Hot take: Maybe music consumption and production has changed enough that it's basically a commodity now, and maybe not worth paying "full" price for anymore most of the time?
There's a tiny handful of artists for whom I'd go out of my way to buy an album directly from them (or a t shirt, or concert or whatever, just to support them).
But for most of my day, music is more just a background thing, like having the radio on, and I don't really pay attention to what's playing or know or care who makes it. Most of it could be (or maybe already is) AI generated and I wouldn't know the difference. I would not pay $20 for an album of that stuff.
I think it's interesting to compare the music industry with the video games one. Both have a glut of suppliers with many invisible titles and producers trailing behind a few famous ones. Both had physical media and big publishers in the 90s and 2000s before transitioning to downloads and streaming. The PC games market moved to pretty effective market segmentation divided between full price new release titles, Steam sales for older games, and first or third party subscriptions like EA Play or Ubisoft Plus or Microsoft Gamepass. Each reaches a different part of the market and can accommodate both players who rent and those who buy. There's also room for smaller indie games, between Steam and Humble Bundle and GOG.
The music market seems archaic, oligopolistic, and predatory by comparison. Where's the Valve of music, offering a great service for both consumers and producers? We do have Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, etc., but why can't they make the finances there work when the also expensive video games market seemed to be doing OK (at least until the post covid bubble burst these last two years)?
I think people have a short memory. It was not that long ago that you’d have to pay 10+e for an album, where most of that would go to the record labels. Now I can pay 10e a month and listen to almost every song ever made, and I’m not going to be willing to pay much more than that.
Artists make their money with live events nowadays. Spotify’s average profit for the last 4 years is around 500m per year. Investors need to be paid and distributing some of that profit among a handful of top artists isn’t going to go a long way.
So how do you suppose we pay the artists more royalties?
Artists have always made their money with live events. Back when people bought CDs, artists got a tiny fraction of a fraction of the sale price. These days they get a slightly larger fraction of a smaller price. A handful of artists at the top of the charts can make bank, and the rest struggle, as always.
I don’t see any solution short of some massive government arts program. It comes down to supply and demand. Most musicians play for a love of music. They would (and many do) play music even if they got no money for it at all. That makes for a glut of musicians and a really low equilibrium price of labor.
We see a similar phenomenon (on a much smaller scale) in tech with games. Lots of people really like making games. They’d do it for free. Getting paid for it at all is a dream. Result: pay is not great in that segment of the industry. Not many of us dream of adding some features to CRUD apps and as a result that pays better.
I wish Spotify would let me "upgrade" individual albums to purchases. Like I'd still pay for my monthly sub, but if I particularly like a track or artist, I could buy that album for a discounted price (like $5, ideally) and the artist would get like 95% of that revenue.
It doesn't really solve the problem of "your music is so generic nobody wants to buy it and nobody can tell you apart from the other similar artists", but maybe it doesn't need to? There's already enough excellent, good, and mediocre music out there to last me several lifetimes even if nothing else gets made. There's way more supply than demand. Everybody wants to be creative, I guess, but not everyone is actually good at it? Maybe it's OK for most of that music to fall by the wayside and only the 1% of the 1% to really make it. Streaming is a good proving ground, and upgrades could help the really good artists earn a bit more.
To me it's not really that different from the infinite supply of shitty books, articles, games, movies, software etc. Most of it just isn't good enough to stand out.
>I wish Spotify would let me "upgrade" individual albums to purchases. Like I'd still pay for my monthly sub, but if I particularly like a track or artist, I could buy that album for a discounted price (like $5, ideally) and the artist would get like 95% of that revenue.
I don't get it, your proposal is that you want to be able to buy albums for less the usual price of $15-20 or whatever? Why would an artist want to do that? Or is the idea basically a tipping function where you "buy" an album for $5, but don't get anything in return?
If you're looking at Spotify's profit to redistribute, you're looking at the wrong places. The right places would be the payola agreements worth billions they already have in place with the major labels, and the fact that they explicitly allow bot plays to prop up the profits of said labels. Starting in January, they won't even tally royalties for songs that get less than 1000 streams- which means most of their catalog. They will just take the money, and consumers are ok with it because less than a thousand people per artist will care. But hey, it's convenient.
Survival of the fittest? I really don't have a problem with this. Artistry is hard - not everyone can make it. 1000 plays is a failure - financially. It probably costs Spotify more to payout the transaction for such a low amount of plays than the amount they are paying out.
This is a non-excuse. All the accounting is done through distribution partners, not to individual artists, and they have computers available to calculate numbers. They have been doing it until now just fine while making money. So have literally all the other streaming platforms.
Is a million times a thousand plays still nothing?
>Where's the Valve of music, offering a great service for both consumers and producers?
How do platforms like spotify not offer "great service for both consumers and producers"? They offer the same 70/30 split as steam, and I'm not aware of any widespread consumer discontent for spotify, aside from maybe their reputation for underpaying their artists (see previous point).
