Spotify - anyone heard of it?

1.7 million 45s + radio royalties = way more than 12k

But go ahead and continue with your made up math thought experiment if it makes you feel better

Its sort of weird how people refuse to take musicians' statements about their declining income at face value

They must all be liars and frauds with crooked accountants, living it up w their ivory backscratchers

xp here? nobody is doing that.

"Prevailing alarmist math"

1.7 million 45s would not have been sold in the comparable time.

Move the markers wherever you want your math is still 100% made up

And radio royalties are still occurring in addition to Spotify revenue.

Like I wonder how many downloads of "Billie Jean" were sold (or would have been sold) in the comparable time it took to earn a half million dollars on Spotify.

(Given that it's a 30 year old song, etc.)

well the converse would be that if Spotify goes bust in two years' time people will need to "buy" the same music again somehow

― legit new threat wrt to a norman invasion (seandalai), Tuesday, November 11, 2014 7:41 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's also probably worth noting how many people won't in fact do this. Say a new album comes out, you listen to it on Spotify, a lot; if it leaves Spotify and reappears in some other format where the artist makes more money, you may or may not actually buy the thing. Maybe you got sick of it, maybe you decided you just need the one hit, maybe you just forget while you're picking out other music, it was a 'summer album' and the moment's passed, whatever. You've gotten most of the listening out of it you were gonna do, while it was virtually free. Whereas in the 90s, as we all know, you wanted the song, you bought the CD. Sometimes it was worth it, sometimes it was a ripoff (biggest reason reviews seemed more relevant then), but the money got made upfront. I realize I'm kinda rehashing obvious things here.

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