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Deadmau5 Withholding His Latest Album from Spotify
- kevingibbon 14y agoI think this is a really smart move for Deadmau5. During this period its not on spotify, diehard fans will pay for the album through itunes (or other means). After its released to spotify they will benefit from spotify distribution.
- truebecomefalse 14y agoIf this becomes common won't that kind of kill the utility of Spotify?
- drgath 14y ago99.999% of what I listen to on Spotify is older than a few weeks, so for listeners like me, no.
- EnderMB 14y agoI'm the same, but if you look at the most listened to lists they tend to match the charts pretty closely. There's probably some kind of long-tail effect with Spotify, but a lot of people use Spotify to listen to what's popular right now, and I'd probably lump deadmau5 in the "popular" category.
- richadams 14y agoSeems to be Spotify US only. It's available on Spotify UK.
- runawaybottle 14y agoWhat monthly price would work for artists?
- batiudrami 14y agoThe problem, I think, is that artists compare Spotify with CD sales, instead of Spotify with piracy. It's hard to determine how much Spotify has decreased both CD sales and piracy, but I'd be putting my bets on it reducing piracy a lot more. It's just so much more convenient.
- runawaybottle 14y agoI don't think they'll ever be able to stretch past $10-$15 a month with a streaming music service. Companies like Spotify/Hulu/Netflix might be better off combining their package to charge a solid premium price (Complete fantasy, I'm aware). It would be like the new cable tv subscription for this generation. $90 a month?
- batiudrami 14y agoYeah. My other comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4573711 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4573711) gives some thoughts on this. For me personally, a good music service (the Spotify catalogue is good, but has nothing on iTunes, for instance) would be worth $50 a month alone, whereas I wouldn't pay anything like $90 a month for streaming TV/movies unless it included live sport. But, I think I may be an edge case. The problem at the moment for music and artists, is finding a feasible business model in a world where streaming music is worth nothing (I'd argue that the Spotify subscription fee pays for convenience, rather than the music itself for most customers).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sprice 14y agoIt's unavailable on Rdio in Canada
- randall 14y agoYou can, however, purchase it for $10. I'm glad you can at least purchase it on Rdio, and hopefully that'll sync to devices too.
- batiudrami 14y agoI love the idea of Spotify (and I'm a subscriber). I also buy albums occasionally, and spend many thousands of dollars a year seeing bands play live. What's great about Spotify, is that artists get paid per listen, which favours artists which make great, lasting music, and against those who produce one hit wonders. If people continue to listen to your music over a period of time, the artist will continue to get paid, and that's great (and those who produce one hit wonders get paid a lot at the time, and virtually nothing afterwards). The problem, of course, is that Spotify doesn't pay very much to artists. Spotify says this is because artists have shitty deals with labels (and I'm sure this is true), but independents also complain about the amount passed on. Spotify, however, last I checked, isn't profitable, so they can't afford to pass on more money anyway. I would happily pay more, but I use it near-constantly at work and at home (easily 6+ hours a day on average). I suspect I'm a minority here. Ensuring artists get paid enough is a problem we haven't solved yet. I tend to think it'll go the way of free-or-near-free streaming (a la Spotify or Youtube), with albums becoming collectibles like Vinyls, and the vast majority of artist revenue coming from live shows. Unfortunately, this is going to mean labels are going to have to negotiate a cut of live shows with artists to cover album production costs (assuming they're not independent, obviously). I don't mind a one-or-two week delay on streaming sites to give people who really want a listen to buy it first. Of course, this helps drive piracy back up, but for artists, their aim shouldn't be minimising piracy, but maximising the profitability of their work.
- majormajor 14y agoI'd also happily pay considerably more for things like Spotify and Hulu Plus and Netflix in exchange for bigger catalogs and sufficient amounts getting passed to the creators to fund the production of future content. I don't see any way to keep physical media from being phased out, and if that's inevitable I prefer a streaming model to a rebuy-for-each-new-digital-format model.
