4 ms·

He's complaining that the sky is falling when it really isn't. His argument gets circular, but this is a decent microcosm: >I also don't understand the claim

by mjolk 13y ago

He's complaining that the sky is falling when it really isn't. His argument gets circular, but this is a decent microcosm: >I also don't understand the claim of discovery that Spotify makes; the actual moment of discovery in most cases happens at the moment when someone else tells you about an artist or you read about them – not when you're on the streaming service listening to what you have read about...Why would you click and go elsewhere and pay when the free version is sitting right in front of you? I've found out about new artists through Spotify's radio service. I 'Discover' new music by clicking around on Youtube or Spotify; I don't read music magazines (amusingly also becoming archaic). Now, where this is actually kind of cool, is that the artist gets paid when I listen.(1) I didn't go out and pirate it.*(2) I didn't give revenue to a Youtube user that uploaded against copyright. I didn't go with the 'free version.' As a paid subscriber, I pay to keeping Spotify running. As a user of the 'free' Spotify version, I pay by consuming marketing, which in turn generates money to keep Spotify running. Spotify in turn gives money to the label, who are responsible for paying the artists. If you buy a nice dinner and the restaurant doesn't pay the busboy, you don't kick the waiter. That doesn't make any sense. Talkies (or records or CDs or eBooks or DVDs or internet or drive-ins) will suck all creative content out of the world. (1) The artist _does_ get paid. If the contract between an artist or group and his/her/their record label isn't lucrative for the musician(s), it's hardly fair to blame the streaming service, isn't it? (2)I wouldn't have even known the song/artist existed disclaimer: I really like Spotify.

ScottWhigham 13y ago
I'm sorry - this reads like a fan's take on what the music industry/bands is like. Have you uploaded anything to Spotify and gotten paid? Do you have proof that a single band you've "discovered" on Spotify has ever received a check as a result of your being able to listen to their music without directly paying for specific access to that album/song? I highly doubt it. Are you familiar with the breakdown between publishing and mechanical copyrights? If not, then you're just spouting the marketing that companies like Spotify/Pandora want you to spout. Spotify sucks for "making money" as an indie band. It's a nice tool in other areas but to act like "the bands that my friends and I listen to get paid when we listen" is, well, either willfully ignorant or naive. That doesn't make it lose/lose for everyone - like you said, you wouldn't have know the song/artist existed and there's value to some bands in that. It's simple: If you didn't get paid to write software, but instead got paid $6 per hour with no insurance to travel the country while staying in cheap hotels and eating crap food and to go onstage for an hour and half per night to code only to throw the hard drive/files away at the end of the show, would you write really great software during your "downtime"? Or would you be exhausted/bored and find that, hey, guess what - I don't think I'm as creative when I'm on day 87 on the road as I was on day 3. Services like Spotify relegate "songwriting" to "something you do in your downtime because they don't pay the bills". Today is a far different musical/creative world relative to 30-40 years when the record company would front you 6+ months of expenses and say, "Go write a great record." If you think that has no effect on the quality of the music written, you're fooling yourself. And the restaurant analogy makes no sense here. Who is the restaurant - the music industry or Spotify? Who is the bus boy? I'm assuming that's the band but then which side is the waiter?
- larrys 13y ago
  Scott - I liked what you said so I forked to your music site. Very nice but wanted to point out that the links at the bottom left ("video/music/calender") don't work for me in Firefox 24 under osx 10.8.5.
wiredfool 13y ago
His point is, that for some artists, exposure is helpful enough that Spotify's awful rates and the fact that the money goes to the labels and not the artists is still a net positive. Once you get past the new, unknown stage, it's a net negative. David Byrne is one of my favorite artists, and coincidentally, another one (Lois McMaster Bujold) had a similar issue with releasing a bunch of ebooks for free. Where the exposure can be _very_ helpful at the beginning of a career, giving everything for free after a long and relatively full career doesn't help pay the rent.
jamesbritt 13y ago
Some additional data: "Streaming music payments: how much do artists really receive?" http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/19/zoe-keating-spotify-streaming-royalties http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/19/zoe-keatin... "My $treaming Data" (from Zoe Keating) http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/16086277627/my-treaming-data http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/16086277627/my-treaming-da... Total streams for 1 month: 6926 Total amount earned: $32.07 Average price paid per stream after CDBaby’s 9% cut: Spotify $0.003339 Rhapsody $0.0091 Napster $0.015224 Rhapsody has a fixed stream rate. I don’t know the respective formulas for Spotify or Napster, but price-per-stream varies: Napster: $0.01658813 to $0.01721973 Spotify: $0.00102187 to $0.01158124 Some prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4330920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4330920

