Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify.
This is false. And I mean, dramatically.
> Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify.
It's roughly 200$.
Number of songs per hour: 60 minutes / 3 minutes per song = 20 songs
Total listening hours per year: 8 hours/day * 365 days = 2,920 hours
Total streams per year: 20 songs/hour * 2,920 hours = 58,400 streams
Total earnings: 58,400 streams * $0.004 (average pay rate) = $233.60
How high do you think that number should be, to be non-"whopping"?
I am seriously confused about what or who anti-streamers think they are zealoting for, what alternative fantasy they are defending.
As someone who has worked in the music industry (i.e. the people actually making a living through music) I witnessed Spotify/YT and the likes as an absolute force of creation of a new class of musicians, that would never have existed before.
I don't deny that Spotify has improved the situation for many artists, but rather that it hasn't done enough and other approaches do it better, and I believe this is factually true.
Let's just skip the part, where we imply it's somehow okay to circumvent fair use, because nobody is making money off of streaming anyway or any such nonsense. Streaming as intended is fine for now. People can just use Spotify, or any of the alternatives, as they are intended and that's fine and on the whole better than anything we had before.
For the record, I am steelmanning a position in which abject piracy is a social negative, which I do not actually believe, but if we take that at face value my arguments still hold.
2. If you just listen to the occasional song, listen to them on Spotify. Artist gets _some_ money, but nowhere near as much as #1.
3. If you don't care about the artist getting anything at all, then use workarounds like this tool, or download on torrents.
Most people used to do #3, and are now doing #2. #1 is just not going to happen, because there's too much friction.
Why do we keep insisting on having middlemen?
Not that I believe it's good or bad either way, it's just cumbersome. People want easy solutions. A few of my long distance friends are artists, and it makes them happy to see that I have bought their new cassette or vinyl on Bandcamp above the regular price, and send nice notes with it.
I can do this for more people more easily thru Bandcamp than figuring it all out myself.
Fair enough. Then don't pay anything?
> it makes them happy to see that I have bought their new cassette or vinyl
On the other hand, I do not want to buy merch, I don't care about physical media and I flat out refuse to buy something with DRM and/or through exploitative middlemen.
13,400 bands (not artists) got paid over $50K by spotify in 2020:
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/how-many-artists-are-...
There are 8 million artists on spotify, and over 80% had under fifty monthly listeners:
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on...
Put another way, 0.16% made over $50K. That's median income in the US. If you assume the money gets split across 5 band members, that's median income in Indonesia.
The fact that every creative endeavour or sport is a mix of a few pros and a lot of amateurs (in the sense that they do not make a living) is not an issue.
The value of Spotify and the like to most artists is enabling them to publish to everyone for basically free, no matter how fringe or bad, and to do it all the time. I think that's wonderful.
> In the past year alone, they’ve spent $194 million on 14.2 million digital albums, 10.4 million tracks, 1.75 million vinyl records, 800,000 CDs, 350,000 cassettes, and 50,000 t-shirts.
Note that $194M is less than 10% of Spotify's revenue.
I'd love to see a breakdown by percentile income per band, but one thing's clear: If I buy something there, then more of my money goes to the artist I'm trying to support than they get from me streaming their album.
Assume the album has 10 songs, is one hour long and costs $20. Ten songs means they get $0.04 each time you listen to it. So, you need to listen to the album 500 times for the artist to be paid for the album. I mostly listen in the car; call it under 2 hours a day, but lets assume 4 hours a day of listening to Spotify.
A Spotify subscription is $11 a month. I can fit 4 non-fraud plays of the album into each day, so that's 4 * 30 = 120 streams. It'd take 4 months of listening to nothing but this one album for the artist to break even, and it'd cost me $44.
Bandcamp + bittorrent would give the artists about twice as much money on average. Buying merch also pays artists more, assuming the cost of the item plus shipping is under half what they charge.
Often, the "listening to music however you please" will contradict "buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists" ... because the particular artists the listener wants to listen is on a big label and thus, their albums on are not on Bandcamp.
The "buy on Bandcamp" advice only works if one likes to listen to the type of artists (typically indie) that happen to release on Bandcamp.
On the other hand, if music listeners want the mainstream stuff (Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Rolling Stones, etc)... they're only on the big tech music streamers like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc.
https://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/locate?select=city&city=mo...
Here are some that I have found new music on (no particular order):
KZSC, KFJC, KZSU, KSJS, KCSM, KKUP, KSJO, KBCZ, KDFC, KPOO, KALX
There's also SomaFM.
It looks like Pirate Cat Radio finally sold out to The Man, and got a broadcast license for their transmitter. Need to check them out again:
Apparently, there are now a handful of high school radio stations around here too. Does that mean the cool kids have kids in high school now? I must be getting old.
Also, music podcasts are a thing. I like Dark Compass for metal.
I personally want to own music that I like and not just lose it if I decide to cut my subscriptions. I use Bandcamp for smaller acts and Qobuz for everything I can't find on Bandcamp.
I'm not sure that "they get paid so little that we may as well stop paying them anything" is an argument you really want to make here? Yes, Spotify pay is crap. Not paying anything is crap too. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Spotify is just leeching of the culture and as drew pointed out you will be 10000 times more effective if you use one of those options.
