3 ms·

> the majority of that money just goes to Spotify Last I checked, Spotify's cut is 30%. That's a lot, but even with a significant error it's nowhere near the "

by hansvm 6y ago

> the majority of that money just goes to Spotify Last I checked, Spotify's cut is 30%. That's a lot, but even with a significant error it's nowhere near the "majority." > If, every month, you paid 10€ to a random artist you liked (or split 10€ between all of them), the artists would receive probably more than two orders of magnitude more money. That's a function of how popular your favorite artists are and how much you listen to them. No matter how unknown they are, if you listen to an average number of streams per month then they'll get at least 70% of your 10€/mo -- a far cry from two orders of magnitude. If your favorite artists are much above average popularity then they'll make more with the Spotify arrangement than if you gave them cash even if you don't listen to them at all. There's still a kernel of truth in what you're pointing out -- at some point in the fairly recent past you had to buy the music outright no matter how often you would listen to it, so if there exists a long tail of musicians who aren't listened to much but whose music would have been paid for in a record/tape/CD/itunes market (and I suspect there does) then Spotify is going to be much worse for them.

tasogare 6y ago
> L ast I checked, Spotify's cut is 30%. That's a lot, but even with a significant error it's nowhere near the "majority." It is in fact way way more than the majority because the remaining is split among artists while the cut is kept in totally by Spotify. Spotify is taking 3€ while any given artist would get a few cents at best.
- mannerheim 6y ago
  A majority is more than half.
- hansvm 6y ago
  Kind of, but that's an artifact of not holding enough variables constant. If you were going to distribute $7 in cash to N artists then that's functionally equivalent to distributing $10 to Spotify and watching those N artists equally up to an average number of streams per month. The few main reasons that model isn't quite perfect are: - You probably watch more artists via Spotify than you would via other methods, so each individual artist is paid less. Note this is less of an issue than it seems because on average there will be proportionally more people watching each of those artists. - Artists may have cut other deals so they're getting much less than the 70% being distributed to "not Spotify." Note this isn't much different from pre-spotify, but it's a real effect. - Something I left out completely in my original comment is that you very well might be paying less per month to Spotify than you would for other forms of media. I vaguely recall a stat saying that the opposite has happened mildly (but we pay a lot less for merchandise), but my memory is fuzzy on that point, so somebody who knows more should step in. That isn't to say that Spotify is better for all artists (it's not), better for most artists (given typical pareto distributions my gut says that's probably also false), or that it's a "net positive" in some ill-defined way (maybe, maybe not, that's not an argument I want to try to make) -- just that Spotify's payment model isn't super complicated or super unfair at a macroscopic level, and it's super easy to construct reasonable scenarios where your dollars would have more positive impact on artists via Spotify than if you just paid those artists cash.
- dTal 6y ago
  Ouch. So 30% per subscriber, not 30% per artist which is what we would usually mean by a cut. A classic instance of "two for you two, and two for me, too!".
squeaky-clean 6y ago
> No matter how unknown they are, if you listen to an average number of streams per month then they'll get at least 70% of your 10€/mo From what I understand the number of listens that month is pooled globally/in buckets for the purpose of distribution. So if you listen to your friend's band once and nothing else, and someone plays a 31 second song on repeat 83612x over 30 days nonstop, your friend's band gets {{payout rate}}*1. And the other artist gets {{payout rate}}*83612. Rather than both artists getting ~70% of their listener's $10 subscription. And then the payout rate is a bit complicated because it comes from a variety of buckets. Some regions earn more/less than others, some account types (free trial, free with ads, family plan) earn less than others. Some specific labels or artists even get their own special buckets. 30% take overall is still correct. If you check their 2020 Q4 "Cost of Revenue" was about 73.5%, which is almost entirely royalties. In practice though, I don't think it matters too much. I don't think many people listen to one artist exclusively. Or if they do, it's probably a pop or children's music artist getting many streams already. But in the rare case of some person listen to one specific relatively unknown artist as most of their streaming, I'm pretty certain that artist does not receive an equal majority of that subscriber's money.
- hansvm 6y ago
  > From what I understand the number of listens that month is pooled globally/in buckets for the purpose of distribution. Yep, exactly. Views are pooled per stream rather than per artist, which is its own can of worms (I mentioned that somewhere in this thread), but if you watch an "average" amount that already accounts for such an artifact. At least 70% of your contributions go to the artists you listen to in such a scenario (that money has to come from somewhere; many artists _don't_ get paid much). > And then the payout rate is a bit complicated because it comes from a variety of buckets. Yep, that's why I simplified it as much as possible in the context of the net effect of your personal actions. Your paid listens will impact one bucket and not the others, and that allows them to be safely ignored when evaluating the difference in an artist's pay with you watching them on Spotify or just giving them cash. > In practice though, I don't think it matters too much. I don't think many people listen to one artist exclusively. This is a point I'm seeing crop up a lot, not just from you. I think we might be talking past each other; I'll lay out why I don't think that matters, and I'm curious to know what you think. In particular, if you're comparing spending X per month on Spotify or spending X per month on other forms of music, in both scenarios you would be splitting that between the artists you actually care about. I'm pretty sure people spend more per month on music than they used to (still haven't found the original source, so maybe that idea is wrong), so IMO it doesn't make sense when comparing Spotify to alternatives to point out that in _both_ instances your money doesn't all go to one artist. There is a point to be made that you'll probably listen to a broader variety of artists through Spotify than otherwise (why not? that's one of their core value propositions), so your individual X payment is split further than it would have been. However, everyone else is listening to more people too, and on average assuming everyone listens to the same distribution of music as in a pre-Spotify world those effects actually cancel out. There is still an open question of whether that distribution is the same -- does there exist a pool of artists being listened to via Spotify who would rarely have their music purchased otherwise? My gut says "yes," but I don't actually know. Is it a bad thing for those artists to be paid?