Right, so then why don't the economics of Spotify work out if similar margins work in the games and apps industries? Is music really that much more expensive to make than video games? Are music labels much greedier than game publishers? What's different about music that makes artists especially poorly paid vs games?
Or maybe it's just that Spotify is a subscription split between all the listened tracks whereas Steam is individual purchases? It's probably be fairer to compare the economics to Microsoft Gamepass.
>Right, so then why don't the economics of Spotify work out if similar margins work in the games and apps industries?
Can you clarify what you mean by "economics of Spotify work out"? Are you talking about how much money artists are getting from spotify compared to steam? If so, I think the answer is pretty obvious. Video games derive an overwhelming majority of their revenue from selling the product itself and associated DLC/microtransactions. All of that is done through steam or whatever storefront, so the storefronts can rightly claim they're paying hundreds of millions to the publishers/developers. This makes them look "fair". On the other hand for music, streaming is only a fraction of overall revenue. Artists also derive revenue from live performances, merch, and album sales. That makes streaming platforms seem "unfair", because they get so little revenue from them, even if the revenue split is the same. I don't see this as an issue though, only an issue of public perception.
Artists are free to take their works off streaming platforms if they don't like the deal, but I suspect most don't because the free publicity they get from being on streaming platforms drive other revenue sources. Streaming is a loss leader. Artists complaining about this makes as much sense as news publications complaining about how little money they get through subscribers, when their real revenue source is advertisers.
(smallish) artists complain about it because they also run a loss when they try and tour. It’s quite difficult to make any money in this industry, and that’s fundamentally the source of discontent. It feels absurd to make a product then get paid nothing for making that product when lots of people use it.
>It feels absurd to make a product then get paid nothing for making that product when lots of people use it.
It really shouldn't be considered absurd, especially to people on hacker news. Many software projects are used by billions of devices (eg. linux, curl, openssl), but nobody is creating websites protesting how little github pays them. Just because people use your product, doesn't mean they're willing to pay money for it. If you can't make the economics work because nobody is willing to pay for your product, or there are tons of people lining up waiting to undercut you, blaming the platform is barking up the wrong tree.
But those are the rockstars of the FOSS world, the equivalent of Taylor Swift or whatever. I doubt she or artists like her would be complaining about how she doesn't make enough money from music.
The typical way to make a living from open source is to use your work as a portfolio to get a job doing closed-source development. Then if you keep working on your open source stuff it’s either for fun or to keep your portfolio up to date for when you want to switch jobs.
I don’t think there’s a musical equivalent to that strategy.
Thing is, one of the reasons why so many people use the product is because it's so cheap for them. Given the sheer amount of content being produced today, I don't think it's reasonable to expect most of it to command the price that it needs to be for the makers to make money off it. This is separate from the issue of parasites like Spotify, which can still profit in this arrangement by skimming a little bit from everyone.
>I don’t think its reasonable to expect most of it to command the price that it needs to be for the makers to make money off it.
Would it be that much though? Consider an artist with 20k unique regular listeners, which is successful territory but nowhere near big. If albums cost 3-5 bucks, an artist could make a good individual living releasing albums every 8 months or so, which is plenty of time to make em. Songs could then be maybe 30-50 cents. We’re never going back to such a model, but it wouldn’t be that expensive to fund artists.
also, of course it's a very frequently voiced "observation" that some percentage of a big amount of money... is a big amount itself, yet the marginal cost is - and you might not believe it, but - almost zero!
that's why people complain about taxes, bonuses, etc.
the usual complaints from small artists are usually about how the network effects are "biasing" the payout distribution toward big names. (ie. the fixed monthly subscription revenue split amongst all the artists weighted by plays.)
Spotify boasts a huge free user base, when I looked at their financials, I mathed that a paying user generating 6x as much revenue as the ad supported users. They simply can't raise their payouts and support free users.
There is a Valve for music, it's called CD Baby. Ten bucks buys you instant distribution on all the platforms. That's as good as it gets for both producers and consumers.
It can't solve the problem of getting artists compensated because Americans do not value music. You yourself even expressed your own opinion of the lack of music's value. This is the fundamental reason why we've allowed Spotify to pocket 99% of the total value of music. If Americans valued music and the musicians that labor to make it more, they would care about artist compensation. But they don't, trusting the 'free' market to do it for them.
I thought the hyperbole was over-the-top enough to discourage a strict interpretation, but hyper-rational HN will never crack! And 30% is a lot considering the remainder has to pay the rights holders first.
> when the also expensive video games market seemed to be doing OK
I’m pretty sure ballooning AAA budgets leading to studio death marches, lack of courage to innovate and deviate from a winning formula, the demise of mid-budget games, etc. have plagued the industry for over a decade now.