Spotify is more or less just a signal booster nowadays - because you have to be on there since everyone uses it.
I for one would never put my music on Spotify, even if I get what like 20$ out of it, what a horrible company and service.
Not everyone is on bandcamp. Seems like some sort of north american website.
Of course not.
> I’m in Asia btw, largest continent of the world.
Those were only a few examples from the top of my head. We also had sales in S. Korea and Japan.
Not really.
curious how do ppl discover your band on bandcamp?
you are wrong in your assurances( eg: i am listening to this on spotify at the moment Odeon Yılları Album by Nesrin Sipahi ) and your "other options" have nothing to do with how you listen to their music. Ppl listening on spotify also go to concerts they are not mutually exclusive.
I didn't find that artist on bandcamp or any other non-streaming platforms. only on spotify, youtube, apple music. Are they not equivalent, didn't realize you were making a point specifically about spotify.
And yes I will surely go to that artist concert if they are in my area. Me listening to on spotify has nothing to do with it. If anything I would've never found that music if it wasn't for spotify.
And there are many options to buy her music as physical copies directly from her labels.
Of course it’s fine to use Spotify to listen to music and find new artists - I’m saying the worst way to pay artists that rely on their fan base for income.
Who said this though?
This is what you originally said.
> If you care about the artist here pay them directly either through bandcamp
I responded to this
> I assure you that every artist that wants to make money will have set up _something_
Why did you bring 'far cry from a small indie artist ' into the picture all of sudden when you said 'every' in original comment.
Your original comment was about 'small indie artist' only ? You should've said 'small indie artist will always set up something' if you meant that. agree that might be true for small artists.
I think that would be obvious to anyone that wants to have a conversation in good faith.
Your comment wouldn't have been worthy of a response if you had said 'small artists'. Because thats well known problem with all streaming platforms and not just music.
Now looks like you are not even saying 'small artists' . It only applies arists who are not 'well known' ? No idea what you are even trying to say. Maybe use some precision ?
Of course I can’t give an extremely precise category of artist that is better paid directly than through Spotify - but everyone reading that argument in good faith knows what is meant.
You just choose to read it in the most unfavourable way imaginable.
https://www.amazon.com/CDs-Vinyl-Nesrin-Sipahi/s?rh=n%3A5174...
They're selling CDs, Vinyl and MP3s on Amazon, but their SoundCloud only has 29 followers.
Maybe they screwed up when they went all-in on indie digital distribution back in... 1978?
If you didn’t want to support artists you can just say so and cut out the gymnastics.
> If you didn’t want to support artists you can just say so and cut out the gymnastics.
classic projection
Seriously, I would rather visit Bandcamp a 100 times than use Spotify, even though the website player of Bandcamp sucks and I need a user script to regulate the volume of it.
If you and I listen to 1000 artists over the course of a year, and you spend $1000/year on album purchases (let's say $10 each) while I subscribe to spotify, I pay $90 a year while supporting all of the artists I listen to, loosely based on how much I listen to them, while you much more significantly support up to 100 of the artists you listened to.
I think what you're doing is better, don't get me wrong, but I can only afford $90 a year anyway.
In your case though, you could support all the artists you listen to by paying for a spotify/itunes/whatever subscription and using that as your primary listening service, while also purchasing their music via bandcamp. You probably won't feel the additional subscription price.
And I think most people who can afford $1000/year for music are not going to be using YouSpot, so I'm not sure why you're pointing out that people can leech off of spotify and then support the artists directly, when the above person said "please also support the artists"
> You're better off listening to music however you please and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists;
Yes, but most people can't afford this. It's good that YouSpot is available for people who can't even afford spotify (no one upthread said otherwise), and many people aren't going to be able to pay bandcamp $1000 per year to support maybe 10-50% of the artists they listen to. So please save your thesis for somewhere it's relevant.
For the average person who can maybe comfortably afford $90 per year, a subscription service is a much more viable way to support the musicians they listen to than buying 4-9 albums
A lot of people here would rather blame those who steal better than they do, than question the industry that allows artists work to be sold off.
Furthermore, I would say that most people using Spotify and alike services do it only for convenience, but certainly not to "support the artists".
If you have the means and inclination to pay more I strongly urge people to pay more also. There are issues with the intermediaries, but there is no practical way for people who can't afford $1000/yr to support the artists they like legally, while still being able to listen to them.
So if your suggestion is that someone who can afford $90/year should only have access to the albums they can afford to purchase through bandcamp because those support the artists more directly, I strongly disagree. This just further creates a wedge between the wealthy and regular working class people.
Are you suggesting poor people make do with the few albums they can purchase from bandcamp and then whatever they can listen to on the radio? On youtube? Because I fail to see how those are any less 'theft' than just paying spotify and listening there.
edit: I'm actually legitimately confused about what your idea is here and I'd like to understand. It seems like we're both coming at this from an anti-capitalist perspective, but your idea that poor people should have reduced access to the arts doesn't seem to align with any anti-capitalist ideology I'm aware of.
