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> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. By doing this

> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...) But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole - that kid playing some pop song on repeat 24/7, that restaurant playing Bangla music in the background whenever it's open, or the spammer uploading 10000 machine-generated tracks and setting an army of bots with stolen credentials to listen to them on random shuffle - they all direct Spotify's artist pool money much, much better than you.

xnx 3y ago
Too bad Spotify doesn't calculate streaming royalties per user. If I listen to a single artist in a given month, my entire royalty portion of my subscription for that month could go to that artist vs. being diluted by the activity of all the bots on Spotify.
janaagaard 3y ago
> But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole. But doesn’t that even out? Napkin calculations: There are 10 subscribers to Spotify, each paying 10 dollars/month, and everything goes 100% to the artist. 9 of them only listen to Taylor Swift and 1 only to Metallica. If the subscriptions would go directly to the bands you listen to, Metallica would receive 10 dollars from the one listener. But the subscriptions are distributed based on the percentage of listeners, meaning that the Metallica fan is only giving 1 dollar to their favorite band. But this percentage is also payed by the 9 Taylor fans, so they also pay 1 dollar. In the end Metallica receives 10 dollars per month. What am I missing here?
troupo 3y ago
That's the criticism I can wholeheartedly get behind. I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone). However, I think it's a hard problem to solve. The huge fanbase of who listen to Tailor Swift on repeat will have some of their money go towards less popular bands. If all their money goes exclusively to Taylor Swift (and similar artists), it's possible that there will be quite a number of bands who will see their earning drastically decrease. There's also the question of where will the money go for the deceased artists. Today, it goes to rights holders and effectively disappears with no accountability on the part of the rights holder.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  > I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone). > However, I think it's a hard problem to solve. All you have you have to do is buy the music. From either the band’s website, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.
  - crtasm 3y ago
    Bandcamp gives the highest % to the artist/label, and I would argue also the best place to buy music.
  - troupo 3y ago
    I rarely listen to a band. Or even to an album. I often listen to music of a specific genre, and for that Spotify (and similar services) are great: I discover artists I'd never discover otherwise.
usrusr 3y ago
Are you implying that Spotify distributes by number of plays, not by number of plays, weighted by account utilization? (where a play on a one hour a month account would count considerably more than a ten hours per day account). If it's not (inversely) weighted by utilization, then I'd assume that it's less the fault of Spotify but more the fault of licensors being unable to think beyond simplistic money-per-play metrics in their negotiations with Spotify. From Spotify's perspective, it's kind of obvious that the "gourmet play minute" is more valuable than the "gourmand play minute".
- vintermann 3y ago
  Yes, this is how it works. There are separate pools for ad-supported plays, and I believe separate pools per country now (because Spotify premium costs a lot less in India than in e.g. the US), but it's still pooled. It used to be the case that the big record companies demanded pro-rata licensing. Tidal (before Jay-Z bought it) commissioned studies on user centric licensing and approached the record companies about it, but they were uninterested. Now, however, it seems the record companies want user centric licensing, but Spotify resists it. It's hard to say exactly what kind of politics lie behind that opposition. I'll note, however, that Spotify seems to have adapted a lot to "gourmand" listening with their background playlists.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    Those per country pools are an interesting tool: being as German as I happen to be, my natural reaction to subscriber share (this seems to be the established term for weighted by utilization?) is "can't do that, because Data Protection". We do like to imagine that it should in some miraculous way be possible to use streaming without the streaming provider knowing what we stream, and that Bad Things Will Happen if that miracle fails to materialize. Separate pools could be the way out: take the division by country and subscription status, but further divide each bucket by utilization. Ten percentile blocks for example. It would not have to be perfect to be well good enough. And I suspect that it would be easier to communicate in negotiations than an accurate formula, similar to how many countries seem to have ended up with discrete tax brackets instead of one universal formula across the entire range.
jbgt 3y ago
Weren't we all complaining 20 y ago that music labels were giving bands pennies on the dollar and the only way they could actually live off of the music was by touring and selling merch? I think Radiohead then did the groundbreaking selling of mp3s for a pay what you want fee. Now the baddie is Spotify.
