Weren't we all complaining 20 y ago that music labels were giving bands pennies on the dollar and the only way they could actually live off of the music was by touring and selling merch?

I think Radiohead then did the groundbreaking selling of mp3s for a pay what you want fee.

Now the baddie is Spotify.

Worse than that, I remember reading articles about how some artists didn't "make" a single dollar from their first album that sold millions. It all went to the record company and paid for marketing and advances.

Sometimes they didn't begin to see revenue until 2nd or 3rd albums.

Labels did scum stuff like have sublabel go belly up (oops no royalties anymore), not paying royalties, not giving artists royalties when on VA album, and downright piracy, and enforcement of centralization via signing rights away to (equivalent of) RIAA. These are just examples from memory talking to artists.

Didn’t Louis C.K sell his standup stuff direct to fans for 5$ for a DRM free downloadable mp3, from his website?

Why don’t more artists do that?

They do. Bandcamp is a thing, and it's pretty much that, minus a fee for the infrastructure.

But it's not a panacea. An old classmate of mine who's a decently successful Jazz artist now (by Jazz artist standard), had scammers upload her album to Bandcamp without her knowledge. They defrauded a lot of money from her actual fans, probably more than she ever made on Spotify.

* Bandcamp, now owned by Songtradr, that promptly fired half its employees.

As bad as this is...as this thread points out, more of the money needs to go to artists, and supporting fewer employees should let them do this.

As long as it remains a viable platform. Hopefully the cuts weren't a "gut because we want to run this down on life support" move.

Classic Hacker News. “Companies shouldn’t spend money, except if it’s on developers!”

Ironically part of signing onto a label is providing protection from stuff like this.

It's maybe what it's supposed to do, but her label didn't.

Was your classmate already on Bandcamp?

Yes, through the record company.

Amazing, thanks for mentioning this! I had no idea. He looks to sell everything on there, not just mp3s, and they are well priced! Just bought a couple of videos of his performances, and it does indeed include DRM-free .mp4 downloads. Even includes a .srt file for subtitles!

I bought it when he released it. It was good for him but arguably he lowered his worth and took a pay cut, and it also set a bit of a price ceiling base rate for comedy specials at 5$, which if you aren’t the #1 comedian at the time like Louis was you can’t bring in the same sales volume.

Sure did

https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.

Doesn't Spotify share half its profits too? From my understanding it's still the music labels that are not giving the artists their share.

Yes, the music labels have a conflict of interest because they took financial positions (equity) in the streaming services in exchange for giving artists lower rates. So they don't really represent the artists. They instead joined up with the streamers to screw over the artists.

>From my understanding it's still the music labels that are not giving the artists their share.

If that is the case, the artists can easily sue the labels for violating the terms of the contract. But the fair share is just what the two signing parties agreed to.

Which is definitely a fair deal signed between equals, right?

What profits?

It's actually 70% of REVENUE according to this: https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per....

Most hits today are produced by Spotify. Actually they are record company. And they also have a really shitty contract. That at the end the revenue stream, for the artist is coming back to Spotify anyway.

It’s easy. 1. Search talent on TikTok. 2. Let them sign shitty contract. 3. Produce them. 4. Market them on Spotify.

5 . Win win. Win win for Spotify not the artist.

It wasn't that groundbreaking. Radiohead were already massively popular despite taking the anti-Britpop, anti-commercial rock route in the '90s. The online MP3 thing in 2007 was a bit of a publicity stunt -- the record was still distributed by XL , which retained all the traditional distribution channels.

I believe Smashing Pumpkins actually beat them to it by several years by releasing Machina II for free online in 2000 after the breakup of the band.

It was ground breaking, taking into account that Radiohead released a critically acclaimed album. In Rainbows had a digital release that was pay what you want, not exactly the same as putting something out for free after breaking up.

I feel like the biggest loss from the days of big record companies is that no one is going to front a promising young band enough to go away together and make their 'Dark Side of the Moon' or 'OK Computer'

* I know both bands probably could've self-financed those projects by that point in their careers, but would they have? And would their role as investors have changed their artistic decisions?

What is noteworthy about these albums that the artists would not have made them otherwise?

Pink Floyd’s next album had the cover and best song dedicated to saying how much they hated the record label

I'm not so worried about humanity's loss of peak works like these since I don't think any young band has it in them at the start anyways. What young artists need is an on-ramp and a way to stay in the business long enough to hone their craft and build a following while turning out a couple Pipers at the Gates of Dawn. Works like Dark Side and OKC are developed, not born, and we need that pipeline.

