
How Good is Spotify for Indie Musicians? (Not Good) - dgurney
http://concertwindow.com/6303/how-good-is-spotify-for-indie-musicians
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iamben
As someone that's done 'the band thing' and been involved with plenty of
others who have and are doing 'the band thing' - if I was doing it now, as a
smaller artist I would absolutely go to town with distribution by whatever
means necessary. I'd get onto spotify, itunes, amazon, whatever. Hell, I'd
probably even give the record away for free. For a smaller (indie/indie label)
band, getting people through the door was always the biggest problem. Get them
through the door, get the fanbase, you can sell them whatever you like.

When I had the numbers, I'd deal with the money. Long and short, I'd rather
have 10 thousand people listen to my record and talk/blog/tweet about me /
come to shows, than 100 people buy it and 10 people come to my show.

~~~
cclark20
Except Spotify isn't for discovery and virality. What your talking about is
getting people to discover music. Usually done through blogs, social media,
youtube. But when your talking about a service like spotify which is really a
one dimensional store for storing, putting music on your mobile device that
doesn't drive merch sales or concert tickets or even fans then they should be
paying there fair share to artists. Granted maybe with FB open graph
integration this is changing. And of course this isn't just a Spotify problem
this is a label problem (of course now they're one and the same). Anyways the
question isn't whether giving your music away for free or not is a good idea
-- The question is why isn't Spotify doing what they say there are there to
do?... Pay artists.

~~~
iamben
I disagree - I've been using Spotify for a couple of years to discover new
music. The 'Related artists' panel, and then the 'Top Hits' easily lets you
find similar bands/musicians and sample their most popular songs.

I'd prefer someone to discover a song of mine of Youtube, or read about me in
a blog or a Twitter post, and spend the day streaming everything I've done -
come to my show and singalong. Looking at listings for my local venue, I'll
regularly spend the preceding days / week listening to who's coming to play
before I go and see them live.

I'm aware my views differ from some, but we're in an age where you can pirate
an album in 30 seconds. Those that are going to steal it, will. Similarly,
those that _want_ to pay, will. Until you have enough loyal fans/generic
TV/radio coverage to buy your single on iTunes, why not just let them hear it
wherever and ask them to donate or buy a t-shirt or vinyl?

Answering the question as to why Spotify isn't paying artists - the system may
not be perfect at the minute, but it's certainly pushing the boundaries much
better (and more legally) than anything previously. Which is a great, great
thing, IMO.

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mseebach
I'm a long-time Spotify user, and I have not bought a single piece of music
(digital or CD) since I signed up, and I suspect I won't ever again.

Even if you offered me a free CD sent to my door, I wouldn't know what to do
with it. I suspect the optical drive in my laptop is dead (I tried to burn a
Linux install CD out of habit about a year ago, three in a row came out
corrupted, then I discovered installing from USB-drives) and even if I'd get
it ripped, I'd need to distribute it between my personal laptop, work desktop
and phone (for living room listening). And dealing with backup.

Or, if you were on Spotify, I'd invest the time it takes to type in your name
and give it a listen. If I enjoyed it, I'd probably buy a ticket to your show
when your tour comes to London.

You're awfully concerned with getting your as-of-yet non-existent fans to
cough up their cash rather than focusing on discoverability and betting on the
long tail (I'm rudely making the assumption that Irish folk songs performed on
accordion isn't going to displace Rihanna and Justin Beiber from the Top 40).

~~~
dgurney
I suppose for a musician, taking the leap of faith from cash-in-hand to maybe-
cash-down-the-road is a big one. Even if ultimately it might pay off. It's a
pretty fundamental transition between business models.

Edit: Also forgot to mention an important distinction in my point, which maybe
wasn't clear enough: I will definitely put my music on Spotify eventually...
just not at first, so I can capture a few sales that might otherwise have been
lost to it.

~~~
mseebach
But you might have passed though London by the time I hear your music. Or I
might read the review of your new CD in a newspaper and look you up,
unsuccessfully. By the time you're there, I've long since forgotten you.

I'm not in the music business, so this is only based on readings and hear-say
and should be taken with a massive grain of salt: Perhaps you'd be better off
forgetting about making money off of your debut album. You can focus on
getting maximum reach and energise your fans and then, if you don't make any
money, it's not disappointing.

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cletus
The vast majority of musicians can only support themselves via live
performances. This was true before streaming services. It was true before the
Internet. It's still true.

Radio stations pay (through a complicated scheme) royalties to songwriters.
There are no performance royalties (whereas there are on Internet-streamed
radio, which can be seen as a victory for radio broadcasting lobbying).

Major label artists typically earn nothing from music sales [1] due to RIAA
accounting.

