Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I never want to 'buy' or 'own' digital music again. I'd imagine that is a popular feeling these days.

and man, that pitchfork article by Galaxie 500 guy that amateurist linked is incredible, at least for someone like me that really only knows the barest bones of this whole situation.

yeah it's a good article, but soul-crushing

i def. feel like if i'm gonna pay money for something i want a physical copy of it so i can't lose it when my HD inevitably crashes (and i know, i have stuff backed up but still)

dumb of me not to do this until now but consider this a public service announcement:
http://www.worldstart.com/spotify-%E2%80%93-back-up-those-playlists/
unless anyone knows of an automated method of backup?

because when spotify DOES eventually ghost, I'd like a record of my playlists.

You know, I could use the same math to argue that Spotify payments are really problematic. If the average major label album earned artists around a dollar in royalties and you take that same average that I was suggesting - a ten track album played on the average of ten times total after the album is purchased - artists were making about a penny per song play. Now, there's about 7/10 of a penny being generated total, i.e., the total amount that's going to the label.

From this, I think there are two things that need to happen. Labels need to pay artists fairly out of that kitty (especially given that their overhead is much lower without manufacturing and distribution costs). And the amount paid in total by streaming services needs to go up. By how much, I don't know - that was the question I was interested in answering.

^^

The math is easy = if the 800 million people that are using itunes used spotify instead, spoitfy would be raking in $200 billion a year. That's about $199 billion more per year than they're getting now. That's MORE than PLENTY for even NICHE indie acts with like barely any plays to potentially make a living of spotify.

Spotify is the future, its not even a debate anymore. They will restructure their payments as more money comes in. I'm sure it will be a more dynamic system depending on your plays, rather than a flat rate for all as now. The format is fantastic for artists, in terms of open discovery and reaching fans reliably. Most premium Spotify users don't listen to music any other way.

hahahah

easy peasy

lol

http://bupner.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/things-to-do-with-raccoons.gif

http://www.thefunniestanimalscom.com/medias/album/vzcazrr.gif

http://www.raccoonforks.com/

Well, I scrobble to last.fm for precisely that reason - so I always have a record of what I played. I lost my last Spotify account because I was evicted suddenly & never got my laptop back. But all of the obscure electronica I was discovering was thankfully logged on last.fm!

raccoon forks looks like a good company

by marc ribot:

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/11/06/is-streaming-good-for-musicians/if-streaming-is-the-future-you-can-kiss-jazz-and-other-genres-goodbye

In its first year of streaming on Spotify, my band Ceramic Dog earned 112.80 euros in Europe and $47.12 in the United States from our album "Your Turn." The album cost over $15,000 to make. By contrast, CD sales on earlier albums netted us between $4,000 and $9,000.

hey look Tim here's some real math

(not the most well-reasoned contribution, i guess, but still good to hear from an actual working musician)

xpost

it sounds like they probably shouldn't have been making albums even before spotify

I am comfortable with kissing new jazz music goodbye

that's a shitty thing to say but i guess he asked for it

I am comfortable with kissing lots of music I don't listen to goodbye too. Seems like a dick move to actively participate in the prevention of other people listening to it though.

he did basically say it himself in the next sentence

"Now, maybe the market knows best, and the world is in fact better off without artists like me."

xp

I mean http://open.spotify.com/track/0ll1q3aoxhA7n4hydmhvof

guys, knock nu-jazz all you want, but Marc Ribot is a fantastic guitarist and has probably played on albums even and your cold hearts cherish

*even you

it sucks that the internet killed journalism, it sucks that the internet killed the music industry, fewer people will be working in those industries, that sucks.

spotify is not really the bad guy here, they just happen to be the ones doing the price discovery. I am sure they would love to charge $50 a month.

In its first year of streaming on Spotify, my band Ceramic Dog earned 112.80 euros in Europe and $47.12 in the United States from our album "Your Turn." The album cost over $15,000 to make. By contrast, CD sales on earlier albums netted us between $4,000 and $9,000.

hey look Tim here's some real math

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, November 12, 2014 11:18 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol yes that is real math, and it's red either way you add it up.

I think by "netted" he means they made that figure on top of recouping the costs for cd making/distro.

^^^

Ceramic Dog's Your Turn on Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/artist/2EKKgp12AZDmsFbMU59X0C

Spotify royalties explained: http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/

If you only put one album on Spotify, and evasively switch your artist name from "Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog" to "Ceramic Dog", and don't even link to the Spotify album from your own website, and its most-played track has only 3500 streams, and the stream-counts for its other 12 tracks basically decline as a function of track-position, revealing that more than half of the people who started your album didn't make it to side two, I think it's fair to say that you aren't really making the most of your opportunity.

