That higher royalty isn’t because of altruism. It’s probably a factor of licensing volume.

Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism.

I guess I’m just not sure what sort of “gotcha” this is supposed to be. The beauty of incentive alignment is that you don’t have to waste your time trying to discern nebulous motivations of large groups of people.

> Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism.

All the money that streaming services pay out goes to copyright holders. Guess who the copyright holders are. If you say "artists", think again. For the absolute vast majority of music it's the Big Four/Three: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation

So, when the likes of Spotify pay 60-70% of their revenue to the record labels, and the artists get peanuts... Spotify (and Tidal, and Apple Music, and...) get blamed. Now this is a real puzzler.

But the artist does get more peanuts if I stream on a service that spends more on royalties per play, yes?

If they just sold it, then no? They might get more for their next sale, though I imagine the count of streams is more influential for that than the revenue per stream

> If they just sold it, then no?

Please explain.

> though I imagine the count of streams is more influential for that than the revenue per stream

Whether I listen on Apple or Spotify, their count of streams increases by the same amount.

Until the Big Four renegotiate the agreement, yes.

Because if royalties are function of licensing volume, it makes no difference who you choose. If more people ditched Spotify for Apple Music, they’d start getting more favorable rates with record labels.

If you really wanted to help artists, it would make the most sense to use whichever service is cheapest and then donate the difference to artists. But, personally I’d just go with whoever provides the best user experience, which is none of them, so I basically haven’t listened to music aside from occasional YouTube chill beats for years.

This is unfathomably sadistic.

Yeah, don’t go work for FAANG’s because that increased salary is probably just a ploy to increase profits.