The parallel artists shouldn't be drawing isn't to the cost of purchasing a
song or a CD but to radio royalties. If a radio station plays a song, how many
people hear it? How much do they earn per listener? Unfortunately, that's
really hard to answer.

Streaming services should be viewed as a means of discovery and curation. The
bigger the audience you have the more you can make from live shows, which is
your staple income unless you're the Rolling Stones, Sting, the Beatles, etc.

To focus on the <1 cent per stream figure is shortsighted. You should be
letting as many people as possible listen to your music. There's a reason tech
companies typically start by giving away their services: build an audience and
you can scale. This applies to musicians.

Think about it: charging $5/head for 50 people at the local bar to listen to
you takes you exactly the same amount of time as charging $50/person for
10,000+ people to listen to you in a large concert venue.

Sure not everyone is going to get so famous but I guarantee you this: if you
don't get relatively well-known, your income from music sales in any form
won't sustain you or even be that significant.

~~~
twainer
Some facts on the ground here are just wrong - although the intuition feels
correct: "The bigger the audience you have the more you can make from live
shows, which is your staple income unless you're the Rolling Stones, Sting,
the Beatles, etc."

As someone who has been in the business I can tell you that touring is very
expensive and complicated - especially when you get into the middle-zone for a
band where they want to tour regionally rather than just play out in their
home town. Touring has become more competitive for bands and listeners-
attention as well. Even for bands with small ambitions the amount of so-called
'fans' is often uselessly misleading because you can get a false sense of how
committed a 'fan' is and how many true fans you actually have.

On the higher end, take an artist like Imogen Heap - who has a huge, cult
following, has had some hits on the radio, won a Grammy, has a very lean
production situation, and plays out by herself. That sounds like the perfect
situation in the modern scenario - but she decided not to tour after her last
Grammy-winning album because it was too expensive.

Touring does not in any way solve any of the problems of people not paying for
music.

As far as streaming services being viewed as a means of discovery and creation
- that benefit is for the listener and not the artist. There is a hugely
compelling argument to be made that the enormous and chronic amount of choice
actually prevents people from forming deeper relations to things.

To give one example, drawn from an Economist article maybe 5 months back - in
a British supermarket shoppers were given a choice between a table with 6 jams
to try or 25 jams to try. In either case, anyone who tried jams was given a
coupon for the jam of their choice. Many more people stopped by the table with
25 jams, but the redemption rates were hugely different: 30% for the those who
stopped by the table with 6 and 3% for those who stopped by the table with 25.

One can debate it many ways, but there can be no denying that the range of
choice and access has fundamentally changed how a consumer relates to the
possibilities in their environment. I deal directly with plenty of indie
bands: exposure hardly matters because it does not equal attention. That's
what boosters of the free-model don't appreciate. Things that people get for
free are assigned less attention, less care than things they have to decide,
and pay for, and own. That's the bitter truth. If you want a fan's attention,
inspire them to pay for something - and not .30 for a download, but $10 for an
album.

My counsel to young bands is to try and do just that - charge real money and
make real product. Then at least you know where you stand. Chugging along on a
illusion of fandom by getting people to 'like' you and stream your music for
free is a lesson in futility.

Spotify is more like a search engine for music. It's a nice thing for the
user, but truly meaningless for an artist. The new people making it big are
doing so in spite of things like Spotify, not because of them - and that
hardly makes Spotify qualifiy as an asset/savior in my book.

Think about it: 1 million spins on Spotify would gross you $2000 - which is a
small budget to produce a truly professional single track. 20 million spins
would throw off enough money to give you the budget [$40,000] that was granted
to low-end rap acts in the late 90s for an album-length release - not counting
promotion of any sort of course.

Consider that 20% of our mythical 20 million spins were actual iTunes dloads
instead of Spotify listens. A band - even one on a major label - would earn
well over $300,000 - and from a single track.

No matter how adroit the magical thinking the truth is the same as it has
always been: sales = money.

~~~
Fliko
I totally disagree about how music is devalued and I share Trent Reznor's
belief that paying what you want devalues music, whereas giving it away
doesn't. I'm going to give you a quote from him instead of explaining it
because my opinion lies off of personal experience whereas his lies off of
professional experience when he worked with Saul William.

"This is where you offer tracks or albums for a user-determined price. I hate
this concept, and here's why. Some have argued that giving music away free
devalues music. I disagree. Asking people what they think music is worth
devalues music. Don't believe me? Write and record something you really
believe is great and release it to the public as a "pay-what-you-think-
it's-worth" model and then let's talk. Read a BB entry from a "fan"
rationalizing why your whole album is worth 50 cents because he only likes 5
songs on it. Trust me on this one - you will be disappointed, disheartened and
find yourself resenting a faction of your audience. This is your art! This is
your life! It has a value and you the artist are not putting that power in the
hands of the audience - doing so creates a dangerous perception issue. If the
FEE you are charging is zero, you are not empowering the fan to say this is
only worth an insultingly low monetary value. Don't be misled by Radiohead's
In Rainbows stunt. That works one time for one band once - and you are not
Radiohead." - Trent Reznor

<http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?30,767183,767183#msg-767183> (Under update 3
in the first post)

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swilliams
Here's a freebie for Spotify and Rdio: Allow artists to sell their merch from
your app/website. It would engender a ton of good will from artists. It might
even help your margins (which I imagine can't be too huge) too.

