.
I agree and I see it with my own music habits. I do listen to Apple Music stuff all the time, but really there are a handful of artists I value personally and can recognise by name. Even today, I continue to buy their vinyl records not really for the purpose of listening but just because it's a cool way to support them outside of streaming.
It would be interesting to know how the amount (hours) of music being listened to changed over time, in comparison. With streaming and radio, it correlates in time, whereas with physical media and downloads, purchases stretch over time in relation to when you listen to them, and the revenue is decoupled from how much you listen to it.
People aren’t going to pay more so it is in fact not worth more.
I know every artist thinks their unique vision is infinitely priceless but things are actually worth what people are willing to pay for them. If you can’t convince people to hand over money for it, then it’s not worth that much.
Exactly, things are only worth what people are willing to pay for them and for a lot of people music is relatively low in the pecking order. I pay for spotify but would leave it they raise the prices.
That is actually not how it works, at least not in any sense that carries meaning in the real world, and that's easily verifiable be checking the counter factual: People pay more for things than they are worth all the time. For example: Marketing courses.
I really hate when people pretend that you can just go sell your stuff on your website and that would settle the debate. Unless you're already extremely popular, not being present on streaming services is almost akin to not existing at all. Even though streaming services aren't a monopoly, as a whole they have a huge percentage of the market and what they pay out famously is very little and (at least in the case of Spotify) skewed towards the big artists.
Yes, fair is complicated, but the decision of what's fair and what isn't is something a society can take and it seems that Uruguay did take that decision. Good for them, I guess.
Is minimum wage also twisting the arm of business? How much would be fair for minimum wage?
I'm not sure how you've come to the conclusion that "artists" (who?) do not get a "fair" (how much?) deal.
I'm sorry noone wants to listen to your garage band anymore because they prefer megastars like Taylor Swift or can listen to the newest K-Pop five seconds after a song was released and uploaded, but that's globalization for you.
Sure, 200 years ago you had to listen to whoever could afford an instrument in your village - regardless of skill - but we don't inhabit that world anymore.
I actually don’t think they are an incredible bargain. At current prices, a single subscription is 8-10 albums a year. That is way above what I would have been buying had the world stayed on CDs.
Ive got the family subscription to Spotify. The four of us each listen to a solid 100,000 minutes of music a year for $15 a month. 400,000 minutes of entertainment for $180 is easily the best value entertainment I’ve ever seen. That’s 37 hours per dollar.
The price of something is determined by those that are willing to pay for it. And I am a Spotify artist just over the >1000 streams mark.
Spotify (and others) are a discovery service that you happen to get some money for. You are trying to get into the algo and if people like it reads that signal and puts it out. It has NOTHING to do with fairness. If your music doesn’t connect with people then, that.
If interested. Work cost circa €600 (mostly from session drummer) and an awful amount of work from me as the producer. Am I annoyed that I may never break even? No because I am realistic about the product I am creating and how it is a pyramid scheme. But I do get to listen to it
https://open.spotify.com/track/5MCvIFKabQfN7gnInX12BB?si=RzX...
No matter how much prices rise, the artist will never get a fair deal as long as they deal with labels.
On the other hand while they may get more of a percentage of the payout if they don’t deal with labels, they probably will get fewer streams without the marketing.
Streaming music unfortunately needs to be considered marketing for most artist and as a cliche as it sounds - it’s all about live performances and merchandise.
And breaking up the one true monopoly - Ticketmaster
Remove the incredibly bloated middleman aka the traditional music industry. The actual cost of distributing music has come down immensely with digital distribution and streaming.
"But they do so much more, like PR and marketing and stuff". Ironically, those who are already big get the biggest PR plus better deals than smaller artists. I don't think we need to raise Spotify prices just so Taylor swift can get even richer.
Spotify spends millions per month on lavish "creative" team salaries in NYC who do nothing but create gradient playlist covers and other low grade "design" work that is 100% unnecessary. All while they redesign and destroy their UX and product experiences every iteration. All of that money could go straight to the artists.
At least someone in their design department keeps uselessly moving things around. The latest was tucking away the desktop application's search function into the sidebar, even though the space it used to occupy is now just wasted space. It feels like they are trying to go the Netflix way where the normal usage is just consuming whatever they put in front of you. But we're probably not even supposed to use it on desktop...
I think Spotify's aesthetic and design is one of the things that keeps people from moving over to other platforms.
Nobody wants to use programmer art software. And these things are more carefully considered than most people would believe.
