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The new system only works because smaller bands are subsidising the bigger ones. For example. I only listen to smaller indie bands on Spotify for a month. I gi

The new system only works because smaller bands are subsidising the bigger ones. For example. I only listen to smaller indie bands on Spotify for a month. I give Spotify my £10 for the month. Does my £10 go to those smaller bands? No. It gets given to Lady Ga Ga because she got 100 bazzillion listens that month. Even though I never listen to her music. Spotify should work out who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays. It would be fairer, but it would mean the bigger bands earn less, and expose the fact that streaming really isn’t making anyone enough money. How could it when I’m now paying only £10 a month for what used to cost hundreds? But it’s better than piracy!

coliveira 6y ago
sorry, but I don't think what you're proposing makes sense. The same way you're listening to small bands, millions of people are listening to the #1 hits. The result would be the same, the big names getting millions and small bands getting a few bucks.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  Thought experiment. Imagine I only listen to one song in one month by one band who currently make ~0 on Spotify. In my new system, they now make £10.
  - fireflies_ 6y ago
    Sounds like this only works if people who listen to smaller bands/indie music listen to fewer songs on average. I'm not sure if this is true. People who find themselves exploring niche tastes are probably "enthusiasts" who do more listening and listen more broadly.
    - mortenjorck 6y ago
      It's all hypotheticals until there's some data. You could just as easily have an enthusiast who finds a few new indie albums per month and listens to them all the way through, or someone who leaves a top-40 playlist on in the background.
      - jonplackett 6y ago
        From the article: 82 per cent of respondents earned less than £200 from streaming in 2019, including some with “millions” of streams. This just could not happen with what I’m suggesting. Example: The band above, which earned < £200 must have at least 2 million streams a year = 166,666 a month For simplicity let’s assume each of those 166,666 streams is a unique user. Each also listens to 1999 other songs that month (about 5 hours a day of music seems average?) So each owes the artist 1/2000 of their £10 subscription = $0.005 166,666 streamers * $0.005 = £833.33 a month = £10,000 a year.
  - ebg13 6y ago
    If we assume that they'd make more from your (plural) personal 10 than they'd make from their tiny fraction of total revenue, then yes.
    - jonplackett 6y ago
      The whole point of the article is saying 80% of bands only make £200 a year. A band only needs a few hundred fans to easily get above that. Let’s do some math: 100 fans listen to their music only 5% of the time. 100 fans x £10 x 12 months = £12000. Your 5% of their listening gives you £600. 3 X higher than 80% of bands. And with only 100 fans. And only listening to your music 5% of the time!
      - ebg13 6y ago
        Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that I was disagreeing. Yes, I agree with you.
        jonplackett 6y ago
        Haha. Sorry! I though it was a sarcastic yes! It was good to actually work it out anyway for my own peace of mind :)
  - rrobukef 6y ago
    Next somebody will say they need to be weighted according to song-length because the concertos of Vivaldi are much longer than a pop-song. Of course, ultimately, every playthrough must be tracked down to the second. Let the law of large numbers do its work.
    - jonplackett 6y ago
      I know you’re joking, but I believe bands are already gaming it by having loads of short songs. So maybe that is actually fairer!
  - HeyZuess 6y ago
    > In my new system, they now make £10. I am not sure how this works in regards to economies of scale. However all artists are free (except for contractual agreements) to release their art independently and keep the whole pie. Let's take your £10. Now spotify has operational costs, staff salaries, operational costs. How much is your £10 worth now? Well its not actually too hard to work out you could take a look at the balance sheet. But I gather your £10 is worth quite substantially less. This does not include any further cuts like for the record label, song writers, produces, marketing etc. TL;DR; your £10 is not worth £10 if you factor in other overheads.