- jeffool 14y agoI'm surprised services like Spotify and Hulu haven't divvied up their content into special subscriber packs like Cable companies do. Spotify Premium costs $10? We have to assume the average listener listens to less than $10 worth of music. Find the amount each genre listens to, and charge just a dollar over that (but less than $10) for, say, the current top selling 100 albums and the genre of the subscriber's choosing. Say, $5 for hip hop, $7 for rock, $3 for country, etc. Hulu could do the same with scifi, drama, comedy, film, TV, and documentary packs all at cheaper prices, all along with their current "everything for the top fee" charge. /edit: Similarly, as they've done with StarTrek.com and SouthParkStudios.com, I can't imagine why every show hasn't offered their full series online. Especially those brands with many shows and fan-bases that could be brought together.
- skunker 14y agoI've tried buying some downloads. I still use Spotify for everything, but some stuff isn't on there. But when I go to an artists site, and they pretty much say "buy it on iTunes" it's all over for me. iTunes is horrible and not exactly "cheap" either, it almost costs me as much as a physical copy, yet the cost for the label is much lower. I would love to use Amazon MP3, but I am not american.
- iamben 14y agoDoes anyone know how Spotify royalties compare to radio play royalties on a per listener basis? I see them as a very similar service (excluding talk radio, of course), just with spotify being far more convenient and better for discovering new music.
- FaceKicker 14y agoI think the point is that Spotify is so convenient that you essentially own any music on it, especially if you have premium, potentially making it pointless to buy the album for many customers. Prior to Spotify and similar services, if you wanted to listen to music legally (which piracy doesn't give you) and conveniently/on-demand (which the radio doesn't give you), you had to buy the album. (I'm assuming your point was that Spotify probably pays at least as much per listener as the radio.)
- iamben 14y agoYeah, correct on my point, if that's the case. I suppose it's much like piracy in a way - would people have bought the album if it wasn't for spotify? Is every spotify listener a lost sale? I have absolutely no hard facts to back it up, but I see a lot more people attending festivals and shows and supporting artists in different ways. I know a lot of spotify subscribers who use it for work and still buy the MP3s for their ipod, or the CD for their collection. I have hundreds and hundreds of CDs, all in storage. I buy them occasionally at shows but tend to buy vinyl (if I can) to support a band now. I listen to lots of music on Spotify I would never buy, or never have bought. For a fair few of those I'd probably go and see the artist/band live, though.
- nthitz 14y agoReminds me of how big media companies delay release on Netflix or Amazon to promote DVD sales. In either case it's available for the pirates before retail stores.
- ghshephard 14y agoI find it fascinating (Ironic?) that iTunes is now seen as the "preferred platform for artists wishing to make money selling their music" - given both it's history, as well the complete and utter lack of DRM associated with iTunes Music.
- jiggy2011 14y agoDRM on music is 100% useless. You would have to prevent a DRM free copy from existing at all.
- ghshephard 14y agoDRM is annoying, but it can be effective. There is a DRM free copy of every popular science fiction novel you can think of up to around 2010 or so (And, since I haven't checked for about a year, we may have moved into 2011/2012). But, with the exception of Top 100 novels - it's next to impossible to find/download these books unless you try really, really hard. I'm sure many of those people who buy a book on Amazon, would instead download if it were effortless to. (Though, many would also purchase it, in much the same way many of us purchase our TV shows and Music.) DRM on books, so far, has slowed down piracy of books. It's not 100% effective, but it's certainly not 100% useless.
- jiggy2011 14y agoI doubt that this has much to do with DRM. More likely a lot of this stuff is just less popular so there are going to be less people seeding it etc. I'm going to guess that piracy has a very long tail and the majority of piracy traffic happens with a small minority of files. There's also the issue that books are generally cheaper. Books also have some advantage in that it is more difficult to exploit the analog gap there, you need a way to print it out and rescan it. Or take a photo of each page and then use OCR. Music on the other hand can be pirated by plugging the output from your speaker jack into something else that records it.
- coolnow 14y agoThere are DRM removers for books if you know where to look.
- thechut 14y agoI had no problem finding it on usenet...
- Matsta 14y agoThe funny thing is, even if Deadmau5 only sells his music on iTunes, Amazon etc, by the time you deduct Apple's/Amazon's cut and the record label's cut, he isn't going to make that much, maybe $100k or even $200k Net if he's lucky. To put that in perspective, I know that Deadmau5 usually gets around $100k per gig he gets played (for the bigger festivals anyway), so really after 2 gigs he's going to have made more then his whole album. And it's the case with most artists now anyway, they make more money from concerts then they do in song sales.
