7 ms·

They will never see a single cent from that, AA will continue to rotate domains and nothing was accomplished, except for spotify's legal team which earned easy

• echelon 6mo ago
  I don't know how to feel about any of this. First and foremost, I feel like Spotify is scummy. I don't like what they did when they were founded, I don't like what they do to artists. I hate the hyperscalers being in this business (Google, Apple, Amazon) as that's another thing they do that devalues an otherwise healthy market. Bringing in outside business division revenues to dump on another market's prices is ecologically unhealthy for optimal capitalism and healthy competition. On the one hand, while I want cheap media, I also want artists to make money. While Spotify puts real price pressure on artists, piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all. I get Gabe's value prop with Valve. Make the service easy, cheap, convenient, good, and piracy begins to diminish. But if there are cheap services and cheap avenues (that still underpay artists), why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all? Do Bandcamp. Buy merch. Do something to support the artists. I feel like paying piracy services is the opposite of that. But ethical quandary - doesn't Anna's Archive also support spreading research papers, etc.? Complicated feelings. I wish we had better ways to pay originators of things. Art, music, authors, researchers, ICs, ... I feel like studios and middlemen and companies themselves are entities that exist because rewarding work or value or happiness at the site of exchange is hard/intangible.
  • greatpost 6mo ago
    [dead]
  • ikrenji 6mo ago
    people that get their music from AA would never buy it or pay spotify for it, so the "loss" is completely imaginary. same goes for movies, videogames etc
    • pas 6mo ago
      in some sense yes, as long as there are sources of good enough cheaper alternatives millions of people won't ever pay for Spotify (or even use the free version with ads, but the free-with-ads version is in itself a good enough for many many many people), but of course in a vacuum with only Spotify people would probably pay for it! though the determination of damages is usually completely all over the map (and usually skews high to serve a punitive purpose, though I doubt it has any real deterrent effect).
    • kansface 6mo ago
      This is bad epistemology. Incentives change the behavior on the edges.
  • tosti 6mo ago
    The entire record industry is scum and Spotify is just a part of that. It can just die a swift death, would be for the best. Bandcamp is much better. Much lower barrier to entry for everyone and it has my favorite artists.
  • arnvald 6mo ago
    I’d love to see a streaming service where my payment goes to artists I listen to. Spotify pays 70% of their music revenue to publishers based on the total number of listens. All revenue is put together and split based on the global numbers. Which means that niche band I like will get next to nothing. Instead if they account for 50% of my listening time in one month, they should get 35% of what I paid to Spotify that month. Unfortunately big labels will never agree to that.
    • darkwater 6mo ago
      But, unless they put some thresholds on minimum listens, isn't basically the same thing what they do and what you propose? 35% of 1 is the same as 0.000000035 of 10.000.000
      • collabs 6mo ago
        No, because let's say OP pays USD 10 and listens to only one song one time -- obviously, Linkin Park In the end -- right now, the payout is almost nothing. With OP proposal, they would get USD 7.
      • mikepurvis 6mo ago
        Not all listens show the same intention. If I go to the barbershop and they're playing Spotify top-40 playlists running all day long, that is very different from me actively choosing what I want to listen to for a few hours a months while I'm listening in my car, or putting on Friends Per Second while doing the dishes. My $7/mo should be going to the artists I actually chose to listen to, not the stuff that droned passively for hours in background environments. Particularly when I'm actually a high margin customer for Spotify; the cost to them of my subscription is low since I spend so little time on the service. That makes it all the more galling that my subscription cost is mostly going to Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.
        • darkwater 6mo ago
          I mean, I understand and agree, and I'm pretty sure that Spotify Premium users are very skewed towards less mainstream tastes, so I agree it would be better for smaller artists and would probably change the power balance (well, if we forget that music labels exist). But yeah, if as others pointed out you were to give 70% of your subscription cost to the artist that composed/performed the single track you listened this month, it would be very different.
  • Cpoll 6mo ago
    > piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all. This has historically been unclear. Lots of artists make more money from touring and merchandise than from record sales, and piracy is likely to boost those.
    • throw0101d 6mo ago
      > Lots of artists make more money from touring and merchandise than from record sales, and piracy is likely to boost those. Reminder of the recent "The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'": * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473673
      • lostlogin 6mo ago
        In a similar vein, the recent thread on bootleg recordings - with both the article and the comments suggesting a more complicated relationship between piracy and band warnings. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765604
    • TylerE 6mo ago
      True to an extent, but records are great promotional tool, and rather expensive to make if you don't want it to sound like poop. Perhaps something like $10-25k on the very low end for something half-way "serious", and that's assuming you're not going all Chinese Democracy and can actually cut the thing in a week or so. Then it has to mixed, mastered, art prepared, etc. Most small-medium time artists can't afford to front all the expenses. If no one buys the records, no record company will give the band an advance. Even if most records don't really generate any direct profit for the band, getting the production bankrolled is a pretty big benefit.
