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So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song? In the

So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song? In the old days, artists would join a label and put out an album. The artist would earn about 10% of sales or so (varies of course, but on average). So a $15 CD would earn an artist $1.50. The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. So it would take about 300 streams of a song to earn the same amount as selling a CD used to make. I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? There are many albums I own that I have listened to way more than 30 times, which is what it would take for a 10 song album to get 300 song 'streams' Is that a fair compensation? Why or why not? I think artists should be able to earn money from creating music, but I don't know how we decide how much they actually deserve if we aren't just going based on the price the market sets.

deleted 1y ago
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troyvit 1y ago
That's why I like bandcamp. Artists choose the price for their music and I'm free to pay that price, or more, if I think that's fair compensation.
steveBK123 1y ago
> I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? Fundamentally, inflation-adjusted there are 1/2 as many dollars coming in the front end to the US music industry in the 2020s as there were in the 90s peak, per most sources... even though population is 30% higher. So per-capita music spend in inflation adjusted dollars is down like 60-65%. And there's probably far more artists to spread that around to now with the long tail of bedroom producers / part timers / etc all the way up to Swift. So surely artists are making less than they used to, regardless of how the pie is sliced up because there is a smaller pie. Given the trend in everything else in our economy, I am dubious that the newer streaming arrangements are incrementally more artist-friendly than the old physical media music industry.
claw-el 1y ago
>… should be able to earn money from <activity>… I wonder what forms our perception of what activity should be able to earn money from and what should not. I know that me being a professional nap taker should not be able to earn money from it, but when does one activity turn into ‘should be able to earn money from’?
newsclues 1y ago
Does the record company make more money than the artist? That’s unfair to me. The people making the art, should be paid the most.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  Why?
  - saulpw 1y ago
    That's the way they feel. Why do you think it shouldn't be that way?
- nomel 1y ago
  > The people making the art, should be paid the most. Why? There's a fair market value for the art. There's also a fair real world cost* for distributing and advertising, set by the market (the people working those positions need to eat too). It's trivially easy to go negative, if you try to market something that isn't popular. If it weren't a net benefit for the artist, they wouldn't go under a label, or stream on a certain platform. They're not being forced to. They do it because it results in more money in their pocket.
  - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
    > They do it because it results in more money in their pocket. more than zero can still be too little money in exchange for the labor provided and the profit produced.
    - nomel 1y ago
      If the value that others get from it is not worth the effort that someone puts into making it, then we say it's unsustainable. You can't make people give you money, to cover the cost of something they don't want. And, that goes for the entire chain of human effort that is from the artist to the listener. There's a team that maintains the internet connection so the author can upload. * maintains a storage array/metadata catalog to hold the song. * creates the algorithm to recommend the music to people. * creates ads to recommend the service to people. * ...etc If any part of this chain finds their effort not worth the value they receive, the whole chain stops. The point before it stops is the market value of that service. Someone charges more than the market value? Then someone else, who finds the effort worth the cheaper pay, will do it (ok, besides monopolies that have captured the government, but they're not really relevant in this case). If you think it's possible to do what you want, then put the effort into starting a service! You don't want to? Well, nobody else does either, because what they get in return will not be worth the effort. We live in a society.
mingus88 1y ago
I’m not sure about this accounting. I know some artists with very successful songs and they made nothing substantial from millions of streams Could it be that the streaming platform pays 0.005 which then gets divided amongst the whole band, and then the label takes their cut for producing and marketing it? Whereas before, the label was simply giving 10%?
- brentm 1y ago
  I managed a few artists in the past. Usually Spotify paid something like $0.0035 per stream but it ranges based on where the listen took place. One artist owned part of their catalog so earned the 100% on those streams. The rest of their catalog was owned by a major label where they were credited 15% of the streaming take (which was slightly higher than the direct rate) towards their unrecouped major label account. I'd say overall though, streaming can be good for artists. It helps keep them fresh in fans ears (via auto-generated & editorial playlists) and provides a revenue stream for the older stuff that would never be selling in stores or iTunes now.
- brewdad 1y ago