The problem was that the big companies had the good recording studios and the possibility to make records and distribution. This was very expensive.

Today are studios in abundance. And bands that are good are usually good connected and certainly know a good down mix engineer. Then they can distributed via Bandcamp.

Today it’s much better for artists who want to make music. The big record labels were just gatekeepers.

It was also when CDs were $19.99-25 which I distinctly remember because I was 10 in 1995 when I bought my first CDs (smash, it was written, dookie) and I could rarely afford to buy them.

And then artists still weren't getting paid but an even bigger portion of my income went to them. shrug.

Spotify's always been the baddie, they've just hid it well.

I may be in the minority, but I just don't really find the "support the artist" argument that compelling. I have artists I like and I grew up with. If I saw them in public I'd get giggly and maybe try to say an awkward hello. But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist.

I assume the artists are reasonable rational adults. If they're on the platform, its economically advantageous to them. If they sold their rights at some point in time for money, or pay their tax debts, or whatever, I assume they did so knowing full well what that means. If Spotify is no longer advantageous to them, they would pull their music off and I may search other ways to listen to it.

We have a system to deal with these sorts of things, it's called voluntary exchange and it's the only way things change. If artists pulled their music, Spotify would have to adjust. In the meantime I just don't have the time or energy to track every individual employee grievance

> But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist.

What has that to do with anything? You don't pay because you want them to like you, you pay because you want to give them the chance to keep making music in the future.

For that reason, on free support platforms like Patreon, I'm pretty tough about not "gilding the lily". If someone is clearly well-funded enough to have artistic freedom, with a good margin of safety, I look for someone else to support, even if I love them.

What does that have to do with Spotify? If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in. Just sell me something I want at a price I find reasonable. I don't need a story about how it's so hard for you to pursue your passion or how you can't continue in the future.

> If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in.

To me this reads the same as "I can't be bothered to consider ethics for every economic transaction I participate in".

I'm not sure its possible to do it 100% of the time, but I try to constantly consider it.

Again, it's about voluntary exchange. Imagine if someone did that to you? I worked low wage jobs before. If some do gooder started lecturing me about how I'm being exploited I would rightly tell them to f off. If they wanted to throw me some money I may or may not be appreciative but I have autonomy about my choices and I extend that same belief to others

"artists deserve to be exploited because they chose it." Thats a very childish assessment of the music industry and how artists are taken advantage of. It has absolutely nothing to do with "being lectured by 'do-gooders'" either, you're injecting an emotional story as an argument where there is none.

Yea, a lot of the "it's a contract" and "it's voluntary" arguments fail to recognize the huge power imbalance between a label and a band, or any agreement between a single person and a huge company. These agreements are almost never between equals, and are often one-sided and "take it or leave it".

Yes, technically I voluntarily entered into my contract with my ISP, my cell phone carrier, and my employer. But in all cases, it's obvious I'm getting screwed over because of the massive power imbalance. It's a fact of life, but it should at least be acknowledged.

What ethics are there to consider besides 'money can be exchanged for goods and services'? Everyone is a willing participant in the transaction.

Off the top of my head.... -How was the labor sourced for those services? -Child Labor, illegal immigrant labor? -What are the working conditions for the labor?, is it sweatshop -what inputs go into the goods/services? -what do they do with their waste? -where do the inputs come from? My country, another country, my town, a town in my state...

you may think the government plays a role to enforce some of these, and they do to a point...

You can go on in your own head about all the things behind that simple exchange of money for something. If it's a perfectly competitive market sure, that may work but there aren't many if any markets in the US that are that level of competitive.

A personal anecdote for you. My uncle owns an auto parts re-manufacturer, so they rebuild car parts and sell them. I worked there a lot growing up. The normal input is buying "cores" from service stations....your starter motor isn't working and you get a new one, that old one is sold to someone like my uncle who refurbs it.

Often we had people come by with very clearly stolen parts....should we have just exchanged money for those? This ranged from a tweaker who would show up with one part, to full scale organized theft rings with pallets of parts...

So, do we buy those since the price is much, much better? There is a an ethical decision there...

I'm curious, do you personally buy any goods or services? It seems like the logical conclusion to this kind of thinking is to just not ever purchase or use anything.

I'm curious, do you personally make any decisions? It seems like the logical conclusion to this kind of thinking is to just not ever consider or decide upon anything.

I do make decisions and often times people many degrees removed get hurt or exploited as a result of it.

I choose not to focus on that though, whereas the person I replied to apparently does. I was curious how such a person manages to live a just life in the modern world.

Apparently those decisions don't include answering the question at hand.