Granted, I have this opinion about shovelling money at podcasts creators, and I'm sure someone could tell me the same. But you know, 200mill for Joe Roegan. Ugh.
They can’t demand higher prices because their main competitor, piracy, is free.
I’ve long been opposed to piracy and thought copyright laws should be more strictly enforced, for exactly this reason. Yet most people seem to balk at that idea and think they have an absolute moral right to free content. I’m not sure why.
Lots of people make quite good music for free, or are dead and no longer care if they get any money (even though in the latter case companies are fleecing listeners long after the artist has died)>
Piracy did well for a while in the CD era. There is no evidence that current prices represent a ceiling for what would work in 2023 before people would turn again to piracy.
Much cheaper content has pretty much been normalized and it’s much easier to make free copies of stuff than it used to be. And the money ends up taken from someone which, in music, mostly ends up being the artists.
The true value of music is pretty much zero, anything someone can get for the "reproduction" of their work is a plus. Now Uruguayan musicians will get the true value for their work, when Uruguayans go to the piratebay to listen to their songs.
Nonsense, if they divided my monthly payment by hours listened they'd get about 1-2 CDs out of that every month, more than I have ever bought in my life. And they don't even have to spend any money to burn and distribute them. So they're already making more money than they would otherwise. The only issue is that the money isn't going to those who actually deserve it. Don't encourage these greedy jackals to charge even more.
Younger people buying one or two albums per month used to be extremely common. And distribution of media generally (also in the case of books) is a much smaller percentage of the costs than most people assume.
It’s worth remembering that it was different greedy jackals getting the lions’ share of money in the CD era, not the artists. Artists rarely got more than 10%.
Artists are making plenty. It is just that the supply of artists is much higher than the demand, because lots of people want to make money playing music, but there is only so many hours a day to listen to it.
And while I get plenty value from my Spotify subscription, I also spend much more on music than I otherwise would have.
They put all the streams in one pool and then split from there. Popular artists get almost all of it.
When you spend $10 or whatever on streaming, you'd expect $7 to be split between the artists you listen to, but it's not. Instead almost all of it goes to the big artists anyway because in the big streams pool the small artists you listen to have a tiny proportion of listens, even if you exclusively listened to them.
This gets worse when you consider all those shops/cafes/etc with Spotify's top charts playing on repeat. They may be a small percentage of users, but they're an outsized proportion of streams, and almost exclusively big artists.
This is the way it is because big artists have big name labels, and those labels are the only ones who can negotiate, so the deal ends up favoring the big artists/labels.
This is definitely not how most consumers would expect it to all work, and therefore "unfair" seems like a reasonable term to use.
The "pool all streams" model doesn't necessarily favor big artists, it favors artists that are listened to by people that stream a lot of music.
For example, consider a bimodal population of 1000 people that listen 10 times to a popular artist (for a total of 10,000 streams) and 10 people that listen 1000 times to a small artist (for an identical total of 10,000 streams). In the "pool all streams" model, both artists get paid the same, while in a "split per user" model, the popular artist gets 100x the payout of the small artist.
An interesting question then is whether big or small artists are disproportionaly listened to by people that stream a lot. I haven't seen any data on it, but intuitively it wouldn't surprise me if it's the latter case.
> "They put all the streams in one pool and then split from there. Popular artists get almost all of it."
Like they should, mostly because they drive Spotify subscriptions. It's fair because there is a strong correlation between popularity and work, coupled with talent.
> When you spend $10 or whatever on streaming, you'd expect $7 to be split between the artists you listen to, but it's not.
Even if they'd distribute your subscription to your favorite artists, the total revenue for those artists and their share would still be mostly the same. Only in some degenerate scenarios, where you listen to only one obscure artist that nobody listens to, would those numbers be any different, and not by much.
> This is the way it is because big artists have big name labels.
Economies of scale probably apply. Like they should. ;-)
Talented artists can often sign with big labels. And isn't it wonderful that in 2023 you can publish your work, on Spotify and elsewhere, without having to sign with a big label?
Tidal (spotify competitor) takes 2 euro and gives 'em to the artist you've listened to the most.
But the rest of the money is probably all going to the big ones as you explained.
Just saying this because it is so weird. Like, hell yeah I sure hope my money goes to the people that I listen to why is this a thing??
> They put all the streams in one pool and then split from there. Popular artists get almost all of it.
... but that's because popular artists account for almost all the streams, right? I don't think a per-user split is any fairer, it's just different, and there's no clear evidence on whether there'd be less of a gap between big and small artists with a user-centric split.
I don't. I expect that when I pay for a streaming service, as soon as the money is in their account all bets are off and no insight is given.
