Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly (2015)

for everyone else

my sister would like you guys to know that she's been listening to Bubbles since 2004

but is it an all time record ? I mean, kendrick is big but surely there are bigger sellers/stars on spotify (drake ?)
and then there are the sells on iTunes which surely made him some big money too.
+ 1 million in 24h is A LOT of money !

funny, an hour ago a friend sent me this : http://www.skyrange.net/highest-paid-musicians-2014-earnings-per-second

and I was wondering who the hell michael buble was !

i will never understand online $ numbers. i read this recently and it really did seem like peanuts:

Spotify's per-stream payouts for songs played by its users are low. At the accepted industry average of just under 0.4p per stream, 1m Spotify downloads pays out around £3,800 – small beer for a band like Pink Floyd, whose career album sales are counted in the hundreds of millions.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/17/pink-floyd-back-catalogue-spotify

though that's songs, not a whole album. still, seems like nothing.

that billboard article has a faaaaar smaller estimate for that 24 hour haul

How much is that worth? A Spotify representative confirmed that the 9.6 million represents any stream from the record, meaning Lamar's new long-player brought in about $44,160 in a single day globally, according to Billboard estimates.

lol

the confusion that number and hopesandfears' is that hopesandfears is assuming the entire album got played 9.6m times, and billboard seems to have gotten a correction on that front

and even then the question is how much of that goes right to lamar

hum. that's a big difference 1 million$/44K$ !

if you have to break an all time record just to make $1million that's prob shitty

― J0rdan S., Thursday, March 19, 2015 11:30 AM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for everyone else

― J0rdan S., Thursday, March 19, 2015 11:30 AM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah. spotify pays musicians shit cause it's m/l a monopoly, needs more competition imo. (its also a start-up that doesn't make profits but ignoring that fact) if artists started pulling their material en masse to put it on a competitor's service that pays higher dividends they would be forced to raise rates

Both hopesandfears and billboard don't explain the math behind their estimates, but hopes and fears links to a "spotify explained" article by spotify that has this

Recently, these variables have led to an average “per stream” payout to rights holders of between $0.006 and $0.0084

so i'm guessing hopes and fears logic was

so 9.6m full album streams (let's be generous), x 16 songs = 153.6m song streams

153.6m song streams times $.0084 (let's be generous) = $1.29m

now billboard actually spoke with spotify, and wound up with a far smaller number and a clarification that the 9.6m streams included any stream from the record. So if you take away that "x 16 songs" from the earlier math, the total is $80,064. $57,600 if you used the lower estimated royalty rate.

and accent on estimated as the way spotify actually assigns royalties is far more complicated, relating to what nation heard it and whether it was heard by one of the 15m paying subscribers or the 45m non-paying. And from that amount, spotify keeps 30% and 70% goes to the "rights owners," of which lamar probably ain't the biggest one.

so basically, if you have 10mil plays you get 50K$ ? yeah, that's pretty bad...

and the "you" getting the 50k is the record label

money has to filter through the byzantine spotify accounting before it even gets to the usual byzantine record industry accounting

such a scam

there was a new yorker thing about it a while ago. the formula they use to calculate artist revenues per play is private and not linear

not as good a week for Kendrick after all !
I imagine if he reads that article saying he earned 1million$ in a day... and then he finds out he only made whatever's left of the 50K after the label got paid...
depressing. and inspiring for his next album !

it's a scam but it won't last. the new yorker article made a good point that apple could just make its own streaming service linked to itunes, have it come preinstalled on the next gen of iphones or the new osx, and basically put spotify out of business

i'm vaguely optimistic about the potential for streaming services to actually put $ back in music. it has desirable properties in terms of scale too, u don't need to pay the fixed costs of producing & shipping millions of cd's just upload a file to a site.

