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Thank Spotify: people who pirate music has dropped by 25% in Sweden
- wccrawford 15y agoWait, you mean people really are willing to pay for things when they are priced correctly? Imagine that!
- TeMPOraL 15y agoWow, even when they're easy to buy and use? How is this possible!
- pyrmont 15y agoYeah! Screw you, musicians that want to earn minimum wage! http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...
- cageface 15y agoI hope programmers are so sanguine when their work is "correctly" priced into oblivion. I do think that subscription services are the wave of the future but I don't see how you can argue that Spotify helps artists.
- TeMPOraL 15y agoNot-much-$ is still better than none-$-at-all. It's not exactly the choice of Spotify vs. buy a CD in shop, it's a choice between Spotify and BitTorrent.
- 12334454 15y agoThat does not make it the correct price. The correct price pays back the production cost (including paying for the time and creativity of the artist in making up the song) and adds some profit. Get that from volume or high price but low price is not correct price.
- WettowelReactor 15y agoThe correct price is what consumers are willing to pay for not what you think your profit margin should be.
- cageface 15y agoUnless you want to see the product disappear from the market, the "correct" price must also compensate the production costs and provide for a little profit for the author. Thanks to digital piracy the price many customers are willing to pay falls far short of that mark. If stealing physical goods was as easy as stealing digital goods you'd see the "correct" price of a car far fall below what it costs to make it too.
- WettowelReactor 15y agoExcept I have a plethora of buying cars and plenty of dealers willing to take my money. In the digital space a considerable amount of piracy is due to no legally available outlet for purchase of digital goods in a manner commiserate with what users want. Look at the success of iTunes and spotify as filling consumer needs. Besides if the price consumers are willing to pay for your product does not cover its production costs then you have no market (i.e. product)
- nate_meurer 15y agoYou appear to be using your own definition. Correct pricing, in an economic sense, is that which an undistorted market will bear, using whatever definition of "undistorted" you like. It's that simple.
- cabalamat 15y ago> using whatever definition of "undistorted" you like My definition includes the absence of violence, threats of violence, or dishonesty. If the only reason people aren't using BitTorrent downloads is threats of violence (which is what threats of internet disconnection are, albeit at several levels removed), then it isn't a free/undistorted market.
- chrischen 15y agoIt is a choice between buy a CD in a shop, itunes, or Spotify. Especially if you pay for spotify, why pay again for the same music?
- tintin 15y agoIt's all about volume. Some money made on Spotify, some by selling CDs, some by concerts, some by merchandise. And there is ofcourse exposure.
- jsavimbi 15y agoTwo words: Don McLean. All moneys made off of one song. From 1971. Sonnofabitxch.
- dlikhten 15y agoAnd we want to prevent that. Just because it benefits ONE guy or one small group, does not mean its a good idea. It just means that one guy will suffer and have to actually work for a living while the rest of us have a chance.
- nate_meurer 15y agoIn my experience, the software industry is a bit more open to the idea that business models will need to adapt to the realities of the internet age. And yes, many of us are quite sanguine about it.
- cabalamat 15y ago> I hope programmers are so sanguine when their work is "correctly" priced into oblivion. On the whole, I think they are. I haven't heard anyone here (or anywhere else) complain that hardly anyone bought their iPhone app that they put a lot of effort into.
- cageface 15y agoI hear programmers constantly lamenting outsourcing, undercutting by cheap contractors on Elance, cheap & shoddy work done by consulting companies etc. Your iPhone analogy is poor because what Spotify is doing is displacing an existing, profitable product with an unprofitable (for the artist) product. Maybe it's inevitable but it's churlish to so smugly call it "correct". I remain skeptical that programmers will be so happy to see their livelihood "disrupted" when and if it happens to the extent it's happened to artists.
