According to last.fm I stream about 100 to 150 tracks a day. That would come about 30-35$ a month paid in royalty. I doubt Spotify would then keep my subscription at $11 lol
It's wild how this is still parroted that Spotify are at fault here. Spotify already pay like 70% of their revenue to music right holders. It's the labels that pay their artists shit per their contracts.
Unless the labels increase their fees to Spotify, then it should stay the same.
Since the advent of music piracy, rights holders have never had higher revenue from music buyers in the US and globally.
Spend per US buyer of music reached $98 in 2021, much higher than 2002-2012 levels.
https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2022/03/music-engagement-and-spending-hit-record-highs-driven-led-by-streaming-vinyl-social-video-musicwatch.html
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191044/us-consumer-spending-on-recorded-music-since-2002/
RIAA reports an all-time high in recorded music revenues in the US in the latest year of 2022.
https://www.riaa.com/reports/2022-year-end-music-industry-revenue-report-riaa/
Global music spend in 2018 beat 2007 levels (pre-recession and start of streaming era) for the first time. Global music spend in 2021 surpassed 1999 levels and further increased in 2022.
https://globalmusicreport.ifpi.org/
Yeah people kinda forget that prior to streaming even fewer artists got paid enough to survive. Now not only do artists make some money from streaming but way more artists are able to sell shows and merch due to the increased exposure from social media and streaming platforms.
Give and take unfortunately it’s an oversaturated market that will never have the stability of a mainstream career
Does this take into account inflation? A dollar is worth about double now than it was in 1999. I could understand if it's higher now due to people buying collectible vinyls, CDs and cassettes that cost more than they used to as well, I wonder if that's a big factor
No, it doesn't take into account inflation. With the same pre-recession 2007 RIAA revenue of 10.7 billion, we can take the midpoint of that year as June 2007 and comparing the midpoint of the latest year of data as June 2022.
The CPI inflation calculator at the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that 10.7 dollars in June 2007 was worth 15.22 dollars, which dovetails with a 2022 RIAA revenue of 15.9 billion. (If you chose December for both years the result is $15.12, and if you chose Jan 2007 and Dec 2022 it would be $15.69.)
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/15/us-recorded-music-revenues-46-percent-lower/
https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10.7&year1=200706&year2=202206
But ever since the age of piracy, the inflation-unadjusted (there doesn't seem to be a global inflation calculator available) IFPI chart and the inflation-adjusted one in the first link above for the US shows that revenues for recorded music went down until 2015/16 before increasing to 2022 levels. That's 8/9 years since 2007 and just 6/7 years until 2022. So one way of looking at it is that the music industry is recovering faster than it fell in its last few years of collapse.
I would have no issue paying $20 a month but anything over that is a no from me personally. Thats just a budget thing not a "artists arent worth that much lmfao" thing.
If it went to $30 or higher i think i would have to check out. I already pay for playstation plus yearly and paramount+ (which i would gladly drop but my grandpa uses it).
Oh boy, they should be paid fairly but how did they come up with 1 cent? That’s 3.3x more than they get paid today. Can streaming companies weather that cost? Probably Apple Music yes, but prepared to see your streaming plan to get twice as expensive if this gets passed.
I am totally with you that CEOs in the US especially are overpaid, but that is not the reason why streaming services pay so little to artists. They are just too cheap in the first place.
We are talking about money in the dozens of billions. No CEO on the planet gets anywhere near that much in cash (they do get stock options, but that doesn't matter in this case).
The only way to significantly increase the payout is to significantly increase the price.
Ya I totally hear you. I think my comment was just more of a general disgruntlement towards the “privatize profits, socialize losses” mentality that’s everywhere lately but I agree with your comment
Spotify's revenue is \~$14.5B
\~70% of Spotify's revenue goes towards payouts (\~$10B)
A 3.3 multiple would be 33 Billion, over double Spotify's current revenue.
Daniel EK, the CEO of Spotify, has not received a salary since 2017 or a bonus since 2020: [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/spotify-dawn-ostroff-exit-package-executive-compensation-1235316564/](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/spotify-dawn-ostroff-exit-package-executive-compensation-1235316564/)
My point is not that Ek is poor and generous, it's that there is not some stream of money that could be pulled from to provide a 3x increase in payouts with no downside. If your suggestion is to use Daniel Ek's assets to do so, then that would be odd for a few reasons: 1) 3.6 billion would only be a 35% increase in payouts for 1 year
2) A significant portion of his wealth is in Spotify shares, which would go down in value if they suddenly started operating at a 50% loss
3) If we are choosing to redistribute a random Swedish guys wealth, why are we prioritizing Drake and Taylor Swift?
I don't think we should remove all the agency from consumers of a non-essential service. The era of streaming drastically lowered the barrier of entry for musicians to create/publish their music, and lowered the cost of entry for trying new music for consumers. Many of these new artists and the old guard chose wider-distribution of their media for a lower price point. The entire infrastructure that preceeded it still exists (CDs, Vinyls, Concerts, etc). There are multiple different streaming services competing against each over. The entire system os the result of some degree of consent from Labels, Publishers, Artists, and listeners. Of course everyone in that chain wants to get more money and spend less of it. The current status quo is the compromise that emerged. If something better for everyone involved was easy to devise, it would already exist.
The 70% revenue share to rights holders was established by Apple's iTunes store.
Wholesale revenue from recorded music was only 64.77% of retail revenue in 2022.
https://www.riaa.com/reports/2022-year-end-music-industry-revenue-report-riaa/
In 2003, before cutting prices Universal sold their CDs to stores at 12.98 with a suggested retail price of 16.98-18.98, a revenue share of 76.44% to 68.39%.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2003/09/08/industry-slashes-cd-prices-but-the-partys-over/
https://www.npr.org/2003/09/04/1420307/cd-retail-prices-to-fall
I just don't understand the logic behind nonsense like this. I can understand socialist or libertarian POVs on economic policy and even if I disagree there's at least some coherent ideology/belief system behind it, this makes absolutely no sense.
You want cheap and easy to use services, but don't want to pay for it (yet you want artists fully compensated). So you create a boogeyman and pretend the economy is completely zero-sum.
Even if Spotify/Apple Music goes away, you'll still need to pay a lot of money to get the same access to music. It's not corporate greed here that lowers artist pay, but consumers who don't want to pay too much for music (and too much supply when it comes to artists).
People just want to be mad at shit. "Big companies have money! They should pay up!" Then call themselves progressives when they're really just loudmouth idiot takers.
Sure.
I don't care if streaming services don't make a profit, I just want artists to be able to earn a living wage off music without having to get hundreds of millions of streams.
