I think it's well known that artists are not the ones in the music business who profit the most unless they're among the top few. However, it is informative to see a concrete number.
Think of all these lesser known artists and bands: if your song gets 100,000 spins (that's a high number for a lot of them), that just made you 400 bucks. Probably minus taxes. Divided by the number of band members, I suppose.
Subscriber Share[1] is the solution. Envato has done it, SoundCloud is doing it. It will never arrive for large music streaming platforms. It's not the platforms' fault. It's the rights holders'.
* Heavy users get too much of a vote. In effect, they decide where money from less active subscribers goes, even if everyone pays the same.
* Specialized or niche content struggles to earn real money. Everyone goes for the big hit.
* It is vulnerable to click fraud. You can control more money than you paid, just by downloading lots.
What they suggest, paraphrased:
If you stream 10 items, each item earns 1/10th of your total usage e.g. each gets $1. Taken to an extreme, if you only stream 1 song, then that artist gets the full $10.
-----
How then, does this model seek to pay artists based on users who aren't paying?
For example if you're Marc Rebillet you improv everything, Marc has a loop sampler, a couple of laptops, a keyboard synth, headphones and and a microphone, he makes noises, or sings, and the loop sampler creates rhythm because that's how loops work - so he's "just" on the fly coming up with the words and the tune. Maybe Marc spends 10 minutes going from silence to a backing track and then puts together a 5 minute song about, I dunno, how amazing squirrels are, "Tree Rat God Freak". Seems to me that's 15 minutes and if a thousand people stream it and Marc gets paid $4 for that it's a profitable use of his 15 minutes.
[ Of course because watching this happen live is fascinating people actually pay to watch Marc on Twitch, so he gets more than $4 before the song is even finished ]
On the other hand, maybe you spend six months composing an orchestral piece, you need a full orchestra to perform it, that takes them several hours to rehearse and get it down, and then a million streams of that doesn't really pay everybody for their time.
That sees crazy high? I assume this is one of those things where a massive amount of subscribers barely stream anything and that's how they can justify such a large payout?
How is this so large? You need millions of listens a month to have any kind of basic income that may match a low end HN reader. Even more streams if you have anything but yourself involved in your music (label, producers, other talent, etc).
Because it is high compared to what people make on places like YouTube. The attention economy doesn't pay much and generally people aren't willing to pay either.
Few people pay for YouTube premium, many run adblock and even then ads don't exactly pay very well for a lot of niches. It makes sense I think. The numbers are roughly in line with what other types of videos make on YouTube.
For those who don't tour or sell stuff this is peanuts. Not all musicians want to perform live, some can't even due to the nature of the music... or COVID.
But this is just supply and demand in action - at any given moment there is a ton of high quality music to listen to in pretty much any style you can think of at your finger tips.
Listening to a live performance, on the other hand, is far more rare than an individual stream, and that scarcity results in actual value. Same with merch.
I'm saying this as a musician.. why should I feel entitled to $X per stream when there is so much good music out there to stream? Just because I put a lot of effort into some thing doesn't mean I'm entitled to a living wage from it. There are way, way too many people who do something extremely similar to feel entitled to that.
Yeah, 20 years ago... That was before we got this invention called the Internet, which can be used to promote your music and let others find it instead of having to rely on tours and merch ;-)
Then they honestly loose money with me.
I listen probably whole work day (in reality more). That is 8 hours, cca 4 minutes per song = 120 songs a day. That means they pay out about 0.5 USD per day for me. Let's say not all days, but just 25 days a month (i listen weekends too) would mean 12.5 USD paid out.
I pay 9.99 EUR for family (11.8 USD). There are other people on my account.
Doesn't work that way. The money you pay that is reserved for artists is thrown onto a big pile, and then the money is distributed to the artists proportionally to how many plays they generated.
I don't think it works like this: a fixed rate times the number of streams. It is probably the other way round. They get _some_ revenue per user per month, which can be ads or a premium fee (which again can be different, because there are student, dual and family subscriptions, as well as one time promotions). Then they get their cut. The rest is divided between thousands of copyright holders according to some magic formula. Spotify still gets its 30%. As long as their operating cost to serve you is less than 3.33 EUR, they are good.