- michaelcampbell 3y ago
  Spotify's always been the baddie, they've just hid it well.
- ikt 3y ago
  Sure did https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.
- mlrtime 3y ago
  Worse than that, I remember reading articles about how some artists didn't "make" a single dollar from their first album that sold millions. It all went to the record company and paid for marketing and advances. Sometimes they didn't begin to see revenue until 2nd or 3rd albums.
  - Fnoord 3y ago
    Labels did scum stuff like have sublabel go belly up (oops no royalties anymore), not paying royalties, not giving artists royalties when on VA album, and downright piracy, and enforcement of centralization via signing rights away to (equivalent of) RIAA. These are just examples from memory talking to artists.
- akudha 3y ago
  Didn’t Louis C.K sell his standup stuff direct to fans for 5$ for a DRM free downloadable mp3, from his website? Why don’t more artists do that?
  - vintermann 3y ago
HPsquared 3y ago
This could be solved by a "donate" button to reward bands you like. Edit: (such an obvious idea, they've already done it: "fan support" feature).
- rchaud 3y ago
  No thanks. E-tip jars belong on Twitch and Youtube Live. Something about that feels very "off", it feeds that parasocial interaction thing in ways that a band selling merch does not.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    All music/sports/etc fandom has a similar parasocial element. Same thing, only different manifestations.
  - lowercased 3y ago
    but... I generally don't want their 'merch'. I don't need another t-shirt, hat, keyring, whatever. It literally just adds to more waste that I don't want to contribute to. We'd all be better off if I had an easier way to just send $4 to a band/artist I like. I do that for some via patreon. I've known people overpay on bandcamp to get a few more $ to someone. There are artists that will never come to my area. There are artists that simply can't travel/perform due to any number of factors. "Sell merch via Shopify or Spotify" just feels like pushing people in the wrong direction.
- mlrtime 3y ago
  Yeah, or maybe a tip jar? Perhaps some PG at Spotify can copy the stripe tip screen and when before playing a song you get asked the infamous 18%,20%,25%,NO TIP question? No thank you.
- exodust 3y ago
  It seems the 'fan support' feature is not available on the Spotify website, only the native app. Explains why I haven't noticed it. So they finally added a way to directly support artists. That's nice, but disappointing they excluded the web app from this feature. Its omission hurts potential donations. Spotify also lowers audio quality on the web app, gee it's almost like they don't want me to use the web app.
strken 3y ago
You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label. The best way to support a band, as far as I know, is to turn up to their shows and/or buy their merch. Royalties were always a dicey revenue stream.
- vintermann 3y ago
  > You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label. For fringe metal music? Not likely!
  - mlrtime 3y ago
    If OP was going to his local record/cd store and not some fringe underground market, he was 100% supporting some record company. Maybe not one of the ones listed, but in the 80s it would have been a company.
  - Reubachi 3y ago
    By "fringe metal", they're likely talking about mainstream thrash and groove metal. And those bands where on these exact labels; Reign in blood - Def Jam (1986) Pantera - Atco /WB (1986) Megadeth - Capital (1986) Sepultura - Roadrunner/WB (1989) Anthrax - Island/Universal (1985)
    - wjnc 3y ago
      This does read like a slight snark (the step from 'fringe' to 'mainstream' - who wants to be mainstream?). It further emphasises the point that in the 80s and early 90s looking for non-local 'long tail' music as a youth was pretty much impossible. Especially if / when too young for bars and concerts, all you could find had to be signed on mainstream labels. I had the luck in that I could go to local concerts, thus discovering local talent (and buying their cassette tapes). You needed venues and allowing parents for that. Currently listening to several artists with < 500 streamers a month on Spotify. Nothing in the 80s and 90s can compare with that discoverability.
    - vintermann 3y ago
bko 3y ago
I may be in the minority, but I just don't really find the "support the artist" argument that compelling. I have artists I like and I grew up with. If I saw them in public I'd get giggly and maybe try to say an awkward hello. But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist. I assume the artists are reasonable rational adults. If they're on the platform, its economically advantageous to them. If they sold their rights at some point in time for money, or pay their tax debts, or whatever, I assume they did so knowing full well what that means. If Spotify is no longer advantageous to them, they would pull their music off and I may search other ways to listen to it. We have a system to deal with these sorts of things, it's called voluntary exchange and it's the only way things change. If artists pulled their music, Spotify would have to adjust. In the meantime I just don't have the time or energy to track every individual employee grievance
- vintermann 3y ago