So such a generalisation of what people expect doesn't hold up for consumer products I'd say. I wouldn't be surprised if most customers don't even think about it at all.
I don’t think that would necessarily favor small artists. That would just favor artists who are listened to by people who don’t use Spotify a lot.
Right now someone who only streams a few songs gets a very small “vote” (assuming pay is per stream). That would make it so that everyone had the same “voting” power. But I doubt there’s much correlation between people who use Spotify less and small artists. In fact that’s probably a negative correlation if anything, and this could end up hurting local artists.
Sorry, I’m failing to see the difference between this and what actually happens. They currently take 70% of their revenue and split it across artists by stream, and what I’m reading is that you’re proposing is that we take each subscriber’s revenue (presumably less some profit factor - say, 30%) and split it by the artists they stream. What am I missing?
Not sure how this favors small/local artists. Most people I know who listen to small/local artists listen to much more music than those who listen to big pop artists. That means the current system actually favors the local artists since their listeners have an outsize “vote” when all streams are bundled together.
Is there any reason to believe big artist listeners on average stream more songs per month?
A better way would be for streams to interoperate with a copyright clearance mechanism where, when an artist opts out of the regular stream users still can validate they own a copy and get access through the stream. I have a library of saved songs I never hear on Pandora, and often my favorite artists and songs get dropped leaving a rather bland experience over the long haul.
But in terms of unit economics, the bigger artists/labels (or the artists that bring more users) are responsible for funding the entire platform, no?
In other words: A small artist can _bring_ users to the platform, fair enough, but the platform that gives access to other artists and enables that needs to take the bigger share.
Do artists have a contract with Spotify or with their labels? If it's with the labels, Spotify pays the labels and they give to the artists what they agreed upon, possibly an unfairly low amount of money but contracts are contracts.
The Uruguay parliament should regulate the contracts between their local artists and the labels. Some of them will ban Uruguay artists but some of them, maybe local ones, will intercept the money no matter what.
Or Spotify makes deals with individual artists, but there is a long and thin tail of them.
> Cost of revenue consists predominantly of royalty and distribution costs related to content streaming.
> Cost of revenue also includes the cost of podcast content assets (both produced and licensed)
> Cost of revenue also includes credit card and payment processing fees for subscription revenue, customer service, certain employee compensation and benefits, cloud computing, streaming, facility, and equipment costs.
So all operational costs is included in that "70%", including: infrastructure, payment fees, etc. etc.
A breakdown:
217 committed Google Cloud Platform per quarter (based on 4344 in 5 years)
105 for amortization of content assets (podcasts they bought)
30 for some content write-off
102 "minimum royalty" for licensed content (not the regular artists), (based on (2124-83) in 5 years)
100 my estimate for app store fees, assuming 15% fees for 20% of the users
67 my estimate for ca. 2% creditcard fees
? streaming
? facility
? support software + employees
? equipment, software, etc
? refunds etc
? free spotify for employees
So a total of AT LEAST 723 is not related to paying out royalties.
(2472-723)/3357
They're paying less than 52%. My estimate would be between 35% and 40%
Those revenue and cost of revenue figures blend together different things. Their contracts with music distributors (recordings) + statutory rates for music publishers (compositions) = ~70% of the revenue pool from advertisers and subscribers.
However, podcasts work differently, both on the revenue and cost side, and appears to be mixed in. Additionally, Spotify sells optional marketing programs (ads within Spotify, for example) which I assume are included in revenue. So it's hard to draw the right conclusion just from the summary numbers.
They need to at least split it by stream time. It’s non-sensical to have a 2 minute pop song be paid the same as a 14 minute classical song. This has weird off effects like pop stars making shorter and shorter songs so they get played more often, which causes less ability to concentrate for extended periods of time in the young people that listen to it.
I suppose the argument wouldn't be about how their revenue is distributed, rather that they should be charging more for their subscription (which is, in my opinion, insanely cheap). They're able to keep it that cheap because they're underpaying artists.
"Spotify already pays nearly 70% of every dollar it generates from music to the record labels and publishers", yet musicians still get paid incredibly bad. Maybe if the only way of making your business model sustainable is by underpaying artists, your business is just not sustainable.
Yes, artists have the wonderful choice of being able to sign for one of three labels, with no meaningful distinction between the deals any of them offer, because that's just how oligopolies roll. And they collude^Whave deals with spotify.
Apple's App Store pays out 70% of every dollar to app developers, yet most apps make nothing. It's less about the 70%, and more that infinite shelf space and finite human attention leads to a lot of ignored products.