If you listen 3000 songs and pay 10 EUR, I suppose that will pay out 7/3000=0.002 EUR per song. 5 times the average. If I pay 16 EUR for a family subscription, and we listen 100 tracks, then I suppose our streams will pay out 16*0.7/100 = 0.112 EUR per track. That's crazy good (at least I hope that the artists I listen to get that much from my streams when I don't listen much). My friend listens to Spotify Free. Let's say the ad revenue is 1 EUR per month. 0.30 is the cut. 0.70 goes to the artists. If she listens to 160 tracks, it will be close to the average Spotify pay out. Not much. Better than nothing.
>Of all the money Spotify receives, 70 percent goes to the right holders.
So Spotify only takes a 30% cut, that seems reasonable. Could be lower with more competition but it seems they have a lead over other services.
>How does that work? All the money is split across all streams. But the system also concerns the share of one artist within all those streams. So let's say Drake is responsible for five percent of all streams, then five percent of all money has to go to Drake.
And it seems like it's proportional to the usage.
>Is it unfair?
>Of course, that's okay if you enjoy listening to Drake. But what if you never do? Then it's actually a bit weird since your money goes to Drake while you never listen to his music. That's why some artists think that you should only pay for the artists you actually stream. And not that everything is lumped together and then distributed.
And then this seems to try and contradict that? What's unfair here? Are they giving a bigger share to artists that are played across more users and not more streams?
Well, let's find an extreme case to point out the difference. I think it's number of streams (which for songs is going to be effectively listening time).
Let's say you have 2 artists who in one month:
1) gets 1000 fans who listen 11-hours-per-day to his and only his music. Let's call them "Drake".
2) gets 10,000,000 users to play a 2 minute catchy song, then promptly leave the platform. Let's call them "OneHitWonder"
Both have resulted in 20 million "listening minutes". However, there's a imho pretty strong case to be made that user 2) did far more to earn it than 1) did.
So effectively Spotify rewards artists that bring long term listener loyalty to specific artists rather than innovative new music makers. Not much money for attention grabbers.
So the first "1h waterfall sounds" will earn far more than "OMG NEW FUN TUNE YOU GOT TO HEAR" ... even if the second gets far more listeners.
As things currently are, it seems that they aggregate all streams and all revenues and divide accordingly.
Say that someone listens to one song from one artist once a month. As things stand, that would lead to just pennies going to that artist. What OP seems to want is for 70% of that person's subscription to go to that artist.
Basically reward artists for having dedicated superfans rather than broad appeal.
Broad appeal would still result in high net earnings, possibly higher. A large number of users listen to top x / happy / study / winter playlists exclusively
Alice listens exclusively to Drake and Bob listens exclusively to Queen. But Queen gets $5 and Drake gets $15!
Why? Alice listened to twice as many tracks as Bob.
This really doesn't seem fair, I'm a very selective listener, and my gf isn't - she just wants lots of background music. She doesn't care what the song is and I'm subsidising artists that produce music that lands in the playlists she plays ("alexa, play happy music") more than I'm contributing to artists that produce music for my tastes. This is a very different to pre-streaming.
It doesn’t matter because it would average out because you will have queen fans who listen at a high amount as well. Unless for some reason an artist has a fan base which majority listen to less music than the average person for some reason.
It absolutely does matter, and it absolutely does not even out. Background music is extremely profitable on streaming services. The more amenable to being played in the background your music is (whether at a party or around the clock at a hair salon or other business), the more you will make, at the expense of artists that are more suited for deliberate listening - even though those artists are probably why people subscribe to the streaming service in the first place.
How exactly is it bad to reward musicians for having more airtime? It seems the market is working as intended.
Although, you seem to make a good point. BMI differentiates radio royalties by number of performances[1]. Except---and I haven't researched this very well---they seem to pay more if a song is more popular.
