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> Instead, my subscription is probably pooled according to some black box formula and ends up paid to some of their top performers like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, o

> Instead, my subscription is probably pooled according to some black box formula and ends up paid to some of their top performers like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, or The Weeknd. While the indie artist I have been obsessed with gets literally nothing because they don’t meet a certain arbitrary threshold. Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is <insert big pop artist> that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically. If I upload my music to a platform that pays me 100% of the royalties, I will get to keep the most of 0 dollars, because nobody will be there to listen to it. I would argue that the issue is mainly relevant for indies who are past the "much-needed exposure" phase, starting to blow up, and now don't get a good (fair) share of it. That would be a great moment to go off platform, and take the audience with them, but many can't (won't) do that, because it may mean less exposure. So, after all, Spotify seems to bring something of their own to the table (a pool of listeners) that they want to be paid for. To get more exposure, they need bigger artists, to get those, they need money and crooked deals to convince the big labels to license it. So, while unfair at first glance, comparing a Taylor Swift deal to what I'm getting off of Spotify perhaps (I'm only guessing), I am happy to accept the deal for the random exposure I am now enjoying because of it. I feel like I am betraying all artists just saying this, but I keep coming back to wondering why everyone feels like they deserve the exact same deal like a big-name artist (who bring their own audience I am benefiting from).

