11 ms·

Like others in this thread, I naively assumed this was how Spotify already worked, and wondered why the payouts tended to be so low. Now it makes sense, and put

Like others in this thread, I naively assumed this was how Spotify already worked, and wondered why the payouts tended to be so low. Now it makes sense, and puts the numbers here (http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/ http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/) in context. Realistically, it would be both hard to change structurally and a hard sell for major labels to give up what is effectively a subsidy of popular music by indie fans. Let’s take the author’s thought experiment to its logical extreme: Imagine “Terry” listened to just one obscure band for the entire month of February. $7 of his $10 subscription fee is going to artists, but let’s say he’s also the only fan of that band on Spotify. So that band has effectively zero percent of Spotify’s plays for the month, meaning that the band gets effectively zero percent of Spotify’s monthly revenue. Terry thinks $7 went to his favorite band, but it actually got divided up among February’s top 40, with only a fraction of a fraction of a cent going to the band!

pjc50 12y ago
But there's an impedance mismatch here. The copyright holders are being paid per-play but the users are paying all-you-can-eat. That's always going to be an imbalance. The only way to "fix" that would be to charge "Terry" a cent per listen like a jukebox. This is a bit like being a vegetarian at a buffet and complaining about your admission fee paying for steak which all those other people are eating. It's true, but you came to the buffet because it was much cheaper than a la carte with better service.
- mortenjorck 12y ago
  That’s not how Spotify works, though. According to the link above: Every time somebody listens to a song on Spotify it generates payments, but Spotify does not calculate royalties based upon a fixed “per play” rate. Unless there are some secret deals being struck for fixed per-stream royalties that Spotify isn’t admitting to publicly, every rightsholder gets a percentage of monthly revenue. Which sounds fair, until you consider long-tail producers and consumers, for whom the marketplace is distorted by this model. Your buffet analogy isn’t really apt here because streams aren’t limited resources, and they all have the same effective wholesale cost to Spotify (again, assuming no secret deals).
  - avn2109 12y ago
    >> "...assuming no secret deals..." You're totally right on the merits, but it's worth noting that the big record labels are composed entirely of and built their empire solely upon unjust-seeming secret deals, and we have no reason to believe that they've stopped that modus operandi now merely because they're dealing with Spotify.
    - detail3 12y ago
      Indeed, there were secret deals with record labels in which Spotify gave up 'some amount' of equity to majors in order to be able to stream their catalogs....along with an upfront sum of course. I think the real problem that isn't being discussed is the fact that on a service such as Spotify it is impossible for an artist to be independent, his/her efforts WILL support majors via their equity in streaming services.
- dandare 12y ago
  Can someone please glue this to the top? The whole discussion here is one big straw-man.
- IanCal 12y ago
  > But there's an impedance mismatch here. The copyright holders are being paid per-play but the users are paying all-you-can-eat. That's always going to be an imbalance. The only way to "fix" that would be to charge "Terry" a cent per listen like a jukebox. Or split Terry's money between the artists they actually listen to.
- niels_olson 12y ago
  So I prefer non-lyrical trip-hop. I wouldn't know I have that preference without discovering it through Spotify. You're telling me I should now start buying those albums on iTunes if I want to actually vector money toward those artists? But I can get most of them for almost free on Amazon Prime. So why not just send money to the artist directly? I listen to Spotify and Pandora almost exclusively. Mainly Spotify. I probably listened to 300 tracks of Emancipator a month on Spotify. At 0.00786 per play, that works out to 2.85. For the last 2 years: 2.85 * 24. That's $56.59. I seriously doubt I would have spent that much on iTunes. In fact, from their site, I can only spend $46 on their music. http://emancipator.shop.redstarmerch.com/Dept.aspx?cp=69283_69314 http://emancipator.shop.redstarmerch.com/Dept.aspx?cp=69283_... In the long run, it seems to me that Emancipator is winning on Spotify, even if I overestimated by a factor of 3 and only listen to 100 tracks a month. Presumably, I will be listening to Emancipator for a long time.