>even though those artists are probably why people subscribe to the streaming service in the first place.
Then surely the solution must be to try and determine which artist actually brought in the users and give them some kind of lead bonus. I would assume any platform that started doing that would eventually beat platforms that didn't because all the lead generating bands would move there and no new users would have a reason to go to the other services.
Assuming the normal and other statistical handwaving is very dangerous in this kind of dataset and application.
It will give you a high probability of being near right in a random case but completely destroys the detail. In this case the detail is niche music genres and artists, growing or dying, that contribute greatly to the "flavour and future of society". When we assume too much here we actively suppress minority positions making certain genres and use cases completely non-viable.
I highly doubt elevator music has the audience listening profile of eminem, and thus the current system either over or under pays elevator music producers.
Other areas which are likely extreme are: new EDM artists, classical compositions, play-a-long songs (ie learn guitar), cultural artists (US christian youth, Belarusian native rock).
I wouldn't see this as unfair, just changing the compensation model. In the past you still had background music playing on the radio or Musak or whatever. Now the compensation model is changing. Maybe the actual problem is people are assuming bands people actively want to listen to should be compensated more but it's actually more important to make the kind of music that ends up on the most "background listener" playlists if you want to get paid the most.
It's an unexplained and unfair bias for a certain type of song that coincidentally favors the top 0.1% of artists.
Imagine a teenager girl playing an international pop star 2m31s song on loop for the entire evening after school, then think about her father listening to ~4m20s songs of a local rock band on his way to work
If both of them pay for an individual subscription and those were the only things they listened to that month, the Spotify pay cut would pay the pop star 100x more for the same service.
They're paying the same rate as everyone else. Their users just listen to fewer tracks on average. Probably because they forgot they were subscribed to the service.
The source of those stats is not clear enough in my opinion.
Is the "per-stream" measure a result to try and have a comparable basis between the various actors, or is it really the only underlying factor in the calculation (beside the country which is mentionned as another factor)?
My guess would be that services would pay per minute-stream, not per stream. Otherwise, artists that tend to have longer form would not be willing to participate (I'm a big fan of Keith Jarrett, for instance, whose solo concerts mostly consist of tracks of around 40 minutes). You could also imagine hybrid models with bounds that de-linearize certain factors.
Looking at a very aggregate average is a recipe for erroneous conclusions...
Payment is indeed per stream, not per minute (last time I checked). Tracks below 30 seconds make no money for the artist, so the optimal length for a track is a little more than that. Yes, Keith Jarrett (and many others) get screwed by this system.
Payout proportional to the track count favors short tracks. The payout proportional to the air time favors longer tracks.
As long as payouts are calculated on an account per account basis, any approach is fair. A TOOL fan will probably listen 5 times fewer tracks than a Ramones fan, but it is OK because every their stream is worth 5 times as much.
Though if they pool track counts (or minutes played) across multiple accounts, then different listening patterns of different accounts will always skew payouts one way or the other. And it is always unfair.
The most interesting takeaway for me from this article is that Apple Music doesn't actually pay 1ct per stream unlike what is often suggested. Also that it is closer to Spotify than it is to Napster or Tidal when it comes to payouts per stream.
All those numbers are useless. The streaming companies have essentially the same deals with the record companies. It's just an artefact of how streaming payout works.
The services which pay out most per stream, are just those which have a lot of paying users who don't listen to very much music. The less music they listen to, the more owners get paid per stream.
Jack Stratton's Vulfpeck 2018 “To understand their artist payout, you need a new currency. I call it the ‘The Pity.’ There are a hundred pennies in a dollar and a hundred pitties in a penny. On a given play the artist will make about 60 pitties and that rate seems to be dropping”
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadThink of all these lesser known artists and bands: if your song gets 100,000 spins (that's a high number for a lot of them), that just made you 400 bucks. Probably minus taxes. Divided by the number of band members, I suppose.
[1] https://medium.com/made-by-elements/subscriber-share-on-enva...
* Heavy users get too much of a vote. In effect, they decide where money from less active subscribers goes, even if everyone pays the same.