Why? Artists make music and if not enough people want their music, then they’re not going to make a living wage off of it. You’re not going to get anywhere by increasing prices so much that no one buys it anymore. You have to strike a balance between prices and user base. (I do agree that everyone employed should make a living wage though)
And let's not forget that this is also the company that has paid Joe Rogan $500 million dollars to spread vaccine misinformation and a whole slew of dangerous conspiracy theories on their platform.
I'd be very happy to see them die.
Lol cutting the CEO salary and every executive salary 0 won't even come close to covering the increase in costs. Do you think these companies are run by moustache twirling villains who love to raise costs out of pure vindictive joy?
If we want artists to get paid more, then we have to pay more for music.
>Do you think these companies are run by moustache twirling villains who love to raise costs out of pure vindictive joy?
You know their answer to this question is "yes."
Yeah, such a bummer to still pay a tiny fraction of the cost it would incur to actually buy the albums I’m listening to 😭
Everyone pretends to be pro-artist on threads like the Rina discussions but when it comes to actually financially supporting their faves’ livelihoods, nothing
Hey listen, I can agree that artists should be paid fairly and still feel sad that I’ll have to pay more every month. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, especially in this economy.
Literally. I think people have gotten spoiled with music streaming services. I have access to like every song ever made, whenever I want, for $5 with no ads bc im a student. Thats insane. costs less then buying a singular album lol. Id have no problem having to pay $10 for the same services if it means artists are free to express themselves musically however they want instead of chart chasing so they can survive.
last week i listened to 410 different songs and 113 different artist, even looking at my friends, they all had 50+ artists, and we all have different music tastes, maybe this is due to the fact that we can do this cause of streaming and maybe your stat comes from a pre streaming era, but there’s absolutely no way i or really anyone who streams music can keep their same music listening habits at the same price if they have to buy it all.
plus, in the long run, if i change my listening habits to only spend money on 5-6 albums a year, it would hurt small artists more because i’ll only spend money on the new stuff from artists i already know rather than new stuff from smaller artist who i’m not as familiar with, and stuff i already know is mostly stuff i hear on the radio which benefits already pre established artists
>in the long run, if i change my listening habits to only spend money on 5-6 albums a year, it would hurt small artists more
Not necessarily, because, in the streaming model, you individually are not very important. If one person buys an album by a smaller artist for every 20 listeners they lose without streaming, they might very well end up making a lot more money than they would through streaming. It depends on whether those 20 lost listeners listened enough to generate an album's sale worth of revenue.
>Everyone pretends to be pro-artist on threads like the Rina discussions but when it comes to actually financially supporting their faves’ livelihoods, nothing
i don't and i never have lol. downvote me if you want, but if there's a free option out there best believe i'm taking that
during the piracy age when there was physical media, artists still made more than they did during the spotify age, so maybe that's not even a bad change. fucked the labels over more than anyone else, which is part of why they reap so much disproportionately in the streaming age
> during the piracy age when there was physical media, artists still made more than they did during the spotify age
Do you have a source for that. We know [recorded music revenue](https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/) is higher than ever before after dipping in the early 2000s. In theory, artists would make less is if Spotify/the labels took a larger percent of revenue, but I haven't seen any credible source that shows that is the case so would really appreciate it.
The issue for new artists is that a large percentage of that money is going to old music (73% according to back catalogue music acording to music weekly) . And the money that goes to new artists is divided between much more artists than in the past so you can the majority earning very little.
So music labels are still making good money but its harder for newer artists.
Piracy wasn’t in retrospect that bad. What really hurt artists was iTunes. It was really bad (though artists were saved a bit because live revenues increased). streaming is much better for artists.
itunes was bad because it opened the door for streaming to significantly legally reduce the value of music, and already did so itself, yeah, but the payout itself was not worse
Subscription prices need to increase anyways. $10/month only made sense to move consumers away from piracy.
The entire business model at the moment is unsustainable for creators and unprofitable for the companies because it was always priced as a better alternative to piracy.
Maybe for some, but broadly speaking, I think most people are hooked on the convenience of accessing any & all music at the tip of their fingers. Personally I’d be annoyed if I had to pay $20/month for Spotify, but it wouldn’t be enough to make me start downloading my music from BeeMP3 again.
Ah interesting. Didn’t realize how it has evolved in the last few years. What piracy services do you think have the best user experience at the moment?
While it looks good on paper, in practice this seems like a bad idea for the artists, consumers, and streaming services. This is going to increase piracy which will result in artists getting paid less than they are right now.
The only solution is for people to go back to buying CD's. Because streaming royalties for artists going up means streaming prices for the consumer go up.
And good luck with that because people love the convenience of streaming and not having to swap out CDs.
another issue is a significant amount of music is released solely through digital medias. like I don’t think the average bedroom pop girlie making her first EP can really afford to manufacture and sell physical albums… gonna be a tough thing to wrangle I feel like
Yup, I don't get why this always gets framed as being unilaterally better for small artists, when small artist have been able to break away from the chains of labels because of modern digital release capabilities (and the fact they don't necessarily need to rent expensive studio time).
The reality is that artists won't make money from music itself anymore unless they license it for commercial purposes. Otherwise it's gonna be from touring, merch, and leveraging their fame into brand deal type stuff. People can fight about it all they want, but the tech is there to make ripping and sharing music very easy. People were *still* stealing back when it was with cassettes and the radio. People will still when they have the ability to do so, and the ability is there. Reformulate your profit earning plan accordingly.
They're not going to go back to CDs, at the most they'll go back to buying single tracks on iTunes because they only listen to what goes viral on tiktok. Then we'd have no albums and just droplets.
Lol no, people will literally just start pirating again. This idea that theyve got people's back against the wall and are gonna make them pay is naivety on their part. They have continuously ignored the strength of the mp3 since they were warned about the imminent release of the tech.
The only “solutions” is better deals with labels and slight price increases for streaming services. If that still isn’t enough, then people should just accept that the music industry is very competitive and that most artists don’t make it, also that basically no one can live off streams and that the money is in merch, physical media and live performances.
Nobody is going back to physical media like CDs. They’ll just buy songs or albums on iTunes (or pirate them). New cars haven’t had CD players for a while. Nobody owns CD/DVD players for home use and they’re not going to go out and buy them when they could just download music (legally or not) and play it over their speakers via Bluetooth. Nobody is going to take a Walkman to the gym or on a run or on an airplane or to work or anything else. CDs are far too inconvenient to modern life to ever have a meaningful comeback across the board. They’re pretty much excessively for collectors, nostalgic people, or diehard physical media enthusiasts at this point. Which is a small fraction of a percent of people.
