

Spotify responds to Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich criticism - balbaugh
http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/spotify-responds-to-thom-yorke-and-nigel-godrich-criticism/055383

======
rwhitman
Lately I consume my music almost entirely via Spotify, and its increasingly
apparent that there are a number of artists I love who are not a part of their
catalog. As a consumer its frustrating, but then again I'm using the free
service...

I really wonder what the future holds for cloud based entertainment in this
regard. I now consume all entertainment via cloud services and Netflix / Hulu
etc have very similar if not worse problems when it comes to movie and TV
catalogs. You'd think that now we're several years into it that these problems
would have ironed themselves out by now, but it seems to be getting worse. For
the consumers we're all just screwed

~~~
meritt
I subscribed to spotify premium for a year and a half but recently cancelled
my subscription and went to a competitor. I feel the UI/UX quality of the
desktop version has degraded significantly and they are actually removing
features as opposed to adding them.

Basic things like: drag-n-drop sharing with friends, my friends list was
replaced with people suggested to follow, still no outbox for songs I sent, no
back button on "radio" stations nor a way to see the radio playlist/history,
new UI for albums/artists/songs is horrible, Ctrl+F to quickly filter items in
current result set was removed for some reason, no fuzzy search capability,
etc.

I'm not sure what userbase Spotify is targeting but it's one I am clearly no
longer a member.

~~~
koueri
Out of curiosity, which competitor did you move to?

~~~
meritt
It's Google Play for now. Great desktop (when chrome is in --app mode) app,
pretty abysmal android app. It's not without its faults either.

I did't mention the competitor because my primary complaint was to raise more
awareness about the things Spotify could fix to bring me (and others) back as
customers -- Not to drive business to someone else.

~~~
koueri
Sure, understood. I appreciate the heads up, though - I'm in a similar
position, myself.

A bit of a tangent, but I'm also having some issues swallowing the "pay for a
license" pill in a lot of respects, e.g. Spotify and Steam (of course, we all
do it anyway), so if there's a chance to continue to do that but also own
things, or otherwise move away from that ephemeral type of usage, then I'm
interested, so always interested to learn more about alternative products.

------
l1ghtm4n
Musician, Spotify user, and Radiohead fan here. Spotify fulfills my dream of
working in a record store so I can spend all day discovering music. This
argument is behind the scenes paperwork between the service and the content
owners. They should figure it out without bothering me the end user. If they
can't, then they're both at fault.

------
balbaugh
Boilerplate response. One would think that they would want to nip this in the
but. At least cite some specifics, there are clearly lots out there...

 _Writing or speaking about streaming music screwing artists? Read these
articles first_ [http://musically.com/2013/02/13/streaming-music-screwing-
art...](http://musically.com/2013/02/13/streaming-music-screwing-artists/)

------
kayoone
Its kind of the same problem like pirating video games for example.

People dont pirate games they really want to have, they pirate those they
wouldnt be buying anyway..most atleast.

For music its the same for me.. I might listen to the Radiohead stuff on
spotify (which i pay for). But would i pay for it if they take it away ? No.

~~~
chrischen
Do you have the data to back up that claim? Last I checked, there aren't any
_true_ communist societies out there and the ones closest to communism aren't
doing too well...

You're basically making the claim that if people were left to freely choose,
they will automatically pay the fair price for things they want?

~~~
kayoone
No i am not. I am making the claim that most people that use something for
free would not pay to use it if it wasnt as seen in countless fremium paying
user percentages.

~~~
tunesmith
It's the same cost/benefit calculation I point out below.

For services like spotify (and I'm specifically referring to the part of the
service where you can choose to play a specific song), there is cost to an
artist, in lost sales. Meaning, people who would normally buy a cd/track, and
who do not since they listen to it on spotify. I think people can agree this
cost is not zero - some sales definitely _are_ lost - but they'll argue the
magnitude of the cost.

There is also a benefit in terms of discovery. This is the streaming revenue,
plus the sales that come from discovery. I think people can agree the benefit
is above zero - discovery _does_ happen - but they'll again argue magnitude.

The question is whether the discovery benefit outweighs the cost. There are
widely varying opinions on this, and it can really only be answered with data
rather than by someone's strong opinion.

It's also tricky question to test because I think the counterfactuals may be
impossible. How do you simultaneously test the success of a song on Spotify,
and the exact same song not on Spotify? Maybe an artist with two equally
popular cds could put one on Spotify and not the other and see what happens
for a rough approximation, but I'm not sure. I'd love to hear more thoughts on
ways this calculation can be approximately measured.

