
Mariah Carey’s record-breaking day shows how little musicians make from Spotify - Mtinie
https://qz.com/1507361/mariah-careys-record-breaking-day-shows-how-little-musicians-make-from-spotify/
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TACIXAT
>Spotify pays whoever holds the rights to a song anywhere from $0.006 to
$0.0084 per play.

It makes me happy that the cost of digital goods is falling. The distribution
costs are so low for a digital item that this price seems much more in line
with what people should pay for a download / stream.

Interestingly, at $10 a month Spotify is charging users $0.00023 per minute
(60 * 24 * 30). If each song is about 3 minutes, they're making money on
anyone who spends less than 10% of their time listening to music.

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msvan
Digital goods are not worthless because they can be downloaded easily.
Distribution costs shouldn't matter much when determining price. Competition
should though, and there is plenty of competition for people's time between
digital goods.

Also, I'm sure Spotify pays for engineers, offices, lawyers, designers,
servers, marketing, avocado toasts and other essentials in addition to
royalties.

~~~
pureliquidhw
I agree with your underlying point, but distribution cost absolutely matters
when determining price.

Competition for time is a great way of framing why I pay for many services. I
pay $10 to Spotify to avoid hundreds of commercials each month, it is
absolutely worth it to me. Same with Netflix. Would do the same with Gmail if
it was an option.

~~~
extra88
> Would do the same with Gmail if it was an option.

It is, pay for G-Suite.

~~~
pureliquidhw
I've looked at that before, and I can't claim this with 100% certainty, but
seems I cannot use my current email address. I don't want to change that.

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kbutler
No - how many times have these people paid for this song?

If they had bought the CD (and many of them have) or the cassette (and many of
them have) or the mp3 (and many of them have) or the iTunes AAC (and many of
them have) they could play it infinite times and never pay Mariah another red
cent.

The music industry keeps trying (and sometimes succeeding) to convince people
that they deserve new payment for the same work on every form of new media
forever.

~~~
dgzl
Don't they, though? (Within copyright limits) If you buy a cassette, the
quality and experience is much different than something more contemporary.
Doesn't the work of data-conversion and remastering warrant additional
funding?

> How many times have these people paid for this song?

You're really only paying for the medium, and renting the music.

~~~
jjeaff
Cassette to CD, I agree or record too. But once I buy the CD, I can rip it
losslessly and it is the exact same ordering of bits no matter where or how I
play it.

~~~
dgzl
What about if the artist changes the music, like Yeezy did on TLOP. Would you
pay again for a new version of the music?

What about in the future, when we add new dimensions to our music, that
requires additional remastering? Our current music formats are really great,
but I wouldn't be surprised to see another transformation before too long.
Maybe downloadable VR concerts, or some integrated rumble data to assist with
bass boost. Or possibly holographic versions of the artist performing.

You'll be buying the same music for as long as the industry can keep turning
the knob, just enough to bring new interest.

~~~
kbutler
A concert recording is a separate work. A music video is a separate work.

An online stream of an existing audio recording is not a separate work.

~~~
dgzl
But three different masters of the same song is three different pieces of
work, right? A remix is different work, right?

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kbutler
A remix is a different work. A different encoding of the same piece is not a
different work.

If by "different master" you mean a separate recording of a different
performance of the song, then yes, it is a different "work" \- a separate
copyrightable sound recording, but it is the same work of the song writer.

Re-mastering may or may not create a separately copyrightable work, depending
on the creative expression that goes into the re-mastering.

Encoding to cassette, CD, mp3, audio stream in various formats is a mechanical
process, not a separate "creative expression" that receives or deserves
separate copyright protection.

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baby
$92,400 in a day. How little. For a single song (released in 1994 at that).
How detached from reality can people be?

~~~
paol
You're missing the point. This is the absolute ceiling of success that can be
reached in Spotify. If the payout of _that_ is 90k, what do you thing the
payout of the typical artist is on Spotify?

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jlarocco
I love music, strongly support musicians, and buy tons of music, but you're
not going to make me feel bad that artists can "only" make $92k a day on
Spotify.

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webdood90
I think the point is an elite artist tops out at 92k, meaning unknown artists
will be making peanuts for their contributions. You're not supposed to pity
that top tier artist, only realize that the ceiling is relatively low for
everyone.

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dgzl
The artist isn't making that money, the rights holder is. Who knows how many
hands see that money before the artist does.

~~~
jjeaff
Well, at least due to the effect of technology on music, many unknown artists
are able to produce their own music and go directly to Spotify and other
services. And they do that quite often now though I don't know that many
making a living on streaming royalties.

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gralx
Put this in context. Profitable musicians make most of their money from ticket
sales to live shows. Recordings serve that business model mainly as
promotional material. Profitable recording acts like the later Beatles have
been extremely rare exceptions.

