I don't know about profesional musician, but in the university we have a small YouTube channel about math exercises for the students.
A 10 minutes video (of amateur level) involves something like:
* 6 hour of preparation: We have to select the topic and the exercise. And also thinking how to split the solution in the blackboard.
* 2 hours x 3 persons for recording: One person for the writing, one for the voice and me. We retake each step many times, and we discuss before and after each take.
* 6 hour of editing: Fix the sound (volume, big background noise, try to fix errors). Fix the writing (typos, recolor part of the writing, move some text). Also, change the speed of some parts, because sometimes writing is boring, but remember to resynchronize the voice.
(Some videos are easier and involve less time, some are more difficult and need more time to be finished.)
After all the preparation and edition (I hope) it looks very natural and it's very difficult to realize how much time it involves. But it is not at all at a profesional level.
You guys are missing the point. It might be the all-time highest payout from Spotify. Because of Spotify, many many people will not buy the song. So what once would have been millions of dollars in revenue is much less, and the entire music industry is splitting a rapidly shrinking pie. Yea the very very top will still make enough money to live in big houses and drive big cars, but the middling people can't live off their take. So in order to make it you have to become an international sensation.
One that apparently took 15 minutes to write. If only I could derive a lifetime of income from 15 minutes worth of work.
Another interesting tidbit is that if it was a patent rather than a copyright, the rights would have expired 3 years ago. I spent far longer than 15 minutes just talking to the patent attorney the last time I filed a patent.
Also took far longer than 15 minutes to build her brand and audience to the point where she's releasing celebrity holiday albums that anybody cares to listen to instead of fading into obscurity. But for the lack of a holiday album, Limp Bizkit might still be with us.
That said, holiday albums are just a ploy to net royalties in perpetuity-- you're guaranteed airtime and income once a year for as long as Christmas and copyright law exist. Nobody should expect to be making bank on long-tail efforts.
Picasso is sketching at a park. A woman walks by, recognizes him, and begs for her portrait. He agrees and a few minutes later hands her the sketch. She is elated about how wonderfully it captures the very essence of her character. What beautiful work it is. She asks how much she owes him. "5000 francs, madam," says Picasso. The woman is incredulous, outraged, and asks how that's even possible given it only took him 5 minutes. Picasso looks up and, without missing a beat, says: "No, madam, it took me my whole life."
That's like saying Usain Bolt only ran for less than 10 seconds and he gets all the glory. It takes years of practice before one becomes an overnight success.
Mariah Carey is incredibly talented musician who dedicated her entire life to music. If she made a chart topping song in 15minutes, that just shows how good of a musician she (and her team) is.
Mimi has an astounding 5 octave range for her voice. The only other modern singer in the 'popular' music realm that has a larger dynamic range is Axl Rose of GnR. Her voices spans from F2 to G7. Keeping that set of pipes working (especially for as long as she has) is a LOT of work and discipline. She, without any doubt, has worked for more than 15 minutes.
"Blink" is a great book by Malcolm Gladwell. He goes into detail about the flashes of inspiration or genius that people receive when creating great things and how that generally only happens to people who have spent their lives learning a craft and being steeped in it all the time. Many thousands and thousands of hours of hard work are behind most anyone who can sit down at a piano and hammer out a great song in a short period of time.
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?
So if the price is $15 and there are N users playing M streams of songs ... how much is really available to each artist?
Note that they don't make any claim about spotify's margins or profits here. It's a submarine article to demand they raise prices (and pass the increase on to the labels).
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.
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.
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.
That's nonsense, and the given evidence doesn't support the conclusion. $92k in a day is ton of money by almost any measure. Even more so because the song was recorded 24 years ago.
It's possible most artists are getting screwed, but the example given doesn't show that at all.
The real takeaway from this example should be how broken the copyright system is. It's disgusting that somebody can still milk out $92k a day for work they did 24 years ago.
In a vacuum where Spotify is the only income for a musician sure, but it is easier than ever to publish on many massive platforms tying in with revenue from live performances, merchandise, advertising, etc. Sure its not as safe a a 9-5 job but that is a conscious decision in order to do what one loves, what one is good at, or what one can get rich doing - unlike most 9 to 5s...
Instead of worrying about superstars making only 92k/day maybe you should worry about how much the typical artists makes. In today's winner-takes-it-all world there is a good chance that if Carey made much more the average guy still would make nothing.