- pcf 6y ago
  Of course it makes sense – if all of the OP's 10 pounds per month went to the bands he's listening to, they would get his 10 pounds every month. Right now they get almost nothing, because the current model redirects his money to the major labels' biggest artists. Understand?
Aerroon 6y ago
>Spotify should work put who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays. I think this is what YouTube does with their premium subscription service for content creators. You get a chunk of the YouTube premium revenue based on how much people with the premium subscription watched.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  It’s obviously the fair way to do it! Possibly they’re able to do it because there’s more money available there than music streaming?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
majormajor 6y ago
> Spotify should work put who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays. I'm not sure this is really fairer, or practical. Listeners that listen to less music (well, fewer artists at least, but that feels like its often going to correlate) being more valuable feels like it creates weird patterns and incentives. If you only listened to one song in a month, should that band get your full subscription cut? What if you listened to no songs, but didn't cancel? In any case, I imagine there's an aggregate effect where the whole pool of spotify listeners habits ends up being something that approximates a normal distribution and paying per-user vs paying per-stream would end up basically the same. You listen to 40 niche artists one month, 10000 other people listen to 40 popular ones, the popular ones get 10000x the revenue... There are bands with thousands of monthly listeners, and then ones with tens of millions of monthly listeners. The few in the latter bucket are gonna dominate the payouts.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  Basically my opinion is, yeah! Why not? If I only listen to one band, have my money! Why does anyone else deserve it any more than they do? Or if you want Spotify could do it over the year rather than the month so it’s less extreme. I just want my money to go only to bands I listen to. Is that so crazy? If I listen to no music, maybe then it can just go based on my average listening history, or last month. Don’t let a few edge cases put you off a much fairer way of distributing the money in general.
  - enobrev 6y ago
    I have to agree. I'm not sure I understand why any other artist should receive that subscription money if I paid for a service abd only listened to a single artist. The service got their cut. Shouldn't the artist make their money for my listening preference? I clearly would not have paid for that service if that band wasn't there to listen to. Beyond fair, it seems well deserved. The opposite of that is strange to me. Seems akin to buying a record at a record store and having my money go to other artists because people usually buy their records.
hinkley 6y ago
In a similar vein, I'd like to get my company to give money to OSS projects. I'd love to send a minimum of $20 a year to every project we use, and a far larger amount to 1) the ones we enjoy using and 2) the ones that save us the most effort. But that would be writing a lot of checks and a pretty big total overall. What else can you do? A lottery system? Round Robin? 3 years is a long time. Ultimately I think you need a bigger pool, and I have only suspicions what that might look like.
saaaaaam 6y ago
User centric payments are a big debate in the industry just now. Deezer has been trialling this. As some people below have said it may or may not be the answer - the jury is out. Chances are it would have a smallish benefit to smaller musicians, very little impact on the revenues of globally recognised superstars, and almost no change for those in the middle.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  Interesting it’s being explored and thanks for the ‘user centric’ terminology. I just replied this to a comment below. Would like to get your take since you clearly know something about what’s happening. The whole point of the article is saying 80% of bands only make £200 a year. A band only needs a few hundred fans to easily get above that. My attempt at some math: 100 fans listen to a band 5% of the time. 100 fans x £10 x 12 months = £12000. Your 5% of their listening gives them £600. 3 X higher than 80% of bands. And with only 100 fans. And only listening to your music 5% of the time!