  Question (You may or may not have insight): What happens when I download a playlist and listen to it offline in my car on an hours long roadtrip? Do my “streams” get counted once I get back online? Does the artist get credit for an estimated number of streams based on typical patterns? Does the artist get bupkis since I might play a song ten times but it wasn’t technically streamed to me?
al_borland 1y ago
It is also implied that the author is now pirating their music, so now instead of the artist getting some money from the author, they get none.
- jszymborski 1y ago
  The author says they buy the albums. "Moving away from Spotify doesn't mean abandoning artists. In fact, I now support musicians more directly by: Purchasing music directly from platforms like Bandcamp where artists receive 82-90% of sales Buying physical media from official stores Supporting Patreon/subscription services for favorite artists Attending concerts and buying merchandise Buying a $10 album on Bandcamp puts about $8.20-$9.00 in the artist's pocket. To match that on Spotify, you're talking roughly 1.6k-3k streams of that album per listener. If the artist has a label taking a cut on Spotify, the stream counts needed go up further. My self-hosted setup is about controlling my listening experience and owning what I pay for, not avoiding fair compensation to artists."
  - al_borland 1y ago
    I assumed a lot of that was a disclaimer to try and avoid encouraging illegal activity outright. Lidarr seems to be a cornerstone of the setup. I assume Bandcamp is for more obscure indie stuff that isn't as available from the pirates.
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      Lidarr isn't just for piracy, it's a good tool for keeping your library organised. It does musicbrains matching, fixes the metadata based on that, fetches pretty pictures of the artist etc. There are other tools for it, but Lidarr is what works for me.
      - mvanbaak 1y ago
        They specifically mention: lidarr is connected to sabnzbd. They add 'to download music I bought' but I find that very hard to believe. Since when do sites like band camp etc expose your bought library over usenet?
jszymborski 1y ago
The article says they purchase from bandcamp which takes less than 20%, and support them on patreon.
the_gastropod 1y ago
I used to work with a former member of a moderately successful rock band (they had a song in Guitar Hero, for example). He'd talk a bit about the royalties he'd received. His royalties from Spotify were negligible. Like single digit dollars per month. Think about a ~$15/hour job. A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that. Only the top fraction of a percentage of artists on Spotify hit that. Music has always been a tough business with middle men taking the lion's share of the upside. Streaming services just add another layer of middlemen.
- cortesoft 1y ago
  > A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that How many hours did it take to create the songs? You can write a song and then keep making money off it for years. There are also other revenue streams, with live performances and merchandise, etc. I don’t think you can really compare music streaming to a full time job unless someone is ONLY making music for streaming and doing it 40 hours a week.
- dagi3d 1y ago
  how much did their label get?
seemaze 1y ago
I can't say whether the music industry fairly compensates artists or not. I can say that the film industry, for example, has leveraged each subsequent evolution in distribution technology as on opportunity to shift profits towards distributors and away from those involved in production.
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
> how little money per stream artists make ... What is fair compensation for writing a song? Those are two different things. Recording artist does not always equal songwriter. So how much should the songwriter make? The recording studio? The audio engineer? All the other people involved in creating the recorded song? Now that it's made, how do you get people to know the song exists and want to listen to it, much less purchase it? The reason compensation isn't a settled thing is it's a very complex thing to answer. The simplest possible answer is "the artist sets their own price" - assuming they just DIY'd the entire production, advertising, distribution, etc themselves. But that is so much work that they would need to already have an income stream to give them the time to do it all, not to mention all the non-music skills if they're not paying professionals to do the rest. If they're not just going to play at the local coffee shop, or bus from city to city barely making enough for gas and beer, they need some way to professionally produce, mass-market, and mass-distribute their songs. It's not feasible for most musicians to do this themselves, so there exists a music industry to do it... which gives them all the cards... letting them set the price, and contract terms... which are often unfair. That's what happens when an industry is given the power to exploit people: they do.
- Daz1 1y ago
  People don't actually care about answering this question, they just want to steal music and keep a 'clean' conscience.
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    Nope! I just think the business model is rotten. I worked at Amazon MP3 back in the day, mostly because I adored the concept of people paying to download DRM-free files. Same reason I use GOG for my games: I have a lot of money waiting for people that want to sell me files that I have control over. But the industry moved another direction, and they want ultimate control over everything: not just the songs themselves, but the clients to play them and everything in between. And the tragedy is they screw the artists just as much as customers. Copyright has been captured by the middlemen at the expense of the artists and audiences: that's the real reason people have no respect for the industry, and why copyright is so reviled.