- svnv 15y agoYes, let's blame the people that are trying to solve illegal file-sharing issues. Spotify is competing with free and they offer such a great service that people are willing to pay 10 euros a month for a subscription. Most of my friends use more money on music streaming services now than they ever did back when they where buying cd's, and these are people who have been "pirates" for the last 10 years or so.
- mzl 15y agoThat infographic is just wrong, I wish people could stop linking to it all the time. The data it is based on is some small numbers from the first months after Spotify launched, before the revenue strems had actually started. No hard numbers are released, but it is generally acknowledged in Sweden that Spotify is now the largest online income for artists.
- tjogin 15y agoSpotify pays more per listen than radio does. If that's not enough money for an artist, then the problem is really that the artist isn't popular enough when people get to decide for themselves what to listen to.
- m_eiman 15y agoSpotify pays more per listen than radio does. Exactly. According to this article[1] (in Swedish) about Lady Gaga making $340 from a million Spotify listens to a single song, the same number of listeners on the radio would have made her $15. [1] http://www.expressen.se/noje/1.1787187/lady-gaga-tjanar-1150-kronor-pa-spotify http://www.expressen.se/noje/1.1787187/lady-gaga-tjanar-1150...
- ralphc 15y agoI clicked on that to bookmark and translate later, and holy-crap-my-eyes-are-bleeding. And I thought some sites in the US were bad with ads. Click at your own risk.
- m_eiman 15y agoSorry about that, Expressen is one of Sweden's two main tabloids. Here's a rough translation: Lady Gaga had the most popular song on Spotify, with one million listens. Now she gets her money from STIM [Sweden's collecting agency for artists etc]: 1,150 SEK ($170 USD). Lady Gaga's "Poker face" was the most popular song on Spotify during the music service's first five months, according to the first payment of STIM money made on behalf of Spotify, according to STIM's own paper "Stim-nytt". The song was played one million times - which yields 2,300 SEK ($340 USD) that Lady Gaga and songwriter partner Redone share. Dogge [Swedish artist] upset Rapper and songwriter Dogge Doggelito is upset when he hears the sum. - It's sick. We musicians have no rights, you don't get paid any more. Lady Gaga would have made more money driving an unlicensed cab one night at [known place in Stockholm]. "Better than file sharing" Artist and songwriter Alexander Bard [another Swedish artist] doesn't want to comment on the sum without knowning how Lady Gaga's contract with her label looks, but says: - 2,300 is more than zero which she would have gotten from Pirate Bay. It's better than file sharing, says Alexander Bard. The future Both Alexander Bard and Dogge Doggelito believe that Spotify and similar services are the future. - These are teething troubles. I hope that we creators one day in the future will be paid reasonably and fairly, says Dogge Doggelito. "Stim-nytt" compares the sum to if "Poker face" had been played in the radio show "Sommar" that averages a million listeners. Then the STIM payment would have been only 100 SEK ($15 USD).
- fastfinner 15y agoanybody know why spotify is mentioned so much more than grooveshark?
- kupo 15y agoSpotify is 100% licensed. AFAIK, Grooveshark is more like Napster in that it's a free-for-all with user uploaded content, though they have worked out deals with some of the record companies.
- Greg12x 15y agoI personally like grooveshark, because it literally has everyone song I want.
- kalleboo 15y agoThat's a pretty good sign that it's not really legal.
- bengl3rt 15y agoSad that that's a good indicator, still, no?
- dstien 15y agoSpotify also started out with a lot of unlicensed content before they came clean in early 2009: http://www.spotify.com/uk/blog/archives/2009/01/28/some-important-changes-to-the-spotify-music-catalogue/ http://www.spotify.com/uk/blog/archives/2009/01/28/some-impo...
- shinratdr 15y agoRight but they solved that problem in 2009. It's 2011 and Grooveshark is still mostly pirated content.
- Chrono 15y ago
- Greg12x 15y agoYay.