I think it’s more of a function of mental leisure time. People like worrying about these things and wrapping up simple transactions (“I’d like to stream music this month for $10”) into some moral and ethical quandary as if they can resolve or contribute to an existing relationship between two other parties.

It’s nice that we have the luxury to think about these things. But for the most part, I ignore it and discount people who bring it up to other people, unless they genuinely think people aren’t aware of the situation.

Maybe it’s guilt over benefiting from this. Maybe it’s just internet points for demonstrating one’s knowledge and virtue. Beats me, I hope it reduces.

"I assume the artists are reasonable rational adults. If they're on the platform, its economically advantageous to them." - Your assumption is wrong though. Artists aren't on spotify because it's economically advantageous for them, they are on spotify because they have no other alternative. It doesn't matter if it's streaming platform A or B or C, they are ubiquitous and as an artist you want your music to be heard, so you have to play the field. In this case, the field sucks and mirrors capitalism, skewing the gains towards the top of the pyramid.

Is there some other market system that produced better music?

This one has its flaws but it seems to be optimizing for a great variety.

> In this case, the field sucks and mirrors capitalism, skewing the gains towards the top of the pyramid.

What alternative do you suggest and why would it work better than capitalism?

> skewing the gains towards the top of the pyramid

Hasn't Spotify been losing money for all/most of its existence? Or is there some other top of the pyramid?

Daniel Ek sure hasn't lost any of his own money.

One basic reason to support artists you like is just because you want them to make more stuff.

I think you're of the majority opinion actually. There are loud voices on HN whenever this topic comes up, but clearly most people don't think about these issues much, they just want to access music.

Spotify isn't really the problem. Record labels being the gatekeepers and a bunch of byzantine historic laws that they sit on are the problem. Musicians themselves are the problem - those few who've made it big could band together than change things in various ways for all, but that would mean giving up some money so...

You assume a lot, wrongly.

Artists don't have a choice. If the only viable marketplace is ripping off sellers, and sellers chose to remain there because it's the only viable marketplace, and the sellers gotta hear their buyer defending the owners of the only viable marketplace ripping them off, they're not gonna keep selling and you're not gonna keep getting new music.

This race to defend the most evil of corporations, ripping people off right and left, is rampant on HN over the last 5 years. It's like all the hacker turned into lackeys or something. What a shame. The first 10 years of this site the people here had backbones but now they're mostly just bootlickers.

Are you implying that Spotify distributes by number of plays, not by number of plays, weighted by account utilization? (where a play on a one hour a month account would count considerably more than a ten hours per day account).

If it's not (inversely) weighted by utilization, then I'd assume that it's less the fault of Spotify but more the fault of licensors being unable to think beyond simplistic money-per-play metrics in their negotiations with Spotify. From Spotify's perspective, it's kind of obvious that the "gourmet play minute" is more valuable than the "gourmand play minute".

Yes, this is how it works. There are separate pools for ad-supported plays, and I believe separate pools per country now (because Spotify premium costs a lot less in India than in e.g. the US), but it's still pooled.

It used to be the case that the big record companies demanded pro-rata licensing. Tidal (before Jay-Z bought it) commissioned studies on user centric licensing and approached the record companies about it, but they were uninterested.

Now, however, it seems the record companies want user centric licensing, but Spotify resists it. It's hard to say exactly what kind of politics lie behind that opposition. I'll note, however, that Spotify seems to have adapted a lot to "gourmand" listening with their background playlists.

Those per country pools are an interesting tool: being as German as I happen to be, my natural reaction to subscriber share (this seems to be the established term for weighted by utilization?) is "can't do that, because Data Protection". We do like to imagine that it should in some miraculous way be possible to use streaming without the streaming provider knowing what we stream, and that Bad Things Will Happen if that miracle fails to materialize.

Separate pools could be the way out: take the division by country and subscription status, but further divide each bucket by utilization. Ten percentile blocks for example. It would not have to be perfect to be well good enough. And I suspect that it would be easier to communicate in negotiations than an accurate formula, similar to how many countries seem to have ended up with discrete tax brackets instead of one universal formula across the entire range.

There's no chance that this is blocked by data protection laws. This is looks exactly like the kind of case where data can be collected and processed without consent, since it's needed to operate the service and meet the contractual obligations of paying the musicians the right amount.

(And that doesn't mean that they could keep the data indefinitely or use it for other purposes without consent.)

Heh, I don't even doubt the legality, I was talking purely about subjective expectations, about how it feels to us.

On top of that this data can be completely anonymised without compromising the data. All you need is an entry "a user listened to a song".

