6 ms·

Does paying for Spotify actually help any artists meaningfully though? No. Your monthly $10, after Spotify and the labels get their majority cut, goes by perce

by einr 9y ago

Does paying for Spotify actually help any artists meaningfully though? No. Your monthly $10, after Spotify and the labels get their majority cut, goes by percentage to the most popular artists on the service, with absolutely no regard to which artists you have personally listened to, so if you have even remotely obscure taste you are effectively not supporting the artists at all. Bandcamp, on the other hand, takes a 15% cut of digital downloads and 10% for physical releases/merch. If you buy an album for $10 on Bandcamp, the artist gets $8.50. If you play an album by an indie artist on Spotify 100 times, they might get $0.0002 or thereabouts¤. ¤ Not actual numbers, but the point is it is effectively zero.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
Has this payout structure been conclusively documented? I mean specifically the part about obscure artists getting absolutely nothing. I know a couple of relatively obscure bands personally, and they do get something from Spotify. It's not much, but they do get a little bit. They consider streaming more as advertising that gets their name out there and their music easily accessible, but they make most of the actual money from shows and merch. E: Artists can see their playcount stats and payouts here: https://artists.spotify.com https://artists.spotify.com and as far as I know, even niche artists are paid the $0.006 per song, not just the biggest players. E2: I am a huge fan of the Bandcamp model, though. Most of the time I find music there that isn't on Spotify, and I've also bought albums on there even though they're on Spotify as well, because I want to support the artists directly. I have completely stopped buying physical albums.
- einr 9y ago
  It's not as simple as I made it out to be, of course, because the music industry is a confusing and terrible thing, but the point basically stands: no one except Spotify and record label execs makes anything more than rounding errors from Spotify streaming. You need millions of plays to make minimum wage. There used to be a FAQ entry on spotifyartists.com about royalties and the complex formulae by which they are divided amongst the various parties entitled to slices of those precious fractions of a cent, but I can't find it now. (That's right: on a promotional site directed towards artists, aimed to encourage people to make their work available on Spotify, there is nothing anywhere about how they intend to pay you. Because honestly, they don't.)
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    >You need millions of plays to make minimum wage. You also need to sell a hell of a lot of albums every month, to make minimum wage. I do agree that they should pay artists more, but I consider it an issue with the record labels, rather than with Spotify.
croon 9y ago
Isn't distributing each subscribers fee individually and distributing all of them collectively by listening habits the same thing? Made up example: $100000000 * 0.0000001 of all listening activity = $10 Or $10 * 1 of all my listening activity = $10 Or are you saying that Spotify cuts off at a certain point and doesn't pay anything out, or that they take a fixed cut after allocation?
- einr 9y ago
  Let's say Artist X has their music on Spotify but is currently making $0 a month. Now, for the sake of argument, let's say I spend an entire month listening to only Artist X a thousand times; I personally think it's fair in that case that whatever scraps of my Spotify fee are left for the artists should then go 100% to Artist X because they're the only ones I've listened to. So, in this utopian scenario, they might make $5. With the current model, if I do that, Artist X gets paid near zero. So you can see how the models are indeed different.
  - Orphis 9y ago
    But no one actually does that, and if you really did, you don't need Spotify, just buy their album directly. Such a payout seems appealing in theory, but in practice will just give more money to the very popular bands since they dominate the market and leave a much smaller share for the others.
    - einr 9y ago
      in practice will just give more money to the very popular bands since they dominate the market and leave a much smaller share for the others. Which is exactly the current situation, by the way. Anyway, what I was doing was just demonstrating that the system is not the same. Although I am admittedly bad at maths and statistics, it seems to me that the system I am proposing would be more likely to pay out at least coffee change to small-time artists. I might be wrong, though. Basically I think it's unfair and unintuitive how everything I pay goes to artists I don't listen to. There has to be a better system.

by einr 9y ago

KozmoNau7 9y ago

Has this payout structure been conclusively documented? I mean specifically the part about obscure artists getting absolutely nothing. I know a couple of relatively obscure bands personally, and they do get something from Spotify. It's not much, but they do get a little bit. They consider streaming more as advertising that gets their name out there and their music easily accessible, but they make most of the actual money from shows and merch. E: Artists can see their playcount stats and payouts here: https://artists.spotify.com https://artists.spotify.com and as far as I know, even niche artists are paid the $0.006 per song, not just the biggest players. E2: I am a huge fan of the Bandcamp model, though. Most of the time I find music there that isn't on Spotify, and I've also bought albums on there even though they're on Spotify as well, because I want to support the artists directly. I have completely stopped buying physical albums.

einr 9y ago
It's not as simple as I made it out to be, of course, because the music industry is a confusing and terrible thing, but the point basically stands: no one except Spotify and record label execs makes anything more than rounding errors from Spotify streaming. You need millions of plays to make minimum wage. There used to be a FAQ entry on spotifyartists.com about royalties and the complex formulae by which they are divided amongst the various parties entitled to slices of those precious fractions of a cent, but I can't find it now. (That's right: on a promotional site directed towards artists, aimed to encourage people to make their work available on Spotify, there is nothing anywhere about how they intend to pay you. Because honestly, they don't.)
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  >You need millions of plays to make minimum wage. You also need to sell a hell of a lot of albums every month, to make minimum wage. I do agree that they should pay artists more, but I consider it an issue with the record labels, rather than with Spotify.

croon 9y ago

Isn't distributing each subscribers fee individually and distributing all of them collectively by listening habits the same thing? Made up example: $100000000 * 0.0000001 of all listening activity = $10 Or $10 * 1 of all my listening activity = $10 Or are you saying that Spotify cuts off at a certain point and doesn't pay anything out, or that they take a fixed cut after allocation?

einr 9y ago
Let's say Artist X has their music on Spotify but is currently making $0 a month. Now, for the sake of argument, let's say I spend an entire month listening to only Artist X a thousand times; I personally think it's fair in that case that whatever scraps of my Spotify fee are left for the artists should then go 100% to Artist X because they're the only ones I've listened to. So, in this utopian scenario, they might make $5. With the current model, if I do that, Artist X gets paid near zero. So you can see how the models are indeed different.
- Orphis 9y ago
  But no one actually does that, and if you really did, you don't need Spotify, just buy their album directly. Such a payout seems appealing in theory, but in practice will just give more money to the very popular bands since they dominate the market and leave a much smaller share for the others.
  - einr 9y ago
    in practice will just give more money to the very popular bands since they dominate the market and leave a much smaller share for the others. Which is exactly the current situation, by the way. Anyway, what I was doing was just demonstrating that the system is not the same. Although I am admittedly bad at maths and statistics, it seems to me that the system I am proposing would be more likely to pay out at least coffee change to small-time artists. I might be wrong, though. Basically I think it's unfair and unintuitive how everything I pay goes to artists I don't listen to. There has to be a better system.