by mjolk 13y ago

ScottWhigham 13y ago

I'm sorry - this reads like a fan's take on what the music industry/bands is like. Have you uploaded anything to Spotify and gotten paid? Do you have proof that a single band you've "discovered" on Spotify has ever received a check as a result of your being able to listen to their music without directly paying for specific access to that album/song? I highly doubt it. Are you familiar with the breakdown between publishing and mechanical copyrights? If not, then you're just spouting the marketing that companies like Spotify/Pandora want you to spout. Spotify sucks for "making money" as an indie band. It's a nice tool in other areas but to act like "the bands that my friends and I listen to get paid when we listen" is, well, either willfully ignorant or naive. That doesn't make it lose/lose for everyone - like you said, you wouldn't have know the song/artist existed and there's value to some bands in that. It's simple: If you didn't get paid to write software, but instead got paid $6 per hour with no insurance to travel the country while staying in cheap hotels and eating crap food and to go onstage for an hour and half per night to code only to throw the hard drive/files away at the end of the show, would you write really great software during your "downtime"? Or would you be exhausted/bored and find that, hey, guess what - I don't think I'm as creative when I'm on day 87 on the road as I was on day 3. Services like Spotify relegate "songwriting" to "something you do in your downtime because they don't pay the bills". Today is a far different musical/creative world relative to 30-40 years when the record company would front you 6+ months of expenses and say, "Go write a great record." If you think that has no effect on the quality of the music written, you're fooling yourself. And the restaurant analogy makes no sense here. Who is the restaurant - the music industry or Spotify? Who is the bus boy? I'm assuming that's the band but then which side is the waiter?

larrys 13y ago
Scott - I liked what you said so I forked to your music site. Very nice but wanted to point out that the links at the bottom left ("video/music/calender") don't work for me in Firefox 24 under osx 10.8.5.

wiredfool 13y ago

His point is, that for some artists, exposure is helpful enough that Spotify's awful rates and the fact that the money goes to the labels and not the artists is still a net positive. Once you get past the new, unknown stage, it's a net negative. David Byrne is one of my favorite artists, and coincidentally, another one (Lois McMaster Bujold) had a similar issue with releasing a bunch of ebooks for free. Where the exposure can be _very_ helpful at the beginning of a career, giving everything for free after a long and relatively full career doesn't help pay the rent.

jamesbritt 13y ago

Some additional data: "Streaming music payments: how much do artists really receive?" http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/19/zoe-keating-spotify-streaming-royalties http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/19/zoe-keatin... "My $treaming Data" (from Zoe Keating) http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/16086277627/my-treaming-data http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/16086277627/my-treaming-da... Total streams for 1 month: 6926 Total amount earned: $32.07 Average price paid per stream after CDBaby’s 9% cut: Spotify $0.003339 Rhapsody $0.0091 Napster $0.015224 Rhapsody has a fixed stream rate. I don’t know the respective formulas for Spotify or Napster, but price-per-stream varies: Napster: $0.01658813 to $0.01721973 Spotify: $0.00102187 to $0.01158124 Some prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4330920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4330920