But Ribot's report of his revenue from this tiny amount of Spotify activity does agree with the approximations in Spotify Explained, so his problem has nothing to do with rates or disingenuousness or deception, it's that basically nobody is listening to this record on Spotify. It's definitely true that Spotify doesn't make it possible for you to make a living from music that nobody knows about or plays.

Which doesn't prove that streaming won't kill jazz, but his one anecdotal data-example doesn't support anything else he says there, and it's the only piece of evidence he offers.

("Martha, My Dear", a Madeleine Peyroux song that Ribot played on, has 488,761 plays. "Anadamastor", a Dead Combo song Ribot played on, has 72,829 plays. Your Turn has more like 21,000 total plays from all 13 songs put together.)

I have no interest in Marc Ribot solo albums but moodles is right he is a great guitarist who deserves to make a living at it

xp

what does 'deserves' mean here

[Should disclaim: I work at Spotify, but I don't have anything to do with payment issues, and I'm referring solely to the publicly-visible stream-counts shown in Spotify itself.]

what does 'deserves' mean here

idk give him a gov't stipend or something

that would make a better article

I'm all for gov't arts funding yup let's have it

that would be a result of his deserving and not what constitutes deserving

obv the only future of music is a patronage model which means amanda palmer sadly otm

Once an artist dies, all their music should get streamed free for all eternity

Is there a way to remove downloaded music from your device and reclaim storage space?

One aspect of the streaming revenue issue I haven't seen discussed a lot is how the old pre-MP3 music business model based on the constraints of physical media relied on demanding the full purchase price for an album before allowing the listener the privilege of even accessing most of what they'd bought to determine whether what they'd already paid for was actually worth owning.

I probably just resented the many crappy $18 CDs I bought from Sam Goody as a dumb kid, but I bet I was far from alone in that feeling. And if reliance on consumer ignorance and dissatisfaction is key to propping up the whole industry, or at least segments of it, idk is that really worth saving

old model was bad, new model is worse

it sounds like they probably shouldn't have been making albums even before spotify

― iatee, Wednesday, November 12, 2014 2:19 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm actually curious about this re: how economics of albums worked in "ye olden days" - did an artist expect to make their full living off the album, or was it supposed to make some money for them, but primarily be something around which you could organize other things off which they made the real bucks? (Touring? T-shirts? Op-eds?) Sincere questions here, I really don't know how this worked/works. And obviously this would vary a lot between artists and their markets - I assume Pearl Jam made more off CD sales (proportional to their larger pie) than the Dismemberment Plan.

Dunno if telling Ceramic Dog that he should have somehow used Spotify better really gets at the question, though - I mean, how many more plays do we think he would have gotten if he'd linked to Spotify from his website a lot, or tweeted about it? How many more pennies would that translate to? Should he have ended his shows by saying "Hey, there's a merch table at the back, we have CDs - - - but don't forget, you can stream it on Spotify!"? Clearly that would be a worse financial move for him, so, more generally: why exactly should he try to drive additional traffic to his Spotify if the marginal increase in plays is worth eight to ten cents upfront and maybe a whole lot of lost revenue? It seems to me the only way streaming can actually be good for the artist is if the streaming acts as a kind of loss-leading front-end advertisement for something else you do, like selling people the physical album or linking them to your donation page.

As for saying that people didn't make it to side two, that just seems like a low zing to me, like "want to make a living on the music of yours that's widely-listened-to? Well, better make sure all your music is just as popular - it could mean upwards of twenty to sixty cents more in your pocket!" This is not a standard to which people were held in the physical-album era: if you could hook people with some big hits and get enough buzz going that the rest of the album wasn't just complete dross, you could make money. And yeah, "side two" - I don't find it surprising in stream-land that people are more likely to click away to something else than if they just paid $15 for the CD. How typical are those kinds of dropoffs in album-listening?

(most of that is to glenn, not iatee)

I read an interview with Neil Peart of Rush a while back where he explained how their business model has changed completely over time. Back in the 70s and 80s, they made most of their money off of record sales and radio. Touring was something you did to promote the album and get more sales. Nowadays they don't make any money off of their albums and consider recording a luxury or indulgence and all of their money is made off of touring and merchandise.

Now that's just for a hugely popular band. If you are more at the indie level, I can only imagine it is that much more difficult all around.

Should disclaim: I work at Spotify

get thee behind me, Satan!

there /should/ be much more public arts funding but a world where james inhofe chairs the senate environment committee is not a world where venues get many public dollars to put on avant-jazz concerts.

many xps,

it's more like a zero sum game that musicians used to do pretty well in, and not 100% fairly, but where leverage is now overly lopsided in the consumer's favor