Labels take 50-90% of the royalties money, depending how big the artist is. Huge artists can have their own sweetheart deals, or their own labels, but 50-90% of a cut to the label is pretty usual.
They both pay approximately the same for premium subscribers, and Apple's trial period pays approximately the same as Spotify's ad supported model. They're both trying to drive premium subscriptions, which make both them and rightsholders more money, but using different strategies to get there
Is there a service that actually gives MP3 downloads? Call me old fashioned but I'll happily pay for a service that actually gives me MP3 files that I can download and keep offline.
MP3 isn’t as popular due to its inherent poor quality but the iTunes Store (not Apple Music) still gives you non-DRMed AAC files (I don’t believe any lossless files are available that way).
Well.. yes but don't re-encode audio from Youtube to MP3, that's adding further quality loss to already not-great quality files. Download AAC or OPUS or whatever it's serving now.
Maybe there is a market for a "patreon for musicians". A platform that distributes your music to all streaming platforms but doesn't steal the rights from you. And additionally lets fans subscribe monthly for favorite arists (like patreon) for early access to music and discount to concerts and merch. IMO the patreon model is so good to lift artists out of poverty if they provide value to a small number of people without them having to loose all their creations to some publisher they signed off to in the begining.
Maybe if myspace didn't kill itself, it could have been it.
You can get all your music onto all streaming platforms without giving up any rights for about $20/year. The Patreon part, presumably you could use Patreon itself for this?
Would be great if there was transparency to the user, e.g. the bottom line amount of pay distributed to artists from your listening per billing period.
Also they should let internet radios on there and do the same because I have some smaller ones I listen to that don't support premium (higher quality/no ads) streams. All under the precondition they don't destroy indie internet radio culture along the way.
It would raise too many questions like "why did most of my money go to artists I never listened to in the first place" and Spotify does not want you to be aware of that.
>I would pay double for my spotify subscription if it meant better artist pay.
I doubt most people would be willing to do the same, however. So, an expensive Spotify would lose to cheaper alternatives.
But the crux of the matter is that most artists are willing to work for pennies; either for the small chance of future success or simply because they like doing it (it's just a hobby for them). There's an oversupply of "good enough" talent, undercutting everyone else (except the top 0.01% who are already rich and famous).
So would I. RN I'm listening to an old playlist I hadn't touched in 8 years, and it's making my heart fall over. Family plan in particular is ridiculously cheap ... though in fairness ALL artistic content is compared to when I was growing up
I gave up on Spotify after the Neil Young debacle. I've tried Deezer and Qobuz both really weren't as good as Spotify they lacked the range of songs and creating playlists was really awkward -- any other alternatives people would recommend?
Same, I've went back to Bandcamp and buying CDs (used and new) and I rip them to my storage. I also upload them to my Airsonic server. I use the Substreamer Android app to then listen on the move.
I get discovery via Youtube and some friends, but it's way less than before with Spotify. I don't mind it though, as I've always tended to listen the same artists over and over again instead of new ones.
Considering that the Airsonic server also hosts bunch of other stuff for me, I think that the cost is similar to the 12$/month cost of Spotify (6$/month + buying 5 CDs per year). Also I get to own my bought music.
I listen to net radio as well, NTS, Rinse FM, Dandelion Radio give a good mix (UK based at least).
I have a Spotify subscription and it is great for the depth of the catalogue and playing your favourite music when you get the itch, but algorithmic playlists suck. Humans do discovery much better, and just leaving radio playing broadens your taste.
YouTube Premium for both YouTube Music and ad-free YouTube without caring for any adblocking hoops? I've been considering it. Their family deal shares price with Spotify Family here and it's much better value. Some people also claim that it offers better sound quality despite similar bitrates than Spotify. Besides, more automated mixes (even an offline mix), better recommendations, and plenty of music videos and good music video discovery.
What pisses me off about YT is their music and videos share the same playlists. So if you import your Spotify to ytm you get a bunch of music playlists in your yt. I wish it was separate.
The default recommendations were pretty hip-hop-based for me, though, but nowadays it's better. I also subscribe to di.fm, which probably tells a bit about my music taste.
Wasn’t Tidal owned by Sprint? (And apparently it’s now owned by Jack Dorsey.) Isn’t that like supporting Zune for being an “underdog”, despite it being owned by Microsoft?