schnitzelstoat 3y ago
I mean they are revenue-share deals. So each label will get paid a % of Spotify's total revenue according to the number of listens they have and how well they negotiated the deal. So labels like UMG are going to get a better deal than some indie artist who just has to sign up normally. How much the UMG artists end up getting paid is up to UMG. The problem is really that 90% of people listen to a few big artists that are owned by these mega-labels. And that distorts the entire economy of the sector.
- iamsaitam 3y ago
  It's like if income tax brackets were inverted and the higher your income the less taxes you pay.
- vintermann 3y ago
  It's not always people. Spotify has a spam problem. With the distribution key Spotify uses (correctly, if not precisely, described in the article), you don't even need stolen account credentials. You can just sign up a thousand accounts, and listen to your own fake artists, and actually get paid more than you spent on those accounts. All you need to do is play a lot more songs than the average listener. Make your spam songs short (slightly more than 1 minute seems to be enough to defeat Spotify's anti-spam algorithms, judging by the spam I find), and you can rack up a ton of plays. And if you do that, you should even have room to put in a few plays of the big pop stars. So that you have someone protesting if your spam accounts get closed by spotify and their plays wiped.
short_sells_poo 3y ago
> Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is <insert big pop artist> that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically. I'm confused by your argument here. If the big popstars bring people to a platform, then presumable there will be more than enough people to listen to those popstars and their share of the revenue will be naturally very high, no? Let's say there are 1 billion music listeners worldwide (I pulled this number out of my ass). 90% of these want to listen to pop music and will subscribe to a platform that has the major pop artists. It then follows that these pop artists will naturally get 90% of listeners on the platform too, no? The only difference is the marginal 10% who want to primarily listen to indies. In other words, a "fair" revenue distribution model would still direct most of the money to a handful of popstars, but now it wouldn't be so extremely skewed. Instead of 99%, they'd only get 90% - which should IMO be more than enough and crucially at least it's fair. As it stands, indie musicians who need to money are basically subsidizing the extremely popular artists who don't need subsidizing anymore. It's completely the wrong way around.
- mittermayr 3y ago
  I agree with all you say, but I probably didn't fully get the point you were trying to make with this: > indie musicians who need to money are basically subsidizing the extremely popular artists I am not sure how my $8 of Spotify money subsidized Taylor Swift and/or how that is a problem? I would have $0 otherwise, not $10. Spotify enabled me to get to the $8. Fair is a hard word when the distribution power of Spotify is not accounted for, I'd argue. Again, I know nothing, it's just one perspective I often find myself in, and it feels weird (being someone who benefits from Spotify, i.e. the $8 instead of $0).
- michaelt 3y ago
  > If the big popstars bring people to a platform, then presumable there will be more than enough people to listen to those popstars and their share of the revenue will be naturally very high, no? Ah, but what if those big stars have the negotiating leverage to get paid more per play ? If the platform has a fixed-size pie and can afford to pay $0.005 per play, but Joe Rogan and Taylor Swift will walk away unless they get $0.01 per play, should small artists' slice of the pie be reduced to $0.002 per play?
microtonal 3y ago
Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is <insert big pop artist> that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically. That's because a small number of streaming services monopolized the market. In the old days, the mid-sized city I live in used to have like 15 mainstream music stores and 3 that carried mostly indie music and they were well-visited. Streaming could be fair if they cut up the royalties by subscribes: https://medium.com/cuepoint/streaming-music-is-ripping-you-off-61dc501e7f94 https://medium.com/cuepoint/streaming-music-is-ripping-you-o... But the labels with major pop acts simply will not let that happen, because it'll drastically lower their revenue.
- robjan 3y ago
  The average indie wouldn't even make it to these indie record stores though. They only have so much space and so much ability to carry slow moving inventory.
jchw 3y ago
I think you've over-complicated this, or at least missed the point by quite a lot. The question is extremely simple: Why should I pay money to listen to music I like, and then that money goes to music and artists I've never and never will listen to? I don't care how much money top performers want. If I am going to spend money on music, it should go to artists that I actually listen to. And it does, because I buy music on CD and via Bandcamp and other websites, instead of streaming it. And that's kind of the thing. If I go into a record store and buy a CD or record or something, that's what I paid for, that's what it goes to. Hell, even if I watch a monetized video on YouTube Premium, a portion of my subscription money goes to that creator. It's Literally only music that works this way, to my knowledge. There's plenty of problems with music licensing, and to me this is just another one of them.
- mittermayr 3y ago
  > Why should I pay money to listen to music I like, and then that money goes to music and artists I've never and never will listen to? Well, you could simply bypass Spotify and just buy the music directly from the artist, no (which you indicate you do)? So Spotify isn't necessary for this, I'd guess? Spotify isn't a payment app for artists (again, I feel super weird defending them, I am not a fan myself!), it's a distribution channel.
  - ikt 3y ago
    Even better, use Spotify to discover artists then buy their music! It's not mutually exclusive!
    - mittermayr 3y ago
      That's exactly what I wanted to say further up but you summarized it way better in less words. I still think Spotify is great to discover music, but yes, there needs to be direct monetization outside of it!
  - jchw 3y ago
    I take issue with this because it's kind of neither here nor there. You could give a more charitable interpretation by just treating Spotify as a music discovery service, that's not really what Spotify is marketed or intended for. Spotify is meant to be the ultimate end-game of online music streaming: it is meant to flat-out replace your giant MP3 library. And that's exactly how many people use Spotify. Not just Spotify, but also Apple Music, Pandora, etc. If it was a music discovery service, it would be reasonable for artists to accept lower payouts and whatever other garbage because it's just an additional revenue source anyway. However, streaming music is not just an additional revenue source. Streaming music is becoming the primary way that people consume music all of the time. It is a $25 billion/year industry. Artists and fans alike can't control the way that the larger market moves, but the way that the larger market moves will for sure have major impact on the entire industry and that impact will trickle all the way down. There is no reason to think that we can't or shouldn't try to discourage and flat-out regulate unfair practices. It's not that all things middlemen do are bad, it's that they routinely gain immense power in the market and then together they act against the best interests of nearly everyone other than themselves, while the barrier to entry remains so high that it may as well not be possible for all intents and purposes. I don't really understand the point of defending what Spotify does, Spotify fights tooth and nail to try not to pay more royalties. When they were small they argued they had no choice but to pay low rates because otherwise they could never survive, and of course they never went back and changed their mind on that, because what incentive do they have? So yeah. My opinion? Spotify sucks, the article was spot on.
light_hue_1 3y ago
> I feel like I am betraying all artists just saying this, but I keep coming back to wondering why everyone feels like they deserve the exact same deal like a big-name artist (who bring their own audience I am benefiting from). Because we want a level playing field that leads to innovation. Just like we used to not tolerate monopolies in other areas of our lives. Or price fixing. If you let the top few entities work together to extract most of the value for themselves and keep everyone else out, getting through will be nearly impossible for anyone else and you'll create a system where everyone listens to just a few artists. It's well past time that anti-monopoly and anti-price-fixing laws get applied to situations like this. And to the disaster that is Ticketmaster.
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schnitzelstoat 3y ago

