Yep. Straight from one such smaller artist’s mouth:

https://www.nodepression.com/the-wrong-haul-neil-joni-have-y...

This seems like a problem associated with how money is apportioned out by the streaming services. As I understand it, they basically throw all the user money into a big pot, and throw all the streams into a big pot, and then apportion it out that way.

However, the problem with that is, if I don't listen to Taylor Swift at all, why is a portion of my subscription fee going to her? If, say, $10 per month of the money I give to Spotify goes to artists, it should just go to who I listen to. If I listen exclusively to Obscure Band X, then all of my money should go to them. If half my streams are Taylor Swift and half OBX, then they should both get $5.

Money is fungible. If you do $5 worth of streaming OBX's music, they'll get $5. Whether that gets transferred directly from your personal Spotify account into theirs, or initially put into a "big pot" and then the same amount is given to them, what does it matter? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your issue?

Here's the problem. I've got a family spotify subscription. For $15 a month we get 4 accounts. Each of us listen to around 100,000 minutes of music a year. Lets call that 100,000 songs for $180. If every song has the same payout then my family is being subsidized by the people who spend $10 a month to listen to 30,000 minutes of music a year. We're effectively taking other people's subscription money to pay the artists we listen to.

The argument as I understand it is: Basic Alice streams the top 40 for 9 hours and pays $5, and Hipster Bob streams a band you haven't heard of for 1 hour and pays $5. Band you haven't heard of was responsible for $5 of revenue, but they only get $1 because they were only responsible for 1/10th of the streaming time.

https://www.deezer.com/us/ucps explains it.

> However, the problem with that is, if I don't listen to Taylor Swift at all, why is a portion of my subscription fee going to her?

Because Spotify needs to pay extra to have the right to stream Taylor Swift, or Dua Lipa, not OBX.

> If I listen exclusively to Obscure Band X, then all of my money should go to them

Well, that's the thing, some of your money will always go to Taylor Swift or whatever label she is on, regardless of whether you're listening Taylor Swift or not.

As an musician myself I'm NOT on Spotify and actively prevent my music to be on that platform. "Exposure" is meaningless. I make 1000 times more money slapping ads on my music on Youtube than these streaming services.

This is still a major win for smaller artists though as exposure is the main thing they are missing. Pre-streaming/internet they would have only had local scene, fan clubs, etc. They always made all their money via fans buying things. All performing musicians (as opposed to studio musicians) make the majority of their money this way, the recording industry was always primarily a way to get promoted, it was never a good way to make money.

That doesn't really match up with the b-list regional folks I've gigged with.

As far as I can tell, the big goal for the folks who were 25 in 1978 was to get an album on with large distribution and make basically mailbox money for the rest of a career. I've known people who have done that basically on a couple songs. Like, pretty middle of the road folks I've met were able to make a living off their mailbox.

That will likely never happen again in our lifetimes.

But it's just not the case that folks were never making a living off selling recordings.

And further, being in a world market (as far as I can tell for a small, small time artist) is horrible:

I'm a very, very good musician but I am not world-class good.

But now I have to compete with world-class artists?

I'd much rather have to book shows via telephone if it means that I had access to a local scene that didn't have access to literally every recording ever made.

As a listener I personally like that access, but as a musician I have no problem thinking it's categorically =not= better for folks on the small end of things.

Sounds like they won the lottery by getting perpetual visibility on poorly made albums thanks to how poorly optimized discovery and publishing was back then. Wont ever happen again with how much better those processes are today.

Also doesn't sound like that old system actually was good for the music industry, it made a few lucky people a lot of money even if they didn't produce good music, which encourages people to chase those contracts and optimize for that rather than pleasing music listeners.

I get the point. As a practicing musician, I quite disagree.

These folks aren't terrible, but they aren't, like Queen or Michael Jackson.

There are a couple of directions that my disagreements run, but of them would be something like this:

there's no middle ground where people can make a modest living playing music anymore. There were several ways to do that, prior to the mid 90s.

That was good for the industry in that instead of only allowing amatures or world-class acts to be performing, you had a ton of folks kind of not being great.

But the only way you get to be really, really good at this is by doing it all the time.

So now, instead of having a bunch of folks who were kind of making it, you mostly have either destitute folks or hobbyists.

So I don't agree that having a bunch of middling musicians didn't produce good music: where do we think all those really talented, experienced folks come from? People aren't born knowing how to arrange a tune or work an audience.

sorry, but this is all types of wrong:

> Sounds like they won the lottery by getting perpetual visibility on poorly made albums thanks to how poorly optimized discovery and publishing was back then. Wont ever happen again with how much better those processes are today.

first: better for whom? optimized for what, in particular? Spotify is better optimized for funnelling the money that artists earn towards Joe Rogan than any other system in human history. but that's not an absolute good; that's optimization for a particular purpose.

second, it's wrong because the lottery those folks won was not a discovery or publishing lottery. I'm not even sure how (or why) you think the publishing side of the music industry is any different than it was in 1978; maybe you're not using "publishing" the way the industry uses it. but discovery wasn't a problem back when it was incredibly expensive to record music in the first place. that change has nothing to do with Spotify or streaming or anything like that; it happened because digital recording technology (mostly) replaced analog recording technology, and each type of recording tech got commoditized, i.e., smaller and cheaper. that had to happen for a discovery problem to even exist; in 1978, recording studios were almost industrial machinery.