  > But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist. What has that to do with anything? You don't pay because you want them to like you, you pay because you want to give them the chance to keep making music in the future. For that reason, on free support platforms like Patreon, I'm pretty tough about not "gilding the lily". If someone is clearly well-funded enough to have artistic freedom, with a good margin of safety, I look for someone else to support, even if I love them.
  - bko 3y ago
    What does that have to do with Spotify? If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in. Just sell me something I want at a price I find reasonable. I don't need a story about how it's so hard for you to pursue your passion or how you can't continue in the future.
    - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
      > If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in. To me this reads the same as "I can't be bothered to consider ethics for every economic transaction I participate in". I'm not sure its possible to do it 100% of the time, but I try to constantly consider it.
stdbrouw 3y ago
This has always seemed like fear-mongering to me, because for the pooled proportion of plays to be completely different from the mean of the per-user proportion, there would need to be an extreme discrepancy in amount of songs listened to per month and/or in the kinds of songs played by those who pay for premium vs. those who opt for ad-supported. No, if I only play the same artist for an entire month, they likely won't get $10 (-$2 in expenses), maybe it's $7 or maybe it's $12, but I don't see how you can go from there to "Beyoncé is getting all your money!?!?!" Are there any specific examples of artists that get much more or much less than you'd expect, or is this all just a thought experiment?
- Kye 3y ago
  The share is determined by contract, not by some fair-minded algorithm. You would have to listen to that artist over 3000 times in a month for them to get $10 at the normal artist's $0.0032/play. Big artists don't see such low figures, though more obviously goes to the system that pays the salaries of the people who get those deals for them.
  - stdbrouw 3y ago
    Well, sure, but whether an artist gets the full amount or a pittance from their label is not relevant to the question of whether Spotify's pooled numbers are unfair to some artists. The ultimate payout is not something Spotify has a say in.
- vintermann 3y ago
  It's pretty easy to do some math on this. There are pseudonymous background music artists who have just released one or two tracks, and who have more listens than famous bands with a 30-year history, because they were featured in one of Spotify's background music playlists. It is of course rumours that this music is commissioned by Spotify (which they deny) or that they get kickbacks in some other form. You don't get exact numbers (because Spotify won't share them!) but there's no question background music is vastly more profitable on Spotify than the kind of music people go to concerts for, and it's at the latter's expense.
deeviant 3y ago
> By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...) This argument can be used to justify basically any business practice. It's a weak argument. Should I be forced to buy 10 inedible doughnuts to find one editable one in the name of allowing people to practice making doughnuts out of random things they find in their kitchen? Should I have to buy 5 cars before I find one that doesn't break after a a month in the name of supporting the auto industry? Obviously, this is nonsense.
- oneepic 3y ago
  I think there's a strawman here. I look for different things artistically and functionally about the things you mentioned. Cars should function well and feel good when I test-drive them, but I wouldn't buy a hideous car. Music is somewhat functional (does the cd or record play? does it skip at all etc) but then you have to listen to it. Years ago we might have seen a music video, heard a song on the radio, then went and bought a whole album to hear the rest. I guess I'm saying the buying process is different and it doesnt make sense to apply it to every imaginable product or industry.
  - iggldiggl 3y ago
    > Years ago we might have seen a music video, heard a song on the radio, then went and bought a whole album to hear the rest. I guess I'm saying the buying process is different and it doesnt make sense to apply it to every imaginable product or industry. And I've definitely found songs that so-to-speak came along via an album purchase and which I might have initially dismissed, somewhat eventually growing on me after a while. Not saying that this always happens, and I'm not the biggest music listener around, so take that with a pinch of salt, but still…
serjester 3y ago
Spotify uses a weighted average - you can't abuse the system like that. The tough reality is that 10k fans paying $10 a month and spending 1% time listening to an indie artist only works out to $1k / month even if all the money went to the artists. Unfortunately that's not the case - Spotify has overhead, artists sign with labels and other middlemen creep in. As a result artists make pennies. The only way to change this is to get consumers to pay drastically more but that's what killed iTunes in the first place.
- vintermann 3y ago
  It's not hard to find artists who abuse the system like that: algorithmically generated music, from algorithmically generated artists, hundreds of which have almost the exact same number of plays (and thousands more than real artists I've followed for years.

