4 ms·

Paul McCartney and Kate Bush lead call for change to music streaming payments

9 points by chalst 5y ago

andytheant 5y ago
Probably an unpopular opinion but... Making and distributing music to masses of people has never been cheaper / easier. Making music is easier due to availablility of software and equipment. Distribution is easy because of platforms such as Spotify, Soundcloud... and so on. Musicians struggling to make money from people listening to their music digitally might be related to the enormous available supply. If I never get to listen to X bands / artists music, then I'll get to listen to someone elses and will likely never even realise X band or artist existed. Most musicians I listen to have been introduced to me via the mediums I use to digest music. When I was younger, TV and radio, now mainly Spotify and different playlists I subscribe to.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  So to you, polka is the same as Top 40. Got it. Also, learn to edit your own posts. I had to read your wall of text 3 times to understand what your point was, if any.
- hashkb 5y ago
  Just to clarify: you think it's fair that less than 20% of what you pay to Spotify goes to artists?
  - aNoob7000 5y ago
    How much money was Jay-Z's Tidal paying artists? I think music streaming is a low margin business that is only successful at a large scale. Why doesn't Paul McCartney, who's extremely wealthy, spin up a music app to stream his stuff and ask people to pay for it? Because he wouldn't make any money from after setting up the infrastructure, marketing it, paying people, etc...
    - hashkb 5y ago
      Phish did that. I pay them. They're objectively the highest paid independent artists ever.
  - prepend 5y ago
    Isn’t that the highest amount ever paid when compared to radio, cd, etc. I think the difference is that it’s distributed uniformly to all artists as opposed to CDs where Paul and Kate got high percentages but almost all others got zero. So the percent paid is higher as far as gross in, gross to artists. But the outlier rates are lower because there’s no special contracts. I guess an equivalent is how much is the total ad revenue for radio vs what’s paid to artists (not labels). Or the total revenue made from music retailers CS what’s paid to artists. The novelty with streaming is there aren’t tons of steps and indirections.

9 points by chalst 5y ago

Probably an unpopular opinion but... Making and distributing music to masses of people has never been cheaper / easier. Making music is easier due to availablility of software and equipment. Distribution is easy because of platforms such as Spotify, Soundcloud... and so on. Musicians struggling to make money from people listening to their music digitally might be related to the enormous available supply. If I never get to listen to X bands / artists music, then I'll get to listen to someone elses and will likely never even realise X band or artist existed. Most musicians I listen to have been introduced to me via the mediums I use to digest music. When I was younger, TV and radio, now mainly Spotify and different playlists I subscribe to.

redis_mlc 5y ago
So to you, polka is the same as Top 40. Got it. Also, learn to edit your own posts. I had to read your wall of text 3 times to understand what your point was, if any.
hashkb 5y ago
Just to clarify: you think it's fair that less than 20% of what you pay to Spotify goes to artists?
- aNoob7000 5y ago
  How much money was Jay-Z's Tidal paying artists? I think music streaming is a low margin business that is only successful at a large scale. Why doesn't Paul McCartney, who's extremely wealthy, spin up a music app to stream his stuff and ask people to pay for it? Because he wouldn't make any money from after setting up the infrastructure, marketing it, paying people, etc...
  - hashkb 5y ago
    Phish did that. I pay them. They're objectively the highest paid independent artists ever.
- prepend 5y ago
  Isn’t that the highest amount ever paid when compared to radio, cd, etc. I think the difference is that it’s distributed uniformly to all artists as opposed to CDs where Paul and Kate got high percentages but almost all others got zero. So the percent paid is higher as far as gross in, gross to artists. But the outlier rates are lower because there’s no special contracts. I guess an equivalent is how much is the total ad revenue for radio vs what’s paid to artists (not labels). Or the total revenue made from music retailers CS what’s paid to artists. The novelty with streaming is there aren’t tons of steps and indirections.