- mhd 15y agoHow much of that is due to Spotify, and how much can be attributed to IPRED[1]? (Either by people actually not downloading stuff or people not being counted due to services like Ipredator[2]) [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPRED http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPRED [2]: https://www.ipredator.se/ https://www.ipredator.se/
- stfu 15y agoYeah, these single "cause-action" relationships are always questionable.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jsavimbi 15y agoIn case anyone cares, music sharing is about to return to 100% at my house due to the shortsighted inabilities of whomever is running Spotify.
- giddas 15y agoyou hear that spotify? you're doomed
- shennyg 15y agoWhat inabilities? Spotify reduced my "sharing" dramatically.
- shoota 15y agoI believe they're talking about the Facebook required to signup for Spotify which is causing a lot of controversy lately.
- jsavimbi 15y agoYes, that is correct. I could however just look at it as paying $10/month for a service that I know will only be around for the short term, or around in the short term in a format that I like to consume but will change dramatically and without notice in the near future due to the magical* whims of some product lead over at the Parent Company (Fb). * I'd like to know what sort of of process a product person goes through whence writing stories or making suggestions for a product. Do they eval their own ignorance, stupidity, pettiness and laziness, choose two for average and proceed to operate forward using only those two qualities backed up by a mid-ranked college's beer-stained diploma? tl;dr: even Angry Birds didn't sell out sooner.
- cmilas 15y ago"Pirating" music and DL'ing an app that you can listen to copywritten music is the same thing. Major differentiating factor is that on spotify, you now have the option to be a paid member. Love spotify nonetheless, but is just pushing %'s around to make the article sound like "Its working"
- phzbOx 15y agoIn Canada, spottify is illegal. So I had to "hack the system" to get an "illegal" software in order to get music legally. (Had to register and download the app from a us proxy and asked a friend living in us to pay with his credit card.)
- tvon 15y agoThat was the only way to get the music legally?
- goatforce5 15y agoIt's not illegal... it's just not available.
- petercooper 15y agoIt doesn't matter! Business-wise, the key metric is if profits are up for the artists. Imagine two customer scenarios: 1. Pirate 100 albums in a year, buy 5 albums, yielding $7.50ish collectively for the 5 albums. 2. Listen to everything on Spotify, play 2000 tracks, each paying 0.2 cents per play. $4 is spread amongst everyone. A fall in "piracy" doesn't necessarily cause (or even correlate with) overall earnings to go up.
- 555imon 15y agoSince Sweden adopted anti P2P laws (IPRED) in 2009 Spotify usage has grown. In 2009 France adopted an anti P2P law (HADOPI). Since then music sales in France declined at a lesser rate than global sales and therefore artist earnings declining less than on global level (http://www.fortherechord.com/hadopi-and-cartes-musique-france%E2%80%99s-answer-to-piracy/ http://www.fortherechord.com/hadopi-and-cartes-musique-franc...). This would point to a correlation between "piracy" and music sales.
- gerggerg 15y agoSome fun things to think about: - About 23 percent continue to pirate music, but this number is dwindling. 23% is hardly dwindling. With margin of error it could easily be over a quarter of all consumers. This doesn't take into account, non-legal ways of acquiring music that are not classically "sharing" like you tube and sound cloud Methods of collecting this information are often as reliable as alexa is for page rankings. And MOST IMPORTANTLY none of this directly means anything for the bottom line of the artists. Piracy goes down, but middle men go up, middle men win.
- fernandotakai 15y agoI would easily pay for spotify – it's not that expensive and it's quite good. The only problem is that they can't accept my money because I don't live on USA/UK/Sweden.
- paul9290 15y agoRight now I have a hobbled together iPhone meet car stereo set up. I was just thinking I want Spotify in my car and the ability to talk to my car to play any track (Ford already has cars you speak to start listening to iPod music). When Spotify or another has created this feature/service then it's worth the $10 per month. Until then I'm using my hobbled system to listen to tracks on YouTube and Vevo for free (Pandora too which lately has tons and tons more commercials then it did in 2009 and 2010).