I've been using Qobuz (along with my own Navidrome instance) for the past year. The depth of music in some genres seems pretty good, and seems to have all the mainstream artists, but once you get past them in indie/pop/rock genres the gaps in the catalog really start to show. I've reached out to some artists, and no one seems quite clear why their releases don't appear in Qobuz when they appear in all of the competition. Unfortunately, none of the competition makes lossless streaming available (and I'm not counting Tidal's MQA, even if it was available on Linux).
When I joined they had some social features, and searching for user created playlists seems possible. The last couple of times I've tried I've only gotten Qobuz's official playlists in search results. I've had to make do with syncing playlists from Spotify with Soundiiz.
When combined with how inaccurate the metadata is (including the lack of ability to report the inaccurate metadata) and the lack of any new features in the past year (including lack of copying pre-saves from every other platform), it really seems like investment in Qobuz has stalled.
It's too bad, because it seemed pretty promising. I really miss Rdio. :'(
For listening to Navidrome on the go I use the "substreamer" app on Android. The "Podcast Republic" app also works well for listening to college radio streams to find new artists.
May or may not be available in your locale. I don't actually use Deezer (I use Spotify) so I don't know how much of their catalog is available in FLAC.
I’ve been using Soundcloud since I was 14 and still keep it up. It more or less has the same songs (with some exclusions here and there) and it has tons of mixes which are lovely. I love having lofi on as i code so i got a few 2 hour mixes to power me through.
SoundCloud is my main thing these days, it seems to have way more of the niche stuff I'm interested in (like game music). Thought it wasn't particularly popular, but I happily recommend it.
I gave up around that time too, initially for Tidal. These days, I've mostly gone back to buying most music I listen to. I've even bought many of the things I pirated as a teenager-I value music, so why shouldn't my spending habits reflect that? Discovery is through the came channels I used 20 years ago, plus some youtube. Record stores are great for used stuff-I picked up ten albums on CD for like $32 last month.
Plus, I run a navidrome server, so I can stream (some of, I have a lot of vinyl) my own music when I'm out. I'm a lot happier with this arrangement.
YouTube Music barely works, is terribly designed even by Google standards, lacks basic features any free music player had in the 90s, and they'll probably shut it down next week anyway.
Same. I switched back to Spotify though because I missed the vast amount of user generated playlists you can look up on spotify. Also, Spotify caches a lot more than Tidal, so it performs better when I'm walking around connected to my spotty college wifi.
I love when companies just behave better when countries enact fair laws.
Of course it may not be easy to define what is a "fair law" but if it weren't for them, there wouldn't be workers rights or abuse prevention in many forms.
Yes but in this case it's silly because Spotify licenses music from artists and record labels under specific contract terms. Making it illegal to execute that contract in country A while being bound by that contract in country B was never going to turn out well.
For this law specifically it's a shitshow because they have their current math for the rest of the world which consumes 70% of their revenue and this law simply says yes and pay more. They can't rebalance the money to comply with the law because they would immediately get sued by record labels and so it would have to cut into the 30% which is just pure loss for them.
When you write a law that guarantees you'll lose money in an entire country with no way out you're kinda backed into a wall. Small artists should get paid more but this change can't come like this because there's nothing for Spotify to actually do in response to the law.
Readit News
Current prices are an incredible bargain and only so because they don’t reflect the true value of the product.
Anything else is just trying to square the circle.
I grew up during the age of peak CD sales, and I still only bought like ten audio CDs in my life, all of them on the secondary market. I essentially didn't spend any money on music before Spotify came along. Now I spend 15 EUR every freaking month.
And it's not just piracy, although it is that, too. Before Spotify came along, I listened to music radio, and I also listened to a lot of free amateur music. And that was at a time when distribution was a challenge; now any artist can create a Bandcamp (or whatever) page in seconds and give away their work.
The entry barrier for making music is just incredibly low. I'm sure only gifted individuals can make exceptionally good music. But most music isn't exceptionally good and loads of people can make music that's good enough to have on in the background, i.e. what Spotify is being used for the vast majority of the time.
This assumes all artists are alike, which patently they are not. Artists that make amazing music that doesn't stream well, are pretty fucked and their revenue stream from recorded music has basically vanished.
Spotify algorithm filters these artists hard.
I call these artists peak experience artists, they make music you might listen to occasionally, perhaps even just a handful of times, but you don't listen to in the background daily / weekly / monthly.
Whereas' pre streaming to listen to it once you bought a CD for £14.99 and the label got £7 and the artist on an indie got ~£3.50. Now the artist gets <0.01p for that listen.
Huge difference and a chiling effect on the sort of music that can be made.
(I've worked for a big UK indie and currently manage musicians and have seen the trends in music distribution first hand since 1992).