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    I probably listened to 300 tracks of Emancipator a month on Spotify. At 0.00786 per play, that works out to 2.85. For the last 2 years: 2.85 24. That's $56.59.* I don't think most people listen to 300 tracks of any artist per month consecutively. Say you are doing 30 tracks per month on average by an artist, that's $5.66, less than buying three 10 track albums. I have hundreds of albums on CD (I'd guess ~500 or 600). There are many that I probably only listened to five times.
    - niels_olson 12y ago
      I don't have to listen to it consecutively. But I listen while driving, while studying, while working. I certainly fall in the category of indie fan listening to a lot of music from catalog artists, not hit makers.
      - lambeosaurus 12y ago
        Another checking in. Guilty as charged. My main gripe is that because of this stupid model, it pushes a lot of the artists I would listen to away from spotify because it doesn't connect them directly with the revenue stream they should be getting from their true fans. Artists have a hard time surviving without that.
- eridius 12y ago
  There's another option, which is to calculate the "per play" rate differently for each listener. If one user plays 300 tracks per month (one 10-track album per day), and another user plays music 24/7 (the gyms that have been mentioned before), why should the per-play fee be the same in both cases? If this was a pay-per-play model that would be fine, but this is all-you-can-eat streaming. Users that listen to a disproportionately high number of songs should not dictate which artists get money. That awards those users far more than their normal $10/mo purchasing power. This scheme is similar to the proposal to calculate artist pay independently for each user, but I think it's a little simpler, since you still only calculate the artist pay out of the global pot, you're just weighing each play by the user's total monthly plays. And you can put a minimum on it too, so the per-play weighting doesn't take effect until the user listens to more than a given number of tracks per month (this way the user who has a subscription but just occasionally listens to a song here and there isn't paying the artist $1 per play, which is to say, until you reach a certain point, listening to other songs won't "devalue" your previous tracks).
6stringmerc 12y ago
Well put. I'd like to further the notion that major labels / legacy businesses do their best to eat all the pie and only leave crumbs for the rest of the community. Put in a metaphor, when gorillas fight, nobody cares about the ants until enough of them start stinging together. Not perfect, but hopefully you get the point. My source is the following article over at Complete Music Update, which elaborates on the tactics employed by YouTube in their goal of competing with Spotify: http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/independent-labels-hit-out-at-youtubes-unnecessary-and-indefensible-negotiating-tactics/ http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/independent-label...
pdpi 12y ago
> A subsidy of popular music by indie fans That's an interesting problem — this is only true if indie fans listen to less music than pop fans. Imagine there are 10 users, 9 of whom only listen to pop, one only listens to indy, all of whom pay 10$. Now consider two scenarios: A. everybody listens to 100 tracks per month, or B. pop listeners stream 110 tracks per month, and the indy listener streams 10 track per month Scenario A: 9 pop * 100 tracks = 900 tracks streamed 1 indy * 100 tracks = 100 tracks streamed total 1000 tracks streamed total to pop artists = 900/1000 * 100$ = 90$ total to indy artists = 100/1000 * 100$ = 10$ Scenario B: 9 pop * 110 tracks = 990 tracks streamed 1 indy * 10 tracks = 10 tracks streamed total 1000 tracks streamed total to pop artists = 990/1000 * 100$ = 99$ total to indy artists = 10/1000 * 100$ = 1$ The argument remains that you'd expect your money to go to the artists you listen to, but the payment arrangements don't necessarily benefit mainstream artists over indies, unless indie fans listen to less music than mainstream music fans. EDIT: Now that I think of it, it probably benefits pop music over metal and progressive rock (or, worse still, classical music), because pop tends towards short songs, so more tracks played over the same period of time.