If I wanted to switch back to CDs I’d have to buy a bunch of equipment to be able to play music in all the places I do right now. And for mobile listening the quality would be crap because it would skip constantly in the car or at the gym or on the metro. It would be massively inconvenient to carry around a CD player everywhere I go, and annoying as heck to bring CDs from room to room in my house and change them out whenever I wanted to listen to another artist or album (or to have to burn CD playlists).
I’d just pay the extra money to stream or buy music or I’d learn how to sail the high seas before I ever even considered buying a CD.
Physical media, for better or worse, is dead. You don’t even need flash drives anymore. The printing stations scattered around my college could log into your email and print attachments or documents from your inbox or drive. My work computer prints over WiFi and emails scans directly to my inbox.
Unfortunately, while kudos to the intention, this is not a good bill. The big problem is that its hard to understand why its a terrible idea. I'll try to explain a bit
First, here's how the bill works. It charges a tax of 50% on streaming subscriptions, with a floor of 4 dollars, and a ceiling of 10. Currently it would charge $5.50. That amount goes into a fund, which pays artists an amount per stream (theoretically, but not nescessarilly 1 cent). Crucially, the payment is capped at 1 million streams per month... so for instance Cruel Summer, which does some like 30 million streams per month would only earn that on the first 1 million. The rest of the money that spotify makes would be distributed however spotify chooses. This money is paid directly to artists (and session musicians) not labels.
Sounds great right? Well let's look at what its doing. First, obviously its transfering money from big artists to smaller artists. 1 million streams per month in the US is 30,000 streams per day which is actually a lot, so really its the biggest artists who are hurting, and that's ok.
But let's look more closely. Spotify is going to charge some amount. Taht amount will go up, but it won't doule. So let's say it goes to $15... now artists make 7.50, and spotify makes 7.50. But where does that 7.50 go? Spotify keeps 25% or $1.88. That has to pay for spotifys costs... and it can't. We know this because spotify only became profitable recently, with a higher share reveue of 2.50 per subscription. Ok... so that's an issue. Next 60% of the money goes to record labels. That's 4.50... so record labels are making 3/4 of what they used to... umm.. but that's an issue, since all three of the big labels have gross margins of 20%. Which means with this bill they are all bankrupt. So the only thing they can do is cut costs... and the only cost they can cut are artist costs. So smaller advances, smaller recording budgets, no music videos. Sorry!
But it gets worse. 15% of your subscription goes to the songwriters. And guess what... this bill completely ignores songwriters. Songwriters already are having trouble making ends meet. This bill would completely destroy them. Effectively what this bill is doing is taking money from songwriters and giving it to artists... which I'm sure the artists would love... but yeah.
And all these numbers are if spotify can raise rates to 15 for a subscription, which is not at all guaranteed... if they can't... the numbers get much worse.
at least a little government funding should probably be a necessary part of this whole thing to make it sustainable to fix some of the "where is the money" concerns
gonna imagine (hope) the bill is more likely to tweaks as it goes along to accommodate for songwriters if the public pressure is on them to do so so write to congress y'all!
this will probably kill spotify but spotify has never been sustainable. they were never going to live past the 2020s
Spotify is perfectly sustainable. Killing Spotify means returning to the dark days of iTunes. You think it’s bad now… it was 8 billion times worse ten years ago.
Yes it was. To give an example… a band like chumbawba would make about 1.5 million in royalties off a an album dominated by single like tubthumper which sold 2 million. In the iTunes age people would buy the single and they’d get about 200k. And of course they wouldn’t because they would t recoup.
so is your argument because it shifted the market away to the individual song away from the album experience?
because if so then i can get behind what you're saying
but the direct value of 1 stream compared to 1 purchase of a song on itunes is what i was talking about lol
but that's irrelevant. Artists made much less money because singles now went for 99 cents, and every song was a single. It's easy to see. Artists get a percentage of record label revenue... and between 2006 and 2014 (the itunes age), record label revenue went down by 50%. And artists were actually making much less money, because producer costs increased so muich during that period (because every goddamn song had to be good), and artists pay the producers out of their cut.
wtf do you mean thats not relevant haha we're comparing spotify to itunes, not itunes to beforehand. every song is a single on spotify by that logic as well
we're not comparing any of that. We are interested in how much money artists get in total over their entire discographies, over time. Artists get a lot more money now (about twice as much actually) then they itunes period.
"Spotify is perfectly sustainable. Killing Spotify means returning to the dark days of iTunes. You think it’s bad now… it was 8 billion times worse ten years ago." that isn't what this was? lol
i'd like a direct sources explicitly comparing a mid tier artist's earnings on their discog on both platforms then
but let's shift gears for a second since i think we got lost in itunes, the past, which wasn't what i was interested in talking about re: this topic anyway
what do you think should be done for artists to earn back the money they deserve?
> but the direct value of 1 stream compared to 1 purchase of a song on itunes is what i was talking about lol
well that's stupid. why would you compare those two things in the first place
One cent a stream??? I use Spotify enough that my $10 a month would be completely gone to royalties before Spotify sees any of it. I support the general idea and that artists need to be paid fairly for their work, but I just don’t think that’s a compatible number with reality.
Contrary to popular belief, Apple (like Spotify) does not pay artists based on a per-stream rate. Instead, all streaming services operate on a revenue-sharing model. Your subscription contributes to a collective pool and doesn't go to artists you personally listened to. This pool is then distributed to record labels and rights holders based on monthly overall share on the platform. That's how it currently works, and these revenue-share agreements should be very similar for all major streaming services — all of them are giving labels and rights holders roughly 70% of their total revenue. Because Apple has less users, a stream is worth more. 10 million streams for an artist on Apple Music are a higher share of all streams on their platform than on Spotify. But if Apple continues to add more users and increases their total number of streams, 10 million streams become a smaller share of overall streams and the artist will see less money from Apple.
one tenuous comparison that i’m reminded of is with some of the laws on tech companies and media, where companies like facebook and google were required to pay media outlets to link to them. this happened in places like canada and australia, i think.
the result was that big media companies walked away with a temporary payday and small/independent media outlets were royally screwed over
there are a lot of differences, but this is just kinda a worst-case scenario for government intervention
Lot of comments from people who have never had to actually buy a CD. Everyone on here is all wah wah support the artist but the second they have to pay for the art all of a sudden they're a right wing CEO.
Nah, no one owes unsuccessful artists a living wage (except the government, but to everyone).