probably_wrong 1y ago
Without giving specific numbers, I think the following situation is inherently unfair: I pay Spotify $20. They take their cut (say, 50%) and there's $10 left for the artists. I've only listened to one small artist throughout the entire month. The artist does not get $10 but much less despite Spotify knowing precisely which artists I listened to.
- benoau 1y ago
  They on average pass approximately 70% on, but the record labels also eat heavily into that before the artists get their share. I'm reminded of an effort a few years ago to legislate the creators getting 50% - which of course meant the "platforms" and the "labels" would collectively share only the other 50%. Which is presumably why the initiative failed. > The three major labels - Sony, Universal and Warner Music - faced some of the toughest questioning of the inquiry, and were accused of a "lack of clarity" by MPs. > They largely argued to maintain the status quo, saying any disruption could damage investment in new music, and resisted the idea that streaming was comparable to radio - where artists receive a 50/50 royalty split. > "It is a narrow-margin business, so it wouldn't actually take that much to upset the so-called apple cart," said Apple Music's Elena Segal. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473 https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473 These days Spotify has hundreds of millions for Joe Rogan and podcast investments, and Apple reports a 75% profit margin on services, so I guess it is quite profitable for everyone except the actual artists.
  - micromacrofoot 1y ago
    indeed - record company exec salaries don't come out of the ether, that's money that could otherwise go in the artists' pockets
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    Apple Music is a miniscule part of service revenue compared to App Store, payments from Google ($20 Billion a year), AppleCare, etc.
    - 1y ago
geekamongus 1y ago
One of the big differences between the old days and today is that you have exponentially more musicians releasing music every day due to how easy it is for bedroom producers to create and release tracks with very little barrier to entry. I can create 10 songs in a weekend on my laptop in my basement and send them out to all of the major streaming services for about 20 bucks. This floods the market with many, many independent musicians trying to get heard. And the only way to get heard today is to make it onto curated Spotify playlists, build a following, and hope that someone at a record company somewhere hears you and takes interest. Not only is Spotify a tool for consuming music by the public, it is also the main way that musicians have to promote themselves anymore. As a musician (who gave up the dream of making this a job long ago), it really sucks. There is infinitely more competition out there now, and when you factor in all the AI crap making it on to Spotify (some of which they are responsible for), it is even worse.
- prawn 1y ago
  What style of music were you making? I suspect, and this goes for more than just the music industry, that it helps if you're a natural self-promoter.
  - endtime 1y ago
    Not GP, but I believe Polyphia [1] self-produces on a laptop in a bedroom (or at least did when they started out?). 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_gkpYORQLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_gkpYORQLU
  - geekamongus 1y ago
    I make 90'S-ish indie rock. I play all the instruments (drums, guitar, bass, keys) and sing. Having to self-promote is the main struggle, and that's the only way to "make it" anymore. Similar with the book publishing industry. My wife spent a year writing an amazing book, paying an editor, but when shopping it around to publishers, none of them would bite because she didn't already have a social media following. They expect you to have 20k followers knowing that X percent of those will buy the product.
don_quiquong 1y ago
Maybe a market-based approach is inherently flawed for things like art, research, various services (health, education, etc)
zer00eyz 1y ago
> So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? The value of recorded music is now zero. Recorded music having A value was a result of markup on distribution profits. There is now no money in distribution. (There are a lot of parallels between how globalization works and how the record industry worked but thats another conversation). ML, generative music is coming for the music industry. Its not hopeless but your Spotify is just a loss leader. It's a gateway to your social media, to your (paid) endorsements and to your shows (another problematic facet of the industry) and merch. There are plenty of ways people with talent and a "voice" can profit. But you better be consistent and authentic.
bongodongobob 1y ago
Now ask how much global distribution used to cost. It's $40/yr right now with Spotify. That alone makes Spotify a massive boon for artists. Any bedroom artists complaining about Spotify just don't understand the industry at all. It's a performance art and always will be. If you can't get people to come to your shows or don't even play shows, well, look inward.
kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
A better comparison is the pre-streaming royalties from radio and Muzak.
magicalhippo 1y ago
> The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. Not saying it's perfect, but Qobuz is paying[1] ~3.5x that. I've been trying it out as a Spotify alternative, fairly pleased so far, though the "radio" feature in Spotify is better at finding new tracks I like. That said I buy albums on Bandcamp for stuff I really enjoy. [1]: https://community.qobuz.com/press-en/qobuz-unveils-its-average-payout-per-stream https://community.qobuz.com/press-en/qobuz-unveils-its-avera...