Or are you just opposed to the consolidation of the distribution channels which exploit the working class (artists in this case) but somehow haven't drawn the connection that this is a condition of late-stage capitalism?
If so, I'd recommend listening to some content by the wonderful Cory Doctorow
There are 8 million artists on Spotify, and 551 million monthly active users. That's $9000 per band on average per year. The 99.9th percentile band on Spotify makes $50K, and the 80th percentile artist makes $0. If we split the money across the 20% currently making any money at all, that's $45K per year per band. Therefore, the "pirate + directly pay one band at random" strategy would fund ~100 times more artists then Spotify does.
Also, if Spotify went bankrupt tomorrow and 100% of their users switched to pure piracy, we'd only lose roughly 15K below-minimum-wage jobs globally. There are currently 36,000 Spotify listeners for every band being paid what would be a median income for one person. If a tiny fraction of them decided to go to concerts or donate to appropriate non-profits, etc, it'd be a net gain of jobs for artists.
Note: There are only 220M premium subscriptions, so my numbers are a bit inflated. Ignoring the 330M ad supported listeners would lead to numbers that are too low. Also, I assumed people would pay for a spotify subscription which is more than the assumed $90.
Maybe divide everything I said by two?
Link to subscriber numbers:
An annual spotify subscription in the U.S. is $99 (possibly less with boxing day deals and such), but I'd assume the majority of subscribers are outside the U.S. where prices are lower across the board.
But 6M of those artists may be AI-generated filler content, possibly published by bots. I don't think the correct idea is to divide the potential money people can spend by the number of artists. There should be some connection with what people are actually choosing to listen to, anything else would reward opportunistic publishers of low-effort, uninspired music (and encourage people to do even more of this).
Which then brings up the problem: If people were to fund one artist they listen to (lets say an artist they choose to listen to rather than an artist they accidentally listened to a song by once), are they going to choose at random from their list of such artists? How do they then get that list to pick from? How do they discover new music to potentially listen to more of in the first place
Apps like Spotify, (or OSS like YouSpot that piggybacks on Spotify) are both valid answers to those questions.
Then you have the dilemma of who's paying the cost of the bandwidth, and the development costs.
If you want to be fair, I think people should be encouraged to pay what they comfortably can with their budgets. They're using the infrastructure and platform of spotify (or similar) for discovery, so Spotify or similar should reasonably expect some money to cover costs and pay their devs. Then they can also pay any number of random artists whenever the mood strikes them.
If they can't afford spotify, they can still use YouSpot, kick the YouSpot devs one or several dollar per year, and then purchase music from their preferred artists up to the amount comfortable for them.
Using YouSpot is the closest actual thing to 'stealing' btw, because they're actually consuming a resource (bandwidth and server time) that's intended for subscribers, from a company that pays for it. Add to that, by using their software (and spotify's upstream), if they're not financially supporting the YouSpot devs and the Spotify devs for the work they're consuming then we're back to the initial claim (which I already said I disagree with) that consuming something that can be 'copied' ad infinitum without paying the producer is theft.
But I think any of the above are reasonable options for people who want to maximize the support of creators of the things they consume while staying within their means
This would pull some revenue away from the > 99.9th percentile artists, but that's OK with me.
I'm more worried that, even if we count jobs that are way below minimum wage, Spotify is only supporting 15K bands worldwide. That rounds to zero when compared to their listener base and their revenue.
Anyway, I pay more than just a streaming subscription annually, but I went with an estimate of what's going into just Spotify for my calculations. I'm not convinced there'd be much societal impact (in terms of artists not being paid) if they disappeared tomorrow.
If everyone just pirated and picked a few musicians to support directly every year, the overwhelming majority of people would pick from the 16,000 in the 99.8th percentile on spotify, and the majority of the hundreds of thousands of artists in the 80th - 99.8th percentiles would see no income whatsoever from digital distribution.
It being legal doesn't do much about its unfairness.
> For the average person who can maybe comfortably afford $90 per year, a subscription service is a much more viable way to support the musicians they listen to than buying 4-9 albums
The option that you describe as the best for people who can't put more than 90$ a year on music (which is perfectly fine), is going through a subscription service, because even if a lesser amount of that money goes directly to artists, more of them get to see a bit of it.
I disagree with that, because you don't know for sure where your money is going, as all of this distribution system around streaming services is pretty opaque. As far as I know, the money from subscriptions on Spotify is not equally distributed among the artists that a user listens to. Bigger artists tend to get more per play than smaller ones.
The other option would be to spend that same amount on buying albums each year on a service like Bandcamp, which is known to distribute the money in a more direct and transparent way, and where artists actually have more control over what and how they want to sell.
It definitely means making a choice about what to buy, but it is still better than letting an obscure algorithm make that choice for you.
We should also consider that we can favor artists who are in need over those who are already earning large amounts. This is the opposite of what streaming services seems to be doing.
> your idea that poor people should have reduced access to the arts
This is not my idea and I didn't say that. I criticize those who waste their time chasing the "theft", who they blame for being the origin of the artists being poorly paid, when the subscription model being proposed as the best solution is actually far from it and could also be considered as theft when you put out the numbers of how much artists are asking for their work.
