Spotify - anyone heard of it?

haha

I think the interesting thing about the stream-count decline over the course of the Ceramic Dog album is that it suggests that many or even most of those people weren't pre-existing Ceramic Dog fans (I assume people who already knew and liked Ceramic Dog would tend to listen to the whole album). Pretty sure selling CDs mainly reaches (and extracts money from) existing fans, rather than making new ones. So this is an interestingly different dynamic.

And no, you're not under any obligation to "invest" in your Spotify presence. But the question of whether Spotify pays you fairly for people listening to your music is a very different one from whether Spotify is magically finding you enough new fans despite your complete lack of involvement and public disdain.

well this is cute

lol at ignoring 90% of what people say on this thread so you can push the standard spotify pr "whatever else is going in the music industry that owns 25% of us, a royalty rate is a royalty rate, fair and true" statement in rebuttal to a link

"sorry for interrupting, i just want to debate with the person who can't respond for a second"

couple xposts, didn't you used to become a fan of an artist in part by buying their CDs? And thus getting to know their songs besides the single you heard on the reader? I'm not sure how much we can really glean from the Ceramic Dog streams but assuming that they mean that Spotify has turned more people onto Ceramic Dog seems a little spurious. It could also be the established Ceramic Dog fans checking out the album and not being that into it. In either scenario dude is making a lot less than he would have otherwise, right? Not going to touch the "complete lack of involvement and public disdain" line, it pisses me off but I feel like it's a side-line to the real discussion.

let's not pretend there is any real discussion to be had with an employee of the company in question. who would probably be fired if he posted anything in violation of the party line.

yeah! glenn is just a cog in the big spotify machine! seriously this shit is so tired.

boo to any post that begins "let's not pretend..."

so condescending

lol Sufjan do you not think corporations monitor what their employees post on the internet about their employers

to be clear i'm totally sympathetic with someone not wanting to engage with a bunch of nerds dealing with conspiracy theories and half-truths, etc. i use spotify like a fiend, sure not throwing stones at someone for working for them. I just think its funny to then show up to defend your company from the latest "all i know if i used to get this much, now i get that much" blog post, ignoring all the people who can actually respond. like, i'd just avoid the thread entirely in that case.

"all i know is i used to...", rather

with all respect to a few math enthusiasts, i'd say more criticism of spotify have moved well past "do they pay enough"

most criticism of spotify has moved well past...

gonna set up an "ilx typo" jar

David Lowery weighs in, again:

http://thetrichordist.com/2014/11/11/thank-you-for-appointing-me-ceo-of-spotify-now-a-strategic-plan-to-fix-the-service/

glenn gets paid .01 each time someone reads his spotify apologia

i think the going rate is more like .00000000015

but it adds up after 50 years

he says Youtube is the boogeyman but does their new streaming service mean more money going toward artists? I thought they already were above board by paying out on basis of content ID system

Lowery that is

yeah that criticism seems years out of date

lol Sufjan do you not think corporations monitor what their employees post on the internet about their employers

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, November 12, 2014 2:32 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think that this only limits 'real discussion' if the only potential good you get out of 'real discussion' is the other party saying 'yes, you are right. I was wrong. you are the winner of this discussion.'

And no, you're not under any obligation to "invest" in your Spotify presence. But the question of whether Spotify pays you fairly for people listening to your music is a very different one from whether Spotify is magically finding you enough new fans despite your complete lack of involvement and public disdain.

this is really disingenuous and beneath you.

lol Sufjan salespeople must love you

I am as kind to salespeople as I am to most human beings it's true.

i would almost understand spotify having a chip on their shoulder for being accused of victimizing spoiled artists while major labels just whistle away. if they hadn't made that deal with the devil for catalog, they'd just be a sweet innocent tech start-up with a dream of rescuing the music industry from piracy...that went splat fast because no one thought it was worth it. unfortunately they made that deal, so ek & co, can just deal with it

There was a story a couple months ago that YouTube was supposedly railroading artists and smaller labels into accepting bad terms for its streaming service or else threatening to block advertising on their vids on its free service. Don't know what came of that.