- jmilloy 12y ago
  Right, the key numbers that you've implied are that Scenario A pays out the same whether you use the current artist payment scheme or the one suggested in the post. It becomes clear that the scheme suggested in the post doesn't make sense either... so I accidentally left "Everything is Awesome" on repeat all night and now this month indie band X gets 1c from me instead of $5, even though I still listened to their album 20 times like usual?
- rwissmann 12y ago
  Yes, the article really missed this point. One could also mentioned some sort of tiered payout scheme or a non-linear minimum after a certain amount of plays plus a percentage above that. Likely something that Spotify will experiment with over the years.
  - goatforce5 12y ago
toby 12y ago
I'm a bit confused by the reasoning here. It's clear that light users are subsidizing heavy users, but why are we assuming that light users prefer indie bands and heavy users prefer pop music?
- jmilloy 12y ago
  I think we're assuming that the many users who listen to indie bands spread their listening among many different bands (each use has a difference preference) whereas users who listen to top 40 all listen to the same artists. There is also the idea that some "users" are businesses playing background music all day, and that they are more likely to all choose the same pop songs (which the most people are familiar with) and to play them all day everyday. Unlike a normal user who typically listens to a wider variety and for fewer hours a day.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  It's not that -- it's all about the impact of a larger denominator. Individually, the pro-rata share of one user's $9/mo for indie bands (say 1/100 plays = $0.09) will be larger than the 1/2,000,000 (worth $0.0000005) plays in the aggregate. So basically, my dad, who listens to 60s and 70s music all day on Spotify is mostly compensating top-40 stuff. In the olden days of FM, his listening habits were paid for by the sponsors of the oldies station.
- fragsworth 12y ago
  > why are we assuming that light users prefer indie bands and heavy users prefer pop music? The article explained this - because heavy users are playing music 24/7 at gyms, etc., and never play the smaller groups or genres that only some individuals like (and would like to support).
  - toby 12y ago
    Interesting. I'm sure people are doing this illegally, but technically you're supposed to buy a commercial Spotify license for public performance.
    - 12y ago
fragsworth 12y ago
> Realistically, it would be both hard to change structurally Perhaps there is a simpler solution. Here's one idea: for accounting purposes, only count a limited number of plays per month, per user. It can be the first 100 plays, or if you want to prevent any biasing, it can be a random sample of 100 of each user's plays. A random sampling can even be audited to prove that it was fair.
- tajen 12y ago
  Why do we consider that the places who play 24/7 of pop music are biasing the system? If it were 1 cent per play, and Mickael Jackson was played 100 times during the day in one shop... shouldn't they get $1?
  - fragsworth 12y ago
    If you consider two types of users - average users (10-20 plays a day?) and power users (500-1000 plays per day), both users contribute $10 to the system. Most of the money that the average users contribute ends up sent to the authors of songs that the power users play.
- daave 12y ago
  I don't think sampling's even necessary. Presumably Spotify log every play. If they pushed their logs into BigQuery or something similar, it would be trivial to calculate the revenue breakdown the way the OP describes. 'Big data' is here, and it works. With 100 million users at 1000 tracks per month, we're 'only' talking about 100 billion or so rows to process each month.
exelius 12y ago