Many artists who happily make Spotify friendly music do handsomely if the algorithm is generous. But many do not and can no longer have a full time career in music.
And no, live shows do not make up the shortfall. Not all artists are comfortable playing live and it's harder for artists to reach critical mass where touring is even possible / profitable.
Unless they are already wealthy, which is why you see again and again the same ilk of rich kids breaking out in music (see Fred Again, Fourtet, etc etc).
As a teenager in the 90s and a young man in the 00s, I barely bought a couple of original CDs in those decades. Most of the music I had was pirated (downloaded, or recorded from radio). I would fill my hard drive with 10s of GB of MP3s, then I'd cycle through it via Winamp. And I have no acquaintances with large music collections, unless that music was pirated.
Currently, I'm paying for a Spotify subscription AND a YouTube Premium subscription, which is way more than zero $.
Artists making money are those performing live, and filling auditoriums and stadiums with people. The kind of artists that have dedicated fans, and that make albums that become collectibles. That has always been the case.
> I grew up during the age of peak CD sales, and I still only bought like ten audio CDs in my life, all of them on the secondary market.
This is the kind of anecdote that tries to make an example that proves the argument, but it's so wildly different from the average music consumer in the 1990s that it's completely irrelevant.
You bought 10 CDs at a 2nd hand store in your entirely life and now you pay more for Spotify. But most people were buying 10, or 20, or 30, or more CDs a year, .... and now they're paying _less_ for Spotify.
Not if you adjust for inflation.
Not if you adjust for population growth.
Not if you adjust for growth in artists and music avaiable.
So in the end the money that goes to artists is worth maybe 10% of what it was in 1973, while serving a customer base that is 58% larger, probably much larger than that considering everybody has access now. And this money has to be split among many more artists than before, including many artists who have been dead for decades.
More precisely revenue has just caught up to the level it was 30 years ago
I know every artist thinks their unique vision is infinitely priceless but things are actually worth what people are willing to pay for them. If you can’t convince people to hand over money for it, then it’s not worth that much.
Source?
I really hate it when people try to use government regulation to twist the arm of business for these types of "fair" deals.
What exactly is a "fair" deal ? It's a very complex question and almost impossible to optimise for.
Yes, fair is complicated, but the decision of what's fair and what isn't is something a society can take and it seems that Uruguay did take that decision. Good for them, I guess.
Is minimum wage also twisting the arm of business? How much would be fair for minimum wage?
I'm sorry noone wants to listen to your garage band anymore because they prefer megastars like Taylor Swift or can listen to the newest K-Pop five seconds after a song was released and uploaded, but that's globalization for you.
Sure, 200 years ago you had to listen to whoever could afford an instrument in your village - regardless of skill - but we don't inhabit that world anymore.
I would not vall thr current megastars the pibbacle of skill. In fact its well known they are not chosen based on skill.
That's exactly the problem. People _are_ still listening to local bands, they're just not paying them to do so.
Spotify (and others) are a discovery service that you happen to get some money for. You are trying to get into the algo and if people like it reads that signal and puts it out. It has NOTHING to do with fairness. If your music doesn’t connect with people then, that.
If interested. Work cost circa €600 (mostly from session drummer) and an awful amount of work from me as the producer. Am I annoyed that I may never break even? No because I am realistic about the product I am creating and how it is a pyramid scheme. But I do get to listen to it https://open.spotify.com/track/5MCvIFKabQfN7gnInX12BB?si=RzX...
On the other hand while they may get more of a percentage of the payout if they don’t deal with labels, they probably will get fewer streams without the marketing.
Streaming music unfortunately needs to be considered marketing for most artist and as a cliche as it sounds - it’s all about live performances and merchandise.
And breaking up the one true monopoly - Ticketmaster
"But they do so much more, like PR and marketing and stuff". Ironically, those who are already big get the biggest PR plus better deals than smaller artists. I don't think we need to raise Spotify prices just so Taylor swift can get even richer.
I think Spotify's aesthetic and design is one of the things that keeps people from moving over to other platforms.
Nobody wants to use programmer art software. And these things are more carefully considered than most people would believe.
Granted, I have this opinion about shovelling money at podcasts creators, and I'm sure someone could tell me the same. But you know, 200mill for Joe Roegan. Ugh.
I’ve long been opposed to piracy and thought copyright laws should be more strictly enforced, for exactly this reason. Yet most people seem to balk at that idea and think they have an absolute moral right to free content. I’m not sure why.
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Seems like many artists are okay with the price, that’s why they stream on Spotify.
