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His proposition may sound simple to him, but it really isn't. It becomes very hard to ensure you are being paid properly in his proposed scenario, I would pers

His proposition may sound simple to him, but it really isn't. It becomes very hard to ensure you are being paid properly in his proposed scenario, I would personally expect it would create even more controversy, or extremely long payment records every month for artists. For instance say we have 500 paid users. Lets call them user1 through user500. Each user listens to the same number of songs a month as the value following the word user in their name. Then we have 500 different rates at which artists are paid for their song playing ranging from the entire monthly fee to 1/500th the monthly fee. Therefore providing a full accounting of each of those rates would be necessary for an artist to understand why they got paid more the month they had a single play than the month they had 400 plays. To be fair assuming the minimum song length on Spotify is 30 seconds this record provided to artists would have a max length of (31 * 24 * 60 * 2)+1 = 89281 items for premium users plus items for add supported users if they did not overlap exactly in rate. Assuming all Premium users paid the same rate, which is not the case. Edit: I ignored the 0 listen use case, as well as spotify's 30% cut to simplify an already complicated 'simple proposal'. I also forgot to account for daylight savings time in which a day can have 25 hours.

ianlevesque 12y ago
The royalty reporting is this complex already anyway. It's really crazy.
- genericuser 12y ago
  Please provide an example. As the examples I have seen of artists showing their Spotify payments do not support this assertion. Here is a link to one such example I have seen which has each song paid at the same amount per play. This has made the number of items on the payment record to simply be the number of different songs which were played by that artist. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/BMIstatement2.jpg http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/B...
  - ianlevesque 12y ago
    That is a statement sent to the artist but broadcasters report far more detail to SoundExchange and licensing agencies.
    - genericuser 12y ago
      And this whole time I was precisely talking about what would need to be sent to the artist... Guess I am just missing your point, if you had one. Edit due to reply since its getting nested way too deep: Thanks for clarifying. I never meant to say it was a reason to switch, complexity should never be a reason not to improve. I am just trying to say it isn't what I would call a 'simple' solution as the author asserts. I am also questioning just how much individual artists would actually want to receive all that information, which I believe would become necessary for them.
      - ianlevesque 12y ago
        Just trying to convey that complexity of the accounting for broadcasters is not a reason to stick with the current payout system. The proposal isn't much more complicated than the data we already have to report to some agencies.
krschultz 12y ago
This is a very good point. I'm sure that Spotify could encode the rules and accurately calculate what each artists was owed under such a model, but it would be far more complicated to communicate to people. There are already a bunch of assumptions in the payment model, do you pay per track? (In which case, the artists could game it by sticking in 30 second intro tracks and things like that). Do you pay per minute? (In which case, artists can increase their revenue by putting in dead time in "bonus tracks"). It would be an interesting experiment for Spotify to calculate what the payouts would be given the proposed scheme, and compare the differences. Anecdotally, the people I have met that work at Spotify are a lot more sympathetic to the indie artist and non-Top 40 music than the average person listening to Spotify. There is a reason they keep building ways to discover non-Top 40 music. I'm sure they are interested in making things better for these types of artists.
vlunkr 12y ago
Do you artists would prefer being underpaid to getting extremely long payment records? I really don't see the issue.
- genericuser 12y ago
  No, but I believe humanity in general wants things to be beneficial to them AND simple. Hell most Americans (being one myself) don't just 'want' they feel entitled to. Because of that, I believe a huge number of artists would not bother to make sense of monthly records which could reach 1800 pages, and would complain even though they were presented with such records explaining why their 50000 plays this month were less valuable than their 3 plays the prior month. I am not saying the Spotify method should not be changed just showing that the proposal at hand should not be called 'simple'.
  - halfcat 12y ago
    > I believe a huge number of artists would not bother to make sense of monthly records which could reach 1800 pages I don't understand this argument at all, which suggests that reviewing a monthly report is an O(n) task. Spotify, if they chose this route, trivially solves this with a simple open source app that analyzes your monthly report making it, basically, an O(1) task.
    - genericuser 12y ago
      And gets every artist to happily learn how to use that app to examine 90000 entries in it? My whole argument is that his solution is not simple, while I agree designing, making, and getting artists to use this app which could be made, is indeed possible, would you not acknowledge it makes his solution just a tad more complicated than 'simple' to accomplish that design, creation, and acceptance?
- ignostic 12y ago
