It's so hard to put a value on something like Spotify. I use the Spotify Pitchfork app pretty much every day to find new music. Before that I'd have to read Pitfork.com and then either torrent or buy that artists music. This forced me to be super selective in who I gave the time of day (because reading + downloading would take hours). With Spotify I can listen to 4 whole albums in one day.

If I find an artist I like I will definitely go to one of their live shows. I feel like I spend more on an artists now than I did when I bought their album outright.

hah great for Pitchfork... i'm sure they are making much more than the artists off this deal.

regardless, they don't cover the bands i like and half the music i like isnt on spotify so i just do it the old-fashioned way using discogs.com, downloads, and some good sites that have "related artist" webs. wouldn't you know it, the best site i know for related artist webs isn't a major industry service, its a torrent site! & they accomplish it trivially through user-edits...

so i guess my point is i think its true that Spotify can be convenient for some people, but it doesnt refute my point that they are not trying to do anyone favors (unless it fits their current branding strategy). Spotify is not some techno-anarchistic's grand vision of the music industry. it's not helping music fans discover more about their tastes, it is generally colluding with industry to guide listeners toward their profit sectors. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is a complex sequence of kickbacks between labels, Spotify, and the venues themselves, designed to minimize artist royalty/payouts. If you follow the music industry you know the deals for artists are generally pretty bad & I don't really believe in the "but I go see them live!" rationale because some artists don't tour or aren't big arena acts. AFAIK it's really hard to recoup tour costs unless you are playing decent-sized venues at every stop.

i guess it is just hard for me to get into the feelgood mentality of the music scene when i feel like the technology available could allow us to be much more taste/trend/industry-agnostic but instead seems to just be an extension of industry power (Pitchfork being a major industry player as well...), and I generally feel like the quality of the artistic output is in decline so I don't want to buy into most of the over-produced crypto-pop junk they are selling (fans of 60s/70s/even 80s music are accustomed to a much greater wealth of musical diversity). As I mentioned though, I am not into music journalism i just use artist webs. Maybe if there were some tastemaker I really wanted to follow I would see this as more convenient but I just don't experience music that way. Or at most I'd be like "well, convenient for me, sucks for the artist".

I think I mentioned in my previous comment -- it's not that I can even prove the pricing model false, I just know it doesn't do shit for the artists... 1 sale of a self-published physical album is more profitable for most of them then a year's worth of Spotify listens.

i bet a solely torrents + physical sales model would actually be MORE profitable than involving Spotify... Spotify to me is really only a mechanism for absolving people from the guilt of theft, and conveniently it funnels money back to yet another corp.

There's gotta be some way to make a pay-only streaming service that would fairly compensate artists...

What if, instead of being paid per play, artists were compensated based on the number of unique visitors that played their music? So if one person plays one of their songs, they get paid (for instance) a whole dollar. If one person plays that song 5000 more times, the artist still only gets paid one dollar. But if 5000 different people play that song, the artist gets 5000 dollars. Once. I think this scheme would compensate artists much more fairly, like iTunes, while also providing the cloud hosting and flat monthly fee that attracts users.

How do you get one dollar per song and user, though? The users would have to pay for that. Since they probably listen to a lot of songs in a single month, it would become rather expensive.

Would they, though? I listen to a lot of different music, but I also create playlists that I listen to most of the time. As an example let's take the average user that listens primarily to the top 40 hits and a few select albums from those artists. In one month how many new songs would they listen to on average? 10? 15? Framed this way, a dollar does seem too high, but not by much. I think $0.40-$0.50 per song would be profitable, but that's just a guess.

To me spending 10$/month seems about right - in former times I would probably have bought one CD per month on average.

However, I think what might confuse people in terms of perceived fairness is that with a flatrate, people might listen to a lot more music. But it is a tradeoff between people listening more but paying less per song and people listening less and paying more per song. It's a mistake to think "whoa, if I had sold as many CDs as people listened to my songs on Spotify, I should have received x million $$$." The reality is people probably wouldn't have listened as much without the flatrate.

So in the end all that matters is how much money you receive, not how many times people listen to your songs.

And what have you gained if you limit people to 10 songs per months vs thousands, if they spend the same amount of money? It is only an inconvenience for the audience.

Have any independent artists with a significant amount of listens posted how much money they are making? I am sure there are some rules against this...

I know for signed artists it is a really small amount.

It seems like most groups have accepted that they will make most of their money from shows and merchandising. At least that is the feeling I get.

RJD2 commented a few years ago on his reddit AMA about his royalties:

"i got a check from spotify last month. $.22 was the amount. that help?"

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y542u/hi_im_rjd2_produ...

RJD2 only has about 100K followers on Spotify. For comparison, that is about the same amount as two of my favorite bands, Opeth and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.

It's not Spotify's fault that RJD2 is only as popular as obscure Swedish death metal or obscure 80's folk goth music.

I don't know RJD2, but does Opeth and Nick Cave really only make $.22 a month from Spotify?

If that's true, something is deeply and terribly wrong with the license agreements. These are not some amateurs, but pretty big acts with fans from all over, and while I despise saying they "deserve" this or that I would at least expect the sum to matter.

Yeah, Opeth has 735,477 listeners on last.fm - that's comparable with the best known artists in the genre ever like Deep Purple or Black Sabbath (around 2 million both).

I've been using last.fm for a long time and I've spent a lot of time looking at the data. I would argue that the average person on last.fm is much, much more likely to have heard of Opeth than the average YouTube or Spotify user. I'd also argue that straight up listener count isn't a very useful number, since Kanye West (the most listened to artist on last.fm last week by about 33%) only has about 4M listeners. I don't think Kanye is only 5x as popular/successful/listened to as Opeth.

Sure, but look at it this way. If an artist who has 100K followers removes their music from music sharing services and decides to sell MP3 versions of their album directly for $2. That is 200K. 22 cents a month is obscene.

RJD2's most popular song has more than 17 million streams. Opeths has 500k, the other band you mentioned has a number of songs around 2 million streams. Spotify pays artists based on number of streams, not based on how many followers they have accrued.[1]

So RJD2 should be making significantly more than the bands you mentioned given that his number of streams should represent a larger portion of spotify's total streams.

[1]http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#royalties-i...

RJD2's first two albums were done on two different record labels. His more recent two albums were done on his own record label. His songs with a lot of plays were on his first two albums. It's probably his old labels that are making all the money here.

I have a Youtube video with 17k views that earned me $22.

So assuming one follow ~= one view per month, that means Youtube is 600x more profitable than Spotify. Interesting since Youtube is free and Spotify has paid stuff.

You owned the video. Who owns his song? Spotify could be exactly as profitable as YouTube if he only owns one-sixhundredth of the song.

But still, $.22 for 100k followers is not very much.

Do remember it's also based off plays, not follows. I could have 100k followers, but if I get 500 plays a day, I'd get barely anything.

Ha i kindof just want to repeat exactly this: "But still, $.22 for 100k followers is not very much."

I understand there are technicalities but 22 cents/month is what you'd expect your complete unknown "electronica in basement" neighbor to make off a major distribution outlet, not known artists, even if they are obscure (which I think is a ludicrously out-of-scale term considering these bands have international followings).

I'm sure someone in this equation is making money, thats why it rubs me the wrong way.... it is an extension of the industry rather than a correction of it.

Did he have 100k followers 2 years ago when he posted that or does he have it now?

Surely they'll figure it out somehow, otherwise why would artists continue to give them their music?

Please no sob story about innocent artists being exploited by their publishers. Same logic applies - why would artists continue to work with such publishers?