  - saaaaaam 6y ago
    A few hundred fans is a LOT though. I think a lot of people outside music significantly underestimate how hard it is to get to “a few hundred fans” and how much time, budget, talent and sheer luck that takes. In real terms acquiring 100 fans - who listen consistently and repeatedly - could easily cost tens of thousands of pounds. Here are some numbers plucked not entirely from thin air: If you’ve got a band of four people who write and record enough music to drop out a new track every six to eight weeks (often required to build momentum and sustained engagement) then you’re probably talking about at least 50-60 hours of their time per track between them - and that’s a pretty conservative estimate going from initial song concept through rehearsal to recording in 15 hours - so four or five sessions per song. In reality it’s probably a lot more unless you are super focused, very talented and work well as a band. If you take average UK wages then that’s a cost of around £920 per track. You’re looking at £10k just to write rehearse and record nine tracks - before any production, mixing, mastering, additional session musicians or anything else. Throw in maybe another £500 for those costs, per track. We are close to £15k now. Add marketing, promo, photography, video, design and everything else you need to maintain a significant presence to attract and maintain engagement from fans and you’re easily looking at a year one total cost of maybe £30,000. Sure you can do all of this yourself - but if so you’re going to have to give up your day job. And marketing and promo of music is HARD with lots of gatekeepers and lots of stuff you can easily get wrong, so it’s going to mean you move slower than hiring in someone who knows what they are doing. Add in a tour - and for a lot of musicians, playing live is the best way to add new fans - and you’re looking at doubling or tripling that. For most artists playing live is a cost until you’re playing headline shows in decent sized venues. If you’re headlining a 500 cap venue where tickets are £12 then there is £6000 on offer. Take off the VAT and there’s £5000. Venue takes 20-30%, promoter a similar amount, there’s maybe £2500 left to pay three bands. Headliner gets the lions share - so maybe £1k. But that’s for at least four people - and likely sound operator and a tour manager/driver all of whom need to travel, sleep and eat. At this stage you probably have an agent taking 15% and a manger taking 20% so there is now maybe £700 to get you and your two crew to the gig, into a hotel, fed and back on the road. You need to pay your sound and you need to pay your tour manager - and you need to hire and fuel one - or more - vehicles. Sound is going to be £150-£200 per day - more if you’ve got complex requirements - and your driver will be similar. So now you’ve got £300 per show for food, beds and fuel for 6 people. You get some cash from selling merch but you have to front those costs. A good night selling 30-40 t-shirts brings you another £500 clear after costs. So for an artist big enough to headline a 20 date tour over six weeks (3 shows a week) in 500 cap venues they are going to walk away from that tour losing £120 a day each for lost wages and then the other out of pocket costs. Could be a loss of £1000 a day unless you’re crashing on floors and eating supermarket meal deals. Your tour just cost you £40k+ 18 months in you’ve spent £100k. Now, sure, after writing that music, effectively promoting it, and building your audience touring you’d have more than 100 fans. You’d hope. Let’s say you’ve got 25,000 monthly listeners on Apple Music who have theoretically shifted to user centric payouts. (I’m choosing Apple Music because they are premium-only so it’s easier to model). Subscription is £9.99. Take off the VAT. Take off Apple’s 30%. There’s £5.82 left to split each month, £70 per year. If you are 10% of your fans listening then you’re getting £7 a year. Your 25,000 fans are bringing you £175k. Your manager gets 20%. To maintain this, your operating costs are something like £100k a year.