This is the same problem that any unlimited service has to deal with. Why does a user who downloads 10GB of data per month on their cable modem have to pay the same price as a user who downloads 300GB? They're subsidizing his usage! Why should I have to pay the same price as everyone else for Netflix when I really only ever watch House of Cards? The reason Spotify specifically works this way is because any other reimbursement model is untenable in the streaming world. Rev share works "off the top" because the overhead of managing reimbursement (specifically the audit overhead) at the subscriber level would wipe away too much margin. Pandora had an overly complicated revenue sharing scheme and it nearly bankrupted the company until they moved to a model closer to Spotify's. But more specifically, revenue share works this way because that's how it's defined in the contracts that both the major label and the indie label signed. If the indie labels thought it was a terrible idea, they wouldn't have signed it. Most indie artists anymore simply expect to make next to nothing on distribution and playback of their music: they make their money on the live shows.
- torbit 12y ago
  I always thought bands make their money on tour. live shows & merch; and the label makes more money from CD & song sells. I guess there is a new type of indie. Those that don't go on tour much and want money?
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    This can't be all that new. I feel pretty sure that the group of bands who don't go on tour much, and still want money, is basically the same group as "bands who don't go on tour much".
  - kibibu 12y ago
    Not unprecedented - The Beatles didn't tour their last 7 studio albums (and on their own label, so they were arguably "indie")
    - exelius 12y ago
      That was a different era in music. Technology has made it a lot easier to create and distribute music, so there is a lot more music out there, which means the value of the recording is less than it was prior to the 2000s. The Beatles were also an anomaly in the music industry; they were so popular they basically WERE the industry. Music today is much more of a long-tail market now that there's not a bottleneck in the recording and distribution functions.
nissehulth 12y ago
This is how a large chunk of music royalty distribution works. For example, fees collected from restaurants, shops and other public places basically ends up in a large bucket. Later the funds are being distributed after "market share", which means most of it will be sent to Taylor Swift or the Michael Jackson estate, even if the restaurant played nothing but epic fusion mathcore. I'm guessing that the "big five" asked for a model similar to this when Spotify started, because it was a model they understood.
x0x0 12y ago
It's easier to understand if you remember the major labels got 18% of spotify for their licensing deal. A payment scheme that preferentially paid major labels would then be stunning...
0x0 12y ago
Wouldn't it be a fraction of a fraction of a cent for every subscriber going to the band?
vacri 12y ago
So, under your model, Terry's band gets $7. Total. It's not even worth bothering to get involved with spotify if you only get one single cheap lunch out of it. As it currently stands, Terry's band also gets a small amount of money from people who aren't listening to it, which is something you didn't include in your argument. There's really not going to be much difference for the tiny artists, however you carve it up. $7 is 'effectively zero percent of Spotify's monthly revenue' as well.
dlebech 12y ago
Indeed, a casual listener like myself is basically paying money to the top artists while not listening which is a bit absurd. It is a problem that should be possible to at least partly resolve by calculating artist market share without a bias towards users that have Shopify open all the time. Incidentally, I blogged about this some time ago: https://davidlebech.com/thoughtflow/spotify-royalties/ https://davidlebech.com/thoughtflow/spotify-royalties/
72deluxe 12y ago
I believe this is how radio works too; my friend had some records of his played on the radio and got together a list of when they were, date time and all and approached the BBC about getting payments; based on the same reasoning/calculations as above he got a big fat £0.00.
thinkcontext 12y ago
Grooveshark supports Flattr which does exactly what this article proposes, if the user opts in. http://help.grooveshark.com/customer/portal/articles/669416-flattr http://help.grooveshark.com/customer/portal/articles/669416-...