This probably gets more hairy when it comes to a user's listening history and things like Spotify Wrapped, discover weekly etc., but this is one of those areas that fall under expectations from a service, legitimate interest etc.

I think this discussion was about switching a pooled model to one where a user's subscription payment is directly split according to that user's listens. That requires unaggregated and unanonymized listen data.

Ah true.

This is solved (well, not solved, but handled) by not having a direct link between usage data and the user. So you store your data as <usage, proxy_id> which references <proxy_id, user_id> which references <user_id, user PII>. This way you can always easily break the connection to PII (if the user requests deletion) while keeping per user data.

But true, it's not anonymized in this case.

Even though they just need a total plays sum to pay out to artists, Spotify for sure stores every play by person. You can request your data from them and see for yourself - it's of course necessary for their recommendation services, and even just providing the listening history back to you is a service many people want badly (it is the whole point of services like last.fm!)

You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label.

The best way to support a band, as far as I know, is to turn up to their shows and/or buy their merch. Royalties were always a dicey revenue stream.

> You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label.

For fringe metal music? Not likely!

If OP was going to his local record/cd store and not some fringe underground market, he was 100% supporting some record company. Maybe not one of the ones listed, but in the 80s it would have been a company.

By "fringe metal", they're likely talking about mainstream thrash and groove metal. And those bands where on these exact labels;

Reign in blood - Def Jam (1986) Pantera - Atco /WB (1986) Megadeth - Capital (1986) Sepultura - Roadrunner/WB (1989) Anthrax - Island/Universal (1985)

This does read like a slight snark (the step from 'fringe' to 'mainstream' - who wants to be mainstream?). It further emphasises the point that in the 80s and early 90s looking for non-local 'long tail' music as a youth was pretty much impossible. Especially if / when too young for bars and concerts, all you could find had to be signed on mainstream labels. I had the luck in that I could go to local concerts, thus discovering local talent (and buying their cassette tapes). You needed venues and allowing parents for that. Currently listening to several artists with < 500 streamers a month on Spotify. Nothing in the 80s and 90s can compare with that discoverability.

Well, maybe. Around where I'm from, even the chain record stores would stock some unusual music (like metal) if it was locally popular, but the metalheads had their own stores. I think there's still one or two active in Oslo.

A lot of boutique labels are just sub(-sub) labels ran under the big three. Including metal.

Often they’re ran by artists under contract with one of those three big labels and their big sublabels, mostly as a perk/favor to those artists. They have a bit more creative freedom and leeway who they sign, but the money is still kicked upward and the marketing and recording budget still comes from upstairs.

This could be solved by a "donate" button to reward bands you like. Edit: (such an obvious idea, they've already done it: "fan support" feature).

Yeah, or maybe a tip jar? Perhaps some PG at Spotify can copy the stripe tip screen and when before playing a song you get asked the infamous 18%,20%,25%,NO TIP question?

No thank you.

No thanks. E-tip jars belong on Twitch and Youtube Live. Something about that feels very "off", it feeds that parasocial interaction thing in ways that a band selling merch does not.

All music/sports/etc fandom has a similar parasocial element. Same thing, only different manifestations.

but... I generally don't want their 'merch'. I don't need another t-shirt, hat, keyring, whatever. It literally just adds to more waste that I don't want to contribute to. We'd all be better off if I had an easier way to just send $4 to a band/artist I like. I do that for some via patreon. I've known people overpay on bandcamp to get a few more $ to someone. There are artists that will never come to my area. There are artists that simply can't travel/perform due to any number of factors. "Sell merch via Shopify or Spotify" just feels like pushing people in the wrong direction.

It seems the 'fan support' feature is not available on the Spotify website, only the native app. Explains why I haven't noticed it.

So they finally added a way to directly support artists. That's nice, but disappointing they excluded the web app from this feature. Its omission hurts potential donations. Spotify also lowers audio quality on the web app, gee it's almost like they don't want me to use the web app.

This has always seemed like fear-mongering to me, because for the pooled proportion of plays to be completely different from the mean of the per-user proportion, there would need to be an extreme discrepancy in amount of songs listened to per month and/or in the kinds of songs played by those who pay for premium vs. those who opt for ad-supported. No, if I only play the same artist for an entire month, they likely won't get $10 (-$2 in expenses), maybe it's $7 or maybe it's $12, but I don't see how you can go from there to "Beyoncé is getting all your money!?!?!" Are there any specific examples of artists that get much more or much less than you'd expect, or is this all just a thought experiment?

It's pretty easy to do some math on this.