Oh well if this is truly the point you wanted to make, then we're in agreement.
Earlier I was responding to:
> > jsnell: In the plan where you buy music and only listen to the music you bought you don't need [YouSpot] at all.
> drewdevault: I feel like pretending that you're supporting your favorite artists by listening them on Spotify is a bit more of an appropriate comparison [to not supporting the artists]
I wasn't saying either of these things are better, simply pointing out that paying for spotify is going to support a broad selection of artists a little bit, while paying through bandcamp is going to support a narrow selection of artists a lot, and that both are desirable:
> You're supporting the artists you listen to more uniformly (via spotify) though ... you could support all the artists you listen to by paying for a spotify/itunes/whatever subscription and using that as your primary listening service, while also purchasing their music via bandcamp.
Aka both is better than just buying the music of a few artists through bandcamp while listening to everyone through piracy or YouSpot. That doesn't mean I disagree with anyone choosing to go the piracy + focused bandcamp patronage route.
You jumped in with:
> Paying only 9% of a physical good wouldn't make anyone less of a robber.
Which I took to mean "no actually, just paying Spotify is theft".
If the 80% of people with a limited entertainment budget pick their top 5 artists to support every year, the virtuosos of music are going to benefit, while the "B-tier" and "C-tier" artists who people still like to listen to are going to suffer a lot more.
Paying for Spotify, or more aptly, Tidal (which seemingly pays artists the most) is probably the most realistic way that's accessible to a lot of people, to support the artists they listen to in a way that tracks their actual listening preferences. Yes, buy music in addition to that if you can, but if everyone chooses a few artists to support directly, it's still going to result in many musicians getting unfairly compensated despite lots of people enjoying their music, so I disagree with the idea that it's better to spend $90 on bandcamp in a year vs. $90 on spotify in a year, if it is a choice of one or the other.
Better in some ways sure, because you're disintermediating the streaming platforms, but worse in equitable distribution, which will disproportionately impact artists who are liked by many but "top-10"ed by few
But the main selling point of this app, i.e. the actual submission, is to get the music for free and no ads. The target market of it is not going to be paying a cent, because the entire reason the app exists and was submitted is to avoid paying much smaller amounts for music than what you're paying.
While it might be true that they get more money on bandcamp. They get exposure through streaming websites like youtube, spotify that brings ppl to bandcamp.
I don't understand what does attending live shows have to do with how you listen to their music. Ppl who do listen on spotify also do that.
If you want pay musicians for their music, then you'd be better off buying albums on bandcamp or attending concerts. Paying Spotify is marginally better than just lighting your money on fire.
If the purpose of Spotify is to allow you to listen to music with minimal effort and cost, and don't care if the bands get paid then it does a middling job among paid services. It's probably more convenient than piracy, but I don't know what the state of modern music piracy is (I could imagine a gray-area Internet group that does a better job with metadata and recommendation algorithms than the paid sites do, and that links to a popcorn time style torrent thing.)
I am very very happy to pay for DRM free music
however this getting increasingly difficult as companies don't even seem to want to provide it for sale at all
under no circumstances am I going to pay a monthly subscription for a digital product that can be delivered as a one off download
I've been meaning to dump my Tidal artist list to a spreadsheet or something, and figure out how to pay a few dozen artists directly this year.
One possibility is to buy their albums and copy them to my NAS. Paying for DRM-free downloads seems easier / better, but I'd want to make sure the artists' cut is higher than with streaming.
For what it's worth, iTunes is apparently DRM-free these days. I don't want to figure out their terrible GUI, but presumably there's some tool that'll copy the songs out of it and into a filesystem.
> For what it's worth, iTunes is apparently DRM-free these days.
I'll try this!
It’s crazy to expect all the music in the world on demand for $12 a month or whatever. Spotify can probably do better in some ways but I don’t see how any of this justifies not giving the artists the pennies your mentioning.
Today, artists don’t need most of the services traditional record labels provide, which treated them way worse over the last half century. And that’s a good thing.
Not to say I think it’s fair how little streaming services pay to musicians, but this is more nuanced than just Spotify exploiting artists.
Spotify pay 70% of their revenue back to the rights holders, leaving 30% for operating costs and profits. What percentages would you recommend, and what are you basing it on?
What the artist needs to do for this is come up with the songs, work them out, practice them with a band, record, produce, mix, artwork, release, promo.
For Spotify to release the album on their platform, they just need to sign a deal with the artist and add the album to their library. And this process is obviously largely (if not fully) automated. Of course they have some infrastructure and costs for this, but I think they're much better off than the artists.
i mean, that sounds fair?
Fact of the matter is that in terms of getting artists paid, Spotify's business model and distribution model is inferior to other solutions and the economic cost of circumventing the ads is little to none, and in fact if you take advantage of Spotify's distribution model for convenience and buy elsewhere for economics then you are performing a net social good.
Maybe what you're saying is, you end up spending much more buying merchandise and labuns directly than you would spend on Spotify. (I'm not sure this would be true for everyone though)
Maybe then the solution could be to have a way to just pay more to Spotify (conditional on keeping the revenue split intact).