~~~
chrischen
Spotify isn't really optimized for discovery. Service like YouTube, music
blogs, hypemachine, are much better for this and their UIs aren't designed to
replace your music player either, so listening to music on YouTube isn't going
to replace buying (or some other way of getting the music file) the song.

------
Yhippa
What is the inherent value of a listen (as in, of a song)? I assume the music
industry has been trying to prop that up but with the democratization of
musical content creation that price has to have been driven down. I've heard
new music from new bands that I wouldn't have had a chance to in the 90's.

There are so many songs to listen to on Spotify that I can generally find
something to listen to nowadays. If some artist I like withholds their catalog
that does hurt me initially. I adapt and move on and listen to something else.
Their loss.

------
ThomPete
It's an ironic fact of history that the easier it has become to be an artist
the more entitled these artists feel like.

Everyone else is forced to change their business models to just make a
reasonable amount of money but somehow musicians feel like they should be
exempt from this phenomena.

The reality is that it has never been easier to make money, just not as many
as you used to. The people they should complain to is the record labels not
Spotify. They are the ones taking the big cuts without providing any value.

Spotify is fundamentally a radio station with a few fundamental diferences.

So welcome to the digital economy. It's not easy but at least you can make
money performing. A luxury most other in this economy don't have.

~~~
tptacek
Nobody is forced to change business models the way artists are forced to
change business models. Other business models are obsoleted by market
substitutes. But that's not what happens to Radiohead; people don't listen to
Radiohead substitutes, but instead effectively coerce Radiohead itself into
providing its offering to them for free.

The core leverage Spotify has over artists is, at root, piracy.

~~~
ThomPete
Then so are radios.

Artists are only forced to do what they did in the beginning, namely
performing. They can do that on top of selling for scale.

They have been fortunate enough being one of the first industries that got to
take advantage of the scaleability technology has allowed for.

There is no natural born right to make a lot of money from recording once and
then reselling the same piece without any additional cost. Thousands of
brilliant musicians never got a record deal when the record labels where the
gatekeeper, now everyone has a shot.

But everything comes with a price and so does this opportunity.

~~~
tptacek
No, radios are not analogous; artists can refuse to have their songs played on
the radio, but cannot effectively refuse to have their work pirated.

There are no natural born rights to anything. In the state of nature, humans
contend not with audio licensing but with not being eaten by bears or having
their heads split open by other humans. Past that, everything is a question of
the social contract, and in our social contract, you are usually not entitled
to consume the fruits of someone else's labor on your own unilaterally defined
terms.

The same logic you use to entitle yourself to download music without the
artist or owner's permission is the logic I could use to entitle myself to
download your application's database.

~~~
oz
Thomas, I honestly don't know how you do it.

Every time the copyright debate comes up, you tirelessly try to inject reason
into it. But they're not having it. I simply cannot, for the life of me,
understand why people think that it's their RIGHT to copy the works of others.
I'm no saint - I love me some isohunt - but I don't have the self-entitled
mindset that says "I'm _supposed_ to be able to pirate your stuff, your hard
work be damned."

"Oh, well technology has outdated their business model, artists need to get
with the times!" Well technology has _updated_ the NSA's surveillance model,
but everybody's mad? If ease of copying is a justification for piracy, then
ease of data collection is a justification for mass surveillance.

But the HN crowd is unaffected, because they're relying on SaaS to make money.
I keep waiting for the day when someone invents a way to reverse engineer
webapps, and all and sundry will be able to download
$SociaLocalMobileStartuply.com's code, and freely use it to create their own
competitor to it. Then we'll see the hypocrisy of these entitled pirates.

You don't have a _right_ to people's stuff. If you did, it'd be your stuff.