YouTube Music Key is a pretty lame name

here's some real math

There is a number that exists, in the real world. The average number of song plays, for the life of the artifact, for every LP that was sold at retail price and for every CD that was sold at retail price. I am curious as to what that number was.

That is all.

there is no way to accurately ascertain that number

That's true, but my feeling is that some sort of common sense estimate is illustrative to the issue.

If anything, I think putting the marker at 100 is, at the least, fair. Is it fair to the consumer to suggest that a retail price LP or CD would, on average, amount to fewer than 100 song plays over the artifact's life span?

xp

I'm not obliged to respond to every comment in a thread in order to justify responding to one.

Ribot's piece was interesting, and had actual numbers that could be checked. So I checked them. Anybody could have checked them, I didn't use any special Spotify powers, but as far as I'm aware, nobody else did. They revealed that the Spotify "PR" was actually accurate on the subject of rates, which seems to me like a bit of pertinent information.

(Also, I've been on ILX a lot longer than I've been employed by Spotify, so you could probably give me a little more credit. Also, Ribot is welcome to come join this discussion, although I assume in a spirit of fairness some of you will automatically discredit everything he says and try to make him feel unwelcome.)

Determining how many times a song on an old LP or CD would have been played is hard, as for comparison purposes may not actually tell us much, because that number existed in a pretty different universe of choice. Which is partly why industry discussions sometimes opt to focus on total spending per person, which is maybe less abstract. Back when Apple launched iTunes Match, I think somebody contended that its $25 price came about because the major labels believed that was the average per-person spending on music in a year. I don't know if that was true, or whether it was accurate. In some more-recent discussions it's seemed like somebody thinks the figure might be more like $30. So if either of those is close, then a Spotify premium subscriber paying $120/year is definitely an industry positive.

It's a very interesting question, though, whether that $120 gets distributed differently than the old $30. Is the discrepancy between Marc Ribot's potential Spotify earnings and Taylor Swift's bigger or smaller than it would have been in 1989 or 2004? I don't know the answer, and am not even sure the question is phrased correctly.

i would like to invite matt damon to this discussion as well, though i promise no fairness and will likely treat mr. damon better than any of you

(also, when you leap into a conversation about your employer to respond to a link to a relatively simple complaint, get called out for ignoring the larger conversation/issue, then announce you're not "obliged to respond" before implying that we're making you feel unwelcome, i'd say credit is what you're using up)

Determining how many times a song on an old LP or CD would have been played is hard, as for comparison purposes may not actually tell us much, because that number existed in a pretty different universe of choice.

I tend to think this is waving the problem away a little bit. I'm not sure how the difference in the "universe of choice" matters. As I said, there is a number that exists for how many song plays was averaged for every retail priced CD that was sold in the CD era. If I estimate that at a number that everyone agrees is fair to the consumer, and Spotify's payment structure does not match up to that, I think that's a problem area.

That said, I don't think it's black and white. I think the fact that catalog songs may actually earn more money (possibly considerably more money) from streaming than from reissues and compilations and iTunes downloads, as I was suggesting yesterday might actually by happening, is interesting. Perhaps that's what you mean by the "different universe of choice."

And, I don't know, to me the $25-30 per person amount feels more abstract. I'm not sure why I should figure into the equation all the people who spent nothing at all on music in the LP or CD era.

You're right, I should respond to the actual subject of the thread.

Yes, I have heard of Spotify.

what is the larger conversation/issue you need addressed? glenn's post was not at all 'leaping in'. people were posting about that link.

it's been said, but the debate over how big a royalty spotify should give, to which spotify happily responds that it gives the overwhelming majority to "rights holders" ignores a) the lack of transparency on how the money is partitioned to the various rights holders, b) who the rights holders are, c) the relationship of spotify to the rights holders and d) whether the money is given to the rights holders in a manner that allows them to leave out the content creators. to ignore the collusion with the majors through advances and equity renders the remaining discussion purely theoretical.

this has been discussed considerably, and for an employee of the company in question to show up in the midst of this to debate with a blog post, and then huff when people call out the irony shows the disingenuous, selective aggrievement that the ceo drops on the regular.

first sentence should say "the overwhelming majority of the revenue"

Thinking about it some more, I guess the different universe of choice is that any subscriber can play any song at any time and this is a far larger pool of potential listeners than the people who could play the song previously (which would consist only of people who bought the album or single and their little brother). So, the argument then would be that Spotify pays less than the old model because of the greater convenience by which a larger pool of people can and will play songs.

