Spotify - anyone heard of it?

as the sort of rube to whom world cup playlists appeal, I was curious about the spotify one. there's been some effort put in & it's very long but it seems mostly terrible

Hey! 20 questions, DRINK LADY.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/business/media/free-music-at-least-while-it-lasts.html?ref=business&_r=1

If you're interested in how Spotify pays, it's described in detail here: http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/

Van Dyke Parks quotes a rate of .00065, but the average royalty rate is actually about $.007, which is 10x what he said. He also hypothesizes 100,000 streams in his example, and I think means that to represent a very successful song (since he's comparing it to some hypothetical past song that would have earned him a house). But this not a very high figure in Spotify terms. Pharrell's "Happy", which is a big current hit but hasn't been around very long, has 164,000,000 plays on Spotify, which at $.007/stream is over $1,000,000. The least popular tracks on Pharrell's album have more than 3,000,000 plays each, which is worth ~$21k each.

Charli XCX's "Boom Clap", to pick another current example less dramatic than "Happy", has 462k plays, which is worth $3234 so far, for a song that is just getting started.

And the huge, huge detail that Parks doesn't mention is that Spotify has (according to the most recent data I've seen) about 6% share of the US streaming music market. So if you're using Spotify royalties as a proxy for the whole streaming industry, you better multiply by 16. So how does $52k sound for Charli XCX's stray soundtrack single, which I imagine could have been written in a weekend? And that's before we talk about any non-streaming revenue sources, like merchandise, soundtrack placements in the first place, live shows, downloads and physical media, etc.

So while it's still definitely not trivial to make a living as a musician, especially if you only want to work 1 weekend a year, it's nowhere near as insanely bleak as Van Dyke Parks makes it sound.

Oh, but crucially, these are the amounts Spotify is paying for the music it is playing. That money, of course, usually goes to record labels. The % that goes from record label to artist is a different problem. But a preexisting problem that has nothing to do with Spotify...

Also, just to be clear, I work for Spotify, but I have nothing to do with business matters and I'm quoting only public numbers here that anybody could lookup...

Most musicians are not getting anywhere near the stream numbers you mentioned.

I think glen's point is that Parks' estimate of 100,000 streams = a song that "would have provided me a house and a pool" 40 years ago is not a good estimate.

Complaining that you can't get a house and a pool for writing a song is NAGL.

I am saying one can sympathize with songwriters without embracing Parks' over-the-top take.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/08/spotify_and_pandora_artist_payments_not_as_exploitative_as_they_re_made.html

Statutory publishing rates for streaming audio are currently low enough that the amount Pandora lays out for publishing amounts to only 4 percent of its annual revenue, or less than one-hundredth of a cent per stream, according to this editorial by two members of Congress. Pandora's hoping to lower that rate even further; earlier this summer, the members of Pink Floyd wrote an indignant USA Today opinion piece about Pandora's shady maneuvering. (It didn’t mention that the band had released its catalogue to Spotify a week or so earlier.)

What is the correct monetary value of one stream of one song?

The balance of royalties between performer (via labels) and writer (via publishing companies) is yet another topic, and again one that Spotify didn't cause. But Parks' example said that they wrote and recorded the song, so they'll be getting both sets of royalties.

they should switch to a logarithmic payment model

They should progressively tax Spotify stream payments, get some of that Pink Floyd and Pharrell money over to this Father John Misty guy I keep listening to (though I'm about at the point where I'm gonna buy the record, in large part b/c the cover art is awesome and those Chik-Fil-A cows kinda throw off the mood).

Pandora pays radio royalty rates, which are much lower (IIRC) than Spotify's.

For $10/month you can support the music industry AND not hear ads. Think of it like a tax, since you're in favor of those.

we are in favor of taxing pink floyd and pharrell

(xp) AND download stuff to your phone. it's a really realy good deal -- as are most subscription services.

there should be a $2 discount for buying a physical copy after listening to a track on spotify 1000 times

van dyke and ringo should make like vulfpeck and get all their fans and friends to stream their song in an endless loop while they sleep.

I pay $30/month to Spotify since they don't offer a family plan. Not super-happy about it, since my kids don't use it that much (they are still young).

Also, Glenn - sorry to bug you about this, but since you're the unofficial ILX Spotify rep (believe me when I say that I know that it is a thankless job)...

I got an email from Next Big Sound saying that I could track the Spotify plays for my band, etc. some time last year. I signed up immediately, but ever since then, they claim that "The Spotify team is reviewing your request."

Do you know if this is even true? It's been a LONG time...

For $10/month you can support the music industry AND not hear ads. Think of it like a tax, since you're in favor of those.

― glenn mcdonald, Monday, June 9, 2014 5:22 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is this a better or worse deal for the artists than me buying their LPs? Serious question. I guess it depends how many times I listen to their songs, but I'm a little unclear - how does the $10/month support the music industry more than the non-pay version? Is it just that without the ads, I would play x more songs per hour and the artists would get those extra micropennies?

buying the album has to be much better. especially if it's vinyl and won't eat into your digital plays

which is better for the artist: the 50¢ i spent on their lp from a bargain bin or the 1x i listened to it on paid no-ads spotify?

x-post

Hm, at 10 songs per album, you would The only way streaming would be better is if you listened to the album over 143 times (given .7c/play, and a ten dollar price for the CD).

poor editing, sorry.