  Right now the payment is easy to understand why you were paid as you were. Listens * payment * .7 = my check. If the proposal were followed, all transparency is lost. "Extremely long payment records" is quite an under-statement. Imagine sending a popular artist a 27-million line breakdown (you'd need a LINE PER LISTEN, and what % of a listeners listens that was). That's absurd, and STILL less transparent. I understand the problem, but this is actually a pretty terrible solution. Future complexities build on existing complexity. I can't even imagine the monstrous data, business, and programming nightmares that would arise from breaking payment down in the proposed manner.
curun1r 12y ago
It gets even more complex if you take the fairness he's suggesting to it's logical conclusion. The system proposed still values playing each song equally, but shorter songs comprise less of a user's streaming activity. So the per play rate should be determined by taking 70% of the user's subscription, dividing that by the number of seconds of streaming that user streamed that month and then multiplying that by the number of seconds that user streamed the artist's song (since songs can be stopped mid-song). Regardless of how they bill, it's likely that artists will have to, for the most part, just trust Spotify. There can, and should, be independent audits of the billing code. It seems an analogous situation to what the NGC does around computerized gaming systems. Users have to trust that the system is fair, but the NGC is very thorough about checking that code complies with applicable laws.
mkolodny 12y ago
Complex accounting isn't a good reason to pay artists unfairly. Having said that, the accounting doesn't have to be that complex: 1. When paying out an artist, list out the (anonymous) users who listened to their music on Spotify. 2. For each user: a) Show the what percent of the user's total listening was spent listening to that artist. (e.g. 40%) b) Multiply the amount the user paid by the percentage from (a). (e.g. $10/month * 40% = $4) 3. Sum all of the amounts from #2. (e.g. $4 + $3 + ... = $total) Also, accounting would only be a problem for Spotify. 99% of artists would prefer this model, even if it meant more complex accounting.
- genericuser 12y ago
  I never said it was a reason to. I simply said this method is anything but simple, as the author called it. Your method would require even more potential lines on the monthly report than the nearly identical method I described above. As yours would require a per user line, even though many of them would have duplicate rates. Keep in mind things would still need to be split per song also, as rights holders vary per song. Do you really think giving every artist that many potential lines of accounting every month can be called simple?
  - ignostic 12y ago
    Exactly. Based on data from Spotify[1] and taking an average payment[2] of $.0052, I calculated Spotify would be storing about 20 BILLION accounting records PER MONTH. Showing my work: 15m paying subscribers = ~150m per month, ~105m paid to artists @ .0052 per song = 20.154 million songs in a month. [1]https://press.spotify.com/us/information/ https://press.spotify.com/us/information/ [2]http://thetrichordist.com/2014/11/12/the-streaming-price-bible-spotify-youtube-and-what-1-million-plays-means-to-you/ http://thetrichordist.com/2014/11/12/the-streaming-price-bib...
    - ricardobeat 12y ago
      20 billion records per month is still reasonable, there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of businesses storing a multiple of that amount of data daily.
MichaelGG 12y ago
Daylight savings is easy to fix: don't use it, just standardize on UTC. That's what essentially everyone does in, say, telecom.
- MattHeard 12y ago
  In telecom there is a lot of local-time based billing.
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    I guess GP was talking about switches and mediation. Certainly, once you get to billing (and downstream to "data warehouses"), CDRs have local times! Although they also have a duration field, so extra or missing hours don't cause a problem, which was the original concern.
genericuser 12y ago
Another thing to note (although it represents a pretty useless edge case) is that given a user who spends $10 a month on Premium if they were to listen to 1400 songs in a single month (10/(.005/.7)) bands who he is the only person who listens to and he only listens to once would receive nothing, due to accounting (and the ieee) using round to even, and 0 being the closest even penny. I realize this the amount they are paying now per song is not too far above the $0.005 amount which rounds to 0, and therefore given changes in the market could potentially drop to an amount which would round to 0 for single play also. I also get that a single penny isn't what anyone is going to be upset about. Also that few artists will have a single play. I just find the low number of plays (1400 in a month isn't really that many) required by a person for an artist to potentially not get paid interesting.
thedufer 12y ago
> I also forgot to account for daylight savings time in which a day can have 25 hours. Fortunately, the 25-hour day is in November, which is only a 30-day month. So you're okay on that front.
bobbles 12y ago
How is this any different than say a phone bill format? that shows totals such as 'minutes' $XX, 'data' $XX' and then you can optionally view the entire logs
noamsml 12y ago
Uber and Lyft don't provide per-ride accounting for rides for this reason. I think spotify could get away with "N plays - total $X" in this case, especially since user privacy is at stake. Also the %30 cut is extremely easy to model -- a user that pays $10 with a 30% cut is like a user that pays $7 without one.