  • matthewkayin 6mo ago
    > why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all? Do Bandcamp. Buy merch. Do something to support the artists. I don't like this perspective because it puts the onus on the individual consumer. Many people who listen to music struggle to make ends meet. They do not have the extra money to afford buying albums off of bandcamp, yet they are contributing members of society and they deserve to be able to listen to music. Meanwhile there are billions of dollars floating around in the music industry. Spotify absolutely has the spare cash to pay their artists more; they just choose not to. As much as I love the idea of Gabe's "piracy is a service issue" philosophy, I think the real truth is likely that piracy is an issue of capitalism and wealth inequality.
    • procaryote 6mo ago
      There would be no money floating around the music business, spare or otherwise, if no one paid for music I guess you could fund it with taxes?
      • hansvm 6mo ago
        Sure, why not? Current US music revenue is $6/mo per US taxpayer. For less than half the cost of Spotify you could 5x the income going to musicians if you skipped the middleman and magically just paid them directly. That doesn't seem like a bad deal.
    • Planktonne 6mo ago
      > yet they are contributing members of society and they deserve to be able to listen to music By the same token, artists are contributing members of society and they deserve a host of things, including enough to make a living. You can't demand one group's output as a right for everyone else unless you also grant them rights in return.
    • NeutralWanted 6mo ago
      No one 'deserves' to listen to music. It's not a right. It's a luxury that you can either afford or you can't. FM radio is still around for those people.
  • senko 6mo ago
    > I don't like what they do to artists Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify: > It pays roughly two-thirds of every dollar it generates from music, with nearly 80% allocated to recording royalties and about 20% to publishing, though how much artists and songwriters ultimately receive depends on their agreements with rights holders, which Spotify does not control. [0] Spotify is frantically trying to escape the record label's death grip (hence podcasts), because they know they can squeeze it for just about anything with licensing deals. It's a terrible business model! Spotify keeps a third for their costs (& finally some profit in the past year or two), ie. about the same that Apple takes from App Store for basically nothing[1]. How the record labels convinced the world that Spotify is the bad guy here is beyond belief. -- [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofiachierchio/2026/01/28/spotify-claims-it-paid-out-more-than-11-billion-to-the-music-industry-in-2025/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofiachierchio/2026/01/28/spoti... [1] Certainly app store costs are nothing when compared to the infrastructure that Spotify needs.
    • cm2012 6mo ago
      Spotify paid out ten billion dollars to artists in 2024. This is not small potatoes - total 2024 music industry merchandise sales was around $14b. These big platform payouts matter a lot.
      • senko 6mo ago
        Correction: to record labels. When you read artists' blog posts you can see they get peanuts. Not due to Spotify - due to the recording deals. If you want an exhaustive but eye-opening account of all of the details, I recommend "All you need to know about the music business" by Don Passman.
        • HDThoreaun 6mo ago
          This is the artists fault for signing with the labels. The labels own their music, of course they get the payment.
      • lostlogin 6mo ago
  • paulddraper 6mo ago
    A lot of this has to do with the fact that many more people want to create music, than the number of artists that people want to listen to. So there’s a heavy supply/demand imbalance, and distribution/discovery thrives there.
  • 999900000999 6mo ago
    If I like an artist I buy a physical copy of the album. I just brought Light Years on cassette by Nas. I’m an hobbyist musician and I’m going to sell actual cassettes and donate the profits. I’m never going to get the 500 million streams you need to make money off Spotify
  • Salgat 6mo ago
    I've always liked China's business model for music. In China, all music is free to stream and download. Musicians make their money the more traditional way, through performances, merchandise, promotions/advertising, etc.
    • rafram 6mo ago
      That’s basically the US model as well now.
      • Salgat 6mo ago
        The US still enforces copyright law on song distribution which is the big difference. It basically requires a middleman (like spotify) that soaks up all the revenue from that distribution while giving almost nothing back to the artists.