delusional 1y ago
I think I may think about it in the opposite direction. It's not that the artist makes too little, for me it's just that the platform makes too much. Spotify _should_ be taking a 5-10% cut, and anything above that is unfair. That's not enforcable or anything, but it is why I think artist are paid too little while also thinking the subscription is expensive.
super256 1y ago
I was always a fan of not per stream but of percentage based minutes listened. I spend 15€ every month, take off taxes and Spotify operating expenses, which would be like 10€ left: - I listen to X 90% of my total listening minutes this month, so they get 9€. - I listen to Y 10% of my total listening minutes this month, so they get 1€ I think this would be fair, because I kinda listen the same minutes every month, and most people with a fixed daily schedule probably do it too.
emsign 1y ago
I'd say I pay 10€ per month and it gets evenly split by the artists's songs I've listened to that month. If I only listen to one song or rather one artist. They get all the money (minus the fees for running the service). If I listen to 100 songs by 100 artists, each gets only 10 cents (minus the blablabla). That's how it should be, really.
ohthehugemanate 1y ago
Why do you choose the CD era as your comparison point? Why not cassettes, or the LP decades? The industry has changed a lot and choosing a different baseline is illuminating to any discussion of "fair" compensation. What hasn't changed is the fact that vertically integrated distribution-and-promotion with large market share has all the leverage, all the information, and all the legislative influence. In any time period where that exists, the same result plays out through different media. That is to say, in terms of negotiating power, free market economics, and political influence the artist is not just strongly disadvantaged, but artificially so. It's not a David and Goliath, it's more like David and the Death Star. When Roger Fischer, Adam Smith, and Jack Abramoff would all agree that one side probably needs some extra support, it's a good bet that "fair" lies so far on the other side of the scale that we don't have to worry about precision or philosophy of "fairness" to make a big improvement.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  Because CD has not been superseded by any other physical media? Nobody sells music on an USB stick or on a microSD card. If I go to buy music, it will be always CD.
  - triceratops 1y ago
    I recall reading a report somewhere that vinyl sales are higher than CD sales in the US.
    - tstrimple 1y ago
      I don't know anything about the data. But I literally just purchased a record player that my soon to be 14 year old daughter requested for her birthday. She doesn't have and has never requested a CD player.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
      Right, and the same argument applies: "But a USB/MicroSD format would carry more bits in a smaller space than CDs, and be less fragile, it's just a more convenient physical format for music!" But a) there is no mass market for any physical format any more. It's driven by nostalgia. And b) There's more nostalgia for Vinyl than for CDs simply because they were the main medium for much longer. Of course CDs are less fragile and bulky than Vinyl, just like SD cards are less fragile and bulky than CDs, and streaming on existing devices is even more convenient. But that's not the driving factor. It's all fun until someone leaves their Vinyl record collection in a hot car for a few hours.
SigmundurM 1y ago
How much they should make I'd say is up to how much you value them. If you really like an artist and want to support them, a objectively better way than just streaming their music is purchasing their albums, vinyls, merch, etc.
hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
Spotify isn’t setting a market price, so I’m not sure what your argument is here. Setting a market price means a band in really high demand can charge X dollars but a new band, that isn’t well known and doesn’t have high demand could charge X/4 dollars. Spotify OTOH, charges exactly the same price to the user no matter what song they listen to, and the price is “Monthly cost/number of songs listened to”. Unsurprisingly, instead of leading to the promotion and creation of a whole new set of bands, which is what the democratization of tools and knowledge of music through the internet should have led to, this has instead led to consolidation because the removal of the market price and setting a flat structure means people continue to flock towards the songs that are perceived to be the highest value, ie the most popular stuff.
sceptic123 1y ago
That isn't how Spotify distributes their revenue > Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors. From here: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/understanding-spotify-royalties/ https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/understanding...
coldtea 1y ago
>So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song? The amount they'd get for royalties if you couldn't pirate but had to buy their album/single to hear it. So similar to what they got at the pre-mp3/pre-Napster era. Remove a little for the (non existing) physical costs. (Whether they'd actually get 100% or 0.5% of those royalties would be between them and their record company contract). "But this is streaming" And my argument still is: you should pay the amount analogous to buying it once, and then stream it forever or zero times. Streaming should just add the convenience, not change the pricing.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