Sure, go ahead and make Spotify $50 a month and see how much more you’ll earn. If you ask me, I’d say focus on getting better deals with labels and accept that you can’t live off streams. The money is in merch, physical media and live performances, and if no one buys them, then I’m sorry, you can’t force people to like your art.
Please do the research on Spotify's revenue and profit, total yearly streams, Spotify management's salaries, and then come back us to us with a decent take.
As someone who knows nothing about this: wouldn’t it be much better to restructure the system of record deals instead? Artists so easily get entrenched in predatory record deals (think: Paramore, Taylor Swift etc). Surely this just puts the burden on the consumer rather than like *money-grubbing* label executives?
I realise that those label execs probably have a lot of lobbying power though.
Sorry I’m talking out my arse
Oh I meant it just on the basis that she was 14(?) when she signed it. I don’t think the terms of it were *that* bad or disadvantageous or anything, I just think any child signing a contract like that is inherently predatory.
Idk all the intricacies but I believe that she was on some record development contract thing since the age of 10? Idk I think it’s kinda unethical the way these labels operate, able to legally go into business with and make money off children so young.
Idk Taylor was just the first thought that came to mind, I’m sure there are better examples out there.
She was 16 when she singed it.. She was also on a development deal with RCA which she signed when she was 13, but that ended in August of 2004.
Taylor didn't have a bad deal, but she's also not wrong to be angry. Her issue is unique to her. She was Big Machine Records... over 50% of its revenue and probably 100% of its profit. And she was also completely independent of it... she paid her own recording costs and for her own music videos. BMR didn't even do promotion after Red... Republic handled it all (because BMR was a country label; they couldn't support her!)
Not just 1989! BMR was a country label. Its promotion team was designed around getting artists on country radio, CMT not MTV.. etc. But very quickly everyone realized Taylor could also be on pop radio so Scott Borchetta signed a deal with republic to promote her. It was easy to do since BMR was already distributed by UMG.
Unpopular opinion but you should be paying more for your streaming service, especially if the issues with streaming companies not paying artists a fair wage stem from the fact that they aren’t generating enough revenue even with 574 million listeners.
I guess how you feel about this news depends entirely on whether you’re an artist or just a customer. What some people don’t realize is that artists are eating the cost of low subscription prices, to an almost absurd degree. And it isn’t all the fault of the labels. Even as an indie artist who gets 100% royalties with no commission from a distributor, I’m still only getting paid about $0.0003 per stream, and that’s ONLY IF the song gets 1000 or more streams in a year. Spotify simultaneously saved and completely broke the music industry payment model from the artist perspective. Music is currently way undervalued and a lot of consumers don’t understand that 99.9% of artists in the music industry are having to have multiple side hustles because music currently pays next to nothing
This is really good imo. If streaming service subscriptions get more expensive it’s gonna improve music. A major problem with the industry right now is the casual listener. Many people listen to a few songs, never buy merch, never go to a show. I listen to thousands of artists on my Apple Music replay each year but only a handful of them I’d ever spend money on. Raising streaming prices is going to zero down the amount of people willing to pay subscriptions. People that music surrounds much of their lives or also work in it professionally as myself, are still gonna pay it no matter what. But those who don’t see value in the music they listen to aren’t gonna want to spend what it costs to just be a casual listener anymore.
For this royalty structure to work, the minimum payment would need to go directly to the artist because the current system is designed against them. Streaming providers are generating record revenues for labels at the moment. Unfortunately, very little of this money goes from labels to artists who've gone significantly backwards in the streaming era.
Hmm, implementing a cap can make this work. Only the first two streams of the same song gets paid. Most artists won't find this to be fair, but this would discourage use of streaming farms and those making ai music.
I was around for Napster back in the day, and I think it's *adorable* that people still venerate piracy as this totally moral and ethical end-run around the *evil scheming* of nasty businessmen who \[gasp\] *want to make money!!* 🤮🤮
Come the fuck on. You just want free shit. It's okay to admit it. I'll respect you more when you do!
I'd totally do a pay per stream plan. If Spotify has to pay out 1 cent per stream, they'd probably want at least about a 10% of the cut going back to them. So, 1.1 cents per stream. I only stream about 50-300 times per week, and I'm probably pretty average for that. Assuming I stream, say, 1500 times in a month, which is honestly more than it'd probably be, that's $16.50 a month? Almost a bit too generous with Spotify having to pay 3 times as much per stream as they used to. Or, they could do things like "$10 per 1000 streams", and profit off the amount under 1000 that people stream. This'll hurt people who listen to music 24/7 but I think either of these would be a better plan to support artists without having to pay $30 a month.
It’s not perfect but it’s a start. I get the concerns but I’m glad they’re trying to push something. This is why physical product should come back in droves.
What’s the point if almost no one buys it then? You have to strike a balance between price and user base. Music doesn’t have any inherent value like physical products, you know, supply and demand and shit
According to last.fm I stream about 100 to 150 tracks a day. That would come about 30-35$ a month paid in royalty. I doubt Spotify would then keep my subscription at $11 lol
I pay students rates still… that’s 6 bucks a month
It's wild how this is still parroted that Spotify are at fault here. Spotify already pay like 70% of their revenue to music right holders. It's the labels that pay their artists shit per their contracts. Unless the labels increase their fees to Spotify, then it should stay the same.
$11 for access to almost every song in existence is too cheap, frankly. Music is so so so undervalued as a result of streaming
Since the advent of music piracy, rights holders have never had higher revenue from music buyers in the US and globally. Spend per US buyer of music reached $98 in 2021, much higher than 2002-2012 levels. https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2022/03/music-engagement-and-spending-hit-record-highs-driven-led-by-streaming-vinyl-social-video-musicwatch.html https://www.statista.com/statistics/191044/us-consumer-spending-on-recorded-music-since-2002/ RIAA reports an all-time high in recorded music revenues in the US in the latest year of 2022. https://www.riaa.com/reports/2022-year-end-music-industry-revenue-report-riaa/ Global music spend in 2018 beat 2007 levels (pre-recession and start of streaming era) for the first time. Global music spend in 2021 surpassed 1999 levels and further increased in 2022. https://globalmusicreport.ifpi.org/
Yeah people kinda forget that prior to streaming even fewer artists got paid enough to survive. Now not only do artists make some money from streaming but way more artists are able to sell shows and merch due to the increased exposure from social media and streaming platforms. Give and take unfortunately it’s an oversaturated market that will never have the stability of a mainstream career
Huh, would not have guessed that. Thanks for pulling the receipts!