Something I don't like about Spotify though, is that I don't get to have any kind of say on how the revenue is split. I'd personally prefer if there was an egalitarian bias in payment, and the artists with less revenue would get a greater share of my subscription. But there's no way I can control that, that's the most frustrating to me personally, and I'd gladly switch to a system that pays more (since I currently have the means to).
In fact, I've proposed FunkWhale, the federated (libre-)music streaming platform, should get a subscription service like that, and that I should have some control over the revenue distribution (maybe there would be a minimum revenue split, and the rest I can 'choose my own algorithm', for example one that heavily favors less popular musicians). I agree that meanwhile the best I can do to support them would be paying them directly, and I've found a few have Liberapay (or Patreon) accounts as well.
85% of a bigger number is significantly more than 70% of a much smaller number.
Of course, 500 million users does not mean that 500 million potential fans will be exposed to your work.
How exactly do you do this ? What a dishonest comment to support stealing.
By reading the rest of my comment.
>What a dishonest comment to support stealing.
Copying is not theft.
What a dishonesty.
Moreover, I have proposed ways of engaging with music which makes substantially more money for artists. I am not the one being dishonest here.
I did. You made a silly assumption that all artists put their music up on bandcamp. No one even knows what bandcamp is my area.
I legitimately don't get it.
I don't necessarily believe that Spotify is necessarily worse as a way to make money from their music (I think ad-supported and subscription "bundling" services such as Youtube and Spotify probably result in more money going to artists than all the options for purchasing artists' music piecemeal, like Bandcamp), but artists should definitely make their music available somewhere for fans to purchase regardless
Substitute Bandcamp with Google/Apple music or whatever, the point remains, one can use Spotube and choose to support artists buy paying for their music.
I don't think most people are actually doing this though..
Because its not " one of the most well-known platforms" outside english speaking countries. I assure you no one in Sri Lanka or India know what bandcamp is.
This kind of western arrogance is kind of infuriating to ppl from other parts of the world. Like american tourist demanding that ppl speak to them in english in turkey.
For the parent comment, it’s better to support artists on whichever platform they want to be in, because parent comment feels like he has an axe to grind on Spotify.
Odeon Yılları Album by Nesrin Sipahi
Radio playlists often have artist links. Sometimes they work. For example:
Is that not reasonable? I mean, obviously this number represents a market price point: the system has reached an equilibrium where the "aggregate value" of being able to listen to music full time is $100/year (plus or minus all the confounding factors like who bears it and how it's distributed, etc...).
Is $100/year wrong? That is, after all, right about the price of the subscription you're likely paying already. So... it sounds right to me? What's the mechanism you are imagining where customers paying for subscriptions of that order somehow produce payments to the artists that are significantly higher?
I think a lot of the disconnect here is that the idea of "music revenue" is different in today's world than it was in the days of the 70's rock star. People used to pay a lot more for music! But they don't anymore, and all the parties take a hit, not just Spotify/Apple/et. al.
Your intent is good but gatekeeping people to use an inequitable system is not the solution.
Sure! But at the end of the day, most of the people doing this will listen to hundreds of artists who they don't purchase tickets from, or buy their music directly.
The fact that royalty payment are so low is sad. But if you use this tool, you're lowering them even further to $0.00
Again as someone that works in the industry intimately: use this tool all you want, and find ways to support the artist.
That the comments aren't 100% all aligned is great, I come here for vigorous respectful debate. It helps me reflect on my position on topics.
What's the problem?
This will take my Spotify income from pitiful to non-existent.
Fuck Spotify.
ALL of them had absolutely useless/bad Android Auto/Carplay apps. I know at least half of them (quboz tidal for sure) didn't have a way to search in the car app. Quboz or Tidal didn't even display your subscribed albums/playlists. I forget exactly but I think I could only play their recommended stuff. Exacts are off here but I remember specifically sitting in my car with both of those apps wondering why I couldn't figure how to play my fav playlist or search for an artist.
Then the social stuff. I share collab playlists with a few friends. Apples adding these feautures IIRC. Surely not important to most people but they really make the other apps just feel barebones. I like gamification, rewinds, badges, etc.
The Carplay thing is the killer for me, though.
It definitely shows subscribed albums, etc. The one exception was that, on an older Toyota, it only showed the first dozen or so albums in my collection one time out of the dozen I drove the rental. Parking the car then coming back a few hours later fixed it.
1,000 streams is $4.00. That's a coffee.
Lots of services for creators have minimum payouts. Google AdSense won't pay you until you reach $100. Patreon has a $10 minimum payout using PayPal. A threshold of just $4 is actually very much on the low side.
I genuinely don't understand how this is something to get upset over. It's comparable to what an artist used to make in royalties from a single CD sold. What's more surprising to me is that Spotify previously didn't have a minimum at all.
Spotify and other streaming platforms pay royalties to an artist’s distributor and that aggregate of royalties from all platforms gets paid out to the artist when they reach the distributor’s threshold. Spotify is making that money no longer exist at all for indie artists.
So if you've got 2 albums of 10 tracks each, then you need 1,000 listens of each album to reach a minimum payout of $80, which you've got an entire year to accumulate. So Spotify isn't on the low side -- it's comparable with AdSense's minimum payout of $100.