ianlevesque 12y ago

The royalty reporting is this complex already anyway. It's really crazy.

genericuser 12y ago
Please provide an example. As the examples I have seen of artists showing their Spotify payments do not support this assertion. Here is a link to one such example I have seen which has each song paid at the same amount per play. This has made the number of items on the payment record to simply be the number of different songs which were played by that artist. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/BMIstatement2.jpg http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/B...
- ianlevesque 12y ago
  That is a statement sent to the artist but broadcasters report far more detail to SoundExchange and licensing agencies.
  - genericuser 12y ago
    And this whole time I was precisely talking about what would need to be sent to the artist... Guess I am just missing your point, if you had one. Edit due to reply since its getting nested way too deep: Thanks for clarifying. I never meant to say it was a reason to switch, complexity should never be a reason not to improve. I am just trying to say it isn't what I would call a 'simple' solution as the author asserts. I am also questioning just how much individual artists would actually want to receive all that information, which I believe would become necessary for them.
    - ianlevesque 12y ago
      Just trying to convey that complexity of the accounting for broadcasters is not a reason to stick with the current payout system. The proposal isn't much more complicated than the data we already have to report to some agencies.

krschultz 12y ago

This is a very good point. I'm sure that Spotify could encode the rules and accurately calculate what each artists was owed under such a model, but it would be far more complicated to communicate to people. There are already a bunch of assumptions in the payment model, do you pay per track? (In which case, the artists could game it by sticking in 30 second intro tracks and things like that). Do you pay per minute? (In which case, artists can increase their revenue by putting in dead time in "bonus tracks"). It would be an interesting experiment for Spotify to calculate what the payouts would be given the proposed scheme, and compare the differences. Anecdotally, the people I have met that work at Spotify are a lot more sympathetic to the indie artist and non-Top 40 music than the average person listening to Spotify. There is a reason they keep building ways to discover non-Top 40 music. I'm sure they are interested in making things better for these types of artists.

vlunkr 12y ago

Do you artists would prefer being underpaid to getting extremely long payment records? I really don't see the issue.

genericuser 12y ago
No, but I believe humanity in general wants things to be beneficial to them AND simple. Hell most Americans (being one myself) don't just 'want' they feel entitled to. Because of that, I believe a huge number of artists would not bother to make sense of monthly records which could reach 1800 pages, and would complain even though they were presented with such records explaining why their 50000 plays this month were less valuable than their 3 plays the prior month. I am not saying the Spotify method should not be changed just showing that the proposal at hand should not be called 'simple'.
- halfcat 12y ago
  > I believe a huge number of artists would not bother to make sense of monthly records which could reach 1800 pages I don't understand this argument at all, which suggests that reviewing a monthly report is an O(n) task. Spotify, if they chose this route, trivially solves this with a simple open source app that analyzes your monthly report making it, basically, an O(1) task.
  - genericuser 12y ago
    And gets every artist to happily learn how to use that app to examine 90000 entries in it? My whole argument is that his solution is not simple, while I agree designing, making, and getting artists to use this app which could be made, is indeed possible, would you not acknowledge it makes his solution just a tad more complicated than 'simple' to accomplish that design, creation, and acceptance?
ignostic 12y ago
Right now the payment is easy to understand why you were paid as you were. Listens * payment * .7 = my check. If the proposal were followed, all transparency is lost. "Extremely long payment records" is quite an under-statement. Imagine sending a popular artist a 27-million line breakdown (you'd need a LINE PER LISTEN, and what % of a listeners listens that was). That's absurd, and STILL less transparent. I understand the problem, but this is actually a pretty terrible solution. Future complexities build on existing complexity. I can't even imagine the monstrous data, business, and programming nightmares that would arise from breaking payment down in the proposed manner.