- carbocation 14y ago> And it's the case with most artists now anyway, they make more money from concerts then they do in song sales. It's kind of nice that some artists occasionally (not always, due to piracy) make money from their marketing (i.e., their song sales, spotify plays, etc).
- tptacek 14y agoLots of midlist artists make below-subsistence on concerts. The payouts from club appearances are very low. Deadmau5 is anomalous; comparing his take to that of a typical indie musician is a little like comparing Slint to U2. It's probably true that most artists make more now from concerts than recordings, but don't kid yourself: that's just because most artists can't make anything significant from recording anymore.
- meritt 14y agoSpotify should turn this into an opportunity. Situations like this, allow users to pay-to-unlock albums, otherwise seamlessly integrates with the rest of Spotify. Virtual Currency and pay-to-win works extremely well for social gaming/zynga/et al, why not music industry?
- Matsta 14y agoThey still think its 1998 and that we still go to the store to buy albums on Cassette
- philip1209 14y agoThey could monetize rapidly with Amazon Affiliates
- paulsutter 14y agoRight, and if they did most artists would make their albums purchase only, thereby blowing up Spotify's subscription model. After all, are you a premium artist or not? By refusing to add this feature, Spotify makes Deadmau5 look like the bad guy to his fans.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoDeadmau5 isn't the first to do this, a lot of artists delay a week or two. It's no big deal.
- kevingibbon 14y agothe beauty in spotify is the simplicity. Gamification makes no sense in this context.
- philip1209 14y agoPerhaps each month of Spotify premium should include "early access" credits to use for immediate access to a particular newly released album. This money goes to the label, and users can purchase additional credits if they wish. The other option, if Spotify is looking to play a little more dirty, is that they can have albums withheld in this manner bypass the "new release" page on the basis that they are no longer newly released. This would reduce marketing, play count, and thus payout to the artist.
- iamtyce 14y agoThe record is definitely available on both Spotify UK and AUS, but as far as I can tell only half of it can be streamed if you haven't purchased the mp3's elsewhere.
- iamtyce 14y agoFor the record, I purchased it via iTunes regardless of the fact that I've been a Spotify UK subscriber for 3+ years.
- pixie_ 14y agoThat's cool, I'll listen to it on BitTorrent and no one will make any money. I pirated music for 10 years until the 'business' actually figured out what I want - all the music, anywhere, anytime, for a flat fee, which has much more value-add than pirating. I'm not going to be forced into some other contrived broken business model. The only simple solution I can think of is another level of Spotify membership for early access - like $15 a month. Other than that, Spotify is about volume. Get your name out there, make some money, and make real money by playing shows and selling merch. Making money by sitting back and collecting royalties for 50 years is waaaay too lucrative. Spotify is fixing that.
- chrischen 14y agoWhat if instead of $10 a month, I think $1 a month is a fair price for unlimited music? Can I now justify pirating because someone has pulled my arbitrarily defined "fair" price for unlimited music? The artist is stating that they would like you to pay for the download, and just because the streaming service is legal doesn't mean it's fair or works.
- aggftw 14y agoThen don't use the $10 a month service and go pirate music by all means. That gives signals to the actors, which they will take into consideration when figuring out what their business model should look like. The fact that services like Spotify have caught on as of late are proof that many people like the business model. Let musicians see how much more money they make by delaying the release of their albums in these services. They will figure it out eventually, I hope. It's all about finding the distribution of that arbitrary "fair" price in order to maximize earnings.
- chrischen 14y agoYes and what if this signal that consumers want to send–$10, $1, or $0.01–doesn't work for the musicians???? Musicians can send a signal too. They can stop producing content. Fewer young people will consider going into the arts because they don't want to be starving (this is already the case, actually). I'd love to pay only $1000 for a brand new car, but that doesn't work for car manufacturers. There's no reason a $10 a month service is necessarily sustainable just because that's what people want to pay. Heck, if consumers can demand what they want to pay they'd most likely just go with $0. Why can't they send that signal? It's convenient for the consumer to say $10 because they are comfortable with that. This amount is what labels can squeeze from consumers (because piracy has left them no options), but that doesn't mean it's the final and perfect solution. If music subscription services end up not being much better than piracy, then all it does is grant a false sense of entitlement to these people who might as well still be pirating.