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> 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 a
by 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 agoRight, 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 agoYes, 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 agoI imagine Spotify cares more about not being sued by the majors than distributing money to smaller artists (without legal teams behind them). Also, isn't a big chunk of Spotify owned by the major labels anyway?
- detail3 12y agoYes, though what size chunk is not clear. So certainly 'a' chunk.
- basseq 12y agoIf Spotify wants to send me a representative, scrubbed dump of their streams table (id, userid, trackid, artistid), we could run some interesting what-if scenarios rather than guessing. It's an interesting trade-off: "punishing" artists with fans who only listen to a small amount of music, but who are dedicated to that artist vs. artists with fans who listen to a LOT of music. My gut is that very few artists are getting "screwed", and those who are represent artists with very few streams (at which point the net revenues are very small and who cares about the difference between 2 cents and .7 cents). For most "edge cases" like the one in the article, there's a user on the opposite end of the spectrum who would balance them out. That's my hypothesis, anyway.
- bsder 12y agoThe real issue is simply that anything other than Top 40 isn't relevant to the public at large (power law). I don't really know how you correct that. Even if the indie artists created their own service, several orders of magnitude less people would listen to it. > My gut is that very few artists are getting "screwed" Huh? How does that follow? My gut is that a LOT of artists are getting screwed for exactly the reasons mentioned in the article. This payment scheme isn't an accident. It favors the big, popular copyright holders to keep them off of Spotfy's back. Of course, those big copyrights are also who bring in the majority of revenue for Spotify.
- basseq 12y ago
- tormeh 12y ago>unless indie fans listen to less music than mainstream music fans That point is explicitly addressed in the post. Mainstream users listen more because mainstream users are gyms etc. that just let the top 40 run in shuffle 24/7.
- CaveTech 12y agoI have trouble believing that commercial venues make the majority of the plays on Spotify.
- huckyaus 12y agoHere in Melbourne it's very common for venues to use Spotify - almost ubiquitous, in fact. The bar that I moonlight at used CDs for the longest time but eventually made the switch last year. Most venues don't want to spend time carefully selecting music when they could instead be focusing on customer service.
- dasil003 12y agoSure, but what is the total market size of businesses versus individuals?
- Consultant32452 12y agoI agree. Even if 100% of commercial properties that play music was using Spotify behind the scenes 24/7 that's still got to be only a small percentage of total Spotify plays.
- dagw 12y agoDon't businesses also pay a lot more than individuals. I know here in Sweden playing music as part of your business is licensed differently than playing music in your living room. Commercial properties pay about 10 times as much pr. month for Spotify to cover commercial licensing of the music.
- S_A_P 12y agoThat would be an interesting spotify hack. Start recording 2 minute tracks. Would be a similar situation to 50s and 60s radio. About your point with indie artists vs top 40- it seems to me to be a problem with fragmentation. Top 40 has much more overlap between listeners and casual music fans vs a much more curated play list for the indie music lover. So out of 100 casual music/top 40 fans the playlist is more or less the same. However two indie rock fans have a higher probability of having fewer tracks overlap in their playlist.