* Specialized or niche content struggles to earn real money. Everyone goes for the big hit.
* It is vulnerable to click fraud. You can control more money than you paid, just by downloading lots.
What they suggest, paraphrased:
If you stream 10 items, each item earns 1/10th of your total usage e.g. each gets $1. Taken to an extreme, if you only stream 1 song, then that artist gets the full $10.
-----
How then, does this model seek to pay artists based on users who aren't paying?
Doesn't seem too complicated. Or you could map adds to adjancent tracks.
Further, I would put the hypothesis into the room that the revenue mix has also shifted. From selling music to selling tickets, merch, etc.
Any ideas on those two things?
Anyway, the real question is how the net income compares to living expenses, and how that had developed over time.
For example if you're Marc Rebillet you improv everything, Marc has a loop sampler, a couple of laptops, a keyboard synth, headphones and and a microphone, he makes noises, or sings, and the loop sampler creates rhythm because that's how loops work - so he's "just" on the fly coming up with the words and the tune. Maybe Marc spends 10 minutes going from silence to a backing track and then puts together a 5 minute song about, I dunno, how amazing squirrels are, "Tree Rat God Freak". Seems to me that's 15 minutes and if a thousand people stream it and Marc gets paid $4 for that it's a profitable use of his 15 minutes.
[ Of course because watching this happen live is fascinating people actually pay to watch Marc on Twitch, so he gets more than $4 before the song is even finished ]
On the other hand, maybe you spend six months composing an orchestral piece, you need a full orchestra to perform it, that takes them several hours to rehearse and get it down, and then a million streams of that doesn't really pay everybody for their time.
Listening to a live performance, on the other hand, is far more rare than an individual stream, and that scarcity results in actual value. Same with merch.
I'm saying this as a musician.. why should I feel entitled to $X per stream when there is so much good music out there to stream? Just because I put a lot of effort into some thing doesn't mean I'm entitled to a living wage from it. There are way, way too many people who do something extremely similar to feel entitled to that.
I’d love to see a comparison with what artists we’re getting paid from iTunes before this streaming model.
I pay 9.99 EUR for family (11.8 USD). There are other people on my account.
If you listen 3000 songs and pay 10 EUR, I suppose that will pay out 7/3000=0.002 EUR per song. 5 times the average. If I pay 16 EUR for a family subscription, and we listen 100 tracks, then I suppose our streams will pay out 16*0.7/100 = 0.112 EUR per track. That's crazy good (at least I hope that the artists I listen to get that much from my streams when I don't listen much). My friend listens to Spotify Free. Let's say the ad revenue is 1 EUR per month. 0.30 is the cut. 0.70 goes to the artists. If she listens to 160 tracks, it will be close to the average Spotify pay out. Not much. Better than nothing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepify
So Spotify only takes a 30% cut, that seems reasonable. Could be lower with more competition but it seems they have a lead over other services.
>How does that work? All the money is split across all streams. But the system also concerns the share of one artist within all those streams. So let's say Drake is responsible for five percent of all streams, then five percent of all money has to go to Drake.
And it seems like it's proportional to the usage.
>Is it unfair?
>Of course, that's okay if you enjoy listening to Drake. But what if you never do? Then it's actually a bit weird since your money goes to Drake while you never listen to his music. That's why some artists think that you should only pay for the artists you actually stream. And not that everything is lumped together and then distributed.
And then this seems to try and contradict that? What's unfair here? Are they giving a bigger share to artists that are played across more users and not more streams?
Do they realise that someone who only listens to Drake is also going to be sending money to your artist?
I agree with you, their complaint really doesn't make sense.
Let's say you have 2 artists who in one month:
1) gets 1000 fans who listen 11-hours-per-day to his and only his music. Let's call them "Drake".
2) gets 10,000,000 users to play a 2 minute catchy song, then promptly leave the platform. Let's call them "OneHitWonder"
Both have resulted in 20 million "listening minutes". However, there's a imho pretty strong case to be made that user 2) did far more to earn it than 1) did.