pjc50 12y ago

But there's an impedance mismatch here. The copyright holders are being paid per-play but the users are paying all-you-can-eat. That's always going to be an imbalance. The only way to "fix" that would be to charge "Terry" a cent per listen like a jukebox. This is a bit like being a vegetarian at a buffet and complaining about your admission fee paying for steak which all those other people are eating. It's true, but you came to the buffet because it was much cheaper than a la carte with better service.

mortenjorck 12y ago
That’s not how Spotify works, though. According to the link above: Every time somebody listens to a song on Spotify it generates payments, but Spotify does not calculate royalties based upon a fixed “per play” rate. Unless there are some secret deals being struck for fixed per-stream royalties that Spotify isn’t admitting to publicly, every rightsholder gets a percentage of monthly revenue. Which sounds fair, until you consider long-tail producers and consumers, for whom the marketplace is distorted by this model. Your buffet analogy isn’t really apt here because streams aren’t limited resources, and they all have the same effective wholesale cost to Spotify (again, assuming no secret deals).
- avn2109 12y ago
  >> "...assuming no secret deals..." You're totally right on the merits, but it's worth noting that the big record labels are composed entirely of and built their empire solely upon unjust-seeming secret deals, and we have no reason to believe that they've stopped that modus operandi now merely because they're dealing with Spotify.
  - detail3 12y ago
    Indeed, there were secret deals with record labels in which Spotify gave up 'some amount' of equity to majors in order to be able to stream their catalogs....along with an upfront sum of course. I think the real problem that isn't being discussed is the fact that on a service such as Spotify it is impossible for an artist to be independent, his/her efforts WILL support majors via their equity in streaming services.
dandare 12y ago
Can someone please glue this to the top? The whole discussion here is one big straw-man.
IanCal 12y ago
> But there's an impedance mismatch here. The copyright holders are being paid per-play but the users are paying all-you-can-eat. That's always going to be an imbalance. The only way to "fix" that would be to charge "Terry" a cent per listen like a jukebox. Or split Terry's money between the artists they actually listen to.
niels_olson 12y ago
So I prefer non-lyrical trip-hop. I wouldn't know I have that preference without discovering it through Spotify. You're telling me I should now start buying those albums on iTunes if I want to actually vector money toward those artists? But I can get most of them for almost free on Amazon Prime. So why not just send money to the artist directly? I listen to Spotify and Pandora almost exclusively. Mainly Spotify. I probably listened to 300 tracks of Emancipator a month on Spotify. At 0.00786 per play, that works out to 2.85. For the last 2 years: 2.85 * 24. That's $56.59. I seriously doubt I would have spent that much on iTunes. In fact, from their site, I can only spend $46 on their music. http://emancipator.shop.redstarmerch.com/Dept.aspx?cp=69283_69314 http://emancipator.shop.redstarmerch.com/Dept.aspx?cp=69283_... In the long run, it seems to me that Emancipator is winning on Spotify, even if I overestimated by a factor of 3 and only listen to 100 tracks a month. Presumably, I will be listening to Emancipator for a long time.
- danieldk 12y ago
  I probably listened to 300 tracks of Emancipator a month on Spotify. At 0.00786 per play, that works out to 2.85. For the last 2 years: 2.85 24. That's $56.59.* I don't think most people listen to 300 tracks of any artist per month consecutively. Say you are doing 30 tracks per month on average by an artist, that's $5.66, less than buying three 10 track albums. I have hundreds of albums on CD (I'd guess ~500 or 600). There are many that I probably only listened to five times.
  - niels_olson 12y ago
    I don't have to listen to it consecutively. But I listen while driving, while studying, while working. I certainly fall in the category of indie fan listening to a lot of music from catalog artists, not hit makers.
    - lambeosaurus 12y ago
      Another checking in. Guilty as charged. My main gripe is that because of this stupid model, it pushes a lot of the artists I would listen to away from spotify because it doesn't connect them directly with the revenue stream they should be getting from their true fans. Artists have a hard time surviving without that.
eridius 12y ago
There's another option, which is to calculate the "per play" rate differently for each listener. If one user plays 300 tracks per month (one 10-track album per day), and another user plays music 24/7 (the gyms that have been mentioned before), why should the per-play fee be the same in both cases? If this was a pay-per-play model that would be fine, but this is all-you-can-eat streaming. Users that listen to a disproportionately high number of songs should not dictate which artists get money. That awards those users far more than their normal $10/mo purchasing power. This scheme is similar to the proposal to calculate artist pay independently for each user, but I think it's a little simpler, since you still only calculate the artist pay out of the global pot, you're just weighing each play by the user's total monthly plays. And you can put a minimum on it too, so the per-play weighting doesn't take effect until the user listens to more than a given number of tracks per month (this way the user who has a subscription but just occasionally listens to a song here and there isn't paying the artist $1 per play, which is to say, until you reach a certain point, listening to other songs won't "devalue" your previous tracks).

6stringmerc 12y ago

Well put. I'd like to further the notion that major labels / legacy businesses do their best to eat all the pie and only leave crumbs for the rest of the community. Put in a metaphor, when gorillas fight, nobody cares about the ants until enough of them start stinging together. Not perfect, but hopefully you get the point. My source is the following article over at Complete Music Update, which elaborates on the tactics employed by YouTube in their goal of competing with Spotify: http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/independent-labels-hit-out-at-youtubes-unnecessary-and-indefensible-negotiating-tactics/ http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/independent-label...