Spotify won't go out of business if Apple does that, because not everybody owns (or wants to own) Apple products.

the formula they use to calculate artist revenues per play is private and not linear

between this and the deals for equity made with the major labels, i'd be really surprised if spotify ever gets to an IPO without being accused of collusion

by either an indie or an artist

i'm still looking forward to buying the cd! i will have to travel to the big city of northampton to get one. when is the actual cd available? is it out already? meanwhile, i got THIS today and it is so amazing and it will hold me until i get Butterfly. from Oakland, not Compton. kendrick should hear it if he hasn't already.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/10930878_10153787425967137_1264597256903467794_n.jpg?oh=957b3dba7c1f806850b45193d5a41883&oe=55B692F1&__gda__=1434412942_873c87430e43e0a237bbe160b1899096

https://scontent-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/11059484_10153787426937137_2718347907091307394_n.jpg?oh=3bd7de195368a70a83fe10b9dbd0225d&oe=55822338

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/11053125_10153787427397137_8350641181811643295_n.jpg?oh=89da93edccd399a7fd5c1233dbb705c5&oe=5582A3B1&__gda__=1438332878_09e4c9a0a8e0dfe11babe6ffe00e7388

https://scontent-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/1517439_10153787449387137_113748972734326611_n.jpg?oh=1180fa92c0d5ad91adc311592dde4774&oe=5577A929

i feel like i could pick this apart line by line but it would just make me feel like a jerk if i did. it is good info to know that the songs are readily available though...

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/704-on-kendrick-lamar-and-black-humanity/

you guys are into strawmen, right?

brace yourself for a zillion thoughtpieces
― Maybe in 100 years someone will say damn Dawn was dope. (forksclovetofu), Monday, March 16, 2015

yeah...

lollll i was just thinking "fuck me, the slate piece about this will prob be some challopsy hot garbage and the salon piece will be worse," and i look it up and this is the subheader for it:

How should white listeners approach the “overwhelming blackness” of Kendrick Lamar’s brilliant new album

*headdesks repeatedly*

lol

look out guys, this album is BLACK

the review itself is not as atrocious as that subhead would suggest and it's def a product of clickculture, but still

expecting there to be a salon one about how something is problematic

the Slate piece has stirring passages but the last paragraph reads like shit-I-gotta-return-to-a-thesis-I-introduced deadline anxiety.

it's waaaaaay black. blacker than black. the blackest. have the people writing these things listened to a rap album recently? they're pretty black!

lots of thought in the pieces i've read about what white reaction will be to this album. which i guess i don't see a lot of with other albums? i don't think the phrase "too black" exists in a white music nerd's vocabulary.

i was just told the person who wrote the pitchfork thing is a social worker in oakland and not an actual music writer.

maybe that was at the bottom of his thing and i didn't see it.

Scott, it wasn't at the bottom of his piece! I looked, too. They really need to include those blurbs for non-staffers.

the actual review on pitchfork by jenkins was pretty solid and not at all thinkpiecey

Spotify won't go out of business if Apple does that, because not everybody owns (or wants to own) Apple products.

― Johnny Fever, Thursday, March 19, 2015 12:46 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it would be a sudden huge drop in their market share though, which could make them go out of business. i don't fully understand how they're financed but tech startups seem to depend on having effective monopolies for becoming eventually profitable

The Pitch is pfork's way of getting in on the sj clickbait game. they have good stuff from time to time but lots of garbage. i'm going thinkpiece cold turkey on this album

it's funny how the more political stuff on The Pitch completely does not jibe with the editorial style & politics of the main site though

xp same, but i would be down with more interview pieces tho'. Wanna hear kendrick's opinions and producer input.

it's an album that has definitely struck a chord with black listeners/writers and i think that's awesome. worrying or wondering about what white listeners think of it (uh, they really like kendrick) is a waste of time though. or maybe i just don't care what they think. i rarely do.

This is an album for which I want a 100-word blurb tbh

<i>i don't think the phrase "too black" exists in a white music nerd's vocabulary.</i>

Of course it does. But it's usually in reference to the opening of Public Enemy's "Bring the Noise" or Spinal Tap.

I have literally never heard anyone use "too black" as a descriptor of music

the actual review on pitchfork by jenkins was pretty solid and not at all thinkpiecey
But it doesn't stop the internet from throwing a fit over a 9.3 rating.

fish gotta swim, ppl on twitter gotta care inordinately about the specific number on a p4k review

i was really enjoying lupe fiasco's food & liquor this morning. i'd never heard it! did you guys like that one? i should look for an old thread. that album isn't TOO black. it's juuuuuust black enough. hahaha! i might play it again right now once i get this salsa album off the turntable.

(Lupe's album also has a great spoken word intro on it and it's actually very similar to the incendiary spoken word intro on that jazz album i posted above! the one from oakland. where the pitchfork social worker is from. everything's coming together today...............)