Keep up the fight, Thomas. You're a better man than I am.

~~~
ThomPete
Do you know how much musicians copy from each other?

If you really want to take this logic to it's full extend then be prepared to
a much much more diluted payback.

Music has become a commodity business. Deal with it.

~~~
tptacek
That argument is also stale. _Your_ favorite artists might be Girl Talk and
Public Enemy, but Parquet Courts and Neko Case don't do a whole lot of
sampling, do they?

Again: the problem is not that music is "becoming a commodity business". IT
CLEARLY IS NOT, because consumers don't want "commodity music"; they demand
Yeezus, Magna Carta, Hail To The King and Random Access Memories.

A commodity business is one in which prices are driven down by substitutes.
But unlawfully downloaded copies of Daft Punk albums aren't a real market
substitute for authorized copies of Daft Punk albums.

Instead, music is a market in which middlemen of varying stripes have achieved
control over the market sufficient to dominate the returns for recording music
in the first place. The middlemen of 2013 are actually worse in some ways than
the middlemen of 1990; record labels worked on the VC model and signed artists
were often ensured a middle-class standard of living, but today's middlemen
are companies like Google that aren't in any way incentivized to compensate
artists at all.

Music has been made to seem like a commodity by what is in effect a
monopsonistic cartel. But that commodity status is an illusion, not a valid
market outcome.

~~~
ThomPete
People choose between the choices they have. If Daft Punk didn't exist people
would listen to something else and have the posters up on their wall of
someone else.

They wouldn't instead buy a car.

The easier it is to learn and make the music, the more people will make music,
the more competition there will be, the harder it is to make money. Music IS
the product.

That is by all intents and purposes of this discussion a commodity and the
music industry which includes musicians copy each other all the time.

How do you think musicans learn to play music?

Do you think they learn it by purely taking theory and turning it into songs
out of the blue or could it be that they learn a lot of songs other have
played, transcribe and through that build their own sense of music.

Copying existing music is the way most people learn. By copying others. You
don't need samplers for that.

The middlemen in the 90's decided who should get access to their distribution.
It is a far cry from the ability for anyone today to put out their own records
on their own terms.

The ability for musicians to record a song once and sell it infinitely has
nothing to do with being a musician. The copy of your original is NOT the you
it's a copy and that is a commoditized business.

~~~
tptacek
The question isn't whether Daft Punk will or won't exist. It's whether people
will pay for authorized copies of Daft Punk, or unlawfully download
unauthorized copies.

You keep using this term "commodity" as if it meant "any market where
offerings have a low cost". But that's neither a good description of the music
market nor a valid characterization of commodities markets, which include pork
bellies which are used to make bacon like you might find in a bacon, lettuce
and tomato sandwich as well as gold, silver, and crude oil, which aren't
cheap.

A commodity market is one in which good are standardized to the point where
one provider's offering is as good as any other's, and so the only determinant
of price is cost; commodities markets often feature low prices as a result of
competition. But Daft Punk isn't competing with Blaft Smunk and Zaft Tunk for
who can offer the cheapest dance album. Music consumers demand _Daft Punk_ and
will not accept substitutes.

You comments pretend that what's happening is that music consumers are driving
prices down by avoiding artists who don't pay for licensing on consumer-
friendly terms. But of course that's not what's happening. Instead, consumers
acquire content that isn't licensed at or near "free" by unlawful mechanisms
ranging from ad-supported P2P networks to Google's ad-supported Youtube site.
P2P networks and Youtube don't reliably remit any payments to artists, and
their significant impact on pricing is a market _inefficiency_ ; they're free-
riders.

What makes music appear to be a commodity market is the coercive impact of
technology coupled with the market power of a cartel of specific buyers which
makes it untenable for almost any artist to sell music directly to consumers.
Music is made cheap by piracy, and cheaper still by the fact that a monopsony
effectively controls authorized sales.