pdpi 12y ago

> A subsidy of popular music by indie fans That's an interesting problem — this is only true if indie fans listen to less music than pop fans. Imagine there are 10 users, 9 of whom only listen to pop, one only listens to indy, all of whom pay 10$. Now consider two scenarios: A. everybody listens to 100 tracks per month, or B. pop listeners stream 110 tracks per month, and the indy listener streams 10 track per month Scenario A: 9 pop * 100 tracks = 900 tracks streamed 1 indy * 100 tracks = 100 tracks streamed total 1000 tracks streamed total to pop artists = 900/1000 * 100$ = 90$ total to indy artists = 100/1000 * 100$ = 10$ Scenario B: 9 pop * 110 tracks = 990 tracks streamed 1 indy * 10 tracks = 10 tracks streamed total 1000 tracks streamed total to pop artists = 990/1000 * 100$ = 99$ total to indy artists = 10/1000 * 100$ = 1$ The argument remains that you'd expect your money to go to the artists you listen to, but the payment arrangements don't necessarily benefit mainstream artists over indies, unless indie fans listen to less music than mainstream music fans. EDIT: Now that I think of it, it probably benefits pop music over metal and progressive rock (or, worse still, classical music), because pop tends towards short songs, so more tracks played over the same period of time.

jmilloy 12y ago
Right, the key numbers that you've implied are that Scenario A pays out the same whether you use the current artist payment scheme or the one suggested in the post. It becomes clear that the scheme suggested in the post doesn't make sense either... so I accidentally left "Everything is Awesome" on repeat all night and now this month indie band X gets 1c from me instead of $5, even though I still listened to their album 20 times like usual?
rwissmann 12y ago
Yes, the article really missed this point. One could also mentioned some sort of tiered payout scheme or a non-linear minimum after a certain amount of plays plus a percentage above that. Likely something that Spotify will experiment with over the years.
- goatforce5 12y ago

toby 12y ago

I'm a bit confused by the reasoning here. It's clear that light users are subsidizing heavy users, but why are we assuming that light users prefer indie bands and heavy users prefer pop music?

jmilloy 12y ago
I think we're assuming that the many users who listen to indie bands spread their listening among many different bands (each use has a difference preference) whereas users who listen to top 40 all listen to the same artists. There is also the idea that some "users" are businesses playing background music all day, and that they are more likely to all choose the same pop songs (which the most people are familiar with) and to play them all day everyday. Unlike a normal user who typically listens to a wider variety and for fewer hours a day.
Spooky23 12y ago
It's not that -- it's all about the impact of a larger denominator. Individually, the pro-rata share of one user's $9/mo for indie bands (say 1/100 plays = $0.09) will be larger than the 1/2,000,000 (worth $0.0000005) plays in the aggregate. So basically, my dad, who listens to 60s and 70s music all day on Spotify is mostly compensating top-40 stuff. In the olden days of FM, his listening habits were paid for by the sponsors of the oldies station.
fragsworth 12y ago
> why are we assuming that light users prefer indie bands and heavy users prefer pop music? The article explained this - because heavy users are playing music 24/7 at gyms, etc., and never play the smaller groups or genres that only some individuals like (and would like to support).
- toby 12y ago
  Interesting. I'm sure people are doing this illegally, but technically you're supposed to buy a commercial Spotify license for public performance.
  - 12y ago

fragsworth 12y ago

> Realistically, it would be both hard to change structurally Perhaps there is a simpler solution. Here's one idea: for accounting purposes, only count a limited number of plays per month, per user. It can be the first 100 plays, or if you want to prevent any biasing, it can be a random sample of 100 of each user's plays. A random sampling can even be audited to prove that it was fair.

tajen 12y ago
Why do we consider that the places who play 24/7 of pop music are biasing the system? If it were 1 cent per play, and Mickael Jackson was played 100 times during the day in one shop... shouldn't they get $1?
- fragsworth 12y ago
  If you consider two types of users - average users (10-20 plays a day?) and power users (500-1000 plays per day), both users contribute $10 to the system. Most of the money that the average users contribute ends up sent to the authors of songs that the power users play.
daave 12y ago
I don't think sampling's even necessary. Presumably Spotify log every play. If they pushed their logs into BigQuery or something similar, it would be trivial to calculate the revenue breakdown the way the OP describes. 'Big data' is here, and it works. With 100 million users at 1000 tracks per month, we're 'only' talking about 100 billion or so rows to process each month.