xnx 3y ago

Too bad Spotify doesn't calculate streaming royalties per user. If I listen to a single artist in a given month, my entire royalty portion of my subscription for that month could go to that artist vs. being diluted by the activity of all the bots on Spotify.

janaagaard 3y ago

> But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole. But doesn’t that even out? Napkin calculations: There are 10 subscribers to Spotify, each paying 10 dollars/month, and everything goes 100% to the artist. 9 of them only listen to Taylor Swift and 1 only to Metallica. If the subscriptions would go directly to the bands you listen to, Metallica would receive 10 dollars from the one listener. But the subscriptions are distributed based on the percentage of listeners, meaning that the Metallica fan is only giving 1 dollar to their favorite band. But this percentage is also payed by the 9 Taylor fans, so they also pay 1 dollar. In the end Metallica receives 10 dollars per month. What am I missing here?

troupo 3y ago

That's the criticism I can wholeheartedly get behind. I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone). However, I think it's a hard problem to solve. The huge fanbase of who listen to Tailor Swift on repeat will have some of their money go towards less popular bands. If all their money goes exclusively to Taylor Swift (and similar artists), it's possible that there will be quite a number of bands who will see their earning drastically decrease. There's also the question of where will the money go for the deceased artists. Today, it goes to rights holders and effectively disappears with no accountability on the part of the rights holder.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
> I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone). > However, I think it's a hard problem to solve. All you have you have to do is buy the music. From either the band’s website, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.
- crtasm 3y ago
  Bandcamp gives the highest % to the artist/label, and I would argue also the best place to buy music.
- troupo 3y ago
  I rarely listen to a band. Or even to an album. I often listen to music of a specific genre, and for that Spotify (and similar services) are great: I discover artists I'd never discover otherwise.

usrusr 3y ago

Are you implying that Spotify distributes by number of plays, not by number of plays, weighted by account utilization? (where a play on a one hour a month account would count considerably more than a ten hours per day account). If it's not (inversely) weighted by utilization, then I'd assume that it's less the fault of Spotify but more the fault of licensors being unable to think beyond simplistic money-per-play metrics in their negotiations with Spotify. From Spotify's perspective, it's kind of obvious that the "gourmet play minute" is more valuable than the "gourmand play minute".

vintermann 3y ago
Yes, this is how it works. There are separate pools for ad-supported plays, and I believe separate pools per country now (because Spotify premium costs a lot less in India than in e.g. the US), but it's still pooled. It used to be the case that the big record companies demanded pro-rata licensing. Tidal (before Jay-Z bought it) commissioned studies on user centric licensing and approached the record companies about it, but they were uninterested. Now, however, it seems the record companies want user centric licensing, but Spotify resists it. It's hard to say exactly what kind of politics lie behind that opposition. I'll note, however, that Spotify seems to have adapted a lot to "gourmand" listening with their background playlists.
- usrusr 3y ago
  Those per country pools are an interesting tool: being as German as I happen to be, my natural reaction to subscriber share (this seems to be the established term for weighted by utilization?) is "can't do that, because Data Protection". We do like to imagine that it should in some miraculous way be possible to use streaming without the streaming provider knowing what we stream, and that Bad Things Will Happen if that miracle fails to materialize. Separate pools could be the way out: take the division by country and subscription status, but further divide each bucket by utilization. Ten percentile blocks for example. It would not have to be perfect to be well good enough. And I suspect that it would be easier to communicate in negotiations than an accurate formula, similar to how many countries seem to have ended up with discrete tax brackets instead of one universal formula across the entire range.

jbgt 3y ago

Weren't we all complaining 20 y ago that music labels were giving bands pennies on the dollar and the only way they could actually live off of the music was by touring and selling merch? I think Radiohead then did the groundbreaking selling of mp3s for a pay what you want fee. Now the baddie is Spotify.