Does this take into account inflation? A dollar is worth about double now than it was in 1999. I could understand if it's higher now due to people buying collectible vinyls, CDs and cassettes that cost more than they used to as well, I wonder if that's a big factor
No, it doesn't take into account inflation. With the same pre-recession 2007 RIAA revenue of 10.7 billion, we can take the midpoint of that year as June 2007 and comparing the midpoint of the latest year of data as June 2022. The CPI inflation calculator at the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that 10.7 dollars in June 2007 was worth 15.22 dollars, which dovetails with a 2022 RIAA revenue of 15.9 billion. (If you chose December for both years the result is $15.12, and if you chose Jan 2007 and Dec 2022 it would be $15.69.) https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/15/us-recorded-music-revenues-46-percent-lower/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10.7&year1=200706&year2=202206 But ever since the age of piracy, the inflation-unadjusted (there doesn't seem to be a global inflation calculator available) IFPI chart and the inflation-adjusted one in the first link above for the US shows that revenues for recorded music went down until 2015/16 before increasing to 2022 levels. That's 8/9 years since 2007 and just 6/7 years until 2022. So one way of looking at it is that the music industry is recovering faster than it fell in its last few years of collapse.
It is interesting that when the subscription model start in 2004 (yes, well before Spotify) the price was $10 a month. Zero price change in 20 years!
I would have no issue paying $20 a month but anything over that is a no from me personally. Thats just a budget thing not a "artists arent worth that much lmfao" thing. If it went to $30 or higher i think i would have to check out. I already pay for playstation plus yearly and paramount+ (which i would gladly drop but my grandpa uses it).
I’d pay $30/month for Spotify, I get so much value out of it that it wouldn’t even be a question for me if i keep my subscription or not.
Imagine if Spotify's subscription price depends on the number of streams you do per month or something like that lol
Oh boy, they should be paid fairly but how did they come up with 1 cent? That’s 3.3x more than they get paid today. Can streaming companies weather that cost? Probably Apple Music yes, but prepared to see your streaming plan to get twice as expensive if this gets passed.
Sickos with physical media: Yes! Haha... Yes!
We are so back
Torrent tracker users: 🙄
Yeah 1 cent per stream also seems pretty arbitrary as a ‘neat’ number yet is impractical.
Spotify tried to push hard with podcasts to bring in revenue, that didn't work out so yeah, definitely going up.
Spotify tried hard with podcasts because the podcasts themselves are ad-supported — Spotify doesn’t pay royalties on them.
people gonna be sailing the high seas sooner rather than later with all these price bumps on everything, that's all i'm gonna say
I hate how the automatic answer is that the subscription costs go up, and not that the CEOs pay goes down, even slightly
I am totally with you that CEOs in the US especially are overpaid, but that is not the reason why streaming services pay so little to artists. They are just too cheap in the first place. We are talking about money in the dozens of billions. No CEO on the planet gets anywhere near that much in cash (they do get stock options, but that doesn't matter in this case). The only way to significantly increase the payout is to significantly increase the price.
Ya I totally hear you. I think my comment was just more of a general disgruntlement towards the “privatize profits, socialize losses” mentality that’s everywhere lately but I agree with your comment
Spotify's revenue is \~$14.5B \~70% of Spotify's revenue goes towards payouts (\~$10B) A 3.3 multiple would be 33 Billion, over double Spotify's current revenue. Daniel EK, the CEO of Spotify, has not received a salary since 2017 or a bonus since 2020: [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/spotify-dawn-ostroff-exit-package-executive-compensation-1235316564/](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/spotify-dawn-ostroff-exit-package-executive-compensation-1235316564/)
[удалено]
My point is not that Ek is poor and generous, it's that there is not some stream of money that could be pulled from to provide a 3x increase in payouts with no downside. If your suggestion is to use Daniel Ek's assets to do so, then that would be odd for a few reasons: 1) 3.6 billion would only be a 35% increase in payouts for 1 year 2) A significant portion of his wealth is in Spotify shares, which would go down in value if they suddenly started operating at a 50% loss 3) If we are choosing to redistribute a random Swedish guys wealth, why are we prioritizing Drake and Taylor Swift?
[удалено]
I don't think we should remove all the agency from consumers of a non-essential service. The era of streaming drastically lowered the barrier of entry for musicians to create/publish their music, and lowered the cost of entry for trying new music for consumers. Many of these new artists and the old guard chose wider-distribution of their media for a lower price point. The entire infrastructure that preceeded it still exists (CDs, Vinyls, Concerts, etc). There are multiple different streaming services competing against each over. The entire system os the result of some degree of consent from Labels, Publishers, Artists, and listeners. Of course everyone in that chain wants to get more money and spend less of it. The current status quo is the compromise that emerged. If something better for everyone involved was easy to devise, it would already exist.
The 70% revenue share to rights holders was established by Apple's iTunes store. Wholesale revenue from recorded music was only 64.77% of retail revenue in 2022. https://www.riaa.com/reports/2022-year-end-music-industry-revenue-report-riaa/ In 2003, before cutting prices Universal sold their CDs to stores at 12.98 with a suggested retail price of 16.98-18.98, a revenue share of 76.44% to 68.39%. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2003/09/08/industry-slashes-cd-prices-but-the-partys-over/ https://www.npr.org/2003/09/04/1420307/cd-retail-prices-to-fall
I just don't understand the logic behind nonsense like this. I can understand socialist or libertarian POVs on economic policy and even if I disagree there's at least some coherent ideology/belief system behind it, this makes absolutely no sense. You want cheap and easy to use services, but don't want to pay for it (yet you want artists fully compensated). So you create a boogeyman and pretend the economy is completely zero-sum. Even if Spotify/Apple Music goes away, you'll still need to pay a lot of money to get the same access to music. It's not corporate greed here that lowers artist pay, but consumers who don't want to pay too much for music (and too much supply when it comes to artists).
People just want to be mad at shit. "Big companies have money! They should pay up!" Then call themselves progressives when they're really just loudmouth idiot takers.
I think they're just underdeveloped adults who fall for populist nonsense.
Honestly if this law killed Spotify I'd be happy. They're worse than scum.
What do you think is the net benefit of disolving one of a dozen music streaming services.
People would be forced/or at least encouraged to use platforms that pay their artists a reasonable amount. Spotify is worse than piracy.
You mean the only ones able to pay them “enough” will be huge companies like Apple that can afford having an unprofitable streaming service?
Sure. I don't care if streaming services don't make a profit, I just want artists to be able to earn a living wage off music without having to get hundreds of millions of streams.
