That's disgusting, considering the value I've gotten from it.
So how is "owning" a CD any different from Spotify?
Also, the value of a song diminishes the more you listen to it. Seriously, even if you love a song, put it on repeat for a day and you probably won't listen to it again for a couple of months.
So it's not like Spotify customers will one day buy the music, unless they really have very specific needs, like being somewhere with a bad or expensive Internet connection, but if you subscribed to Spotify in the first place then I doubt that.
Even besides the licensing/ownership fact (you have always purchased a license to listen to the music privately), I bet there's more music released in a given day than hours in that day. I keep thinking that the model where you can just listen to whatever you want for a flat flee makes a lot more sense in this universe.
(Although some are claiming that Spotify's pricing is similar to the amount that the average person used to spend on CDs, so why are labels getting less from Spotify than they did from CDs/iTunes?)
They do not want to, the money you pay to spotify goes to the owners of spotify which are the recording labels and other stock holders. Spotify is not artist-owned, the money will always go to the stock holders and owners before they reach the artist.
http://matthewebel.com/2011/07/20/spotify-let-the-money-pour...
"There are indie labels that, as opposed to the majors and Merlin members, receive no advance, receive no minimum per stream and only get a 50% share of ad revenue on a pro-rata basis (which so far has amounted to next to nothing)." Spotify also bought off the labels by giving them a bunch of shares (18%?) Better yet, even if an artist is with a major label, apparently the revenues labels might realize from share sales are non attributable to artists and hence stay purely with the labels. This seems like utter bullshit but there you have it. [2]
A swedish band Magnus Uggla -- apparently well established -- said "after six months on the site he'd earned 'what a mediocre busker could earn in a day'" [2]
A Norwegian record label called Racing Junior earned "NOK 19 ($3.00 USD) after their artists had been streamed over 55,100 times" [1] (english) [3] (swedish)
British musician Jons Hopkins earned 8 pounds ($12.48 at current rates) for 90k plays, or $0.00013 per play [4,5]. Even if a normal purchaser played a song 250 times, (9e4/250 * 0.7) = $252, or 20 times more money.
All in all, pretty appalling. I'm a Spotify subscriber but I'm going to have to rethink it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Criticism
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/aug/17/major-...
[3] http://www.dagbladet.no/2009/08/11/kultur/musikk/spotify/mus...
[4] https://twitter.com/#!/Jon_Hopkins_/status/13714775382964633...
1. I download legal podcasts / radio shows and listen for stuff I like.
2.Then I'll maybe go an MP3 site and check I have the right stuff / listen a few times to make sure I'm happy.
3. Once I know I want the music I order the CD or sometimes if I feel like splashing out, and its available, I'll order the vinyl.
The joy I get from music and the importance it has to my happiness and productivity means I'm getting a good deal.
I have no idea if the artist gets a better deal because of it, but I hope so. The real reason I do this. MP3 sound quality is not the same and Spotify just sounds flat to me. (excluding your compressed to all fuck pop songs)
edit: Also I can honestly say, I do not have one pirated piece of music on my machine. That makes me feel good :)
tl;dr I could not agree with smackfu/article more, just pirate everything and donate $5 directly to your favorite artist, you already made them more money than spotify ever would for you. And your conscious is clear.
How a retail CD works out for the artist actually varies pretty widely, according to that chart. An album sold on CDBaby will net the artist a bit over 7.5x as much as an iTunes album download. A more traditionally-distributed CD nets anywhere between a few cents more on the high end to under a third as much on the low end.
It would be absurd, though, for me to buy CDs over AAC files because of the audio quality. Additionally to the indistinguishable audio quality I get a better price (I guess I’m paying about one third less on average), instant delivery wherever I am and the music is nice and compact. I don’t have to deal with boxes full of CDs.
Streaming doesn’t fit the way I listen to music (nor are any great streaming services available in Germany). I like my curated music collection.
The most noticeable example I can think of offhand is the David Bowie album Outside - there are a few spots where entire tracks drop out in 256kbps AAC. However, they consist of the kind of very high-pitched sounds that are the first to go when your hearing degrades, so a lot of listeners won't miss them because they never knew they were there in the first place.
Also it is worth understanding the label will be paid $1.60 for these 1000 spotify song plays and the artist gets from this $0.29. So it's not the steaming services doing all the screwing here. If you compare this to a itunes sale where the label gets $0.64 per song sale you would need 400 plays over someones lifetime to get this revenue on Spotify or 160 plays on Last.fm. This to me is is a fairer simple comparison without bringing in factors like future value of money or if spotify reduces piracy....etc
The market says otherwise. People are willing to pay almost nothing for music, even risking huge penalties, because it does have value (the other types you listed). Just not monetary.