This song was written and released 24 years ago and earned its creators probably a million dollars on just this single streaming platform this year. That seems pretty damn good. Remember that streaming platforms are just one small piece of the pie.
Hmm, and Google makes many billions of dollars on their search engine every year. So all the little indy startup search engines must be making an ok living, right?
The music industry is very, very top heavy when it comes to income distribution.
I think a reasonable amount for a musician to earn is comparable to the average income. So let’s say what... 200$ / day? If they get $50/day total for their entire catalogue from just Spotify that’s pretty damn good and probably puts them at more than $200/day between streaming, song and album sales, and live performances and licensing. And that only takes 6000 total plays. Let’s say double that for dilution amongst other copyright holders or label or whatever.
That’s not that much in terms of plays. Everybody wants to be a millionaire artist, but the economics don’t support that.
I'm not sure how it works for people in the Mariah Carey echelon, but small acts make most of their money from touring and merch sales. My understanding is that CD sales don't really got back to the artist anyway, in an appreciable way, even before Spotify, so Spotify seems to be a continuation of that idea.
If the point was how little Spotify pays, they should have highlighted how little typical artists get rather than the example that’s 100-1000X what most people earn in a day.
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?
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.
The article and the comments here are all making it seem like Spotify is the one being cheap. In reality that’s probably the maximum that they can pay to even come close to turning a profit while the distributors are still in the mix: http://fortune.com/2016/05/24/spotify-financials/
That article is from 2016 yet they are still losing money.
There would be a lot more money involved for both Spotify and the artists if they went the Netflix route and cut out the record label middlemen. I’m sure they are trying to do that but for whatever reason they haven’t been successful yet. Probably because the back catalogue of the record labels has a lot more leverage than the back catalogue of a bunch of movies. I wonder if they went the route of churning out a ton of original content if that would gradually increase their influence and get people to sign with them for future releases because they would be paying more. It’s a precarious game, since I’m sure the record labels will be happy to yank all of their music once they get wind of Spotify trying something like this out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is not a correct interpretation of the first-sale doctrine. Someone who purchased a cassette, CD, etc. has the legal right to, among other things, rent the medium to others. For example, if I want to start a cassette tape rental company I can buy cassette tapes and rent them to the public, without seeking permission from the copyright holder of the music or other content on those tapes.
(Some exceptions apply, like the Record Rental Amendment of 1984.)
I don't see how that's different than what I said? The only difference is that there's now a middle man. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the middle man can't make copies of the work and rent them out, right? They're just passing the rental to another person, who definitely can't make copies of the music.
Hmm. I think I got mixed up when you wrote "medium". I associated it with a recording medium, but I think you meant it more like access medium?
If it were recording medium then there are two issues at play: the right to make a copy, and the right to distribute. A rental agreement can exclude the right to sublease/re-rent. However, the copyright owners, by selling a copy of the work, have given up that right to prohibit further redistribution. The middle man may not make copies of the work but may rent them out. It is not "passing on the rental" because there was no rental in the first place; legally speaking.
OTOH, since streaming isn't covered under first sale doctrine, such distinctions are not relevant.
>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.
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.
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.
I used to justify piracy by thinking that the digital data was more like particles in water than items on a shelf. If you pee into the water, it doesn't matter how much or where you aim, all the water is corrupted. In the same way, if an artist releases digital work, they're essentially giving it away because there's no effective way to contain it. DRM fails just like trying to stop pee from spreading in water. I held the idea that if an artist uses a digital medium, they should just accept that when it's copied once (from their private computer to the public web) that it's copied indefinitely. I would claim that the nature of the digital world and internet can't support the blocking off information like that.
I'd like to still believe in this, but I'm not sure the logic holds up.
I pay about $20/year for Spotify because several of my friends have a family plan. I know this tactic is used with foreign students and cell phone plans as well.
Interesting how when the cost distribution falls due to technological change, no one (or hardly anyone) ever proposes that small portion of that should be shifted to the artist / writer end of equation. I would be willing to argue that implicitly the average consumer has already pegged the monetary value of writer / artist's contribution as ~0 and that what people actually peg for value is entirely the physical product that is otherwise unrelated to what is encoded on or within it, which is why you get so many commentators who think purchase price should only ever solely follow the price of the media, whereas, on the production end, the writer /artist's cut has always been determined on the logic of what must be carved out of the price in relation to the production and distribution of that physical medium. So, in essence, when it comes right down to it, both capitalist rights holders and the consumer public, believe in a kind of pseudo slavery where what they want is produced with minimal to no financial impingement upon themselves (which, of course, only make evolutionary sense).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadI finished paying off my toyota camry a couple years ago. It took 5 freaking years.