michaelcampbell 3y ago
Spotify's always been the baddie, they've just hid it well.
ikt 3y ago
Sure did https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.
mlrtime 3y ago
Worse than that, I remember reading articles about how some artists didn't "make" a single dollar from their first album that sold millions. It all went to the record company and paid for marketing and advances. Sometimes they didn't begin to see revenue until 2nd or 3rd albums.
- Fnoord 3y ago
  Labels did scum stuff like have sublabel go belly up (oops no royalties anymore), not paying royalties, not giving artists royalties when on VA album, and downright piracy, and enforcement of centralization via signing rights away to (equivalent of) RIAA. These are just examples from memory talking to artists.
akudha 3y ago
Didn’t Louis C.K sell his standup stuff direct to fans for 5$ for a DRM free downloadable mp3, from his website? Why don’t more artists do that?
- vintermann 3y ago

HPsquared 3y ago

This could be solved by a "donate" button to reward bands you like. Edit: (such an obvious idea, they've already done it: "fan support" feature).

rchaud 3y ago
No thanks. E-tip jars belong on Twitch and Youtube Live. Something about that feels very "off", it feeds that parasocial interaction thing in ways that a band selling merch does not.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  All music/sports/etc fandom has a similar parasocial element. Same thing, only different manifestations.
- lowercased 3y ago
  but... I generally don't want their 'merch'. I don't need another t-shirt, hat, keyring, whatever. It literally just adds to more waste that I don't want to contribute to. We'd all be better off if I had an easier way to just send $4 to a band/artist I like. I do that for some via patreon. I've known people overpay on bandcamp to get a few more $ to someone. There are artists that will never come to my area. There are artists that simply can't travel/perform due to any number of factors. "Sell merch via Shopify or Spotify" just feels like pushing people in the wrong direction.
mlrtime 3y ago
Yeah, or maybe a tip jar? Perhaps some PG at Spotify can copy the stripe tip screen and when before playing a song you get asked the infamous 18%,20%,25%,NO TIP question? No thank you.
exodust 3y ago
It seems the 'fan support' feature is not available on the Spotify website, only the native app. Explains why I haven't noticed it. So they finally added a way to directly support artists. That's nice, but disappointing they excluded the web app from this feature. Its omission hurts potential donations. Spotify also lowers audio quality on the web app, gee it's almost like they don't want me to use the web app.

strken 3y ago

You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label. The best way to support a band, as far as I know, is to turn up to their shows and/or buy their merch. Royalties were always a dicey revenue stream.

vintermann 3y ago
> You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label. For fringe metal music? Not likely!
- mlrtime 3y ago
  If OP was going to his local record/cd store and not some fringe underground market, he was 100% supporting some record company. Maybe not one of the ones listed, but in the 80s it would have been a company.
- Reubachi 3y ago
  By "fringe metal", they're likely talking about mainstream thrash and groove metal. And those bands where on these exact labels; Reign in blood - Def Jam (1986) Pantera - Atco /WB (1986) Megadeth - Capital (1986) Sepultura - Roadrunner/WB (1989) Anthrax - Island/Universal (1985)
  - wjnc 3y ago
    This does read like a slight snark (the step from 'fringe' to 'mainstream' - who wants to be mainstream?). It further emphasises the point that in the 80s and early 90s looking for non-local 'long tail' music as a youth was pretty much impossible. Especially if / when too young for bars and concerts, all you could find had to be signed on mainstream labels. I had the luck in that I could go to local concerts, thus discovering local talent (and buying their cassette tapes). You needed venues and allowing parents for that. Currently listening to several artists with < 500 streamers a month on Spotify. Nothing in the 80s and 90s can compare with that discoverability.
  - vintermann 3y ago

bko 3y ago

I may be in the minority, but I just don't really find the "support the artist" argument that compelling. I have artists I like and I grew up with. If I saw them in public I'd get giggly and maybe try to say an awkward hello. But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist. I assume the artists are reasonable rational adults. If they're on the platform, its economically advantageous to them. If they sold their rights at some point in time for money, or pay their tax debts, or whatever, I assume they did so knowing full well what that means. If Spotify is no longer advantageous to them, they would pull their music off and I may search other ways to listen to it. We have a system to deal with these sorts of things, it's called voluntary exchange and it's the only way things change. If artists pulled their music, Spotify would have to adjust. In the meantime I just don't have the time or energy to track every individual employee grievance