  • troupo 6mo ago
    > First and foremost, I feel like Spotify is scummy. I don't like what they did when they were founded, I don't like what they do to artists. > While Spotify puts real price pressure on artists, You know that Spotify doesn't pay artists, right? That Spotify pays 70% of its revenue to rights holders before it sees a single cent itself? And that it's rights holders who pay artists? I wish the angry pitchfork mob for once managed to attack the actual culprits: the Big Four. Nope, that day will never come.
  • tempaccount5050 6mo ago
    > I don't like what they do to artists. Global distribution. For $40/year. That was fucking unheard of 20 years ago. Spotify is the best thing that ever happened to artists. Don't let the mediocre one's who blame their lack of success on Spotify fool you. They don't make money because they likely suck and can't book dates because no one wants to see them.
    • HDThoreaun 6mo ago
      Finally the correct take on spotify. Artists were 100% fucked before spotify, streaming saved them. Now we have more artists making money than ever, but since most of them arent really successful they whine and whine when they'd be making nothing 20 years ago.
      • tempaccount5050 6mo ago
        Yep. If you can't make it with Spotify and all the social media channels available, you definitely wouldn't have made it before all of this stuff.
  • protocolture 6mo ago
    >I get Gabe's value prop with Valve. Make the service easy, cheap, convenient, good, and piracy begins to diminish. >But if there are cheap services and cheap avenues (that still underpay artists), why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all? Spotify cancelled my package, and keeps sending me offers to rejoin at twice the price (actually more than that, it was a joint account with my wife, so its like 2.5 times if we were both to start paying again). Every time I listen to spotify without the package I get 3 ads to 1 song. Sometimes 2 ads when its generous. I would have probably paid my spotify tax on time every month without thinking about it. But now I hate them to pieces. It seems like my options are: 1. Sign up for a service without the all of music I want to listen to. 2. Sign up for a service thats as scummy as spotify but hasnt quite enshittified yet. 3. Download all the mp3s from my spotify playlists and listen to them locally without the weird payment/advertising apparatus in between. So far 3 makes the most sense to me.
  • analog31 6mo ago
    >>> ...piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all. I'm not sure about that. A related situation is software piracy. There was a long time period when it was easy for people to get "free" copies of software titles such as a major word processing program, by copying them at work and bringing them home. This might not really have hurt the vendor of the software, because they still sold lots of copies to businesses. But it effectively kept anybody from bringing a less feature rich but lower priced alternative to the market. Some of the companies whose works were copied became effective monopolies. Another way of putting it was that the software had two price tiers: A paid tier for businesses and a free tier that kept competitors out of the market. Had anybody done this deliberately, it might have been considered "dumping." Music piracy may have a similar effect of creating a moat for the big labels and players who can diversify their income streams, while preventing small-scale acts from offering an acceptable but lower priced alternative.
  • JoeJonathan 6mo ago
    As an academic, I am happy to see my work on Anna's Archive. Unless your book goes gangbusters, few humanities scholars make any real money from publications, and maybe the 5-10 biggest names in my field make something might get something like ~$40k at signing, and maybe a few thousand more from book sales. So far, I've netted $326 from my first book. But that doesn't matter! We publish because we want our work out there in the world, not because we think it might make us money. On the other hand, I have no idea who runs Anna's Archive. I wouldn't be surprised if it were backdoor funded by AI companies who want the data available for scraping. Maybe that explains the Spotify debacle?
• weinzierl 6mo ago
  Maybe it's not about the money primarily. There are enough parties out there that want the people behind Anna's archive behind bars and I'm afraid this will end the same way as for the Pirate Bay guys in the best case and like it ended for Aaron Schwartz in the worst.
  • ffsm8 6mo ago
    Fwiw, piratebay continues to be the -to my knowledge- biggest public tracker out there, with basically every media production available. And I think that was his point. They may ruin some people's life's... but aside from that, they achieve nothing.
    • nalekberov 6mo ago
      Those are just crappy replicas of 'The Pirate Bay'. Full of annoying junk ads. 1337x is probably the biggest public tracker.
      • bpavuk 6mo ago
        and even 1337x is too annoying to use at times compared to RuTracker
        • nalekberov 6mo ago
          yeah, rutracker is to my knowledge the biggest and "cleanest" semi-public tracker.
    • erkt 6mo ago
      Just visited two nights ago and was pleasantly surprised to see domains active with fresh magnets. The people are returning to nature.
      • dmbche 6mo ago
        It never stopped!
• ok123456 6mo ago
  Didn't Spotify initially use pirated music to develop its system?
  • unnamed76ri 6mo ago
    Considering the currently don’t pay small time artists a dime so they can funnel more money to the record labels that own them, they are still a piracy outfit.