I might feel like these were pedantic points, except that you're the one who
keeps invoking economics in defense of the status quo, as if there were real
economic principles supporting it.

~~~
ThomPete
Yes it is the question whether or not they exist. People will buy something
else. It's not like people walked around saying. "I wish there was a band like
Daft Punk."

People like music naturally and depending on what time in history you lived in
will like different types of music, but music is the fundamental product that
people are buying.

They would buy more or less whatever was available to them, cause that is how
music works. Repetition and the more you hear a song the more you will end up
liking it.

You can choose to play a game of semantics and not accept the term commodity
but the reality is that 50 years ago people paid for music because there was
real cost involved, just like they today still pay for a concert. Today to be
in a position to have a band the price has come down many many times. That's
the primary commodity part.

There is no "hard labour" involved for most of the music you hear today.

They understand that they should pay for it and there is a classic
supply/demand principle in play.

With digital distribution and copying there isn't the same supply/demand
principles in play. The artist don't pay for the medium that holds their
music, they barely pay for the recording anymore, the consumers do themselves.

This is the difference in value. I like the music of bands and I am ready to
support them, but I liked a lot of bands a lot before the internet and I
didn't buy a fraction of what they were selling.

This has all changed and it is at no cost to music in genreal only to the
individual musician. But I would much rather live in a world where record
labels weren't the gatekeepers anymore.

Both the musicians and their audience is much better off.

~~~
tptacek
This seems to be an argument that the price of music has fallen because we no
longer have to pay for little plastic disks. Nobody was paying for the plastic
disks or the clunky reels of magnetic tape.

I'm having a hard time understanding how musicians could be better off in 2013
now that a manipulated robotic market has driven the price for recorded music
down to $0. As hard as it may be to stomach, the facts seem to indicate that
they were better off in the era of A&R reps and cigar-chomping label execs.
The things people claim make musicians money in 2013 were also revenue
sources, also in the mix, in 1981 (another idiosyncratic tech belief is that
the Internet taught musicians how to make t-shirts --- which also get
pirated!). Most live musicians make fuck plus all on touring.

What might be the case is that 2013 is a better time to be a _hobbyist_
musician; you might get some national exposure. But since the entire market
for recorded music is collapsing, along with many (most?) classic artist
follow-on jobs like recording engineering, session musicianship, scouting, and
promotion, it seems like 2013 is a distinctly worse time for professional
musicians.

(I'm not a musician but come from a family of musicians; my brother is a
professional musician, for instance).

 _ps: I 'm not voting your comments down, and voted the parent up; I couldn't
disagree with you more strongly but appreciate your civility, which is
unfortunately atypical of music licensing discussions on HN._

~~~
ThomPete
I wouldn't expect you to vote me down just because we were in disagreement. I
know you well enough for that :)

But back to the discussion.

All people start as hobbyists when it comes to playing music. It's something
you do, not because you have to, not because it helps others, but because it's
fun. It's for most a performing art.

More people can start as hobbyists today than ever before and more people do.
More people are also today able to put out records for almost no money.

50 years ago it was both much more expensive and the only distribution you had
was the one that the lables owned.

Today everyone can put out a song and everyone an access it. A professionally
sounding song has also been driven down to almost nothing.

You need a string quartet? No problem, here is a sound. Need a xylofone? No
problem, here is a sound.

Spotifys data show that people are listening to much more off-chart music,
because they suddenly have access to it. Bands that was never heard of before
or wouldn't have had a chance now has an audience. They wont make Elvis kind
of money, but they can at least make a little.

This is the reason why music is a commodity. Not the individual artist but the
process of making music and reselling the same performance.

The individual artist can still sell their concerts and do so in fact at many
times higher prices than they used to, and people are buying it.

Most musician always made fuck all on touring. Let alone on their records.

I made fuck all when I was a struggling musician myself. Very few people have
ever made money on music besides the record labels.

Music isn't an industry it's performing arts and that you can always make
money on.

The record industry has nothing to do with music besides it selling it. If
anything is a myth, that is the myth.

------
iamben
Whilst I don't see this being resolved any time soon, the whole thing is
getting a little stale. It's the major record labels and the artists who've
had (often big) pre Internet successes that are complaining the loudest.

Things change (for some better, for some worse) - but you have to adapt and
get on with it. Artists are still making (and enjoying making) music and
labels are still releasing music. The ones that go the furthest are the ones
that embrace the situation, take advantage of it and work towards making the
most of it.

Hell, a lot of the younger artists and labels don't know any different.

------
SolarUpNote
I'd love to see a feature that showed how much I've personally paid to each
band I've listened to.

------
joshSimms
I have to respect Thom Yorke's decision. These services only have their own
profit in mind and do not come even close to fairly compensating artists.
Thom's work is pretty niche to begin with and he probably doesn't see more
than a few hundred dollars a month from streaming. For the number of plays he
gets, this is probably not worth his time. Plus, hipsters love it when their
bands turn down mainstream services. Makes them edgy and exclusive. This is a
good business move for them

------
rlu
I pretty much exclusively use Spotify to listen to music. It's incredibly
convenient. I love it.

It annoys me when artists decide not to participate. With Radiohead I at least
'kinda get it' in that their new album is a pay-your-price album, so sure
whatever, fine. But for example, Taylor Swift's Red album is not there. What
does she want me to do? Buy it on iTunes?? No thanks. If anything, it might
make me want to pirate it.

What Spotify _should_ do for these cases is what Xbox Music already does. If
the song is not available for free (a-la Radiohead, or Taylor Swift) then you
can purchase it just like on iTunes. Except that you get the benefit that it
acts like any other song on their free catalog (syncing playlists etc. etc.
etc.)

The only problem I see with this is that if it becomes an option, what would
make an artist want to go the free route rather than the "pay to have" route?
Then again, Xbox Music seems to be doing fine. Everything that is free on
Spotify is free on Xbox Music (+ some others) and then Xbox Music gets the
advantage in that many songs which just are not on Spotify are at least able
to be purchased for ~1 dollar on Xbox Music.

