Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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

I hear Inhofe is a huge Don Cherry fan fwiw

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.

― I dunno. (amateurist), Wednesday, November 12, 2014 1:18 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just think of all the barber shop quartets that'd get funding from a republican chair

nah, those barbershop quartets better pull themselves up by their bright-red bootstraps or they'll be singing on the street.

rockapella has a fresh baritone/tenor http://www.rockapella.com/

that barbershop quartet is called Straight No Chaser btw (xp)

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."