But honestly, compared to the effort involved in producing an album, that's... nothing. $80 is not the difference between making or breaking your music career. It's under $7 a month. A slightly more expensive coffee.
I just don't understand how that can be upsetting. If your streams on Spotify are that low, then you're doing it as a hobby anyways, for the love of it. Which is wonderful. But it isn't your source of income.
As I said in another comment, I’ve cancelled my account so in my case it is costing them more than they are saving. I’m also no longer sending fans to Spotify and this year not all of the music I release will make its way to Spotify.
That seems a little harsh. They're also redistributing it to anyone with just 1,000 streams a song, right? And many (most? nearly all?) of those less-popular artists aren't even signed with a record label, correct?
It seems like more of an anti-spam measure than anything else. And possibly about reducing overhead fees associated with the skinniest part of the long tail.
Seems to me just like yt monetization partner program which required like 50€ revenue for payout and 1000 subs+approval for even enabling monetization (some time ago unsure if it's still limited for new accounts )
Unless I'm missing something it mainly just trims out mass produced content
How many musicians do you know of that only ever released one song? This isn’t about the streaming revenue for one song (though that is how Spotify tries to frame it). There are 1000s of artist who might have even been fairly successful at one point who have dozens or more songs in their back catalog that don’t have over 1000 streams per year. Add up the lost revenue from all of those together and it isn’t about just a couple bucks anymore.
Further, even approaching the argument from how much it means per song is granting Spotify a pass that this is in any way fair to artists. Why should the top 1% of artists take even more money while the struggling musician now gets nothing?
"and it isn’t about just a couple bucks anymore."
And I want to add, that for quite some musicians, a couple of bucks can make the difference between being able to (partly) pay the rent, or not.
And those are usually the ones making interesting music. So I rather would like the trend reversed, less for the superstars, more for the unkown artists. But this is unlikely to change with these services.
On every single one of their tracks?
Let's say they have 20 tracks on Spotify.
1000 plays/month across 20 tracks gives 50 plays/track/month.
50 plays/month gives 600 plays/year, less than the threshold.
ARTIST GETS NOTHING FROM SPOTIFY.
Fuck Spotify.
Third, I didn’t say definitely, but arguably. I might be wrong, but I’m not endorsing anything here.
Lastly, I’m an ex-musician, too and prefer to pay for premium and buy proper albums when I can.
So pointing fingers doesn’t do any favor to anyone.
Have a nice day.
It describes itself as follows:
An open source, cross-platform Spotify client compatible across multiple platforms utilizing Spotify's data API and YouTube (or Piped.video or JioSaavn) as an audio source, eliminating the need for Spotify Premium
the bar is so low - support creators with ad money for free, and some people still can't clear it, or refuse to clear it. the complaining is not fair, it's annoying. if you can't pay, or wouldn't pay otherwise, and still opposed to things like ads, that enable you to get something for free - you didn't deserve to get it in the first place. get over it and pay up or shut up. or rather, put your principles to work and refuse to engage with ad-supported content at all. instead of being like "well...i still want it. so let me get it completely for free. even though i could get it for free, but that's not enough for me." the complaints at their core are just 'i got it for free and i'm still not satisfied'. the annoying kind of entitlement that wants something so badly, it doesn't even dare to just refuse itself the thing it wants.
even with ads blocked "for malware protection", malware could end up being promoted within content, or just encountered somewhere, and there's more actual malware protection (some is built in to OS). so...it's not about "blocking malware" with blocking ads altogether, is it. especially when a bunch of ads are non-interactive and not even about software but stuff like food and other things. it's more about not seeing ads at all.
and sometimes, ad blocking just isn't an "anti-malware" solution in itself. like, if you wouldn't be able to navigate app catalogues and kinda sus out what could be malware or just steer away from untrustworthy apps altogether, ad block isn't gonna help you much there. "native" ads (promotional content) throw an even bigger wrench into that.
A song with 10000000 (10 million) streams , a pretty big hit and only reserved for big artists will give you 500 dollars before cuts, taxes etc.
So not even the biggest artists will make anything substantial.
I've discovered many artists on spotify and have paid for their live concerts.
Curious, how do you discover music ?
Spotify is just the state of things, the monopoly. Like lots of other current status quos bad for on everyone but investors, old money, the richest but there's no real alternatives.
Though i know at least some smaller artists have moved off the platform, but people live in the biggest apps now so it's hard.
Soundcloud somehow never really translated and bandcamp just went bad after it was sold to investors.
I wonder if the scene is ripe for new platforms that's better for artists.
A 10 million stream song will gross about $30-40k. After cuts for an artist, depending on the structure, they might get anywhere from most of that to $5-10k.
Not that Spotify is an equitable payment system but let’s be honest about the numbers.
Spotify is part of the problem, not the solution.
This entire thread has absolutely nothing to do with e.g. telling how Spotify can be hacked and everything to do with script kiddies at best wanting to download a binary from GitHub to listen to music for free.
But sure, maybe HN is that sad distribution mechanism now and, what's more, we're calling this hacker culture!