by hansvm 6y ago

tasogare 6y ago

> L ast I checked, Spotify's cut is 30%. That's a lot, but even with a significant error it's nowhere near the "majority." It is in fact way way more than the majority because the remaining is split among artists while the cut is kept in totally by Spotify. Spotify is taking 3€ while any given artist would get a few cents at best.

mannerheim 6y ago
A majority is more than half.
hansvm 6y ago
Kind of, but that's an artifact of not holding enough variables constant. If you were going to distribute $7 in cash to N artists then that's functionally equivalent to distributing $10 to Spotify and watching those N artists equally up to an average number of streams per month. The few main reasons that model isn't quite perfect are: - You probably watch more artists via Spotify than you would via other methods, so each individual artist is paid less. Note this is less of an issue than it seems because on average there will be proportionally more people watching each of those artists. - Artists may have cut other deals so they're getting much less than the 70% being distributed to "not Spotify." Note this isn't much different from pre-spotify, but it's a real effect. - Something I left out completely in my original comment is that you very well might be paying less per month to Spotify than you would for other forms of media. I vaguely recall a stat saying that the opposite has happened mildly (but we pay a lot less for merchandise), but my memory is fuzzy on that point, so somebody who knows more should step in. That isn't to say that Spotify is better for all artists (it's not), better for most artists (given typical pareto distributions my gut says that's probably also false), or that it's a "net positive" in some ill-defined way (maybe, maybe not, that's not an argument I want to try to make) -- just that Spotify's payment model isn't super complicated or super unfair at a macroscopic level, and it's super easy to construct reasonable scenarios where your dollars would have more positive impact on artists via Spotify than if you just paid those artists cash.
dTal 6y ago
Ouch. So 30% per subscriber, not 30% per artist which is what we would usually mean by a cut. A classic instance of "two for you two, and two for me, too!".

squeaky-clean 6y ago

> No matter how unknown they are, if you listen to an average number of streams per month then they'll get at least 70% of your 10€/mo From what I understand the number of listens that month is pooled globally/in buckets for the purpose of distribution. So if you listen to your friend's band once and nothing else, and someone plays a 31 second song on repeat 83612x over 30 days nonstop, your friend's band gets {{payout rate}}*1. And the other artist gets {{payout rate}}*83612. Rather than both artists getting ~70% of their listener's $10 subscription. And then the payout rate is a bit complicated because it comes from a variety of buckets. Some regions earn more/less than others, some account types (free trial, free with ads, family plan) earn less than others. Some specific labels or artists even get their own special buckets. 30% take overall is still correct. If you check their 2020 Q4 "Cost of Revenue" was about 73.5%, which is almost entirely royalties. In practice though, I don't think it matters too much. I don't think many people listen to one artist exclusively. Or if they do, it's probably a pop or children's music artist getting many streams already. But in the rare case of some person listen to one specific relatively unknown artist as most of their streaming, I'm pretty certain that artist does not receive an equal majority of that subscriber's money.

hansvm 6y ago
> From what I understand the number of listens that month is pooled globally/in buckets for the purpose of distribution. Yep, exactly. Views are pooled per stream rather than per artist, which is its own can of worms (I mentioned that somewhere in this thread), but if you watch an "average" amount that already accounts for such an artifact. At least 70% of your contributions go to the artists you listen to in such a scenario (that money has to come from somewhere; many artists _don't_ get paid much). > And then the payout rate is a bit complicated because it comes from a variety of buckets. Yep, that's why I simplified it as much as possible in the context of the net effect of your personal actions. Your paid listens will impact one bucket and not the others, and that allows them to be safely ignored when evaluating the difference in an artist's pay with you watching them on Spotify or just giving them cash. > In practice though, I don't think it matters too much. I don't think many people listen to one artist exclusively. This is a point I'm seeing crop up a lot, not just from you. I think we might be talking past each other; I'll lay out why I don't think that matters, and I'm curious to know what you think. In particular, if you're comparing spending X per month on Spotify or spending X per month on other forms of music, in both scenarios you would be splitting that between the artists you actually care about. I'm pretty sure people spend more per month on music than they used to (still haven't found the original source, so maybe that idea is wrong), so IMO it doesn't make sense when comparing Spotify to alternatives to point out that in _both_ instances your money doesn't all go to one artist. There is a point to be made that you'll probably listen to a broader variety of artists through Spotify than otherwise (why not? that's one of their core value propositions), so your individual X payment is split further than it would have been. However, everyone else is listening to more people too, and on average assuming everyone listens to the same distribution of music as in a pre-Spotify world those effects actually cancel out. There is still an open question of whether that distribution is the same -- does there exist a pool of artists being listened to via Spotify who would rarely have their music purchased otherwise? My gut says "yes," but I don't actually know. Is it a bad thing for those artists to be paid?