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The algorithm for payment is dumb. If I pay £15 a month and only listen to 4 artists over that time (I’m very predictable) I want those 4 to get £3.75 each. But

The algorithm for payment is dumb. If I pay £15 a month and only listen to 4 artists over that time (I’m very predictable) I want those 4 to get £3.75 each. But they won’t. Lady ga ha will get most of it.

lucb1e 6y ago
Edit: just to bring this up a bit higher in the thread, replies like from u/kgermino, u/dtech, and u/anonymoushn are saying that popular artists rack up their number of plays from background noise (my wording, not theirs) whereas niche artists won't have that advantage. A bar or coworker might play a popular playlist a ton of times as background noise whereas your niche artist will have some dedicated people listening to it that don't rack up a meaningless play count. This causes money to flow from subscribers listening to this niche artist to the more popular artist. That's a problem to which I see various solutions, like only including active clicks on songs or artists in the revenue distribution model, or indeed changing the model to be per user instead of by aggregate number of plays. So it's not really that it's unfair to pay artists more that are played more, it's that because of the way some people use Spotify, plays are racked up for reasons other than because their music is so great. </edit> It effectively works in the way you describe, but aggregated instead of per user. So instead of splitting your £15 into 4, it splits Spotify's total revenue (minus service fee) among the artists listened to. If 100 million users listened to artist A and 50 million to artist B, and those are the only two artists listened to, then they get 100/(100+50)=67% and 50/(100+50)=33% of the revenue, respectively. Listening to certain artists still gets them more money. So I'm not sure why you say that most of your money goes to a popular artist instead. Other people's money goes there because they listened to it, yours doesn't really if you look at an individual subscriber's level. It's a bit like electricity: you can purchase green power but of course they don't dig new cables to get you exclusively green power, they just pay the wind/solar/hydro farms instead of the coal farms for the part of the power that you used. (Some notes I made for myself to make sure I got this straight, figured I could share them: If you listen only to artist A and 999 other people listen to artist B (everyone plays an equal number of tracks), then £15×1000=£15000 goes into the pot, and your artist will get 1/1000×15000=£15 and the other one will get 999/1000×£15000=£14985. Even in aggregate, it should work out, but please correct me if I went wrong somewhere!)
- kzrdude 6y ago
  For this to make complete sense, we'd have to have statistics that proves that free users and premium users have the same listening patterns on average, and I don't think they do. Otherwise the fact remains that we who pay subsidize artists that are preferred by the non-paying users. For this reason, the following is the important difference: Other people's money goes there because they listened to it (Rebuttal: Many other people use free spotify, and didn't pay any money).
- maxerickson 6y ago
  If it does it by aggregated listens and not by artist, then other people listening to some other artist diverts their funds to that artist. If they did it per user, that wouldn't happen.
  - lucb1e 6y ago
    Can you make the math work out in a way that my funds are diverted to another artist? Because what you're saying sounds logical but when I try and compute it, as in the final paragraph of my comment above, it doesn't work out that way. But I could be wrong! Please try it and let me/us know what you find!
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      Just set aside your "everyone plays an equal number of tracks" condition, because that isn't what happens.
      - Aachen 6y ago
        Isn't that fair though? If artist A gets played a million times and I don't listen to them but I play artist B twice that month, shouldn't artist A get most of that money? If artist B was so great I'd play them more often and they'd get more money.
        anonymoushn 6y ago
westwing 6y ago
The algorithm isn't dumb at all. Lady Gaga is relatively more valuable for the platform, so she can ask for a bigger slice of the pie. If all you wanted was a streaming platform that didn't have all these major artists on it, it could be provided for much less than £15.
- FartyMcFarter 6y ago
  > If all you wanted was a streaming platform that didn't have all these major artists on it, it could be provided for much less than £15. This sounds like economies of scale but backwards, which makes me suspicious of this claim.
  - avian 6y ago
    "economy of scale but backwards" describes the whole content industry, doesn't it? At your local shop you will typically pay more for a hit album CD with millions of copies made compared to an indie release with maybe 100 copies made.
  - WJW 6y ago
    The economies of scale for Spotify reduce the cost of their technology as measured in dollars per user, but since the majority of their costs are in artist payments the tech costs don't matter as much.
  - westwing 6y ago
    It's more complicated than that. If economics of scale applied to music pricing, why do records cost all more or less the same? A small act can't support itself from licensing fees alone either way, it would make sense to settle for less, or waive fees entirely, just to increase exposure.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  Yes she can ask for it, and get it. But that isn't good. It means the smaller artists are subsidising her. She is taking money for listens to other people's songs. I don't mean to victimise Lady ga ga here of course. It's just that the bigger artists are only getting any decent money at all because the smaller ones get virtually nothing.
magicalhippo 6y ago
That's why I use Bandcamp. There I know where my money goes and I can even decide how much I want to give the artists. https://bandcamp.com/ https://bandcamp.com/