troyvit 1y ago

That's why I like bandcamp. Artists choose the price for their music and I'm free to pay that price, or more, if I think that's fair compensation.

steveBK123 1y ago

> I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? Fundamentally, inflation-adjusted there are 1/2 as many dollars coming in the front end to the US music industry in the 2020s as there were in the 90s peak, per most sources... even though population is 30% higher. So per-capita music spend in inflation adjusted dollars is down like 60-65%. And there's probably far more artists to spread that around to now with the long tail of bedroom producers / part timers / etc all the way up to Swift. So surely artists are making less than they used to, regardless of how the pie is sliced up because there is a smaller pie. Given the trend in everything else in our economy, I am dubious that the newer streaming arrangements are incrementally more artist-friendly than the old physical media music industry.

claw-el 1y ago

>… should be able to earn money from <activity>… I wonder what forms our perception of what activity should be able to earn money from and what should not. I know that me being a professional nap taker should not be able to earn money from it, but when does one activity turn into ‘should be able to earn money from’?

newsclues 1y ago

Does the record company make more money than the artist? That’s unfair to me. The people making the art, should be paid the most.

School-Cotton 1y ago
Why?
- saulpw 1y ago
  That's the way they feel. Why do you think it shouldn't be that way?
nomel 1y ago
> The people making the art, should be paid the most. Why? There's a fair market value for the art. There's also a fair real world cost* for distributing and advertising, set by the market (the people working those positions need to eat too). It's trivially easy to go negative, if you try to market something that isn't popular. If it weren't a net benefit for the artist, they wouldn't go under a label, or stream on a certain platform. They're not being forced to. They do it because it results in more money in their pocket.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  > They do it because it results in more money in their pocket. more than zero can still be too little money in exchange for the labor provided and the profit produced.
  - nomel 1y ago
    If the value that others get from it is not worth the effort that someone puts into making it, then we say it's unsustainable. You can't make people give you money, to cover the cost of something they don't want. And, that goes for the entire chain of human effort that is from the artist to the listener. There's a team that maintains the internet connection so the author can upload. * maintains a storage array/metadata catalog to hold the song. * creates the algorithm to recommend the music to people. * creates ads to recommend the service to people. * ...etc If any part of this chain finds their effort not worth the value they receive, the whole chain stops. The point before it stops is the market value of that service. Someone charges more than the market value? Then someone else, who finds the effort worth the cheaper pay, will do it (ok, besides monopolies that have captured the government, but they're not really relevant in this case). If you think it's possible to do what you want, then put the effort into starting a service! You don't want to? Well, nobody else does either, because what they get in return will not be worth the effort. We live in a society.

mingus88 1y ago

I’m not sure about this accounting. I know some artists with very successful songs and they made nothing substantial from millions of streams Could it be that the streaming platform pays 0.005 which then gets divided amongst the whole band, and then the label takes their cut for producing and marketing it? Whereas before, the label was simply giving 10%?

brentm 1y ago
I managed a few artists in the past. Usually Spotify paid something like $0.0035 per stream but it ranges based on where the listen took place. One artist owned part of their catalog so earned the 100% on those streams. The rest of their catalog was owned by a major label where they were credited 15% of the streaming take (which was slightly higher than the direct rate) towards their unrecouped major label account. I'd say overall though, streaming can be good for artists. It helps keep them fresh in fans ears (via auto-generated & editorial playlists) and provides a revenue stream for the older stuff that would never be selling in stores or iTunes now.
brewdad 1y ago
Question (You may or may not have insight): What happens when I download a playlist and listen to it offline in my car on an hours long roadtrip? Do my “streams” get counted once I get back online? Does the artist get credit for an estimated number of streams based on typical patterns? Does the artist get bupkis since I might play a song ten times but it wasn’t technically streamed to me?

al_borland 1y ago

It is also implied that the author is now pirating their music, so now instead of the artist getting some money from the author, they get none.