If they don't do that, there's a startup idea for someone.

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droithomme
I haven't used this product so perhaps I am misunderstanding the article. It
seems to confuse sales royalties and streaming fees. Streaming fees are 1 cent
for big names and 2/10 cent for small names, is that it? And sales commissions
for outright downloaded sales are not specified. But then $1 "per stream" is
suddenly brought up in the last sentence without explanation. $1 per track
download or sale is somewhat industry standard, with iTunes' 99 cent tracks.
But $1 per stream or single listening is not normal at all. The two seem to be
very different things, downloads and single plays. To me, the article seemed
to confuse them.

~~~
dgurney
sorry, the $1 per stream is referring to Concert Window's royalty to artists
(the artists get $1 per webcast ticket sold). Then as for Spotify, which is
separate, I had originally thought that Spotify paid 1 cent to the
artist/record label per stream, but in actuality it's a little under $0.002.

~~~
colomon
BTW, we've been enjoying the free webcasts from Passim (lots of Matt &
Shannon!), and my wife went crazy and started talking about subscribing when
she read the Concert Window upcoming schedule. It's a great service for those
of us far away from those clubs.

(PS once I hit the "download free track" on your webpage, none of the links on
the left hand side worked any more.)

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billboebel
When I hear a good indie band, I try to buy something from them. I don't care
what it is... a tshirt, a cd (even though I never play it), a beer cuzy,
whatever. Today I can only do that at a live show. I wish someone would make
it easier for me to give my money to bands I like.

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foulmouthboy
Ridiculously short sighted analysis. So you sell 143 CDs and make your
thousand bucks. Good for you. End of the road. Then you sell another 155 CDs
on CD Baby. Make another thousand bucks. Yep. End of the road.

In the time that it's taken to sell 298 CDs, and effectively reach 300 people,
you're telling me you wouldn't (for free) make the music available to
thousands of users and then just share the hell out of it? How much music gets
streamed by Spotify users just looking to try a track out? That too counts as
revenue.

If it were me, I'd distribute across as many channels as quickly as possible
and hope that I catch on as opposed to "burning out" each channel one by one
in the most painfully slow marketing campaign ever.

~~~
dgurney
Well, a lot of new media companies, including Grooveshark, have made exactly
that argument. It might work for larger artists with a built-in fanbase, which
makes virality easier to achieve since it'll start with some sharing momentum.
But for indie artists with very small fanbases (I'm talking hundreds of fans,
not thousands), having your music available for free doesn't do as much for
you. The fans who would have bought your album will now listen for free and
not buy it, and nobody else has heard of you. Plus, explosive virality will be
harder to achieve - in general - with such a small number of people to begin
with.

Again, I'm sure Spotify pays out a significant amount to the record labels and
major artists, but I'm talking here solely from the perspective of a small
indie musician with a, say, 200 person fanbase. In that case I don't think
your argument makes sense.

~~~
earbitscom
Even Coldplay just announced last week that their new album would not be on
Spotify. They released it this week, it went to #1 by a landslide and a huge %
of it was in digital sales. If it were available on Spotify, you can only
imagine that's not what would have happened.

~~~
dgurney
Good point. I'm curious to see if there's more of this from major bands. I
love Spotify, but as a musician, it does make sense to capture all the sales
you can at first, and then open up your album for free streaming later. Some
fans will do whatever it takes to hear an album when it's released, and if you
give them a free option upon release, you're losing those sales.

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jakubw
I don't want this sound like yet another anti-label rant but as I see it, this
is mostly a chicken-egg problem caused by the big labels, that are unlikely to
be charging Spotify the same fee per stream but rather a flat fee that is so
high that Spotify is still at loss and can't afford paying more to smaller
players. I'd imagine if more artists went independent, things could be better
both for them and Spotify.

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joelrunyon
I think there was a graph here on HN a while back on the number of
CDs/mp3/streams it would take for an artist to make a certain threshold of
income.

If anyone could find that, it would be really helpful in conjunction with this
article.

~~~
spacemanaki
I don't know if this is it, but it's very similar:
[http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-
music...](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-
artists-earn-online/)

Linked from the OP

~~~
joelrunyon
+1 - That's it. Good find.

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Fliko
This is why we have things like Bandcamp and Tunecore