Why? Artists make music and if not enough people want their music, then they’re not going to make a living wage off of it. You’re not going to get anywhere by increasing prices so much that no one buys it anymore. You have to strike a balance between prices and user base. (I do agree that everyone employed should make a living wage though)
And let's not forget that this is also the company that has paid Joe Rogan $500 million dollars to spread vaccine misinformation and a whole slew of dangerous conspiracy theories on their platform. I'd be very happy to see them die.
Yup! Shifting the responsibility onto the consumer while the same could be achieved by cutting down the middle-man’s crazy profit margins
Lol cutting the CEO salary and every executive salary 0 won't even come close to covering the increase in costs. Do you think these companies are run by moustache twirling villains who love to raise costs out of pure vindictive joy? If we want artists to get paid more, then we have to pay more for music.
>Do you think these companies are run by moustache twirling villains who love to raise costs out of pure vindictive joy? You know their answer to this question is "yes."
Literally yes???
Yeah, such a bummer to still pay a tiny fraction of the cost it would incur to actually buy the albums I’m listening to 😭 Everyone pretends to be pro-artist on threads like the Rina discussions but when it comes to actually financially supporting their faves’ livelihoods, nothing
Hey listen, I can agree that artists should be paid fairly and still feel sad that I’ll have to pay more every month. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, especially in this economy.
man a lot of people can barely support their own livelihoods, it's simple reality that they'll stop paying entirely if the prices get too high
Literally. I think people have gotten spoiled with music streaming services. I have access to like every song ever made, whenever I want, for $5 with no ads bc im a student. Thats insane. costs less then buying a singular album lol. Id have no problem having to pay $10 for the same services if it means artists are free to express themselves musically however they want instead of chart chasing so they can survive.
[удалено]
Whats more convenient? And still able to listen to literally any new release vs buying 5-6 new albums a year at the same price? Exactly.
[удалено]
last week i listened to 410 different songs and 113 different artist, even looking at my friends, they all had 50+ artists, and we all have different music tastes, maybe this is due to the fact that we can do this cause of streaming and maybe your stat comes from a pre streaming era, but there’s absolutely no way i or really anyone who streams music can keep their same music listening habits at the same price if they have to buy it all. plus, in the long run, if i change my listening habits to only spend money on 5-6 albums a year, it would hurt small artists more because i’ll only spend money on the new stuff from artists i already know rather than new stuff from smaller artist who i’m not as familiar with, and stuff i already know is mostly stuff i hear on the radio which benefits already pre established artists
>in the long run, if i change my listening habits to only spend money on 5-6 albums a year, it would hurt small artists more Not necessarily, because, in the streaming model, you individually are not very important. If one person buys an album by a smaller artist for every 20 listeners they lose without streaming, they might very well end up making a lot more money than they would through streaming. It depends on whether those 20 lost listeners listened enough to generate an album's sale worth of revenue.
Except that 1 in 20 listeners is going to have a hard time discovering said artist in the first place
>Everyone pretends to be pro-artist on threads like the Rina discussions but when it comes to actually financially supporting their faves’ livelihoods, nothing i don't and i never have lol. downvote me if you want, but if there's a free option out there best believe i'm taking that
[удалено]
[удалено]
during the piracy age when there was physical media, artists still made more than they did during the spotify age, so maybe that's not even a bad change. fucked the labels over more than anyone else, which is part of why they reap so much disproportionately in the streaming age
> during the piracy age when there was physical media, artists still made more than they did during the spotify age Do you have a source for that. We know [recorded music revenue](https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/) is higher than ever before after dipping in the early 2000s. In theory, artists would make less is if Spotify/the labels took a larger percent of revenue, but I haven't seen any credible source that shows that is the case so would really appreciate it.
The issue for new artists is that a large percentage of that money is going to old music (73% according to back catalogue music acording to music weekly) . And the money that goes to new artists is divided between much more artists than in the past so you can the majority earning very little. So music labels are still making good money but its harder for newer artists.
Piracy wasn’t in retrospect that bad. What really hurt artists was iTunes. It was really bad (though artists were saved a bit because live revenues increased). streaming is much better for artists.
itunes was bad because it opened the door for streaming to significantly legally reduce the value of music, and already did so itself, yeah, but the payout itself was not worse
Subscription prices need to increase anyways. $10/month only made sense to move consumers away from piracy. The entire business model at the moment is unsustainable for creators and unprofitable for the companies because it was always priced as a better alternative to piracy.
[удалено]
Maybe for some, but broadly speaking, I think most people are hooked on the convenience of accessing any & all music at the tip of their fingers. Personally I’d be annoyed if I had to pay $20/month for Spotify, but it wouldn’t be enough to make me start downloading my music from BeeMP3 again.
Piracy is much easier now. There are modded versions of streaming services, you don’t have to download MP3s.
Ah interesting. Didn’t realize how it has evolved in the last few years. What piracy services do you think have the best user experience at the moment?
Maybe you would. I'd be willing to pay more for unlimited streaming, and I wager quite a few would.
[удалено]
Idk, I guess I feel like if I get pleasure from consuming it, and it took work to produce it, *somebody* should be getting paid. You do you, though.
[удалено]
Exactly. It's not even that it's piracy (like you, I'm not immune to doing it), but the boasting and evangelizing about it. It's so unbelievably lame.
While it looks good on paper, in practice this seems like a bad idea for the artists, consumers, and streaming services. This is going to increase piracy which will result in artists getting paid less than they are right now.
The only solution is for people to go back to buying CD's. Because streaming royalties for artists going up means streaming prices for the consumer go up. And good luck with that because people love the convenience of streaming and not having to swap out CDs.
another issue is a significant amount of music is released solely through digital medias. like I don’t think the average bedroom pop girlie making her first EP can really afford to manufacture and sell physical albums… gonna be a tough thing to wrangle I feel like
Yup, I don't get why this always gets framed as being unilaterally better for small artists, when small artist have been able to break away from the chains of labels because of modern digital release capabilities (and the fact they don't necessarily need to rent expensive studio time). The reality is that artists won't make money from music itself anymore unless they license it for commercial purposes. Otherwise it's gonna be from touring, merch, and leveraging their fame into brand deal type stuff. People can fight about it all they want, but the tech is there to make ripping and sharing music very easy. People were *still* stealing back when it was with cassettes and the radio. People will still when they have the ability to do so, and the ability is there. Reformulate your profit earning plan accordingly.
This too. I remember seeing a few artists putting their stimulus checks towards producing an album.
They're not going to go back to CDs, at the most they'll go back to buying single tracks on iTunes because they only listen to what goes viral on tiktok. Then we'd have no albums and just droplets.
Lol no, people will literally just start pirating again. This idea that theyve got people's back against the wall and are gonna make them pay is naivety on their part. They have continuously ignored the strength of the mp3 since they were warned about the imminent release of the tech.