This Spotify news is a far greater tragedy for record companies, whose entire
business model relies on royalty collection, than it is for the artists
themselves. But rentier business models don't deserve a whole lot of sympathy.

~~~
rasz
This, successful musicians actually work for a living
[https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-
beat/848138...](https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-
beat/8481384/beyonce-jay-z-on-the-run-ii-tour-sales-by-the-numbers)

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__initbrian__
I want to see an analysis that turns the $60 million into price per play. how
many times a person with a Casette/CD would listen to it over the life of the
medium. radio deals and how many people heard it on the radio each deal. What
other avenues are there? Commercials? $60,000,000/(2018-1994+1)/(25 days
before Christmas) = $96,000 for each day in leading up to Christmas And what
are the current numbers for listening share? What percentage is spotify
compared to radio, tv, youtube, itunes, owned media? Also curious about how to
compare the value for owning the cd,digital copy, etc. v. listening on
spotify? A cd is $10? which would give me only a month of Spotify? But then
expand that to my entire media collection and then I wonder where it breaks
even--10% of my time?

Current Spotify premium user because I like the curated playlists

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jlarocco
Sorry, but I can't feel bad for somebody whining about only making $92k in a
single day from work they did 24 years ago.

Maybe Spotify is ripping off artists, but this story doesn't demonstrate it.

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creaghpatr
The article is unclear about which distribution channels her and her partners
invested in to earn $60M in royalties since ‘94 before being “shafted” by
Spotify for an effort-free return of $92k in a single day. Plus, Spotify did
her a solid by making her the top song on the top Christmas playlist thus
solidifying her position on the Christmas charts for years to come.

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paol
I love Spotify, for the service and just for the fact that it exists (just
look at the fragmentation shitshow that is movie & tv streaming, with enormous
amounts of back catalog still unavailable anywhere, to see how much worse we
could have it)

But it should plainly obvious that the price charged is not sustainable.

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johnzim
The Music Industry did this to itself - because it disliked the amount of
power the iTunes music store had, it decided to allow Spotify's frankly
obscene business idea to float.

Well, one of those partners earned them lots of money and the other massively
devalued their goods.

What's even more laughable is that the iTunes Music Store represented a
massive 'save' for the industry - prior to that they'd earned ~$0 on digital
music thanks to rampant piracy.

I wish this could be seen as the high-water mark of stupidity for the industry
but I know it well enough to be sure that's not the case.

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danepowell
Pennies per play is a hard metric to grok. Let's compare this to CDs.

Assume a CD costs $10, and half of that goes towards the distribution of the
physical media. It has maybe ten tracks. If you listen to it every day for a
few months that's roughly the same "price per play" if I'm doing my math
right.

Maybe that's a little high for an estimate, but streaming is still within an
order of magnitude, and probably reaches way more customers than a given CD
track ever did.

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msabalau
While it is interesting to see how much a superstar makes off a ubiquitous
Christmas classic, it might have been nice to see how irrelevant and
immaterial streaming royalties are to normal musician,

For sheer resourcefulness (and humor) I enjoyed seeing the band Freezepop
include a $3 royalty check in their Kickstarter music video, and offer the
check itself as part of $400 backer reward.

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xbryanx
I never understand why Spotify is so cheap. I'm a bit of a music head, but I
would absolutely pay twice as much for the subscription service. Or is Spotify
primarily making money off ads or data?

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pjc50
The price is roughly at equilibrium with piracy.

~~~
tbihl
At this point, piracy only makes any sense if you can't meet the requirement
of accessing their servers monthly to maintain access to locally stored songs.

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bachmeier
That's a lot more in one day than many people make in a year for doing actual
work (the work of creating this song was done years ago).

If that's all the market's going to pay someone that has already reached a
level of wealth that they can't spend in ten lifetimes, I won't lose any
sleep. If you can live with the market when someone's making millions, you can
live with the market when they're unable to make $100,000 in a day from one
source and for one song.

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Johnny555
How much did it earn from radio play during that time? I didn't hear it once
on Spotify, but I must have heard it dozens of times this month on the radio
in the car.

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celerrimus
Let's say that in one month a year, this song earns on avg. like $40,000/day.
It's around $36,000,000 over the period of 23 years. It's not that bad,
compared to $60,000,000 earned in royalties since its release.

I assume that they count multiple sources of revenue here, like radio
licenses, royalties from movies and ads where this song was used, etc. So
$92,400 per day only from one medium, is not that bad.

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samspenc
Quick calculation: $92,400 a day x 365 days a year = $33,726,000

That is, assuming you made that much every day of the year (on Spotify), you
would make $33.7 million a year.

Granted, you're not going to be able to replicate Christmas plays throughout
the year, but still, that number doesn't seem small, even for a well-
established artist.

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elliott34
Spotify doesn't pay artists. They pay the labels. And labels pay the artists.
What artists get paid has nothing to do with Spotify.

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spectrum1234
This article could be titled "Look how much music poor people can access for
$10 a month (or free, with ads)"

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sbhn
There is so much more choice in music now than even 10 years ago. Spotify or
not, the monopolisation of your hearing time by a few chosen musicians has
been significantly reduced. Less pie for each to share around. Also, spotify
is not the only way musicians make money. Its only one of the ways they reach
there audience and monetise it. Madonna for example would expect to earn 50
thousand a day from youtube, not to mention all the other less talked about
revenue channels.

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smohnot
So Mariah earned $92k in ONE DAY (Dec 24th) this year. My gut is that she
probably earned at least 20x that this year- the song is popular throughout
December. So she earned a couple million bucks on Spotify this year. The song
has made $60m in history... So a couple million on Spotify this year seems
pretty damn good.

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bickfordb
Supply, meet demand

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ykevinator
Poor musicians.

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IshKebab
How does the record high profit ($90k per _day_ ) show how little musicians
typically make?

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scarface74
If one of the most enduring popular songs of the last 20 years makes $90K in
one day and its a very seasonal song. How much would the average artist make?

~~~
IshKebab
Anywhere from 0 to $90k/day.

Ok I guess we can assume that music earnings have a somewhat long tail, but
hopefully you get my point - the maximum doesn't tell us much about the
distribution.