Is this a better or worse deal for the artists than me buying their LPs? Serious question

if you're directly comparing $10 spent on an LP vs. $10 spent on spotify, it's certainly better for the particular artist, and the particular label, whose LP you are buying. i'm not sure it's any better for artists in general or the business in general, though. either way you're spending $10, and either way roughly $7 is going to either one or more labels and publishers, who in turn are going to give a small piece of that pie to one or more artists ('m talking a wild guess at what retail markups are these days; i don't know what percentage stores actually keep). so it come down to a question of whether ariana grande gets that one dollar at the end of the chain, or if ariana grande and 1 million other artists split that one dollar at the end of the chain. in the latter case, ariana may only get .005 cents, but the other 99.995 cents is going to other artists, so you're still supporting musicians.

Right, the general Spotify value-proposition to the music industry is that most people were not going to spend anywhere near $120/year on CDs and downloads, so this is a significant increase in industry revenue per person. ITunes Match, remember, basically staked the per-person cost of piracy at $25/year.

Charting the flow of individual dollars from individual listeners to individual artists is interesting, but much harder to understand holistically.

(schwantz, I don't know a thing about the Next Big Sound deal, but send me an email (glennm at Spotify) and I'll figure out where to route it to get a response)

now that's service!!

Email sent. Super-cool of you to offer.

I can understand some artists fretting over low $, but on the other hand I use Spotify to play tonnes of stuff I've already bought as albums, just because of the ease of it, and I don''t imagine this is uncommon, so those guys are getting extra money they would never have got otherwise.

Thanks, everybody. I think I'm gonna buy that record, and maybe even another one. Been forever.

did anyone else notice that you can no longer sort your search results by artist, album, song title, track length, etc.? for now the only workaround is to enter spotify:search:yoursearchterm into the search field. hopefully the next update will restore full search functionality.

Yes, I did notice that. The other aggravation is that non-Spotify iTunes files are no longer integrated into search results.

I don't know what the deal is with either of those changes, but I'll see if I can find out.

Waiting for ilxors users jeff and glenn macdonald to weigh in on the new functionality before I make my move

I haven't noticed a real big difference with the iOS app. None of the functionality I used seems to be broken. Haven't used the desktop app in a few days.

The sorting turns out to be a temporary casualty of some internal reworking to prepare for bigger improvements...

UPDATE: I bought both the Father John Misty LP (which sounds fucking great even on my kinda shitty speakers) and the $4.99/mo Spotify subscription, which is currently available only as a secret Easter egg that you have to know the name of and aggressively search for, since it's not mentioned or offered at all if you just click for "Upgrade" or "My Account."

Anyway, I don't regret either purchase, my burgeoning classic rock Spotify playlist was just the thing for enjoying some burgers and brews in the back yard, despite the lost classic-rock-radio verisimilitude from the missing auto parts ads.

Hey Glenn -

I would LOVE to be able to create auto-updating playlists based on search terms. Like for example

label:"black butter" year:2014

Where every time a new track comes out that matches my search terms, the list gets updated.

Me too. And we are not the first to want these.

I want that too

One thing I just realised I could do is run the app but also launch the in-browser version - found it easier to make playlists by dragging tracks from the browser window into the app window.

a music subscription model where my playlists are autoupdated with anything I have wish list hunts for (especially with a human curating element) is absolutely something I would pay an additional premium for.

I've been on about this before, but the single biggest obstacle to spotify usability for me (or rather, the main thing that keeps me from being able to switch to clouded listening as opposed to stored listening) is the "UMG Problem". Anything and everything which a UMG label released to the digital services before 2013 has that awful, blatant audio watermarking encoded into it which makes pianos, choirs, acoustic guitars and cymbals sound like they're underwater. Starting in early 2013 I noticed UMG labels started releasing certain new things to the digital domain without this defacement, but not everything; based on by-ear research I've done it seems that by June 2013 all new releases, reissues and recompilations were without watermarks. Which is great, but still leaves the vast majority of their holdings (everything they released to digital vendors before then) still sitting there in an unlistenable state.

So like my Spotify playlists and libraries can comprise everything I feel like listening to except Motown, Decca, ECM, Island, Geffen, Deutsche Gramm, Impulse, Arista, etc etc etc. Which is actually a giant slice of things I love. So I still just say fuck it and do almost all of my listening from my packed to the gills ipod.

I like to hope someday UMG will reup all their holdings without watermarks but unless that can be batch automated somehow I can't imagine them assigning someone on payroll to grind out such a monumental job.

Anyway this is not at all spotify's fault and obv affects UMG items on iTunes, eMusic, Amazon MP3 exactly the same way. But if it were ever fixed by UMG, spotify would be a dream.

Jon I really appreciate your continued efforts to publicize that issue FYI

idk how feasible it is, but it would be amazing if you could search spotify by country of origin

I had never heard about the UMG thing, that totally sucks. Another reason to holds onto CDs.