jszymborski 1y ago
The author says they buy the albums. "Moving away from Spotify doesn't mean abandoning artists. In fact, I now support musicians more directly by: Purchasing music directly from platforms like Bandcamp where artists receive 82-90% of sales Buying physical media from official stores Supporting Patreon/subscription services for favorite artists Attending concerts and buying merchandise Buying a $10 album on Bandcamp puts about $8.20-$9.00 in the artist's pocket. To match that on Spotify, you're talking roughly 1.6k-3k streams of that album per listener. If the artist has a label taking a cut on Spotify, the stream counts needed go up further. My self-hosted setup is about controlling my listening experience and owning what I pay for, not avoiding fair compensation to artists."
- al_borland 1y ago
  I assumed a lot of that was a disclaimer to try and avoid encouraging illegal activity outright. Lidarr seems to be a cornerstone of the setup. I assume Bandcamp is for more obscure indie stuff that isn't as available from the pirates.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    Lidarr isn't just for piracy, it's a good tool for keeping your library organised. It does musicbrains matching, fixes the metadata based on that, fetches pretty pictures of the artist etc. There are other tools for it, but Lidarr is what works for me.
    - mvanbaak 1y ago
      They specifically mention: lidarr is connected to sabnzbd. They add 'to download music I bought' but I find that very hard to believe. Since when do sites like band camp etc expose your bought library over usenet?

jszymborski 1y ago

The article says they purchase from bandcamp which takes less than 20%, and support them on patreon.

the_gastropod 1y ago

I used to work with a former member of a moderately successful rock band (they had a song in Guitar Hero, for example). He'd talk a bit about the royalties he'd received. His royalties from Spotify were negligible. Like single digit dollars per month. Think about a ~$15/hour job. A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that. Only the top fraction of a percentage of artists on Spotify hit that. Music has always been a tough business with middle men taking the lion's share of the upside. Streaming services just add another layer of middlemen.

cortesoft 1y ago
> A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that How many hours did it take to create the songs? You can write a song and then keep making money off it for years. There are also other revenue streams, with live performances and merchandise, etc. I don’t think you can really compare music streaming to a full time job unless someone is ONLY making music for streaming and doing it 40 hours a week.
dagi3d 1y ago
how much did their label get?

seemaze 1y ago

I can't say whether the music industry fairly compensates artists or not. I can say that the film industry, for example, has leveraged each subsequent evolution in distribution technology as on opportunity to shift profits towards distributors and away from those involved in production.

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

> how little money per stream artists make ... What is fair compensation for writing a song? Those are two different things. Recording artist does not always equal songwriter. So how much should the songwriter make? The recording studio? The audio engineer? All the other people involved in creating the recorded song? Now that it's made, how do you get people to know the song exists and want to listen to it, much less purchase it? The reason compensation isn't a settled thing is it's a very complex thing to answer. The simplest possible answer is "the artist sets their own price" - assuming they just DIY'd the entire production, advertising, distribution, etc themselves. But that is so much work that they would need to already have an income stream to give them the time to do it all, not to mention all the non-music skills if they're not paying professionals to do the rest. If they're not just going to play at the local coffee shop, or bus from city to city barely making enough for gas and beer, they need some way to professionally produce, mass-market, and mass-distribute their songs. It's not feasible for most musicians to do this themselves, so there exists a music industry to do it... which gives them all the cards... letting them set the price, and contract terms... which are often unfair. That's what happens when an industry is given the power to exploit people: they do.

Daz1 1y ago
People don't actually care about answering this question, they just want to steal music and keep a 'clean' conscience.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  Nope! I just think the business model is rotten. I worked at Amazon MP3 back in the day, mostly because I adored the concept of people paying to download DRM-free files. Same reason I use GOG for my games: I have a lot of money waiting for people that want to sell me files that I have control over. But the industry moved another direction, and they want ultimate control over everything: not just the songs themselves, but the clients to play them and everything in between. And the tragedy is they screw the artists just as much as customers. Copyright has been captured by the middlemen at the expense of the artists and audiences: that's the real reason people have no respect for the industry, and why copyright is so reviled.

probably_wrong 1y ago

Without giving specific numbers, I think the following situation is inherently unfair: I pay Spotify $20. They take their cut (say, 50%) and there's $10 left for the artists. I've only listened to one small artist throughout the entire month. The artist does not get $10 but much less despite Spotify knowing precisely which artists I listened to.