Whereas in Olde Hollywood, streaming has eaten its lunch, theaters are struggling to stay afloat, the demise of mid-budget films (when’s the last time you’ve seen a comedy in theaters?), and so on.
The book publishing industry is made up of copyright hawks, I can only assume because the internet has allowed self-publishing and unending amounts of free text to compete with.
This is not a good time for content in any format.
Ah, an exception that truly proves the rule. A sequel stuck in production hell for thirty-six years. Granted, it appears to have the mid-budget of what we used to see plenty of (in films such as comedies), but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the Sydney Sweeney rom-com that also came out this year are rarities; it’s been widely known for years that comedies have fallen out of favor from the cinema. (Some say MCU-style superhero quip fests replaced them.) Sample coverage:
I'm curious when AI generated music will displace most artist-created music on Spotify or similar platforms, and if we will even notice. It will probably cost a few dollars per track to generate.
Maybe we'll be left with a handful of Beyoncé's or Taylor Swift's that expand beyond just music, and the rest is generated.
I suspect that AI generated music will be widely produced and consumed in the same way AI movies will largely be used for say commercials or cutscenes, AI images for commercial illustration, and LLM text for content writing; interstitial filler material that is obligatory but no one really seeks out. So you’ll hear royalty-free AI-generated muzak when you’re on hold watching network TV show procedurals/sitcoms, meditation apps and low-fi hip-hop beats channels. When there needs to be sound that you’re not actually focusing on.
> I'm curious when AI generated music will displace most artist-created music on Spotify or similar platforms, and if we will even notice. It will probably cost a few dollars per track to generate.
I sure hope not. I may not buy lots of music, but I have been to see many of my favourite artists in person, in venues that range from a few hundred people to a few thousand - certainly nothing on the scale of Swift or Beyoncé. And I discovered many of those artists through streaming.
Indie/local book shops have had a revival in the wake of the Amazon bookseller behemoth even as big box stores like Barnes & Noble have flailed or Borders have failed, so you may be onto something there. Counter-market cultural trends lead people to value locally-sourced productions.
I'd buy albums off Bandcamp for artists I already know, but I wouldn't use it for discovery. Do they even have discovery features? (I honestly don't know)
Steam's recommendations (and more importantly, sales) are how I discover new games. And there's a lot of titles (both games and music) I'd happily pay $2 or $5 for, but not $20 or $50. There's a lot MORE titles I'd be happy to try for a monthly all inclusive subscription.
For music, I wish Spotify would add a "Like this track? As a Premium subscriber, you can buy the whole album for only $5!" function. That's way less than a full price album but still way more money than the artist would get from streaming.
They kind-of do. The main page allows you to browse popular albums by genre. Each individual album also has a "recommended by this artist" footer, or "people who bough this also bought" (if there aren't any recommendations set).
I also check profiles of other people who purchased an album I liked and see if anything catches my interest.
I do not use Spotify, so I'm not sure if the above counts as a proper discovery tool.
Disagree. Bandcamp doesn't require a bloated desktop app that needs to install a bunch of updates every time you open it. Songs you download are yours to play and distribute as you please. They don't require an active Internet connection to check your license and track your listening habits.
Besides that, Steam is the go-to place to publish games. The only reason you wouldn't distribute on Steam is if you are a Nintendo or Epic-level megacorp that has its own store and exclusivity rules. On Bandcamp, the decision to upload an album comes down to whether the record label allows it. So a lot of times, artists will post early works to BC and drop it as soon as they sign with a label.
As someone who regularly buys music on Bandcamp, I can't say that I've noticed any substantial changes throughout the acquisitions.
It also seems that most bands that I listen to prefer people to buy their music on Bandcamp before other platforms, so presumably it's still a better deal for the artists as well?
There's a tiny handful of artists for whom I'd go out of my way to buy an album directly from them (or a t shirt, or concert or whatever, just to support them).
But for most of my day, music is more just a background thing, like having the radio on, and I don't really pay attention to what's playing or know or care who makes it. Most of it could be (or maybe already is) AI generated and I wouldn't know the difference. I would not pay $20 for an album of that stuff.
I think it's interesting to compare the music industry with the video games one. Both have a glut of suppliers with many invisible titles and producers trailing behind a few famous ones. Both had physical media and big publishers in the 90s and 2000s before transitioning to downloads and streaming. The PC games market moved to pretty effective market segmentation divided between full price new release titles, Steam sales for older games, and first or third party subscriptions like EA Play or Ubisoft Plus or Microsoft Gamepass. Each reaches a different part of the market and can accommodate both players who rent and those who buy. There's also room for smaller indie games, between Steam and Humble Bundle and GOG.
The music market seems archaic, oligopolistic, and predatory by comparison. Where's the Valve of music, offering a great service for both consumers and producers? We do have Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, etc., but why can't they make the finances there work when the also expensive video games market seemed to be doing OK (at least until the post covid bubble burst these last two years)?