So effectively Spotify rewards artists that bring long term listener loyalty to specific artists rather than innovative new music makers. Not much money for attention grabbers.
So the first "1h waterfall sounds" will earn far more than "OMG NEW FUN TUNE YOU GOT TO HEAR" ... even if the second gets far more listeners.
Say that someone listens to one song from one artist once a month. As things stand, that would lead to just pennies going to that artist. What OP seems to want is for 70% of that person's subscription to go to that artist.
Basically reward artists for having dedicated superfans rather than broad appeal.
Alice listens exclusively to Drake and Bob listens exclusively to Queen. But Queen gets $5 and Drake gets $15!
Why? Alice listened to twice as many tracks as Bob.
This really doesn't seem fair, I'm a very selective listener, and my gf isn't - she just wants lots of background music. She doesn't care what the song is and I'm subsidising artists that produce music that lands in the playlists she plays ("alexa, play happy music") more than I'm contributing to artists that produce music for my tastes. This is a very different to pre-streaming.
Although, you seem to make a good point. BMI differentiates radio royalties by number of performances[1]. Except---and I haven't researched this very well---they seem to pay more if a song is more popular.
[1] https://www.bmi.com/creators/royalty/us_radio_royalties
Then surely the solution must be to try and determine which artist actually brought in the users and give them some kind of lead bonus. I would assume any platform that started doing that would eventually beat platforms that didn't because all the lead generating bands would move there and no new users would have a reason to go to the other services.
It will give you a high probability of being near right in a random case but completely destroys the detail. In this case the detail is niche music genres and artists, growing or dying, that contribute greatly to the "flavour and future of society". When we assume too much here we actively suppress minority positions making certain genres and use cases completely non-viable.
I highly doubt elevator music has the audience listening profile of eminem, and thus the current system either over or under pays elevator music producers.
Other areas which are likely extreme are: new EDM artists, classical compositions, play-a-long songs (ie learn guitar), cultural artists (US christian youth, Belarusian native rock).
Imagine a teenager girl playing an international pop star 2m31s song on loop for the entire evening after school, then think about her father listening to ~4m20s songs of a local rock band on his way to work
If both of them pay for an individual subscription and those were the only things they listened to that month, the Spotify pay cut would pay the pop star 100x more for the same service.
How is that coming to $0.004 per stream spotifies fault? What are they supposed to do?
>[...]
>If you are a listener and it's vital for you to support artists, you can start using TIDAL instead of another music streaming platform
Why TIDAL and not Napster? Weird plug
The article just has too many blatant logical flaws in it to be considered trustworthy.
Merch and concerts has always been the money maker but obviously the last 2 years put paid to that.
Is the "per-stream" measure a result to try and have a comparable basis between the various actors, or is it really the only underlying factor in the calculation (beside the country which is mentionned as another factor)?
My guess would be that services would pay per minute-stream, not per stream. Otherwise, artists that tend to have longer form would not be willing to participate (I'm a big fan of Keith Jarrett, for instance, whose solo concerts mostly consist of tracks of around 40 minutes). You could also imagine hybrid models with bounds that de-linearize certain factors.
Looking at a very aggregate average is a recipe for erroneous conclusions...
As long as payouts are calculated on an account per account basis, any approach is fair. A TOOL fan will probably listen 5 times fewer tracks than a Ramones fan, but it is OK because every their stream is worth 5 times as much.
Though if they pool track counts (or minutes played) across multiple accounts, then different listening patterns of different accounts will always skew payouts one way or the other. And it is always unfair.
The services which pay out most per stream, are just those which have a lot of paying users who don't listen to very much music. The less music they listen to, the more owners get paid per stream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB1sTH7bUQ4
only people with $AAPL in their portfolio can be against this
Playing your music in the metro doesn't automatically give you money, a stream shouldn't automatically give you money
Music is art, you offer your art, and it's up to the person to choose to support you
If you can't get your art to people, you can't expect people to support you
Stream != engagement
https://i.imgur.com/Rvq8AH4.png