There is a logic to that but I have no idea where that leads someone in determining what the actual numbers should be.

An employee of a major label with info about their part in this would be a good addition to this discussion, I agree.

I'm not involved in business discussions with labels, and presumably couldn't tell you much if I were. But obviously there is a long history there that predates streaming.

i can't imagine enough ppl are listening to hozier's "take me to church" on spotify to make it worth all these primetime commercials i keep seeing for it

I get confused when we talk about comparing dollars per individual track stream, versus dollars per listen to tracks on a CD you bought. I'm not sure why they should be compared really, when the topic of the conversation is whether the system makes it economically viable to be a recording artist. If you bought a CD, some portion of that money went to the label and some portion went to the artist, and somehow (in combination with touring and t-shirts and guest appearances in CD-ROM video games etc.) it was enough that many artists could stay in business, even artists who weren't very good, and even indie acts. And that transaction, which on the evidence worked out better for the bands than the streaming universe of today does, was effectively complete when the CD was bought. The band got whatever their cut was, and the consumer got the CD. It doesn't matter whether the consumer listened to it once or a million bajillion times, or threw it out the car window on the way home.

The only scenarios (in my mind) where this starts to look less than equitable are

(a) where the royalty structure was a bullshit ripoff for the band, which obviously happened a lot and shouldn't be discounted
(b) where the CD sucks and it wasn't worth it - not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and that was what reviews and stuff were for,

and (c) where, and this I think is what timellison is hypothesizing a few posts up, the person listens to the CD too many times, and the artist would have actually made more money on streaming. Okay sure, but how often would this ever possibly happen, given that .0007 number? Even Taylor Swift, who is a huge star with a grab-bag's worth of catalog gold, has determined that this does not work for her. The idea also casts artists as curiously risk-taking: the chance of scoring a bunch of "Ain't Too Proud to Begs" is, er, sort of low, right? Like basically the odds of "will I be as successful as Taylor Swift"? And if you go for that, in the meantime you say goodbye to all those upfront sales of a whole album of material. I'm probably just out of my depth here though.

If the average royalty rate for a major label $16.98 CD was a dollar, it's easy to calculate how many song streams on Spotify generate more than that. The answer is that you would need at least 143 song streams to generate more than a dollar in revenue.

But that's a dollar in revenue that goes to the label. If the label pays the artist 20% of what they get from Spotify, then an artist now needs at least 715 streams to make the same dollar they earned from the sale of one CD.

I hate to interrupt, and I for one think these are great posts, but the one thing performance-wise that irritates me - since you mentioned "Take Me to Church"...I hate being interrupted during a session of obscure minimal techno with, like, two Bruno Mars songs that stylistically have nothing to do with what I like. Plus screamy pop tracks when I'm in the middle of some cool disco.

This seems relatively new behavior, it seems crappy and anti-music fan. We all heard that radio crap they keep pushing. Electronic selections are terrible.

Also, I have to laugh, half the damn ads are for Spotify, what they can't sell enough ads?

Well, less-terrible algorithmic suggestions actually are in my sphere! Tell me more. We're you listening to a playlist or artist radio or what? And which one, and what bad tracks came on? And were you on mobile or desktop, free or premium?

Or just take notes the next time it happens. Post here or email me (glennm at spotify), whichever you prefer.

The one big negative about going to the premium account, aside from the fact that there is now no apparent way to view other account types or access the student discount: I feel totally cut off from any exciting developments in the field of advanced auto parts.

As I said, there is a number that exists for how many song plays was averaged for every retail priced CD that was sold in the CD era. If I estimate that at a number that everyone agrees is fair to the consumer, and Spotify's payment structure does not match up to that, I think that's a problem area.

spotify's payment structure can't be based on that, though. it has to be based on how much money spotify actually has. which is an entirely different question.