exelius 12y ago

This is the same problem that any unlimited service has to deal with. Why does a user who downloads 10GB of data per month on their cable modem have to pay the same price as a user who downloads 300GB? They're subsidizing his usage! Why should I have to pay the same price as everyone else for Netflix when I really only ever watch House of Cards? The reason Spotify specifically works this way is because any other reimbursement model is untenable in the streaming world. Rev share works "off the top" because the overhead of managing reimbursement (specifically the audit overhead) at the subscriber level would wipe away too much margin. Pandora had an overly complicated revenue sharing scheme and it nearly bankrupted the company until they moved to a model closer to Spotify's. But more specifically, revenue share works this way because that's how it's defined in the contracts that both the major label and the indie label signed. If the indie labels thought it was a terrible idea, they wouldn't have signed it. Most indie artists anymore simply expect to make next to nothing on distribution and playback of their music: they make their money on the live shows.

torbit 12y ago
I always thought bands make their money on tour. live shows & merch; and the label makes more money from CD & song sells. I guess there is a new type of indie. Those that don't go on tour much and want money?
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  This can't be all that new. I feel pretty sure that the group of bands who don't go on tour much, and still want money, is basically the same group as "bands who don't go on tour much".
- kibibu 12y ago
  Not unprecedented - The Beatles didn't tour their last 7 studio albums (and on their own label, so they were arguably "indie")
  - exelius 12y ago
    That was a different era in music. Technology has made it a lot easier to create and distribute music, so there is a lot more music out there, which means the value of the recording is less than it was prior to the 2000s. The Beatles were also an anomaly in the music industry; they were so popular they basically WERE the industry. Music today is much more of a long-tail market now that there's not a bottleneck in the recording and distribution functions.

nissehulth 12y ago

This is how a large chunk of music royalty distribution works. For example, fees collected from restaurants, shops and other public places basically ends up in a large bucket. Later the funds are being distributed after "market share", which means most of it will be sent to Taylor Swift or the Michael Jackson estate, even if the restaurant played nothing but epic fusion mathcore. I'm guessing that the "big five" asked for a model similar to this when Spotify started, because it was a model they understood.

x0x0 12y ago

It's easier to understand if you remember the major labels got 18% of spotify for their licensing deal. A payment scheme that preferentially paid major labels would then be stunning...

0x0 12y ago

Wouldn't it be a fraction of a fraction of a cent for every subscriber going to the band?

vacri 12y ago

So, under your model, Terry's band gets $7. Total. It's not even worth bothering to get involved with spotify if you only get one single cheap lunch out of it. As it currently stands, Terry's band also gets a small amount of money from people who aren't listening to it, which is something you didn't include in your argument. There's really not going to be much difference for the tiny artists, however you carve it up. $7 is 'effectively zero percent of Spotify's monthly revenue' as well.

dlebech 12y ago

Indeed, a casual listener like myself is basically paying money to the top artists while not listening which is a bit absurd. It is a problem that should be possible to at least partly resolve by calculating artist market share without a bias towards users that have Shopify open all the time. Incidentally, I blogged about this some time ago: https://davidlebech.com/thoughtflow/spotify-royalties/ https://davidlebech.com/thoughtflow/spotify-royalties/

72deluxe 12y ago

I believe this is how radio works too; my friend had some records of his played on the radio and got together a list of when they were, date time and all and approached the BBC about getting payments; based on the same reasoning/calculations as above he got a big fat £0.00.

thinkcontext 12y ago

Grooveshark supports Flattr which does exactly what this article proposes, if the user opts in. http://help.grooveshark.com/customer/portal/articles/669416-flattr http://help.grooveshark.com/customer/portal/articles/669416-...