benoau 1y ago
They on average pass approximately 70% on, but the record labels also eat heavily into that before the artists get their share. I'm reminded of an effort a few years ago to legislate the creators getting 50% - which of course meant the "platforms" and the "labels" would collectively share only the other 50%. Which is presumably why the initiative failed. > The three major labels - Sony, Universal and Warner Music - faced some of the toughest questioning of the inquiry, and were accused of a "lack of clarity" by MPs. > They largely argued to maintain the status quo, saying any disruption could damage investment in new music, and resisted the idea that streaming was comparable to radio - where artists receive a 50/50 royalty split. > "It is a narrow-margin business, so it wouldn't actually take that much to upset the so-called apple cart," said Apple Music's Elena Segal. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473 https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473 These days Spotify has hundreds of millions for Joe Rogan and podcast investments, and Apple reports a 75% profit margin on services, so I guess it is quite profitable for everyone except the actual artists.
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  indeed - record company exec salaries don't come out of the ether, that's money that could otherwise go in the artists' pockets
- scarface_74 1y ago
  Apple Music is a miniscule part of service revenue compared to App Store, payments from Google ($20 Billion a year), AppleCare, etc.
  - 1y ago

geekamongus 1y ago

One of the big differences between the old days and today is that you have exponentially more musicians releasing music every day due to how easy it is for bedroom producers to create and release tracks with very little barrier to entry. I can create 10 songs in a weekend on my laptop in my basement and send them out to all of the major streaming services for about 20 bucks. This floods the market with many, many independent musicians trying to get heard. And the only way to get heard today is to make it onto curated Spotify playlists, build a following, and hope that someone at a record company somewhere hears you and takes interest. Not only is Spotify a tool for consuming music by the public, it is also the main way that musicians have to promote themselves anymore. As a musician (who gave up the dream of making this a job long ago), it really sucks. There is infinitely more competition out there now, and when you factor in all the AI crap making it on to Spotify (some of which they are responsible for), it is even worse.

prawn 1y ago
What style of music were you making? I suspect, and this goes for more than just the music industry, that it helps if you're a natural self-promoter.
- endtime 1y ago
  Not GP, but I believe Polyphia [1] self-produces on a laptop in a bedroom (or at least did when they started out?). 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_gkpYORQLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_gkpYORQLU
- geekamongus 1y ago
  I make 90'S-ish indie rock. I play all the instruments (drums, guitar, bass, keys) and sing. Having to self-promote is the main struggle, and that's the only way to "make it" anymore. Similar with the book publishing industry. My wife spent a year writing an amazing book, paying an editor, but when shopping it around to publishers, none of them would bite because she didn't already have a social media following. They expect you to have 20k followers knowing that X percent of those will buy the product.

don_quiquong 1y ago

Maybe a market-based approach is inherently flawed for things like art, research, various services (health, education, etc)

zer00eyz 1y ago

> So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? The value of recorded music is now zero. Recorded music having A value was a result of markup on distribution profits. There is now no money in distribution. (There are a lot of parallels between how globalization works and how the record industry worked but thats another conversation). ML, generative music is coming for the music industry. Its not hopeless but your Spotify is just a loss leader. It's a gateway to your social media, to your (paid) endorsements and to your shows (another problematic facet of the industry) and merch. There are plenty of ways people with talent and a "voice" can profit. But you better be consistent and authentic.

bongodongobob 1y ago

Now ask how much global distribution used to cost. It's $40/yr right now with Spotify. That alone makes Spotify a massive boon for artists. Any bedroom artists complaining about Spotify just don't understand the industry at all. It's a performance art and always will be. If you can't get people to come to your shows or don't even play shows, well, look inward.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago

A better comparison is the pre-streaming royalties from radio and Muzak.

magicalhippo 1y ago

> The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. Not saying it's perfect, but Qobuz is paying[1] ~3.5x that. I've been trying it out as a Spotify alternative, fairly pleased so far, though the "radio" feature in Spotify is better at finding new tracks I like. That said I buy albums on Bandcamp for stuff I really enjoy. [1]: https://community.qobuz.com/press-en/qobuz-unveils-its-average-payout-per-stream https://community.qobuz.com/press-en/qobuz-unveils-its-avera...

