3 ms·

> 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

> 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!".

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!".