I don't think people want only to play music for free. I don't. But for sure this new definition of "what hacking is" is for sure annoying.
Right? People get so attached to their political views that they dont even notice it.
Kevin Poulsen, just wanted to win the Porsche for the poor...
In this way, phreaking was exactly like media piracy.
But all of the above are entirely unrelated to the meaning of "Hacker" in HN.
I’m have a list of artist I want to pay back to:
- the Monty Python - Tom Lehrer - Arrogant Worms - “Weird Al” Yankovic - the Dead South
their work helped through different hard times.
With latest update Spotify’s Home is one scroll away from instagram story like short videos with a timer bar on it, trying to rush me with a decision on what to listen.
OP is the answer to my new routine on consuming music, after which I’ll need more direct ways to support the musicians than using using some Silicon Valley cooked poison.
Likes/subscribes are not support. Artists deserve to make a living.
I’m supremely frustrated by the current state of TV shows (need 8 subscriptions and still have shows I can’t watch). Music on the other hand is wonderful. Many services to choose from, all including basically all music. Different price points for ads/quality level. We should be delighted to pay $10 a month for unlimited music (or free ad supported) and not ruin a good thing.
But any form of paying is much much much better than piracy.
I'm particularly annoyed by Spotify only keeping 'Remastered' versions of tracks that sound smooth/full/pleasing to new-time listeners but shave a lot of character off the original.
Buying used records or borrowing them from the library does not earn artists money either, but no one bitches about that. As far as I'm concerned, downloading rips is the digital equivalent.
The occasional bootleg of an impossible to licence recording is something most music lovers do. But make your default consumption route a paying one. The services are absolutely amazing for what they cost.
Yeah, some music hasn’t made it to streaming. Usually for sad reasons. Those artists need legitimate support even more. Buy em.
But please don’t equate pirating to library lending.
I think this sentiment is wrong. Personally, I pay for content and services that I find value adding (Kagi, Fastmail, etc.)
That said: I am never going to pay for YouTube. The issue is that the entire platform and all of its content is catered to ad-revenue.
I could be convinced to pay for a video service like YouTube where everything into its core and legacy has been based around user payments.
Likewise I am never going to pay for news services that has adjusted their entire offering and content towards ad-revenue.
But until I discover such a platform I am going to keep on my ad-blocker.
While it would be a convenient reality, the people on HN are not even close to representative of the general population, and you can't generalize their tendencies. How many Kagi and Fastmail users are there compared to Google and Microsoft? Look at Google Play reviews for apps that front paid services: even for astonishingly cheap ones, a considerable percentage essentially say "not free: uninstalled! Those conniving bastards!"
And if you're willing to pay for services instead of using ad-supported platforms, you must pay all of your music and other content, then? You don't even have to stomach the DRM from Apple Music, Amazon, e-reader platforms, et al with music shops, book stores, movie theaters, Bandcamp, Patreon, Substack -- there are so many services through which you can exercise your principles and pay for content directly.
It's pretty common for the tech crowd to wag their finger at people who feel entitled to free commercial software and services (e.g. Kagi, Fastmail,) yet do the same exact thing with arts and entertainment. Getting access to content on ad-supported services isn't your right. There are alternatives.
I'm not saying you must uninstall your ad blocker-- there are many unavoidable and essential things-- e.g., things for work-- that contain ads even when they really shouldn't. But you can't just assume that since you pay for some stuff, then everybody else is paying for some stuff, and since the distributors are real jerks, you have ethical carte blanche to take people's work without any payment. Creators don't have a choice to use these systems because people won't pay (directly) for things.
But there is a marketplace. And the content of YouTube is not worth the price of YouTubes premium offerings because they embed ads. Ie. I pay to remove YouTube's ads, but not video sponsorships.
That would be like paying for Kagi and still only be presented SEO-optimized worthless content – I pay for Kagi because I feel like they can filter away that content much better than Google.
I am saying that a product you pay for is not the same as an ad-supported product. It is not just about stripping the product of ads after the user has paid.
So everybody not willing to pay for a Gmail offering without ads, I completely understand them.
Realizing that you’re doing something unethical is philosophically better than denying the obvious. However, as a commercial artist, I’m not really interested in any gussied-up justification beyond that statement.
tbh,i hate moralization over what I decide to consume. If I should consume less travel for the sake of the environment, make it more expensive by taxing it.
if you want to earn more money as a commercial artist, don't morally trip me into something I am not legally obligated to (watching ads), but deliver a product that is more valuable.
I never said I was morally wrong. I merely said that I did not have a moral upper hand. I think I am morally indifferent.
> you must pay all of your music and other content, then
I do in fact pay for my music. I do in fact have news paper subscriptions. I don't think you got my point: I don't both want to pay for my cake on not eat it.
If I pay for content, it should not have sponsorships.
But then again, I did not grow up with paying for satellite TV while also being fed ads 20% of the time watching shows riddled with product placement. In Denmark we have proper public service offerings (that people pay for). In Denmark indie artists regularly receive grants to work on their art.
On the point of supporting artists, by virtue of being a European, I probably have the moral upper hand.