delusional 1y ago

I think I may think about it in the opposite direction. It's not that the artist makes too little, for me it's just that the platform makes too much. Spotify _should_ be taking a 5-10% cut, and anything above that is unfair. That's not enforcable or anything, but it is why I think artist are paid too little while also thinking the subscription is expensive.

super256 1y ago

I was always a fan of not per stream but of percentage based minutes listened. I spend 15€ every month, take off taxes and Spotify operating expenses, which would be like 10€ left: - I listen to X 90% of my total listening minutes this month, so they get 9€. - I listen to Y 10% of my total listening minutes this month, so they get 1€ I think this would be fair, because I kinda listen the same minutes every month, and most people with a fixed daily schedule probably do it too.

emsign 1y ago

I'd say I pay 10€ per month and it gets evenly split by the artists's songs I've listened to that month. If I only listen to one song or rather one artist. They get all the money (minus the fees for running the service). If I listen to 100 songs by 100 artists, each gets only 10 cents (minus the blablabla). That's how it should be, really.

ohthehugemanate 1y ago

Why do you choose the CD era as your comparison point? Why not cassettes, or the LP decades? The industry has changed a lot and choosing a different baseline is illuminating to any discussion of "fair" compensation. What hasn't changed is the fact that vertically integrated distribution-and-promotion with large market share has all the leverage, all the information, and all the legislative influence. In any time period where that exists, the same result plays out through different media. That is to say, in terms of negotiating power, free market economics, and political influence the artist is not just strongly disadvantaged, but artificially so. It's not a David and Goliath, it's more like David and the Death Star. When Roger Fischer, Adam Smith, and Jack Abramoff would all agree that one side probably needs some extra support, it's a good bet that "fair" lies so far on the other side of the scale that we don't have to worry about precision or philosophy of "fairness" to make a big improvement.

1718627440 1y ago
Because CD has not been superseded by any other physical media? Nobody sells music on an USB stick or on a microSD card. If I go to buy music, it will be always CD.
- triceratops 1y ago
  I recall reading a report somewhere that vinyl sales are higher than CD sales in the US.
  - tstrimple 1y ago
    I don't know anything about the data. But I literally just purchased a record player that my soon to be 14 year old daughter requested for her birthday. She doesn't have and has never requested a CD player.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
    Right, and the same argument applies: "But a USB/MicroSD format would carry more bits in a smaller space than CDs, and be less fragile, it's just a more convenient physical format for music!" But a) there is no mass market for any physical format any more. It's driven by nostalgia. And b) There's more nostalgia for Vinyl than for CDs simply because they were the main medium for much longer. Of course CDs are less fragile and bulky than Vinyl, just like SD cards are less fragile and bulky than CDs, and streaming on existing devices is even more convenient. But that's not the driving factor. It's all fun until someone leaves their Vinyl record collection in a hot car for a few hours.

SigmundurM 1y ago

How much they should make I'd say is up to how much you value them. If you really like an artist and want to support them, a objectively better way than just streaming their music is purchasing their albums, vinyls, merch, etc.

hshdhdhj4444 1y ago

Spotify isn’t setting a market price, so I’m not sure what your argument is here. Setting a market price means a band in really high demand can charge X dollars but a new band, that isn’t well known and doesn’t have high demand could charge X/4 dollars. Spotify OTOH, charges exactly the same price to the user no matter what song they listen to, and the price is “Monthly cost/number of songs listened to”. Unsurprisingly, instead of leading to the promotion and creation of a whole new set of bands, which is what the democratization of tools and knowledge of music through the internet should have led to, this has instead led to consolidation because the removal of the market price and setting a flat structure means people continue to flock towards the songs that are perceived to be the highest value, ie the most popular stuff.

sceptic123 1y ago

That isn't how Spotify distributes their revenue > Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors. From here: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/understanding-spotify-royalties/ https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/understanding...

coldtea 1y ago

>So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song? The amount they'd get for royalties if you couldn't pirate but had to buy their album/single to hear it. So similar to what they got at the pre-mp3/pre-Napster era. Remove a little for the (non existing) physical costs. (Whether they'd actually get 100% or 0.5% of those royalties would be between them and their record company contract). "But this is streaming" And my argument still is: you should pay the amount analogous to buying it once, and then stream it forever or zero times. Streaming should just add the convenience, not change the pricing.