I mean they are revenue-share deals. So each label will get paid a % of Spotify's total revenue according to the number of listens they have and how well they negotiated the deal. So labels like UMG are going to get a better deal than some indie artist who just has to sign up normally. How much the UMG artists end up getting paid is up to UMG. The problem is really that 90% of people listen to a few big artists that are owned by these mega-labels. And that distorts the entire economy of the sector.

iamsaitam 3y ago
It's like if income tax brackets were inverted and the higher your income the less taxes you pay.
vintermann 3y ago
It's not always people. Spotify has a spam problem. With the distribution key Spotify uses (correctly, if not precisely, described in the article), you don't even need stolen account credentials. You can just sign up a thousand accounts, and listen to your own fake artists, and actually get paid more than you spent on those accounts. All you need to do is play a lot more songs than the average listener. Make your spam songs short (slightly more than 1 minute seems to be enough to defeat Spotify's anti-spam algorithms, judging by the spam I find), and you can rack up a ton of plays. And if you do that, you should even have room to put in a few plays of the big pop stars. So that you have someone protesting if your spam accounts get closed by spotify and their plays wiped.

short_sells_poo 3y ago

> Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is <insert big pop artist> that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically. I'm confused by your argument here. If the big popstars bring people to a platform, then presumable there will be more than enough people to listen to those popstars and their share of the revenue will be naturally very high, no? Let's say there are 1 billion music listeners worldwide (I pulled this number out of my ass). 90% of these want to listen to pop music and will subscribe to a platform that has the major pop artists. It then follows that these pop artists will naturally get 90% of listeners on the platform too, no? The only difference is the marginal 10% who want to primarily listen to indies. In other words, a "fair" revenue distribution model would still direct most of the money to a handful of popstars, but now it wouldn't be so extremely skewed. Instead of 99%, they'd only get 90% - which should IMO be more than enough and crucially at least it's fair. As it stands, indie musicians who need to money are basically subsidizing the extremely popular artists who don't need subsidizing anymore. It's completely the wrong way around.

mittermayr 3y ago
I agree with all you say, but I probably didn't fully get the point you were trying to make with this: > indie musicians who need to money are basically subsidizing the extremely popular artists I am not sure how my $8 of Spotify money subsidized Taylor Swift and/or how that is a problem? I would have $0 otherwise, not $10. Spotify enabled me to get to the $8. Fair is a hard word when the distribution power of Spotify is not accounted for, I'd argue. Again, I know nothing, it's just one perspective I often find myself in, and it feels weird (being someone who benefits from Spotify, i.e. the $8 instead of $0).
michaelt 3y ago
> If the big popstars bring people to a platform, then presumable there will be more than enough people to listen to those popstars and their share of the revenue will be naturally very high, no? Ah, but what if those big stars have the negotiating leverage to get paid more per play ? If the platform has a fixed-size pie and can afford to pay $0.005 per play, but Joe Rogan and Taylor Swift will walk away unless they get $0.01 per play, should small artists' slice of the pie be reduced to $0.002 per play?