(I've seen them live probably 7-8 times, and have likely shelled out something around $600-700 total for the privilege. Music absolutely has monetary value.)
Value != money.
What a sad bit of reasoning. Monetizing destroys value. The value of music and other arts has nothing to do with how well or poorly it is monetized.
risk = penalty * chance of getting caught
If there is a no risk way of getting something which otherwise has to cost you money, you'd do it. Hence piracy.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real...
Selling records, LP's (33rpm) only really took off after FM radio started playing up to 20 minutes segments of ad-free music, uninterrupted. Prior to FM, the single (45's) was king.
"President Kennedy got shot. It wasn't only the
president that got shot, 50's rock-n-roll died...
then they started playing mourning music... then
emerging out of the mourning music was FM radio...
because during those days it was singles, you were
selling singles. Nobody cared about LP's."
Link Wray [0],[1]
[0] Link Wray, interview "Link Wray video interview-pt 3" starting at 4.00min. Exert from "Rumble Man" cf [1].
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViHdDE0ks3E&feature=relat...
[1] Link Wray, "Rumble Man"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1650853964354373174
After looking through some notes, I found that Rhapsody is closer to Spotify when it comes to artist payments. Rhapsody pays artists ~$0.0002 but pays labels significantly more at ~$0.03 (!)
I discovered him after he gave away his 2005 album, Mockingbird (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockingbird_(album))
His rationale was that he first learned about a lot of his favorite bands via illegal mix tapes, but later bought their work. He views it as marketing, as far as I can tell.
Why not just pull your music from spotify if you don't want it "sold" there?
(Written as a spotify premium subscriber who loves the service, but assumed that the music was legitimately obtained through a negotiation with the labels and / or artists).
This inevitably erodes purchases from any other online outlet, which leads to less money flowing to artists. This is made worse by the fact that Spotify's royalty rate is absolutely abysmal. This is well known, and leads to less money flowing to artists.
Spotify is such a good thing for the consumer of music. I say that as a consumer of music who was a Premium Spotify subscriber until last week. But as an artist, it's just another mechanism for record labels to whittle down the money they owe you for your working for them. That's why I cancelled my subscription last week.
This is the key bit to me -
"...I actually prefer illegal downloading over Spotify because when you get music illegally it’s at least implicit in the transaction that what you’re doing is potentially harmful to the artist. But with Spotify, your conscience is clear because you’re either enduring ads or paying to use the service and access the music."
I'm sure there's a lot more at play here but this is what I've understood from the research I've done.
See the progression in advertising from print and broadcast to adsense.
Also the idea that listening to a song once is worth fractions of a penny is really stupid further making your 'revelation' totally fatuous.
It seems really obvious if not simple, but the chief goal isn't to make piles of money for whomever builds it. That's the only reason I can see that it doesn't already exist.
Semi-side note - It irks the shit out of me that even something as cool as Spotify is still just a means of propping up the same old major label system.
If not, maybe someone could start it up. This field is definitely ripe for disruption.
Spotify has created a business model that works for them. If it isn't working for individual labels or artists they can withdraw their music and provoke a change in Spotify's business model.
Spotify's value exists because of the huge range of music it supports. If you take that away Spotify will be forced to react.
Perhaps the simplest thing Spotify could do is charge more for power users. I've listened to 46,000 tracks on Spotify. Charging people like me more would mean they could up the price paid to artists.
Last time I've checked to discover music on iTunes you had to purchase it.
It appears that previews can now be up to 90 seconds:
If you're focused on the business angle, you're doing it wrong. In fact, it's none of your concern. Success will come if you create great music.
Making music takes a lot of time, effort, and money. Promoting it (as opposed to just playing for you and whoever you live with) takes more of all three. The author specifically says he isn't talking about getting rich, only about making enough to continue doing it ("blue collar musician").
In fact he created and uses a service that gives away his music for free, in exchange for some info about the customer downloading it. "Complaining about not making money" really isn't a fair summary.
Making a living out of making music is like making a living out of open source programming. If it does not pay enough, you have to either put more effort into it and make some sacrifices, or you have to play by some other mans notes/specs.
The entire point of the post is that _Spotify_, rather than piracy, is the option that lets users "feel good about themselves". With piracy, at least the user _knows_ they're not compensating the artist.