kazinator 6y ago
> Spotify should work put who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays. Representation based on number of plays Problem is, suppose you listen to almost nothing but some indie band all month, and you happen to land on Lady Ga Ga just once or twice by accident somehow. Now since proportional representation by number of raw plays has been replaced by number of deduplicated plays tabulated to the artist, £5 goes to Gaga. Squashing repetitions probably won't make much difference, because some people who like unpopular music listen to it repeatedly like crazy, just like people who like popular music. The big stars are not winning due to more plays; it's really due to just being more popular. Suppose every Spotify subscriber streams music 24 hours a day. Then is it still unfair to go by plays? By the way, no mater what, I suspect out of any £10 subscription, something like £9.95 goes to Spotify itself.
- callesgg 6y ago
  The alternative proposal is not to dedup the plays it is to devide the money per user. Also I don’t know the exact amount of money but it is substantially more than 5%. I don’t know where I read it but I have a memory that involves me hearing or reading that Spotify takes about 30%
GuB-42 6y ago
How often do you listen to Spotify? If you listen to smaller indie bands more than the average person listens to Lady Ga Ga, the indies artist you listen to actually get more than £10 worth and Lady Ga Ga gets less. Some people think it is less fair than a "one subscription one vote" system. It is up to debate, but the payment system does not favor celebrities, network effects combined with good marketing do.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  I posted below with some back-of-en-envelope math. It seems obvious to me that anyone with at least a few fans would do better. It doesn’t many fans at all giving them a larger slice of subscription pie to put them over that £200 a month
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  > When I was nine years old, I bought Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby", and I listened to that shit (I'm not joking) like, 250 times in a week. Like a fucking idiot. That's who's listening to this shit. Getting a billion streams in a month. It's fucking nine-year-olds. Our fans have, like, a hundred and fifty albums that they listen to, on a sort of rotation, at least one of them once a month. - Patrick Carney (of The Black Keys) I have no qualms with Spotify's business model: a 30/70 split seems fair. But their incentives are absolutely aligned with the record labels and the huge artists, not the smaller artists. The promise of the golden era of music piracy was that it'd be a force to level the playing field for all artists and give the little guys a fair chance to compete with the bigger guys. Spotify should give a subscriber's money to the artists one listens to. It's not just what's fair; it's common sense, and it would absolutely breathe a new life into the music industry.
jonplackett 6y ago
I’m gonna have one more go at justifying this. Probably just talking to myself at this point... Imagine Spotify only has 2 users. Both pay their £10 a month. One listens to 2 hours a day of their fav band on their commute. The other listens to Taylor Swift on repeat 18 hours a day. Current system, Taylor swift gets £18 and the other band gets £2. Use centric version I’m suggesting, both get £10, just as they would if it had been a CD they were listening to. This seems more fair to me.
- deleted 6y ago
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Guthur 6y ago
You're a sample size of one and so you really think that's representative of Spotify as a whole?
topranks 6y ago
As far as I’m aware Deezer does just what you’re suggesting.
yread 6y ago
It's funny you mention Lady Ga Ga, there was an uproar around her back in 2007, that she only gets 170$ out of a million plays. I'm not sure how many millions are there in your "100 bazillion" listens, but it could be she is also not earning a significant percentage of her income through Spotify https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/spotify-1-million-plays-108-return-1944051.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/...