There is no true value. That is indeed decided by the people who are willing to pay for it.
However I agree that they shouldn't raise prices.
But you’re not prepared to pay more for that value?
How is that possible?
A new CD is around $14 and Spotify is like $12.
And while I get plenty value from my Spotify subscription, I also spend much more on music than I otherwise would have.
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When you spend $10 or whatever on streaming, you'd expect $7 to be split between the artists you listen to, but it's not. Instead almost all of it goes to the big artists anyway because in the big streams pool the small artists you listen to have a tiny proportion of listens, even if you exclusively listened to them.
This gets worse when you consider all those shops/cafes/etc with Spotify's top charts playing on repeat. They may be a small percentage of users, but they're an outsized proportion of streams, and almost exclusively big artists.
This is the way it is because big artists have big name labels, and those labels are the only ones who can negotiate, so the deal ends up favoring the big artists/labels.
This is definitely not how most consumers would expect it to all work, and therefore "unfair" seems like a reasonable term to use.
For example, consider a bimodal population of 1000 people that listen 10 times to a popular artist (for a total of 10,000 streams) and 10 people that listen 1000 times to a small artist (for an identical total of 10,000 streams). In the "pool all streams" model, both artists get paid the same, while in a "split per user" model, the popular artist gets 100x the payout of the small artist.
An interesting question then is whether big or small artists are disproportionaly listened to by people that stream a lot. I haven't seen any data on it, but intuitively it wouldn't surprise me if it's the latter case.
Like they should, mostly because they drive Spotify subscriptions. It's fair because there is a strong correlation between popularity and work, coupled with talent.
> When you spend $10 or whatever on streaming, you'd expect $7 to be split between the artists you listen to, but it's not.
Even if they'd distribute your subscription to your favorite artists, the total revenue for those artists and their share would still be mostly the same. Only in some degenerate scenarios, where you listen to only one obscure artist that nobody listens to, would those numbers be any different, and not by much.
> This is the way it is because big artists have big name labels.
Economies of scale probably apply. Like they should. ;-)
Talented artists can often sign with big labels. And isn't it wonderful that in 2023 you can publish your work, on Spotify and elsewhere, without having to sign with a big label?
Just saying this because it is so weird. Like, hell yeah I sure hope my money goes to the people that I listen to why is this a thing??
... but that's because popular artists account for almost all the streams, right? I don't think a per-user split is any fairer, it's just different, and there's no clear evidence on whether there'd be less of a gap between big and small artists with a user-centric split.
You'd think it should still be fair because money is supposed to be fungible.
So if Artist 1 gets 99% plays, and artist 2 gets 1% plays, then if you split the 70% of revenue at end of month by 99/1 , that should be fair, right?
I'm probably missing something important. Is there a source for the actual formula or so?
I don't. I expect that when I pay for a streaming service, as soon as the money is in their account all bets are off and no insight is given.
So such a generalisation of what people expect doesn't hold up for consumer products I'd say. I wouldn't be surprised if most customers don't even think about it at all.
- 2 users, A and B, each pay $10/month
- User A listens to 20 Taylor Swift songs
- User B listens to 5 Radiohead songs
- Spotify gets a 30% cut
Currently:
- Spotify gets $6
- Taylor Swift gets $11.20
- Radiohead gets $2.80
If each subscriber's bill was split separately:
- Spotify gets $6
- Taylor Swift gets $7
- Radiohead gets $7
So this change would benefit artists that less active Spotify users listen to.
Right now the less active users are paying to support the listening of the most active users.
Personally this would make me feel like my money is more directly supporting the artists I care about.
Right now someone who only streams a few songs gets a very small “vote” (assuming pay is per stream). That would make it so that everyone had the same “voting” power. But I doubt there’s much correlation between people who use Spotify less and small artists. In fact that’s probably a negative correlation if anything, and this could end up hurting local artists.
Fwiw, the actual Spotify math is a bit more complicated than just splitting by streams - I.e., https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/21/23971616/spotify-royalti...
Is there any reason to believe big artist listeners on average stream more songs per month?
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In other words: A small artist can _bring_ users to the platform, fair enough, but the platform that gives access to other artists and enables that needs to take the bigger share.
The Uruguay parliament should regulate the contracts between their local artists and the labels. Some of them will ban Uruguay artists but some of them, maybe local ones, will intercept the money no matter what.
Or Spotify makes deals with individual artists, but there is a long and thin tail of them.