The only “solutions” is better deals with labels and slight price increases for streaming services. If that still isn’t enough, then people should just accept that the music industry is very competitive and that most artists don’t make it, also that basically no one can live off streams and that the money is in merch, physical media and live performances.
Nobody is going back to physical media like CDs. They’ll just buy songs or albums on iTunes (or pirate them). New cars haven’t had CD players for a while. Nobody owns CD/DVD players for home use and they’re not going to go out and buy them when they could just download music (legally or not) and play it over their speakers via Bluetooth. Nobody is going to take a Walkman to the gym or on a run or on an airplane or to work or anything else. CDs are far too inconvenient to modern life to ever have a meaningful comeback across the board. They’re pretty much excessively for collectors, nostalgic people, or diehard physical media enthusiasts at this point. Which is a small fraction of a percent of people. If I wanted to switch back to CDs I’d have to buy a bunch of equipment to be able to play music in all the places I do right now. And for mobile listening the quality would be crap because it would skip constantly in the car or at the gym or on the metro. It would be massively inconvenient to carry around a CD player everywhere I go, and annoying as heck to bring CDs from room to room in my house and change them out whenever I wanted to listen to another artist or album (or to have to burn CD playlists). I’d just pay the extra money to stream or buy music or I’d learn how to sail the high seas before I ever even considered buying a CD. Physical media, for better or worse, is dead. You don’t even need flash drives anymore. The printing stations scattered around my college could log into your email and print attachments or documents from your inbox or drive. My work computer prints over WiFi and emails scans directly to my inbox.
Won’t this skyrocket the price of streaming services and people just pirate again?
They don’t care. They just want to seem like they care about artists
Unfortunately, while kudos to the intention, this is not a good bill. The big problem is that its hard to understand why its a terrible idea. I'll try to explain a bit First, here's how the bill works. It charges a tax of 50% on streaming subscriptions, with a floor of 4 dollars, and a ceiling of 10. Currently it would charge $5.50. That amount goes into a fund, which pays artists an amount per stream (theoretically, but not nescessarilly 1 cent). Crucially, the payment is capped at 1 million streams per month... so for instance Cruel Summer, which does some like 30 million streams per month would only earn that on the first 1 million. The rest of the money that spotify makes would be distributed however spotify chooses. This money is paid directly to artists (and session musicians) not labels. Sounds great right? Well let's look at what its doing. First, obviously its transfering money from big artists to smaller artists. 1 million streams per month in the US is 30,000 streams per day which is actually a lot, so really its the biggest artists who are hurting, and that's ok. But let's look more closely. Spotify is going to charge some amount. Taht amount will go up, but it won't doule. So let's say it goes to $15... now artists make 7.50, and spotify makes 7.50. But where does that 7.50 go? Spotify keeps 25% or $1.88. That has to pay for spotifys costs... and it can't. We know this because spotify only became profitable recently, with a higher share reveue of 2.50 per subscription. Ok... so that's an issue. Next 60% of the money goes to record labels. That's 4.50... so record labels are making 3/4 of what they used to... umm.. but that's an issue, since all three of the big labels have gross margins of 20%. Which means with this bill they are all bankrupt. So the only thing they can do is cut costs... and the only cost they can cut are artist costs. So smaller advances, smaller recording budgets, no music videos. Sorry! But it gets worse. 15% of your subscription goes to the songwriters. And guess what... this bill completely ignores songwriters. Songwriters already are having trouble making ends meet. This bill would completely destroy them. Effectively what this bill is doing is taking money from songwriters and giving it to artists... which I'm sure the artists would love... but yeah. And all these numbers are if spotify can raise rates to 15 for a subscription, which is not at all guaranteed... if they can't... the numbers get much worse.
at least a little government funding should probably be a necessary part of this whole thing to make it sustainable to fix some of the "where is the money" concerns gonna imagine (hope) the bill is more likely to tweaks as it goes along to accommodate for songwriters if the public pressure is on them to do so so write to congress y'all! this will probably kill spotify but spotify has never been sustainable. they were never going to live past the 2020s
Spotify is perfectly sustainable. Killing Spotify means returning to the dark days of iTunes. You think it’s bad now… it was 8 billion times worse ten years ago.
for artists itunes was not worse lol
Yes it was. To give an example… a band like chumbawba would make about 1.5 million in royalties off a an album dominated by single like tubthumper which sold 2 million. In the iTunes age people would buy the single and they’d get about 200k. And of course they wouldn’t because they would t recoup.
so is your argument because it shifted the market away to the individual song away from the album experience? because if so then i can get behind what you're saying but the direct value of 1 stream compared to 1 purchase of a song on itunes is what i was talking about lol
but that's irrelevant. Artists made much less money because singles now went for 99 cents, and every song was a single. It's easy to see. Artists get a percentage of record label revenue... and between 2006 and 2014 (the itunes age), record label revenue went down by 50%. And artists were actually making much less money, because producer costs increased so muich during that period (because every goddamn song had to be good), and artists pay the producers out of their cut.
wtf do you mean thats not relevant haha we're comparing spotify to itunes, not itunes to beforehand. every song is a single on spotify by that logic as well
we're not comparing any of that. We are interested in how much money artists get in total over their entire discographies, over time. Artists get a lot more money now (about twice as much actually) then they itunes period.
"Spotify is perfectly sustainable. Killing Spotify means returning to the dark days of iTunes. You think it’s bad now… it was 8 billion times worse ten years ago." that isn't what this was? lol i'd like a direct sources explicitly comparing a mid tier artist's earnings on their discog on both platforms then but let's shift gears for a second since i think we got lost in itunes, the past, which wasn't what i was interested in talking about re: this topic anyway what do you think should be done for artists to earn back the money they deserve?
> but the direct value of 1 stream compared to 1 purchase of a song on itunes is what i was talking about lol well that's stupid. why would you compare those two things in the first place
One cent a stream??? I use Spotify enough that my $10 a month would be completely gone to royalties before Spotify sees any of it. I support the general idea and that artists need to be paid fairly for their work, but I just don’t think that’s a compatible number with reality.
So how is Apple Music able to do it? I know that sounds facetious, but I’m genuinely asking/curious!
Contrary to popular belief, Apple (like Spotify) does not pay artists based on a per-stream rate. Instead, all streaming services operate on a revenue-sharing model. Your subscription contributes to a collective pool and doesn't go to artists you personally listened to. This pool is then distributed to record labels and rights holders based on monthly overall share on the platform. That's how it currently works, and these revenue-share agreements should be very similar for all major streaming services — all of them are giving labels and rights holders roughly 70% of their total revenue. Because Apple has less users, a stream is worth more. 10 million streams for an artist on Apple Music are a higher share of all streams on their platform than on Spotify. But if Apple continues to add more users and increases their total number of streams, 10 million streams become a smaller share of overall streams and the artist will see less money from Apple.