lucb1e 6y ago

Edit: just to bring this up a bit higher in the thread, replies like from u/kgermino, u/dtech, and u/anonymoushn are saying that popular artists rack up their number of plays from background noise (my wording, not theirs) whereas niche artists won't have that advantage. A bar or coworker might play a popular playlist a ton of times as background noise whereas your niche artist will have some dedicated people listening to it that don't rack up a meaningless play count. This causes money to flow from subscribers listening to this niche artist to the more popular artist. That's a problem to which I see various solutions, like only including active clicks on songs or artists in the revenue distribution model, or indeed changing the model to be per user instead of by aggregate number of plays. So it's not really that it's unfair to pay artists more that are played more, it's that because of the way some people use Spotify, plays are racked up for reasons other than because their music is so great. </edit> It effectively works in the way you describe, but aggregated instead of per user. So instead of splitting your £15 into 4, it splits Spotify's total revenue (minus service fee) among the artists listened to. If 100 million users listened to artist A and 50 million to artist B, and those are the only two artists listened to, then they get 100/(100+50)=67% and 50/(100+50)=33% of the revenue, respectively. Listening to certain artists still gets them more money. So I'm not sure why you say that most of your money goes to a popular artist instead. Other people's money goes there because they listened to it, yours doesn't really if you look at an individual subscriber's level. It's a bit like electricity: you can purchase green power but of course they don't dig new cables to get you exclusively green power, they just pay the wind/solar/hydro farms instead of the coal farms for the part of the power that you used. (Some notes I made for myself to make sure I got this straight, figured I could share them: If you listen only to artist A and 999 other people listen to artist B (everyone plays an equal number of tracks), then £15×1000=£15000 goes into the pot, and your artist will get 1/1000×15000=£15 and the other one will get 999/1000×£15000=£14985. Even in aggregate, it should work out, but please correct me if I went wrong somewhere!)

kzrdude 6y ago
For this to make complete sense, we'd have to have statistics that proves that free users and premium users have the same listening patterns on average, and I don't think they do. Otherwise the fact remains that we who pay subsidize artists that are preferred by the non-paying users. For this reason, the following is the important difference: Other people's money goes there because they listened to it (Rebuttal: Many other people use free spotify, and didn't pay any money).
maxerickson 6y ago
If it does it by aggregated listens and not by artist, then other people listening to some other artist diverts their funds to that artist. If they did it per user, that wouldn't happen.
- lucb1e 6y ago
  Can you make the math work out in a way that my funds are diverted to another artist? Because what you're saying sounds logical but when I try and compute it, as in the final paragraph of my comment above, it doesn't work out that way. But I could be wrong! Please try it and let me/us know what you find!
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Just set aside your "everyone plays an equal number of tracks" condition, because that isn't what happens.
    - Aachen 6y ago
      Isn't that fair though? If artist A gets played a million times and I don't listen to them but I play artist B twice that month, shouldn't artist A get most of that money? If artist B was so great I'd play them more often and they'd get more money.
      - anonymoushn 6y ago

westwing 6y ago

The algorithm isn't dumb at all. Lady Gaga is relatively more valuable for the platform, so she can ask for a bigger slice of the pie. If all you wanted was a streaming platform that didn't have all these major artists on it, it could be provided for much less than £15.

FartyMcFarter 6y ago
> If all you wanted was a streaming platform that didn't have all these major artists on it, it could be provided for much less than £15. This sounds like economies of scale but backwards, which makes me suspicious of this claim.
- avian 6y ago
  "economy of scale but backwards" describes the whole content industry, doesn't it? At your local shop you will typically pay more for a hit album CD with millions of copies made compared to an indie release with maybe 100 copies made.
- WJW 6y ago
  The economies of scale for Spotify reduce the cost of their technology as measured in dollars per user, but since the majority of their costs are in artist payments the tech costs don't matter as much.
- westwing 6y ago
  It's more complicated than that. If economics of scale applied to music pricing, why do records cost all more or less the same? A small act can't support itself from licensing fees alone either way, it would make sense to settle for less, or waive fees entirely, just to increase exposure.
jonplackett 6y ago
Yes she can ask for it, and get it. But that isn't good. It means the smaller artists are subsidising her. She is taking money for listens to other people's songs. I don't mean to victimise Lady ga ga here of course. It's just that the bigger artists are only getting any decent money at all because the smaller ones get virtually nothing.

magicalhippo 6y ago

That's why I use Bandcamp. There I know where my money goes and I can even decide how much I want to give the artists. https://bandcamp.com/ https://bandcamp.com/