As per their latest financial statement ( https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2023/q3... ):
> Cost of revenue consists predominantly of royalty and distribution costs related to content streaming.> Cost of revenue also includes the cost of podcast content assets (both produced and licensed)
> Cost of revenue also includes credit card and payment processing fees for subscription revenue, customer service, certain employee compensation and benefits, cloud computing, streaming, facility, and equipment costs.
So all operational costs is included in that "70%", including: infrastructure, payment fees, etc. etc.
A breakdown:
So a total of AT LEAST 723 is not related to paying out royalties. (2472-723)/3357They're paying less than 52%. My estimate would be between 35% and 40%
However, podcasts work differently, both on the revenue and cost side, and appears to be mixed in. Additionally, Spotify sells optional marketing programs (ads within Spotify, for example) which I assume are included in revenue. So it's hard to draw the right conclusion just from the summary numbers.
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The problem isn't that spotify isn't paying for the content, the problem is that artists sign away the rights to their content?
Is spotify the baddie here?
Maybe spotify and the labels suck?
https://www.promarket.org/2022/10/03/why-streaming-doesnt-pa...
Note: the parent changed their comment
Spotify pays 70% of its revenue to music labels... but its Spotify's fault that this money never reaches the artists?
YouTube with youtube-dl [1] or NewPipe [2].
[1] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl
[2] https://newpipe.net/
Maybe if myspace didn't kill itself, it could have been it.
Also they should let internet radios on there and do the same because I have some smaller ones I listen to that don't support premium (higher quality/no ads) streams. All under the precondition they don't destroy indie internet radio culture along the way.
I doubt most people would be willing to do the same, however. So, an expensive Spotify would lose to cheaper alternatives.
But the crux of the matter is that most artists are willing to work for pennies; either for the small chance of future success or simply because they like doing it (it's just a hobby for them). There's an oversupply of "good enough" talent, undercutting everyone else (except the top 0.01% who are already rich and famous).
If you paid double for your current subscription, that would just put more money into the pockets of the biggest artists on the platform.
In the end its labels who pay the artists, not Spotify.
I use NTS radio for on the go stuff and discovering new music. I pay for their membership which is very reasonable.
I get discovery via Youtube and some friends, but it's way less than before with Spotify. I don't mind it though, as I've always tended to listen the same artists over and over again instead of new ones.
Considering that the Airsonic server also hosts bunch of other stuff for me, I think that the cost is similar to the 12$/month cost of Spotify (6$/month + buying 5 CDs per year). Also I get to own my bought music.
I have a Spotify subscription and it is great for the depth of the catalogue and playing your favourite music when you get the itch, but algorithmic playlists suck. Humans do discovery much better, and just leaving radio playing broadens your taste.
However, they are in the process of adding better APIs for developers to use, so at least that's a plus in my books: https://github.com/orgs/tidal-music/discussions/categories/i...
The default recommendations were pretty hip-hop-based for me, though, but nowadays it's better. I also subscribe to di.fm, which probably tells a bit about my music taste.
When I joined they had some social features, and searching for user created playlists seems possible. The last couple of times I've tried I've only gotten Qobuz's official playlists in search results. I've had to make do with syncing playlists from Spotify with Soundiiz.
When combined with how inaccurate the metadata is (including the lack of ability to report the inaccurate metadata) and the lack of any new features in the past year (including lack of copying pre-saves from every other platform), it really seems like investment in Qobuz has stalled.
It's too bad, because it seemed pretty promising. I really miss Rdio. :'(
For listening to Navidrome on the go I use the "substreamer" app on Android. The "Podcast Republic" app also works well for listening to college radio streams to find new artists.
Disclaimer: I was previously at Grooveshark.
Deezer has FLAC streaming: https://www.deezer.com/en/offers/premium
May or may not be available in your locale. I don't actually use Deezer (I use Spotify) so I don't know how much of their catalog is available in FLAC.
Plus, I run a navidrome server, so I can stream (some of, I have a lot of vinyl) my own music when I'm out. I'm a lot happier with this arrangement.
I love when companies just behave better when countries enact fair laws.
Of course it may not be easy to define what is a "fair law" but if it weren't for them, there wouldn't be workers rights or abuse prevention in many forms.
For this law specifically it's a shitshow because they have their current math for the rest of the world which consumes 70% of their revenue and this law simply says yes and pay more. They can't rebalance the money to comply with the law because they would immediately get sued by record labels and so it would have to cut into the 30% which is just pure loss for them.
When you write a law that guarantees you'll lose money in an entire country with no way out you're kinda backed into a wall. Small artists should get paid more but this change can't come like this because there's nothing for Spotify to actually do in response to the law.