Likewise, most artists don't make any meaningful money from Spotify.
https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-...
That doesn't necessarily follow though. It just means that organizations smaller than NYT or WaPo will make proportionally less money, which would be true of any monetization method. The question is whether you can bring in as many total dollars with such a shared subscription scheme as you could with advertising or some other similar venue.
> Likewise, most artists don't make any meaningful money from Spotify.
And if they would have made meaningful money with CDs, merch, and whatnot then the cause is that people are paying less in aggregate for music via Spotify than they used to from other channels (Spotify's cut might also play a role if the difference is only 2x or something). It's not that Spotify is paying out in proportion to listens, because that was already happening.
You should look at the math in the article I linked. It's proportional to the aggregate of everybody - which basically completely disconnects it from what individual users listen to.
For example: Spotify only has 2 users. User A listens to 10 hours of Drake. User B listens to 90 hours of Kid Cudi. Even though User A and User B both pay $10 and have very exclusively chosen their musical preferences, Kid Cudi gets 90% of the total pool of money.
To put this in another perspective - imagine if someone on Netflix just looped Shit Show A 24/7 and there were 24 other users who watched Good Shit X,Y,Z... for exactly 1 hour every day. Netflix would allocate funding equally between the 1 Shit Show A that the 1 user watched and everything else that the 24 other users watched, even though that 1 show only actually generated 4% of their revenue. It doesn't make sense from a user perspective.
As the numbers increase to the ~100MM paid users of Spotify or Netflix, disparity increases between casual users and power users, it all sort of explodes to amplify all of the earnings to a select few.
What this means is the big guys dominate everything. I realize the music industry has shifted from touring to sell records, to streaming to sell concert tickets - but how do you do that for newspapers? Newspapers can't do anything equivalent to concerts. At that point they're just news stations, which really aren't the same as concerts from a business perspective.
I have actually read the article, and that's wholly compatible with my take on things (that before and after Spotify artists are paid roughly proportionally to how much their music is "used"). There are two interesting points that can create the apparent problem/paradox you're seeing:
(1) It's interesting that a typical power user before Spotify would pay more money for more music, and now there's a flat rate (or counting ads, two flat rates).
(2) The definition of "usage" has shifted a bit. Skipping a lot of details, before recordings people paid per performance, with the introduction of CDs and whatnot people are able to pay per unique song listened to (with power users typically though not necessarily buying more CDs), and Spotify shifts things back so that artists are compensated in terms of total listen time.
It's probably true that power users should pay more (if not, and if artists are appropriately compensated, then everyone else is subsidizing their use), and there can be an interesting discussion around how listeners actually derive value from music and if unique songs matter more than total minutes (or if a more complicated but less explainable metric ought to be used), but the big guys dominating everything is not a new phenomenon.
As an aside, the advertising, distribution channels, and network effects enabling the big guys to dominate everything to the extent they do _is_ moderately new on a human timescale, but that would be true independent of the payment scheme and doesn't seem super relevant to the discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify
I can't really disagree with anything you said. I just view it from a different perspective.
(1) Inflation adjusted, per capita we spend 5x less for music now than we did 20 years ago. Is that because Spotify doesn't charge power users more? Is it because users won't accept higher rates for song rentals? Regardless of the cause, there's less money to distribute.
(2) Popular music is more popular than ever. For a variety of reasons (some potentially Spotify-induced -- e.g., it's pretty hard for me to get it to recommend somebody who isn't soundly leading a genre it thinks I might be interested in), the top X% of artists are more listened to than ever, and that's going to exacerbate any other problems for the long tail of artists.
(2a) That idea is affecting a lot of industries right now. At some point in recent decades it was easy to be the best <thing> in your local small town or group of peers and get all the business. Plenty of formerly in-person industries are now competing globally though. E.g., I would have a hard time recommending the best ML practitioner in my hometown as a teacher rather than just taking Andrew Ng's courses. I'm not sure how that's going to play out in general, but if the top 1% of the population in any field can make everything we want/need then the idea of having to work for a living might need to be revisited? Maybe we'll eventually all transition to biomedical research when nothing else is scarce? In any event, in the short term a lot of professions are being disrupted.
The sad part is that the $.01 per person rate is way, way higher than what Spotify apparently pays out (around $0.006 to $0.0084 from some Googling).
This starts to look better if you just go to something like $0.25 per read, but at that rate you're likely charging much more than it would cost to buy a print copy, or a per-day subscription rate, so i'm not sure the economics would work out there either.
Advertising and other revenue streams also only pay out per view on a fairly small number of views though, right? Is the problem not that advertising pays more per view than people are willing to in the first place of their own volition?