coliveira 6y ago

sorry, but I don't think what you're proposing makes sense. The same way you're listening to small bands, millions of people are listening to the #1 hits. The result would be the same, the big names getting millions and small bands getting a few bucks.

jonplackett 6y ago
Thought experiment. Imagine I only listen to one song in one month by one band who currently make ~0 on Spotify. In my new system, they now make £10.
- fireflies_ 6y ago
  Sounds like this only works if people who listen to smaller bands/indie music listen to fewer songs on average. I'm not sure if this is true. People who find themselves exploring niche tastes are probably "enthusiasts" who do more listening and listen more broadly.
  - mortenjorck 6y ago
    It's all hypotheticals until there's some data. You could just as easily have an enthusiast who finds a few new indie albums per month and listens to them all the way through, or someone who leaves a top-40 playlist on in the background.
    - jonplackett 6y ago
      From the article: 82 per cent of respondents earned less than £200 from streaming in 2019, including some with “millions” of streams. This just could not happen with what I’m suggesting. Example: The band above, which earned < £200 must have at least 2 million streams a year = 166,666 a month For simplicity let’s assume each of those 166,666 streams is a unique user. Each also listens to 1999 other songs that month (about 5 hours a day of music seems average?) So each owes the artist 1/2000 of their £10 subscription = $0.005 166,666 streamers * $0.005 = £833.33 a month = £10,000 a year.
- ebg13 6y ago
  If we assume that they'd make more from your (plural) personal 10 than they'd make from their tiny fraction of total revenue, then yes.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    The whole point of the article is saying 80% of bands only make £200 a year. A band only needs a few hundred fans to easily get above that. Let’s do some math: 100 fans listen to their music only 5% of the time. 100 fans x £10 x 12 months = £12000. Your 5% of their listening gives you £600. 3 X higher than 80% of bands. And with only 100 fans. And only listening to your music 5% of the time!
    - ebg13 6y ago
      Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that I was disagreeing. Yes, I agree with you.
      - jonplackett 6y ago
        Haha. Sorry! I though it was a sarcastic yes! It was good to actually work it out anyway for my own peace of mind :)
- rrobukef 6y ago
  Next somebody will say they need to be weighted according to song-length because the concertos of Vivaldi are much longer than a pop-song. Of course, ultimately, every playthrough must be tracked down to the second. Let the law of large numbers do its work.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    I know you’re joking, but I believe bands are already gaming it by having loads of short songs. So maybe that is actually fairer!
- HeyZuess 6y ago
  > In my new system, they now make £10. I am not sure how this works in regards to economies of scale. However all artists are free (except for contractual agreements) to release their art independently and keep the whole pie. Let's take your £10. Now spotify has operational costs, staff salaries, operational costs. How much is your £10 worth now? Well its not actually too hard to work out you could take a look at the balance sheet. But I gather your £10 is worth quite substantially less. This does not include any further cuts like for the record label, song writers, produces, marketing etc. TL;DR; your £10 is not worth £10 if you factor in other overheads.
pcf 6y ago
Of course it makes sense – if all of the OP's 10 pounds per month went to the bands he's listening to, they would get his 10 pounds every month. Right now they get almost nothing, because the current model redirects his money to the major labels' biggest artists. Understand?

Aerroon 6y ago

>Spotify should work put who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays. I think this is what YouTube does with their premium subscription service for content creators. You get a chunk of the YouTube premium revenue based on how much people with the premium subscription watched.

jonplackett 6y ago
It’s obviously the fair way to do it! Possibly they’re able to do it because there’s more money available there than music streaming?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

majormajor 6y ago

> Spotify should work put who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays. I'm not sure this is really fairer, or practical. Listeners that listen to less music (well, fewer artists at least, but that feels like its often going to correlate) being more valuable feels like it creates weird patterns and incentives. If you only listened to one song in a month, should that band get your full subscription cut? What if you listened to no songs, but didn't cancel? In any case, I imagine there's an aggregate effect where the whole pool of spotify listeners habits ends up being something that approximates a normal distribution and paying per-user vs paying per-stream would end up basically the same. You listen to 40 niche artists one month, 10000 other people listen to 40 popular ones, the popular ones get 10000x the revenue... There are bands with thousands of monthly listeners, and then ones with tens of millions of monthly listeners. The few in the latter bucket are gonna dominate the payouts.

jonplackett 6y ago
Basically my opinion is, yeah! Why not? If I only listen to one band, have my money! Why does anyone else deserve it any more than they do? Or if you want Spotify could do it over the year rather than the month so it’s less extreme. I just want my money to go only to bands I listen to. Is that so crazy? If I listen to no music, maybe then it can just go based on my average listening history, or last month. Don’t let a few edge cases put you off a much fairer way of distributing the money in general.
- enobrev 6y ago
  I have to agree. I'm not sure I understand why any other artist should receive that subscription money if I paid for a service abd only listened to a single artist. The service got their cut. Shouldn't the artist make their money for my listening preference? I clearly would not have paid for that service if that band wasn't there to listen to. Beyond fair, it seems well deserved. The opposite of that is strange to me. Seems akin to buying a record at a record store and having my money go to other artists because people usually buy their records.

hinkley 6y ago

In a similar vein, I'd like to get my company to give money to OSS projects. I'd love to send a minimum of $20 a year to every project we use, and a far larger amount to 1) the ones we enjoy using and 2) the ones that save us the most effort. But that would be writing a lot of checks and a pretty big total overall. What else can you do? A lottery system? Round Robin? 3 years is a long time. Ultimately I think you need a bigger pool, and I have only suspicions what that might look like.