A 10 minutes video (of amateur level) involves something like:
* 6 hour of preparation: We have to select the topic and the exercise. And also thinking how to split the solution in the blackboard.
* 2 hours x 3 persons for recording: One person for the writing, one for the voice and me. We retake each step many times, and we discuss before and after each take.
* 6 hour of editing: Fix the sound (volume, big background noise, try to fix errors). Fix the writing (typos, recolor part of the writing, move some text). Also, change the speed of some parts, because sometimes writing is boring, but remember to resynchronize the voice.
(Some videos are easier and involve less time, some are more difficult and need more time to be finished.)
After all the preparation and edition (I hope) it looks very natural and it's very difficult to realize how much time it involves. But it is not at all at a profesional level.
So a 3 minutes song is not created in 3 minutes.
Perhaps it might be worth considering that this signals a model that could be re-thought to the benefit of the artist?
Another interesting tidbit is that if it was a patent rather than a copyright, the rights would have expired 3 years ago. I spent far longer than 15 minutes just talking to the patent attorney the last time I filed a patent.
Oh, and also, be a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties.
That said, holiday albums are just a ploy to net royalties in perpetuity-- you're guaranteed airtime and income once a year for as long as Christmas and copyright law exist. Nobody should expect to be making bank on long-tail efforts.
Mariah Carey is incredibly talented musician who dedicated her entire life to music. If she made a chart topping song in 15minutes, that just shows how good of a musician she (and her team) is.
https://www.concerthotels.com/worlds-greatest-vocal-ranges
Note that they don't make any claim about spotify's margins or profits here. It's a submarine article to demand they raise prices (and pass the increase on to the labels).
It's possible most artists are getting screwed, but the example given doesn't show that at all.
The real takeaway from this example should be how broken the copyright system is. It's disgusting that somebody can still milk out $92k a day for work they did 24 years ago.
The music industry is very, very top heavy when it comes to income distribution.
That’s not that much in terms of plays. Everybody wants to be a millionaire artist, but the economics don’t support that.
That article is from 2016 yet they are still losing money.
There would be a lot more money involved for both Spotify and the artists if they went the Netflix route and cut out the record label middlemen. I’m sure they are trying to do that but for whatever reason they haven’t been successful yet. Probably because the back catalogue of the record labels has a lot more leverage than the back catalogue of a bunch of movies. I wonder if they went the route of churning out a ton of original content if that would gradually increase their influence and get people to sign with them for future releases because they would be paying more. It’s a precarious game, since I’m sure the record labels will be happy to yank all of their music once they get wind of Spotify trying something like this out.
But it should plainly obvious that the price charged is not sustainable.
Maybe Spotify is ripping off artists, but this story doesn't demonstrate it.
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.
> How many times have these people paid for this song?
You're really only paying for the medium, and renting 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.
An online stream of an existing audio recording is not a separate 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.
That is not a correct interpretation of the first-sale doctrine. Someone who purchased a cassette, CD, etc. has the legal right to, among other things, rent the medium to others. For example, if I want to start a cassette tape rental company I can buy cassette tapes and rent them to the public, without seeking permission from the copyright holder of the music or other content on those tapes.
(Some exceptions apply, like the Record Rental Amendment of 1984.)
If it were recording medium then there are two issues at play: the right to make a copy, and the right to distribute. A rental agreement can exclude the right to sublease/re-rent. However, the copyright owners, by selling a copy of the work, have given up that right to prohibit further redistribution. The middle man may not make copies of the work but may rent them out. It is not "passing on the rental" because there was no rental in the first place; legally speaking.
OTOH, since streaming isn't covered under first sale doctrine, such distinctions are not relevant.
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.
Also, I'm sure Spotify pays for engineers, offices, lawyers, designers, servers, marketing, avocado toasts and other essentials in addition to royalties.
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.
It is, pay for G-Suite.
I'd like to still believe in this, but I'm not sure the logic holds up.
I pay about $20/year for Spotify because several of my friends have a family plan. I know this tactic is used with foreign students and cell phone plans as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Current Spotify premium user because I like the curated playlists
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.
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.
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.