You can’t be “morally indifferent” if you’re engaging in activities that aren’t morally neutral. You’re just being indifferent to the fact that your actions aren’t moral. This isn’t complicated.
Your paying something to someone else doesn’t absolve you from not paying someone.
People generally see themselves as good people, and they use who they are, and other things they do to justify wrongdoing. This is a great example of that.
I do not believe in your rather narrow sighted way of thinking about how one pays for the artists - that is has to be private, directly for the service, and on commercial terms.
Especially since "me and many people in tech" has probably supported artists way more than you ever will by watching a Sneakers ad.
The fact that you’re using your residence in a country with more humane economic policy as justification for treating people with the exact opposite principles exemplifies that.
Stop the mental gymnastics. You feel entitled to people’s art, and your self-image of being a good person with the right political ideals absolves you from what you consider to be a minor indiscretion in simply taking it. You’re wrong.
What I do mind is algorithmic targeting. On the ad serving front, it funds an entire industry that does nothing but violate people's basic human right to privacy. On the personalized recommendation front, it provides a strong incentive for publishers to produce click-bait.
There's one commercially viable corner of the internet that hasn't been ruined by this: Podcasts.
Spotify is trying to ruin that too. Screw them.
Also, if you're looking for a decent music service, consider something privacy preserving like Apple Music, or (better) something that uses metadata-based targeting, like Tidal.
I find most of my music by following hyperlinks in album / band reviews that were written by actual humans. There's a button for that in Tidal. I've heard Amazon Music has such a button as well. I've also found listening to high-quality (local) radio stations with good DJ's is a goldmine, as are music podcasts.
I've also found that non-tailored recommendations (people who like album X like album Y, grouping of opening acts with bands, and, when done right, old-fashioned display ads) also provide a decent signal, since they're typically curated or use the things I just mentioned as signal (instead of using your cookware preferences, or sexual orientation, or whatever).
In addition to being the ethical alternative, it turns out that having bands and critics list things that influenced an album or were influenced by an album is a much better way to explore the space of modern music than via payola with a dollop of high-dimensional clustering.
So, in addition to the ad blocker, I'm not paying for anything that tries to spoon-feed me payola or clickbait.
So let me get this straight: you proudly claim that you pay for services which provide you value. But you don't think its hypocritical that you use YouTube with an ad-blocker and avoid paying for the subscription?
If you keep going back and using it, then it IS providing you with value. You might argue that the value is very small, but it's also not a big inconvenience to watch a few ads. You're still consuming content without contributing anything back.
Nobody prevents them from doing live performances, you know?
I'm not advocating for Spotify in particular. If you can support the musicians more directly, that's even better! But it's not fair to pay nothing, block ads, and then keep consuming content without giving anything back.
When you listen to the radio you pay for nothing. I don't really see where is the injustice here.
As a hypothetical, if you found them selling an album for $5 and you bought it to download on Bandcamp, they'd earn $4.50, which is about the same as streaming their songs about 400 times on Tidal, 1,000 times on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music or Deezer, or 4,000 times on YouTube, Pandora or SoundCloud
I agree. Does Spotify use my money to pay the people I listen to on a given month? They do not. They lump all the revenue together and use it to pay for content in a set of deals with music distribution companies, and some individual artists/podcasters. Which means the percentages are skewed in favor of the big names and labels.
A fair subscription music service should be transparent, and even be able to provide detailed information about how much you are paying to the artists you listen to. E.g. if I don't listen to Coldplay, none of my money should go to Coldplay. If the streaming service wants to, they can use part of their cut to pay Coldplay a bit of extra money.
Amen. If you have the money and really like a band or artist, find a way to put some money directly in their hands if at all possible.
One: They're going to see a lot more money this way and be able to make more music in the long run.
Two: Music can and does disappear from Spotify and other services due to rights and licensing issues.
Three: It's not super-common but sometimes the originals are replaced with remasters or something that isn't quite right to my ears. Robyn Hitchcock's first album ("Black Snake Diamond Role") is on Spotify, last I looked. But it was remastered for digital or whatever and they couldn't find all the original masters - meaning that one of the songs that used to have saxophone doesn't. It sounds entirely wrong now.
Jack Harlow might be one example, but you see the dearth of D2C music and platforms like TIDAL that the marketing and distribution network does matter, and helps good artists take off. Whether you believe mainstream music is "good" or not, is up to your preference
Note that many of the artists I’ve been buying from aren’t on major labels, though.
If anybody actually cares even one tiny bit about a specific musician they should go to live events, buy the original merchandise and/or buy the CDs.
Paying Spotify and similar services is the least efficient way to get money into artists’ pockets.
Musician deserve to be paid for their work, and it's not fair to them to bypass all of the mechanisms to do that. Spotify doesn't pay musicians well, but there are still indie artists making a living from it nonetheless.
I hear a lot of people these days complaining about ads, and that's totally fair. But when it comes time to pay for content, those people rarely are willing to pony up. You can see this happening with journalism, music, apps, etc.
Similarly, most people hate subscriptions, but you can always buy music directly if you don't want to subscribe! A lot of smaller artists provide ways to purchase their music that give them a large percentage of the proceeds, and you can get the music DRM-free if that's something you care about.