vintermann 3y ago
> But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist. What has that to do with anything? You don't pay because you want them to like you, you pay because you want to give them the chance to keep making music in the future. For that reason, on free support platforms like Patreon, I'm pretty tough about not "gilding the lily". If someone is clearly well-funded enough to have artistic freedom, with a good margin of safety, I look for someone else to support, even if I love them.
- bko 3y ago
  What does that have to do with Spotify? If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in. Just sell me something I want at a price I find reasonable. I don't need a story about how it's so hard for you to pursue your passion or how you can't continue in the future.
  - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
    > If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in. To me this reads the same as "I can't be bothered to consider ethics for every economic transaction I participate in". I'm not sure its possible to do it 100% of the time, but I try to constantly consider it.

stdbrouw 3y ago

This has always seemed like fear-mongering to me, because for the pooled proportion of plays to be completely different from the mean of the per-user proportion, there would need to be an extreme discrepancy in amount of songs listened to per month and/or in the kinds of songs played by those who pay for premium vs. those who opt for ad-supported. No, if I only play the same artist for an entire month, they likely won't get $10 (-$2 in expenses), maybe it's $7 or maybe it's $12, but I don't see how you can go from there to "Beyoncé is getting all your money!?!?!" Are there any specific examples of artists that get much more or much less than you'd expect, or is this all just a thought experiment?

Kye 3y ago
The share is determined by contract, not by some fair-minded algorithm. You would have to listen to that artist over 3000 times in a month for them to get $10 at the normal artist's $0.0032/play. Big artists don't see such low figures, though more obviously goes to the system that pays the salaries of the people who get those deals for them.
- stdbrouw 3y ago
  Well, sure, but whether an artist gets the full amount or a pittance from their label is not relevant to the question of whether Spotify's pooled numbers are unfair to some artists. The ultimate payout is not something Spotify has a say in.
vintermann 3y ago
It's pretty easy to do some math on this. There are pseudonymous background music artists who have just released one or two tracks, and who have more listens than famous bands with a 30-year history, because they were featured in one of Spotify's background music playlists. It is of course rumours that this music is commissioned by Spotify (which they deny) or that they get kickbacks in some other form. You don't get exact numbers (because Spotify won't share them!) but there's no question background music is vastly more profitable on Spotify than the kind of music people go to concerts for, and it's at the latter's expense.

deeviant 3y ago

> By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...) This argument can be used to justify basically any business practice. It's a weak argument. Should I be forced to buy 10 inedible doughnuts to find one editable one in the name of allowing people to practice making doughnuts out of random things they find in their kitchen? Should I have to buy 5 cars before I find one that doesn't break after a a month in the name of supporting the auto industry? Obviously, this is nonsense.

oneepic 3y ago
I think there's a strawman here. I look for different things artistically and functionally about the things you mentioned. Cars should function well and feel good when I test-drive them, but I wouldn't buy a hideous car. Music is somewhat functional (does the cd or record play? does it skip at all etc) but then you have to listen to it. Years ago we might have seen a music video, heard a song on the radio, then went and bought a whole album to hear the rest. I guess I'm saying the buying process is different and it doesnt make sense to apply it to every imaginable product or industry.
- iggldiggl 3y ago
  > Years ago we might have seen a music video, heard a song on the radio, then went and bought a whole album to hear the rest. I guess I'm saying the buying process is different and it doesnt make sense to apply it to every imaginable product or industry. And I've definitely found songs that so-to-speak came along via an album purchase and which I might have initially dismissed, somewhat eventually growing on me after a while. Not saying that this always happens, and I'm not the biggest music listener around, so take that with a pinch of salt, but still…

serjester 3y ago

Spotify uses a weighted average - you can't abuse the system like that. The tough reality is that 10k fans paying $10 a month and spending 1% time listening to an indie artist only works out to $1k / month even if all the money went to the artists. Unfortunately that's not the case - Spotify has overhead, artists sign with labels and other middlemen creep in. As a result artists make pennies. The only way to change this is to get consumers to pay drastically more but that's what killed iTunes in the first place.

vintermann 3y ago
It's not hard to find artists who abuse the system like that: algorithmically generated music, from algorithmically generated artists, hundreds of which have almost the exact same number of plays (and thousands more than real artists I've followed for years.