~~~
tunesmith
I'm having trouble understanding your comment - because you explain exactly
why artists would choose not to participate if there is a "paid" option, but
then you say it annoys you when artists decide not to participate. Why does it
annoy you?

Spotify has a discovery benefit, but it also robs track/cd sales. This is in
contrast to something like Pandora, where the discovery aspect is just gravy,
and a person still has to buy the tracks to listen on demand.

If an artist is being rational, they compare the discovery benefit to the
track sales loss, and act accordingly. If a fan begrudges that choice _to the
extent of feeling justified in pirating_ , then what does that say about the
fan? Spotify is actually complicit in reinforcing this attitude.

~~~
chadillac83
Maybe the happy medium is cutting the labels out of the deal, allowing artists
to self publish on the platform and see larger cuts of the proceeds for their
contribution to the network. $500/m and $1/bn aren't exactly chump change
until you realize the artists are getting tiny percentages of those payouts.
If Spotify were to offer a convenient distribution platform and enticing terms
to ditch labels and self publish the might find a sweet spot. That being said,
piracy is popular because it's easy and free, the artists aren't competing
against it because everyone's a pirate, they're competing against it because
it's a more convenient alternative. Skip out on the most popular platform and
your fans will adopt the alternative with a path of least resistance.

~~~
tunesmith
Just a couple years ago, iTunes availability was seen as a more convenient
alternative to piracy. Now apparently Spotify makes iTunes so relatively
annoying that piracy is preferable. I don't really think B flows from A, not
without a lot of fans being encouraged to expect music for free when it isn't
really free.

iTunes isn't that much more annoying than it used to be. People just started
to feel more entitled to free music, encouraged by the newer services, and
paying artists less. That's why it's a long slippery slope.

------
zavulon
This is not new. Spotify have been screwing artists for a long time.

"Got paid £8 for 90,000 plays. Fuck spotify."
[https://twitter.com/Jon_Hopkins_/status/137147753829646336](https://twitter.com/Jon_Hopkins_/status/137147753829646336)

------
bluthru
Spotfiy et. al need to evolve to cut out the middle man. Just as app
developers can publish directly into the App Store, musicians need to own
their work and publish it directly to different marketplaces.

~~~
tommi
Funny how you would take App Store as an example of cutting out the middle
man. App Store has been more about changing the middle man from multiple
publishers on the market to just one.

~~~
bluthru
Good point. I guess I mean cutting out one of the middle men. As it is now
with music there are two middle men: The publisher and the store. Publishers
are getting decent money from streaming services, so that would be nice if it
went directly to the artists.

------
alexvr
What does this mean for In Rainbows on Rdio? It's basically the reason I
subscribed.