saaaaaam 6y ago

User centric payments are a big debate in the industry just now. Deezer has been trialling this. As some people below have said it may or may not be the answer - the jury is out. Chances are it would have a smallish benefit to smaller musicians, very little impact on the revenues of globally recognised superstars, and almost no change for those in the middle.

jonplackett 6y ago
Interesting it’s being explored and thanks for the ‘user centric’ terminology. I just replied this to a comment below. Would like to get your take since you clearly know something about what’s happening. The whole point of the article is saying 80% of bands only make £200 a year. A band only needs a few hundred fans to easily get above that. My attempt at some math: 100 fans listen to a band 5% of the time. 100 fans x £10 x 12 months = £12000. Your 5% of their listening gives them £600. 3 X higher than 80% of bands. And with only 100 fans. And only listening to your music 5% of the time!
- saaaaaam 6y ago
  A few hundred fans is a LOT though. I think a lot of people outside music significantly underestimate how hard it is to get to “a few hundred fans” and how much time, budget, talent and sheer luck that takes. In real terms acquiring 100 fans - who listen consistently and repeatedly - could easily cost tens of thousands of pounds. Here are some numbers plucked not entirely from thin air: If you’ve got a band of four people who write and record enough music to drop out a new track every six to eight weeks (often required to build momentum and sustained engagement) then you’re probably talking about at least 50-60 hours of their time per track between them - and that’s a pretty conservative estimate going from initial song concept through rehearsal to recording in 15 hours - so four or five sessions per song. In reality it’s probably a lot more unless you are super focused, very talented and work well as a band. If you take average UK wages then that’s a cost of around £920 per track. You’re looking at £10k just to write rehearse and record nine tracks - before any production, mixing, mastering, additional session musicians or anything else. Throw in maybe another £500 for those costs, per track. We are close to £15k now. Add marketing, promo, photography, video, design and everything else you need to maintain a significant presence to attract and maintain engagement from fans and you’re easily looking at a year one total cost of maybe £30,000. Sure you can do all of this yourself - but if so you’re going to have to give up your day job. And marketing and promo of music is HARD with lots of gatekeepers and lots of stuff you can easily get wrong, so it’s going to mean you move slower than hiring in someone who knows what they are doing. Add in a tour - and for a lot of musicians, playing live is the best way to add new fans - and you’re looking at doubling or tripling that. For most artists playing live is a cost until you’re playing headline shows in decent sized venues. If you’re headlining a 500 cap venue where tickets are £12 then there is £6000 on offer. Take off the VAT and there’s £5000. Venue takes 20-30%, promoter a similar amount, there’s maybe £2500 left to pay three bands. Headliner gets the lions share - so maybe £1k. But that’s for at least four people - and likely sound operator and a tour manager/driver all of whom need to travel, sleep and eat. At this stage you probably have an agent taking 15% and a manger taking 20% so there is now maybe £700 to get you and your two crew to the gig, into a hotel, fed and back on the road. You need to pay your sound and you need to pay your tour manager - and you need to hire and fuel one - or more - vehicles. Sound is going to be £150-£200 per day - more if you’ve got complex requirements - and your driver will be similar. So now you’ve got £300 per show for food, beds and fuel for 6 people. You get some cash from selling merch but you have to front those costs. A good night selling 30-40 t-shirts brings you another £500 clear after costs. So for an artist big enough to headline a 20 date tour over six weeks (3 shows a week) in 500 cap venues they are going to walk away from that tour losing £120 a day each for lost wages and then the other out of pocket costs. Could be a loss of £1000 a day unless you’re crashing on floors and eating supermarket meal deals. Your tour just cost you £40k+ 18 months in you’ve spent £100k. Now, sure, after writing that music, effectively promoting it, and building your audience touring you’d have more than 100 fans. You’d hope. Let’s say you’ve got 25,000 monthly listeners on Apple Music who have theoretically shifted to user centric payouts. (I’m choosing Apple Music because they are premium-only so it’s easier to model). Subscription is £9.99. Take off the VAT. Take off Apple’s 30%. There’s £5.82 left to split each month, £70 per year. If you are 10% of your fans listening then you’re getting £7 a year. Your 25,000 fans are bringing you £175k. Your manager gets 20%. To maintain this, your operating costs are something like £100k a year.

