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As a musician, this is a topic that hits close to home. The fact of the matter is that Spotify is making boatloads of cash off the works of artists, and they a
by dyeje 12y ago
As a musician, this is a topic that hits close to home. The fact of the matter is that Spotify is making boatloads of cash off the works of artists, and they are not paying out enough to those artists.
Straight from the spotify website [1], they say the average revenue from a stream to a rights holder is between $0.006 and $0.0084. The poverty line is $23,283. That means an artist needs 3,326,142 plays in a year to just hit that line. That's not sustainable for the vast majority of artists.
[1] http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#wait-i-thought-spotify-paid-a-per-stream-rate http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#wait-i-thou...
- manuelflara 12y agoSpotify already pays 70% of their revenue in royalties to record labels. What do you think would be fair? 90%?
- rayiner 12y agoSpotify just moves bits from point A to point B. They don't even help get the music created the way the studios do (by providing the equipment). And technology makes moving bits very cheap indeed. So why isn't 90% reasonable? Or 95%?
- delinka 12y agoServers, storage and bandwidth do indeed have costs. The labor involved to run this infrastructure has a cost. The existence of Spotify fills a demand by artists' listeners. That's a lot of value. Are you suggesting that the value provided in meeting customer demand is worth "nearly zero"?
- freehunter 12y agoThe studios have all the opportunity to make their own streaming service. What Spotify provides is customers, something the labels have not had for a long time now. Spotify is able to make people pay for music again, and that's worth something.
- te_chris 12y agoThat's an entirely irrelevant argument, although it suits spotify as it makes them sound generous - they only take 30%, they're such saints! What they should do is stop loss leading their service off the back of cheap valley money and charge more. It's simple, but they refuse to, because like most other valley companies, they're unsustainable if they don't scale.
- delinka 12y agoHow many ears hear a standard radio "play"? And how many ears hear a Spotify streaming "play"? Which set pays you, the artist, more per ear?
- andrewburgess 12y agoThis would be assuming that you would do literally nothing else with your music except put it on Spotify. I would imagine that if you really wanted to make music your career, you might explore some other ways to monetize.