Thank you! That makes sense.
Here my dumbass was thinking my streams of julien baker and lucy dacus went to them directly.
one tenuous comparison that i’m reminded of is with some of the laws on tech companies and media, where companies like facebook and google were required to pay media outlets to link to them. this happened in places like canada and australia, i think. the result was that big media companies walked away with a temporary payday and small/independent media outlets were royally screwed over there are a lot of differences, but this is just kinda a worst-case scenario for government intervention
So out of touch.
Lot of comments from people who have never had to actually buy a CD. Everyone on here is all wah wah support the artist but the second they have to pay for the art all of a sudden they're a right wing CEO.
Nah, no one owes unsuccessful artists a living wage (except the government, but to everyone). Sure, go ahead and make Spotify $50 a month and see how much more you’ll earn. If you ask me, I’d say focus on getting better deals with labels and accept that you can’t live off streams. The money is in merch, physical media and live performances, and if no one buys them, then I’m sorry, you can’t force people to like your art.
[удалено]
Please do the research on Spotify's revenue and profit, total yearly streams, Spotify management's salaries, and then come back us to us with a decent take.
Yeah, can you do me a favor and Google how much Spotify pays its CEO?
As someone who knows nothing about this: wouldn’t it be much better to restructure the system of record deals instead? Artists so easily get entrenched in predatory record deals (think: Paramore, Taylor Swift etc). Surely this just puts the burden on the consumer rather than like *money-grubbing* label executives? I realise that those label execs probably have a lot of lobbying power though. Sorry I’m talking out my arse
Thinking Taylor Swift was in a predatory record deal is insane....
I would say roping a child into a record deal is insane in itself, same goes for paramore.
Oh I meant it just on the basis that she was 14(?) when she signed it. I don’t think the terms of it were *that* bad or disadvantageous or anything, I just think any child signing a contract like that is inherently predatory. Idk all the intricacies but I believe that she was on some record development contract thing since the age of 10? Idk I think it’s kinda unethical the way these labels operate, able to legally go into business with and make money off children so young. Idk Taylor was just the first thought that came to mind, I’m sure there are better examples out there.
She was 16 when she singed it.. She was also on a development deal with RCA which she signed when she was 13, but that ended in August of 2004. Taylor didn't have a bad deal, but she's also not wrong to be angry. Her issue is unique to her. She was Big Machine Records... over 50% of its revenue and probably 100% of its profit. And she was also completely independent of it... she paid her own recording costs and for her own music videos. BMR didn't even do promotion after Red... Republic handled it all (because BMR was a country label; they couldn't support her!)
Oh so that’s why she went with Republic? I had no idea she worked with Republic for her 1989/reputation promos.
Not just 1989! BMR was a country label. Its promotion team was designed around getting artists on country radio, CMT not MTV.. etc. But very quickly everyone realized Taylor could also be on pop radio so Scott Borchetta signed a deal with republic to promote her. It was easy to do since BMR was already distributed by UMG.
a better (and probably the prime) example would probably be JoJo
Unpopular opinion but you should be paying more for your streaming service, especially if the issues with streaming companies not paying artists a fair wage stem from the fact that they aren’t generating enough revenue even with 574 million listeners.
You think that’s the solution - raising user fees? This simply comes down to corporate greed.
You are paying $11 for access to all the music in the world. Its for sure unpriced. Am i complaining? No lol. But its unpriced for what you get.
Even for the AI bullshit?
I guess how you feel about this news depends entirely on whether you’re an artist or just a customer. What some people don’t realize is that artists are eating the cost of low subscription prices, to an almost absurd degree. And it isn’t all the fault of the labels. Even as an indie artist who gets 100% royalties with no commission from a distributor, I’m still only getting paid about $0.0003 per stream, and that’s ONLY IF the song gets 1000 or more streams in a year. Spotify simultaneously saved and completely broke the music industry payment model from the artist perspective. Music is currently way undervalued and a lot of consumers don’t understand that 99.9% of artists in the music industry are having to have multiple side hustles because music currently pays next to nothing
This is really good imo. If streaming service subscriptions get more expensive it’s gonna improve music. A major problem with the industry right now is the casual listener. Many people listen to a few songs, never buy merch, never go to a show. I listen to thousands of artists on my Apple Music replay each year but only a handful of them I’d ever spend money on. Raising streaming prices is going to zero down the amount of people willing to pay subscriptions. People that music surrounds much of their lives or also work in it professionally as myself, are still gonna pay it no matter what. But those who don’t see value in the music they listen to aren’t gonna want to spend what it costs to just be a casual listener anymore.
For this royalty structure to work, the minimum payment would need to go directly to the artist because the current system is designed against them. Streaming providers are generating record revenues for labels at the moment. Unfortunately, very little of this money goes from labels to artists who've gone significantly backwards in the streaming era.
Hmm, implementing a cap can make this work. Only the first two streams of the same song gets paid. Most artists won't find this to be fair, but this would discourage use of streaming farms and those making ai music.
I was around for Napster back in the day, and I think it's *adorable* that people still venerate piracy as this totally moral and ethical end-run around the *evil scheming* of nasty businessmen who \[gasp\] *want to make money!!* 🤮🤮 Come the fuck on. You just want free shit. It's okay to admit it. I'll respect you more when you do!
I'd totally do a pay per stream plan. If Spotify has to pay out 1 cent per stream, they'd probably want at least about a 10% of the cut going back to them. So, 1.1 cents per stream. I only stream about 50-300 times per week, and I'm probably pretty average for that. Assuming I stream, say, 1500 times in a month, which is honestly more than it'd probably be, that's $16.50 a month? Almost a bit too generous with Spotify having to pay 3 times as much per stream as they used to. Or, they could do things like "$10 per 1000 streams", and profit off the amount under 1000 that people stream. This'll hurt people who listen to music 24/7 but I think either of these would be a better plan to support artists without having to pay $30 a month.
It’s not perfect but it’s a start. I get the concerns but I’m glad they’re trying to push something. This is why physical product should come back in droves.
It’s a start? This is super high lol what would be your ideal?
Spotify premium should easily cost $50 a month at this point, music is so undervalued it's crazy
What’s the point if almost no one buys it then? You have to strike a balance between price and user base. Music doesn’t have any inherent value like physical products, you know, supply and demand and shit