microtonal 3y ago

Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is <insert big pop artist> that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically. That's because a small number of streaming services monopolized the market. In the old days, the mid-sized city I live in used to have like 15 mainstream music stores and 3 that carried mostly indie music and they were well-visited. Streaming could be fair if they cut up the royalties by subscribes: https://medium.com/cuepoint/streaming-music-is-ripping-you-off-61dc501e7f94 https://medium.com/cuepoint/streaming-music-is-ripping-you-o... But the labels with major pop acts simply will not let that happen, because it'll drastically lower their revenue.

robjan 3y ago
The average indie wouldn't even make it to these indie record stores though. They only have so much space and so much ability to carry slow moving inventory.

jchw 3y ago

I think you've over-complicated this, or at least missed the point by quite a lot. The question is extremely simple: Why should I pay money to listen to music I like, and then that money goes to music and artists I've never and never will listen to? I don't care how much money top performers want. If I am going to spend money on music, it should go to artists that I actually listen to. And it does, because I buy music on CD and via Bandcamp and other websites, instead of streaming it. And that's kind of the thing. If I go into a record store and buy a CD or record or something, that's what I paid for, that's what it goes to. Hell, even if I watch a monetized video on YouTube Premium, a portion of my subscription money goes to that creator. It's Literally only music that works this way, to my knowledge. There's plenty of problems with music licensing, and to me this is just another one of them.

mittermayr 3y ago
> Why should I pay money to listen to music I like, and then that money goes to music and artists I've never and never will listen to? Well, you could simply bypass Spotify and just buy the music directly from the artist, no (which you indicate you do)? So Spotify isn't necessary for this, I'd guess? Spotify isn't a payment app for artists (again, I feel super weird defending them, I am not a fan myself!), it's a distribution channel.
- ikt 3y ago
  Even better, use Spotify to discover artists then buy their music! It's not mutually exclusive!
  - mittermayr 3y ago
    That's exactly what I wanted to say further up but you summarized it way better in less words. I still think Spotify is great to discover music, but yes, there needs to be direct monetization outside of it!
- jchw 3y ago
  I take issue with this because it's kind of neither here nor there. You could give a more charitable interpretation by just treating Spotify as a music discovery service, that's not really what Spotify is marketed or intended for. Spotify is meant to be the ultimate end-game of online music streaming: it is meant to flat-out replace your giant MP3 library. And that's exactly how many people use Spotify. Not just Spotify, but also Apple Music, Pandora, etc. If it was a music discovery service, it would be reasonable for artists to accept lower payouts and whatever other garbage because it's just an additional revenue source anyway. However, streaming music is not just an additional revenue source. Streaming music is becoming the primary way that people consume music all of the time. It is a $25 billion/year industry. Artists and fans alike can't control the way that the larger market moves, but the way that the larger market moves will for sure have major impact on the entire industry and that impact will trickle all the way down. There is no reason to think that we can't or shouldn't try to discourage and flat-out regulate unfair practices. It's not that all things middlemen do are bad, it's that they routinely gain immense power in the market and then together they act against the best interests of nearly everyone other than themselves, while the barrier to entry remains so high that it may as well not be possible for all intents and purposes. I don't really understand the point of defending what Spotify does, Spotify fights tooth and nail to try not to pay more royalties. When they were small they argued they had no choice but to pay low rates because otherwise they could never survive, and of course they never went back and changed their mind on that, because what incentive do they have? So yeah. My opinion? Spotify sucks, the article was spot on.

light_hue_1 3y ago

> I feel like I am betraying all artists just saying this, but I keep coming back to wondering why everyone feels like they deserve the exact same deal like a big-name artist (who bring their own audience I am benefiting from). Because we want a level playing field that leads to innovation. Just like we used to not tolerate monopolies in other areas of our lives. Or price fixing. If you let the top few entities work together to extract most of the value for themselves and keep everyone else out, getting through will be nearly impossible for anyone else and you'll create a system where everyone listens to just a few artists. It's well past time that anti-monopoly and anti-price-fixing laws get applied to situations like this. And to the disaster that is Ticketmaster.

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