> if I understand how Spotify pays out -- reduces payouts to other folks

do musicians get remunerated per play (in which case, it doesn't matter how many plays other artists get), or is there a fixed pie and it's divided by percentage of share of plays?

If the latter, that's truly a horrible deal for artists.

It's the latter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41457870

120,000 extra plays a day would have increased the revenue of the streaming platform via played advertisements.

The increased revenue pool in theory means that other artists were unaffected, Spotify made extra money, the fraudulent artist made extra money and the advertisers lost money. This is probably why they waited 7 years and till they had IPO'd to pull the plug.

What is the split between ad revenue vs. subscriber revenue? When I used Spotify I was a subscriber so they got one flat fee from me per month that didn't increase no matter how many times I played a song.

$3300/660000=$0.005 per play $0.005*120000=$600 per day Assuming an 8 hour day thats $75/hour or $3000/40hour week.

I thought spotify pays per time listening. This way users pick who gets money

It's not. The total revenue available for royalties is distributed to rightsholders by the volume they occupy of total plays in a given timeframe[1]. It's been a hot topic for a long time, as your subscription is not going to the artists you listen too only. Huge pop hits that are responsible for X percent of plays across all Spotify streams, will receive X percent of your paid subscription, even though you as a subscriber have never listened to them.

It's a simplification, since 100% of an individual's subscription doesn't go to directly to royalties, it's after expenses.

Smaller artists are frustrated with this model as it favours the big artists.

[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/

Edit: added the link.

As I understand it, Spotify pools together everyone's payments and distributes it by number of listens across all users. You or I would expect we'd be supporting our favorite artists by listening to them, but most of our subscription fees actually go to whoever's at the top of the charts. That restaurant playing "Top 40" on repeat effectively outweighs us both.

No, spotify (and most other services) build a pool of money for payouts. That money is then divided among all artists based on their % share of all plays for the month

Not all artists. Only those with songs that each have had over 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months. That doesn’t sound like much but they effectively demonetized more than half of the music on their platform at the beginning of 2024.

Absolutely horrible deal for artists. Even worse that the record companies of old.

Earnings follow a power law. to redistribute the $ by popularity would mean more $ to top artists, who already make a lot.

>he should definitely be penalized somehow until that money, plus damages, is redirected to actual artists.

You know it won't go to the artists. Spotify takes it and at best some publishers (or what name they choose in music) get a little cut on the top to keep in good graces.

This is definitely wrong but this is exactly why I don't really have any sympathy here.

On top of the fact that Spotify probably also did and does the exact same scheme, but that was in a period of "market capture mode" and the adverts didn't care enough to not be frauded. Instead playing the long game. (Blitzar in another response explained this better than I did).

Publishers don't just get a little cut... they get a LOT of cut.

I've long maintained that the "Spotify fucks over musicians" angle is cleverly positioned to hide the "record labels fuck over musicians the same as they always have for 50+ years" angle. Because the big record labels are still doing great in the streaming era!

I agree. I suppose I haven't seen exactly how much Spotify keeps on top for a while, but I wouldn't be surprised if Spotify itself is beholden to the publishers. Definitely a tug of war.

Same shit, different day either way.

Wrong by one order of magnitude. 12000 plays per day. Not so difficult.