There are pseudonymous background music artists who have just released one or two tracks, and who have more listens than famous bands with a 30-year history, because they were featured in one of Spotify's background music playlists. It is of course rumours that this music is commissioned by Spotify (which they deny) or that they get kickbacks in some other form.

You don't get exact numbers (because Spotify won't share them!) but there's no question background music is vastly more profitable on Spotify than the kind of music people go to concerts for, and it's at the latter's expense.

That's a good point and a legitimate reason to get rid of the pool, but I guess I was talking more about often-voiced worries that big artists are getting richer and indie artists are getting poorer due to Spotify's algorithm -- and those worries long predate the weird ambient stuff.

If background music is the reason people are paying for Spotify then what would you expect Spotify to do?

The share is determined by contract, not by some fair-minded algorithm. You would have to listen to that artist over 3000 times in a month for them to get $10 at the normal artist's $0.0032/play. Big artists don't see such low figures, though more obviously goes to the system that pays the salaries of the people who get those deals for them.

Well, sure, but whether an artist gets the full amount or a pittance from their label is not relevant to the question of whether Spotify's pooled numbers are unfair to some artists. The ultimate payout is not something Spotify has a say in.

That's the criticism I can wholeheartedly get behind. I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone).

However, I think it's a hard problem to solve.

The huge fanbase of who listen to Tailor Swift on repeat will have some of their money go towards less popular bands. If all their money goes exclusively to Taylor Swift (and similar artists), it's possible that there will be quite a number of bands who will see their earning drastically decrease.

There's also the question of where will the money go for the deceased artists. Today, it goes to rights holders and effectively disappears with no accountability on the part of the rights holder.

> I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone).

> However, I think it's a hard problem to solve.

All you have you have to do is buy the music. From either the band’s website, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.

Bandcamp gives the highest % to the artist/label, and I would argue also the best place to buy music.

I rarely listen to a band. Or even to an album. I often listen to music of a specific genre, and for that Spotify (and similar services) are great: I discover artists I'd never discover otherwise.

> By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...)

This argument can be used to justify basically any business practice. It's a weak argument. Should I be forced to buy 10 inedible doughnuts to find one editable one in the name of allowing people to practice making doughnuts out of random things they find in their kitchen? Should I have to buy 5 cars before I find one that doesn't break after a a month in the name of supporting the auto industry?

Obviously, this is nonsense.

I think there's a strawman here. I look for different things artistically and functionally about the things you mentioned. Cars should function well and feel good when I test-drive them, but I wouldn't buy a hideous car.

Music is somewhat functional (does the cd or record play? does it skip at all etc) but then you have to listen to it. Years ago we might have seen a music video, heard a song on the radio, then went and bought a whole album to hear the rest. I guess I'm saying the buying process is different and it doesnt make sense to apply it to every imaginable product or industry.

> Years ago we might have seen a music video, heard a song on the radio, then went and bought a whole album to hear the rest. I guess I'm saying the buying process is different and it doesnt make sense to apply it to every imaginable product or industry.

And I've definitely found songs that so-to-speak came along via an album purchase and which I might have initially dismissed, somewhat eventually growing on me after a while. Not saying that this always happens, and I'm not the biggest music listener around, so take that with a pinch of salt, but still…

Spotify uses a weighted average - you can't abuse the system like that. The tough reality is that 10k fans paying $10 a month and spending 1% time listening to an indie artist only works out to $1k / month even if all the money went to the artists. Unfortunately that's not the case - Spotify has overhead, artists sign with labels and other middlemen creep in.

As a result artists make pennies. The only way to change this is to get consumers to pay drastically more but that's what killed iTunes in the first place.

It's not hard to find artists who abuse the system like that: algorithmically generated music, from algorithmically generated artists, hundreds of which have almost the exact same number of plays (and thousands more than real artists I've followed for years.

Too bad Spotify doesn't calculate streaming royalties per user. If I listen to a single artist in a given month, my entire royalty portion of my subscription for that month could go to that artist vs. being diluted by the activity of all the bots on Spotify.

> But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole.

But doesn’t that even out?

Napkin calculations: There are 10 subscribers to Spotify, each paying 10 dollars/month, and everything goes 100% to the artist. 9 of them only listen to Taylor Swift and 1 only to Metallica.

If the subscriptions would go directly to the bands you listen to, Metallica would receive 10 dollars from the one listener.

But the subscriptions are distributed based on the percentage of listeners, meaning that the Metallica fan is only giving 1 dollar to their favorite band. But this percentage is also payed by the 9 Taylor fans, so they also pay 1 dollar. In the end Metallica receives 10 dollars per month.

What am I missing here?