4 ms·

If there's two groups of people, one who listens to pop music for 10 hours a month and one who listens who indie artists for 20 hours a month (which could easil

If there's two groups of people, one who listens to pop music for 10 hours a month and one who listens who indie artists for 20 hours a month (which could easily be the case if their recommended playlists are mostly indie artists as mine is), then switching to the model you propose would reduce how much money indie artists make, right? It seems more fair to me that artists would get a set amount of money per stream, rather than the amount they get being dependent on how many other songs their listeners listened to.

mikepurvis 6y ago
I think the argument is not that it's the 10 vs 20 hour listeners, but rather the 10-40 hour listeners (workday) vs the 700 hour listeners (radio playing in the corner of a breakroom somewhere). The 700 hour listener has no audience and no human curation, and yet it's got 10x the influence on who gets paid by Spotify. The article I linked also makes a really good point about this model motivating artists to encourage listeners/fans to listen to whole albums rather than single songs— right now if you're playing Spotify for revenue, the only thing that matters is landing your songs on popular playlists where they will get hundreds of thousands of passive plays. The incentives there are not really aligned to what anyone wants long term out of music.
- babelfish 6y ago
  Right, but artists don't care whether you're listening to their music actively or passively. Whether you stream 10-20 hours or 700 hours, 1 stream is 1 stream. I don't see why this should affect the payout
- edoceo 6y ago
  Doesn't Spotify say "don't play at work"? Seems it shouldn't be on in the break room
- Closi 6y ago
  It’s not inherently clear to me that one play should be paid more than another play. In fact, having a different fee per play dependent on the user is a pretty opaque and unclear metric. “How much are 1 million plays worth? It depends on your audience - if your listeners listen to lots of music you get paid less per play, and you will just have to trust us to compute an appropriate fee for you correctly.” No matter how you cut these things there are pluses and minuses . You seem to think that Universal should get paid less for a single Katy Perry stream played from a global playlist compared to a small indie song streamed in a private playlist, and while that’s a valid opinion it’s not intrinsic or even self evident to me.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    I don't think it would be that hard to show a small histogram which had your plays bucketed across different levels of commitment, engagement or some similar metric. Or instead of doing it that way, you'd bucket the users, so say "for song X, you had 30k unique users listen to it in the royalty time period, and here's a histogram of how engaged they were, with the left side being a small number of users who listened to it a lot or didn't listen to much else, and the right side being the large pool of users who heard it once and listened to many other things. The reason this is good for artists is that it rewards them for what many want to be cultivating anyway: a relationship with enthusiastic fans, rather than faceless "plays" which could have come from anywhere. In any case, obviously the conversation is DOA if you start it from a foundational assumption that "a play is a play", but if we acknowledge upfront that artist compensation has always been weird and often quite unfair (see radio royalties, for example— they sure as hell aren't getting compensated by how many people were tuned into a radio station playing their song), then there's room to discuss better options in a new medium that sits somewhere in between the old roles filled by FM radio and private collections of physical media.
    - Closi 6y ago
      > In any case, obviously the conversation is DOA if you start it from a foundational assumption that "a play is a play" That's not my foundational assumption, but I've also not heard a compelling argument that one play / minute streamed should be inherently more valuable than another play / minute streamed. It's also not clear how this value would be calculated, because I also don't think it's clear that proportion of listen time by user necessarily captures the difference in 'value' of one play against another. It also feels like it will be very complex to negotiate with rights providers. Spotify's current negotiations with rights providers are really simple and easy to understand - we divvy up our revenue by play count, you are responsible for $x revenue by this metric, so let's negotiate the %. Moving all providers to another weird metric would be an extremely tough thing to do, particularly because having half on one and half on another would likely happen for a crossover, and would result in a loss of profit during the transition period.
      - 6y ago

mikepurvis 6y ago

I think the argument is not that it's the 10 vs 20 hour listeners, but rather the 10-40 hour listeners (workday) vs the 700 hour listeners (radio playing in the corner of a breakroom somewhere). The 700 hour listener has no audience and no human curation, and yet it's got 10x the influence on who gets paid by Spotify. The article I linked also makes a really good point about this model motivating artists to encourage listeners/fans to listen to whole albums rather than single songs— right now if you're playing Spotify for revenue, the only thing that matters is landing your songs on popular playlists where they will get hundreds of thousands of passive plays. The incentives there are not really aligned to what anyone wants long term out of music.

babelfish 6y ago
Right, but artists don't care whether you're listening to their music actively or passively. Whether you stream 10-20 hours or 700 hours, 1 stream is 1 stream. I don't see why this should affect the payout
edoceo 6y ago
Doesn't Spotify say "don't play at work"? Seems it shouldn't be on in the break room
Closi 6y ago
It’s not inherently clear to me that one play should be paid more than another play. In fact, having a different fee per play dependent on the user is a pretty opaque and unclear metric. “How much are 1 million plays worth? It depends on your audience - if your listeners listen to lots of music you get paid less per play, and you will just have to trust us to compute an appropriate fee for you correctly.” No matter how you cut these things there are pluses and minuses . You seem to think that Universal should get paid less for a single Katy Perry stream played from a global playlist compared to a small indie song streamed in a private playlist, and while that’s a valid opinion it’s not intrinsic or even self evident to me.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I don't think it would be that hard to show a small histogram which had your plays bucketed across different levels of commitment, engagement or some similar metric. Or instead of doing it that way, you'd bucket the users, so say "for song X, you had 30k unique users listen to it in the royalty time period, and here's a histogram of how engaged they were, with the left side being a small number of users who listened to it a lot or didn't listen to much else, and the right side being the large pool of users who heard it once and listened to many other things. The reason this is good for artists is that it rewards them for what many want to be cultivating anyway: a relationship with enthusiastic fans, rather than faceless "plays" which could have come from anywhere. In any case, obviously the conversation is DOA if you start it from a foundational assumption that "a play is a play", but if we acknowledge upfront that artist compensation has always been weird and often quite unfair (see radio royalties, for example— they sure as hell aren't getting compensated by how many people were tuned into a radio station playing their song), then there's room to discuss better options in a new medium that sits somewhere in between the old roles filled by FM radio and private collections of physical media.
  - Closi 6y ago
    > In any case, obviously the conversation is DOA if you start it from a foundational assumption that "a play is a play" That's not my foundational assumption, but I've also not heard a compelling argument that one play / minute streamed should be inherently more valuable than another play / minute streamed. It's also not clear how this value would be calculated, because I also don't think it's clear that proportion of listen time by user necessarily captures the difference in 'value' of one play against another. It also feels like it will be very complex to negotiate with rights providers. Spotify's current negotiations with rights providers are really simple and easy to understand - we divvy up our revenue by play count, you are responsible for $x revenue by this metric, so let's negotiate the %. Moving all providers to another weird metric would be an extremely tough thing to do, particularly because having half on one and half on another would likely happen for a crossover, and would result in a loss of profit during the transition period.
    - 6y ago