curun1r 12y ago

It gets even more complex if you take the fairness he's suggesting to it's logical conclusion. The system proposed still values playing each song equally, but shorter songs comprise less of a user's streaming activity. So the per play rate should be determined by taking 70% of the user's subscription, dividing that by the number of seconds of streaming that user streamed that month and then multiplying that by the number of seconds that user streamed the artist's song (since songs can be stopped mid-song). Regardless of how they bill, it's likely that artists will have to, for the most part, just trust Spotify. There can, and should, be independent audits of the billing code. It seems an analogous situation to what the NGC does around computerized gaming systems. Users have to trust that the system is fair, but the NGC is very thorough about checking that code complies with applicable laws.

mkolodny 12y ago

Complex accounting isn't a good reason to pay artists unfairly. Having said that, the accounting doesn't have to be that complex: 1. When paying out an artist, list out the (anonymous) users who listened to their music on Spotify. 2. For each user: a) Show the what percent of the user's total listening was spent listening to that artist. (e.g. 40%) b) Multiply the amount the user paid by the percentage from (a). (e.g. $10/month * 40% = $4) 3. Sum all of the amounts from #2. (e.g. $4 + $3 + ... = $total) Also, accounting would only be a problem for Spotify. 99% of artists would prefer this model, even if it meant more complex accounting.

genericuser 12y ago
I never said it was a reason to. I simply said this method is anything but simple, as the author called it. Your method would require even more potential lines on the monthly report than the nearly identical method I described above. As yours would require a per user line, even though many of them would have duplicate rates. Keep in mind things would still need to be split per song also, as rights holders vary per song. Do you really think giving every artist that many potential lines of accounting every month can be called simple?
- ignostic 12y ago
  Exactly. Based on data from Spotify[1] and taking an average payment[2] of $.0052, I calculated Spotify would be storing about 20 BILLION accounting records PER MONTH. Showing my work: 15m paying subscribers = ~150m per month, ~105m paid to artists @ .0052 per song = 20.154 million songs in a month. [1]https://press.spotify.com/us/information/ https://press.spotify.com/us/information/ [2]http://thetrichordist.com/2014/11/12/the-streaming-price-bible-spotify-youtube-and-what-1-million-plays-means-to-you/ http://thetrichordist.com/2014/11/12/the-streaming-price-bib...
  - ricardobeat 12y ago
    20 billion records per month is still reasonable, there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of businesses storing a multiple of that amount of data daily.

MichaelGG 12y ago

Daylight savings is easy to fix: don't use it, just standardize on UTC. That's what essentially everyone does in, say, telecom.

MattHeard 12y ago
In telecom there is a lot of local-time based billing.
- jessaustin 12y ago
  I guess GP was talking about switches and mediation. Certainly, once you get to billing (and downstream to "data warehouses"), CDRs have local times! Although they also have a duration field, so extra or missing hours don't cause a problem, which was the original concern.

genericuser 12y ago

Another thing to note (although it represents a pretty useless edge case) is that given a user who spends $10 a month on Premium if they were to listen to 1400 songs in a single month (10/(.005/.7)) bands who he is the only person who listens to and he only listens to once would receive nothing, due to accounting (and the ieee) using round to even, and 0 being the closest even penny. I realize this the amount they are paying now per song is not too far above the $0.005 amount which rounds to 0, and therefore given changes in the market could potentially drop to an amount which would round to 0 for single play also. I also get that a single penny isn't what anyone is going to be upset about. Also that few artists will have a single play. I just find the low number of plays (1400 in a month isn't really that many) required by a person for an artist to potentially not get paid interesting.

thedufer 12y ago

> I also forgot to account for daylight savings time in which a day can have 25 hours. Fortunately, the 25-hour day is in November, which is only a 30-day month. So you're okay on that front.

bobbles 12y ago

How is this any different than say a phone bill format? that shows totals such as 'minutes' $XX, 'data' $XX' and then you can optionally view the entire logs

noamsml 12y ago

Uber and Lyft don't provide per-ride accounting for rides for this reason. I think spotify could get away with "N plays - total $X" in this case, especially since user privacy is at stake. Also the %30 cut is extremely easy to model -- a user that pays $10 with a 30% cut is like a user that pays $7 without one.