I guess that's just two types of wrong, maybe three depending on what you're trying to say with the word "publishing" there.

on the bright side, this is legit:

> doesn't sound like that old system actually was good for the music industry

that's pretty true. but you can say about it about the modern equivalent also.

> it was never a good way to make money.

sorry, this is false; there was a big chunk of the 20th century were selling recordings was very lucrative.

even today, there are still a few people both big and small making money that way.

I feel like this was true before streaming as well. smaller artists would say 'the label takes so much of the record sales, touring/swag is where I make money'

I don't disagree, but streaming services have dramatically exacerbated the problem. Any artist that's been around before and after streaming will tell you that they make far less money, now, than they did when they were selling records, even after their labels and publishers and distributors took a cut.

The same thing happened in games with the rise of digital platforms. The issue isn't streaming, the issue is that competition became 100 times larger thanks to how much easier it is to publish your stuff today.

> Any artist that's been around before and after streaming will tell you that they make far less money, now, than they did when they were selling records,

I read this all the time, and I don't dispute it's true. But I also don't understand the math. Spotify claims to have paid out $7 billion to artists this year. Let's assume that only a quarter of that went to North America, which is the approximate proportion of the North American Spotify market vis a vis the world.[0] So that's $1.75 billion. In the year 2000, which was the top year for CDs, 985 million CDs were moved.[1] Artists would get paid like $1.50 per CD. [2] That was $1.48 billion. Accounting for inflation that comes to $2.43 billion.[3] OK, $2.43 billion > $1.75 billion, so bang, artists made more in the before times. Except, Spotify is just one service. Amazon, iTunes, Tidal, YouTube, Deezer, Pandora, etc. are also paying artists. I don't have the numbers for all those services, but collectively they comprise 2/3 of the streaming market. Assuming their payouts are comparable to Spotify's, the total annual North American streaming payout isn't $1.75 billion but $5.25 billion. And $5.25 billion is a lot more than $2.43 billion.

All of these numbers are very back-of-the-envelope, but even so, I'm not seeing why the artists are getting a bad deal in comparison to the way it was before. Certainly the argument can be made that objectively they were getting an extremely crappy deal before, and now it's graduated to "merely" crappy. But just on the numbers, I'm confused how it can amount to far less money, especially as the payouts keep growing.

I have a couple of hypotheses as to why it might seem worse. (TLDR is that the artists who benefit from the Spotify arrangement aren't talking, but the ones suffering are.)

First of all, popular musicians over time tend to peak at some point and then make less money, simply because their time in the sun has passed. The overwhelming majority of artists with lucrative careers in 2000 don't have lucrative careers now. They got less popular but also coincidentally streaming happened. Might as well blame streaming. Meanwhile, the artists popular in 2022 were in grade school or younger in 2000 are making vastly more money now than they were then, simply because they weren't in the industry yet. Mega-stars like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo weren't even born. They're silent about those days because they didn't experience them. But a fair accounting has to take the Spotify winners into account, not just the people who are suffering now.

Second, I think that a lot of streaming dollars are going toward that long tail, in rather negligible amounts individually but amounting to a good sum collectively. Assume the top tier musicians in the streaming era are losing out compared to their potential income in a physical media dominated regime. But, meanwhile there are tens of thousands of older artists who have weird, obscure tracks that nobody would physically buy on a whim -- and probably wouldn't even be in stock in a physical store -- but their tracks end up getting played occasionally on streaming for a variety of reasons: They were excerpted in a film, TV show, article, or other song, which causes people to look them up, their title or lyrics cause them to pop up on keyword searches, they end up on a shared playlist, etc. Here's a concrete example. I like the Dua Lipa song "Love Again," the one that that has the chorus with the Darth Vader theme done in old-timey style. Except, it turns out it's not the Imperial March at all. It's a sample from an actual old-timey 1932 song, "My Woman." [4] When I found this out, I added this 90 year old song to my playlist, and probably played it a dozen times. That meant the current rights holders got paid about $3.50 on my account. But there's no way I would've paid for a CD, so they would've made zero off me without streaming. Multiply that same story by many others. How many? In my case, Last.fm says I listened to about 6300 new tracks in 2021. In the physical media era I would've had to buy a CD every single day to equal that. In my peak purchasing heyday, probably around 2000, I only bought approximately one CD a week, a lot more than average, but even so that only comes to about 1000 tracks a year. So thanks to streaming services, I helped 5300 more tracks generate revenue that otherwise would not have done. Or to put it another way, Last.fm says I listened to about 3000 different artists (~1500 artists for the first time) who all got paid some small amount, whereas in the time of CDs all that money would've been spent on the few (40-50) artists who I liked well enough to buy a whole CD/CD-single. The losers are the popular newer artists who were deprived of my CD royalties, but of the winners, many are dead or no longer in the industry, so their positive perspectives aren't being heard.

[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/#Spot...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/186772/album-shipments-i...

[2] https://www.indiemusicacademy.com/blog/music-royalties-expla...

[3] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2000?amount=148

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Again_(Dua_Lipa_song)

It was also always "not cool" to say the label actually helped you. I remember a piece on NPR that talked about this.

Many bands use to love their labels privately but in the press blast the labels as evil corporate empty suits to fit that typical narrative and image.

A lot of artists don't perform. I rely on streaming income. It nets a lot more than digital sales.