

Can we now agree Spotify doesn't help artists? - pyrmont
https://twitter.com/#!/jon_hopkins_/status/137147753829646336

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nextparadigms
While piracy may indeed be better than using Spotify as the other article on
HN seems to suggest, I think it's fair to note that Spotify is right when they
say that you shouldn't look at how they do things in terms of $/play or
$/song, just like you shouldn't think a pirated song = a lost sale.

This is the logic RIAA has used for a long time, saying that if a song was
downloaded 100 million times, it means they lost 100 million sales. You should
probably see Spotify plays more like Youtube views. Just because Lady Gaga got
1 billion views on her songs on Youtube, doesn't mean she lost 1 billion
sales, or even close to that.

The same thing with Netflix. Someone might pay $100 per year and watch 300
episodes and movies during that year, but that doesn't mean that if it weren't
for Netflix, he would've bought all 300 from iTunes for $2 each or whatever it
costs there, for a total of $600.

New technology has enabled us to consume a lot more content, but without
paying a lot more. In fact we now expect to pay less. If the industries
offering us that content aren't willing to accept that, people are going to
pirate it. But even if they somehow stopped piracy, they would still not pay a
lot more for the content consumed, and would probably dramatically cut down on
the consumption. The end result of that would be that there would be a lot
less "popular" artists, and a lot less money for those who aren't popular,
because there would be fewer people buying the songs of the unknown ones.

~~~
pyrmont
The problem that I have is that it's not clear to me why you shouldn't look at
it by comparing it to CD sales. The goal of Spotify isn't to capture all the
pirates and leave the rest of the public paying for their music -- it's to
replace other forms of music consumption.

In one sense you could compare Spotify to radio and say that it's no different
to that. But it is different. On radio, I can't select any song I want to
listen to. On radio, I have to listen to what's on a playlist someone else has
created (often in a manner that avoids repeating a particular song). Radio
doesn't replace the needs to buy a song in order to listen to it repeatedly.
Spotify does. And if it's going to do that, I think it behooves them to pay
more to artists (or to place some kind of restriction on the number of times a
song can be played).

~~~
MPSimmons
It's obviously all numbers.

How much do you pay for Spotify a month? $5 or $10? Or free, in which case how
much does Spotify get for an ad impression, and how many ad impressions do you
get served in a month?

Now, how many songs listens do you get in a month? Assuming Spotify takes
absolutely $0 for themselves, how much money can that possibly be?

Now, what in your opinion is a "fair" amount to pay artists for a listen to
their song? Multiply that by the number of songs that you listen to. Would you
pay that for a service?

I'm guessing that I play a few thousand Spotify songs a month (I don't know
where that statistic would be). I pay Spotify $5 a month. If I only listen to
1,000 songs, that's $0.005 per listen. And that's assuming that Spotify passes
EVERYTHING along to the musician (how to studio techs get paid again?)

If people won't pay the "fair" price for music to listen to it, then the price
isn't fair. It's a consumer's market. It sucks that the musician got $16 for
90,000 listens. That's $0.00017 per listen. That's clearly not enough for that
artist to live on, but there's no mention of how many sales they received from
their attention on Spotify.

It's a complex problem. There's probably no simple solution that will satisfy
everyone. Clearly, the main people who are making money with Spotify is
Spotify themselves (since they minimize the amount of bandwidth by using P2P
technology)...but even if they passed more along, it wouldn't make the artists
happy.

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pyrmont
The last time I was discussing this
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3047694>) I was downvoted because I
linked to the famous infographic which appears to demonstrate that Spotify
might not earn artists much money. Supposedly, it's incorrect because it was
based on data after Spotify had 'recently launched' (the data in the
infographic was from 2010).

This tweet is from about 2 weeks ago. Can we now say it doesn't help artists?

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marginalboy
Presumably, licenses to stream this music were acquired by Spotify from the
artists' designated representatives. Presumably, too, those representatives
are receiving some proportion of these licensing fees. If the deal is
acceptable to the representatives but clearly abysmal to the artists, I wonder
what percentage of the fees are being exacted by the middlers.

I know the amount of money received by a typical artist with a typical
contract on the typical sale of a typical CD is, typically, very small.

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sp332
But how many of those people bought your music after finding it or trying it
on Spotify? It might not be better (financially) than piracy, but I think it's
far from clear that it doesn't help artists.

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eaurouge
Does anyone know if the same applies to Pandora? I've used the paid version
for two years now, and would like to believe the artists are getting paid.