kazinator 6y ago

> Spotify should work put who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays. Representation based on number of plays Problem is, suppose you listen to almost nothing but some indie band all month, and you happen to land on Lady Ga Ga just once or twice by accident somehow. Now since proportional representation by number of raw plays has been replaced by number of deduplicated plays tabulated to the artist, £5 goes to Gaga. Squashing repetitions probably won't make much difference, because some people who like unpopular music listen to it repeatedly like crazy, just like people who like popular music. The big stars are not winning due to more plays; it's really due to just being more popular. Suppose every Spotify subscriber streams music 24 hours a day. Then is it still unfair to go by plays? By the way, no mater what, I suspect out of any £10 subscription, something like £9.95 goes to Spotify itself.

callesgg 6y ago
The alternative proposal is not to dedup the plays it is to devide the money per user. Also I don’t know the exact amount of money but it is substantially more than 5%. I don’t know where I read it but I have a memory that involves me hearing or reading that Spotify takes about 30%

GuB-42 6y ago

How often do you listen to Spotify? If you listen to smaller indie bands more than the average person listens to Lady Ga Ga, the indies artist you listen to actually get more than £10 worth and Lady Ga Ga gets less. Some people think it is less fair than a "one subscription one vote" system. It is up to debate, but the payment system does not favor celebrities, network effects combined with good marketing do.

jonplackett 6y ago
I posted below with some back-of-en-envelope math. It seems obvious to me that anyone with at least a few fans would do better. It doesn’t many fans at all giving them a larger slice of subscription pie to put them over that £200 a month
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
> When I was nine years old, I bought Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby", and I listened to that shit (I'm not joking) like, 250 times in a week. Like a fucking idiot. That's who's listening to this shit. Getting a billion streams in a month. It's fucking nine-year-olds. Our fans have, like, a hundred and fifty albums that they listen to, on a sort of rotation, at least one of them once a month. - Patrick Carney (of The Black Keys) I have no qualms with Spotify's business model: a 30/70 split seems fair. But their incentives are absolutely aligned with the record labels and the huge artists, not the smaller artists. The promise of the golden era of music piracy was that it'd be a force to level the playing field for all artists and give the little guys a fair chance to compete with the bigger guys. Spotify should give a subscriber's money to the artists one listens to. It's not just what's fair; it's common sense, and it would absolutely breathe a new life into the music industry.

jonplackett 6y ago

I’m gonna have one more go at justifying this. Probably just talking to myself at this point... Imagine Spotify only has 2 users. Both pay their £10 a month. One listens to 2 hours a day of their fav band on their commute. The other listens to Taylor Swift on repeat 18 hours a day. Current system, Taylor swift gets £18 and the other band gets £2. Use centric version I’m suggesting, both get £10, just as they would if it had been a CD they were listening to. This seems more fair to me.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Guthur 6y ago

You're a sample size of one and so you really think that's representative of Spotify as a whole?

topranks 6y ago

As far as I’m aware Deezer does just what you’re suggesting.

yread 6y ago

It's funny you mention Lady Ga Ga, there was an uproar around her back in 2007, that she only gets 170$ out of a million plays. I'm not sure how many millions are there in your "100 bazillion" listens, but it could be she is also not earning a significant percentage of her income through Spotify https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/spotify-1-million-plays-108-return-1944051.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/...