Stop Thinking of Yourself as a Good Person: The Ethics and Economics of Music Streaming

Lots of food for thought in the article Flopson posted upthread. I was surprised that Apple only wanted to charge US$5 a month for Apple Music, but the reasons given are solid – higher takeup, probably higher revenues. An idea the labels sensibly shot down, if Pando has it right.

Apologies if posted before:

[quote]Earlier this year, analysts at Ernst & Young estimated how streaming revenue is shared [...] after the IRS takes 16.7 percent of the revenue, streaming music platforms collect 20.8 percent. That's not a bad haul, but out of the remaining 62.4 percent, the record label keeps three-fourths of that, leaving only 10 percent of the total to be split between publishers and songwriters and only 6.8 percent for artists.[/quote]

That percentage looks quite familiar – the cut an artist gets from a major-label CD sale is talked about in this article from 2006, and another from 2013 that's somehow more dated. There are obvious differences in the business models and amounts of money involved, but streaming seems less like a new world, more like "seen it all before".

That isn't a defence of major labels. Just shows they're very slow to adapt, maybe, unless it involves upping their own percentage. (On past evidence, the way to create another Beatles will be to pay new artists at the Beatles' rate of... 1.87%?! Get on it, EMI-UMG.)

But the way it is today, I'm cautiously optimistic – I hope the labels' greed will reduce their power in the long run. In April, the "Information Is Beautiful" graphic of all the different music-revenue sources was updated. Who knew Youtube would be so stingy?

But the way it is today, I'm cautiously optimistic – I hope the labels' greed will reduce their power in the long run. In April, the "Information Is Beautiful" graphic of all the different music-revenue sources was updated. Who knew Youtube would be so stingy?

How the hell can the percentage of "signed users to hit minimum wage" on Beats be 140%

300,000 users, but 420,000 plays needed in a month, apparently. Guess we'll never get to see if it actually happens.

xp Because it doesn't have enough users? (Only 300,000 according to the chart)
That statistic means "What percentage of the entire Beats userbase would need to stream a song for the artist's cut to exceed the monthly minimum wage" and the answer is >100% because even if every Beats user listened to a song, it still wouldn't be enough!

Oh my bad I thought users here meant artists (as in, percentage of artists who use the service to hit minimum wage), hence it didn't make sense

I've worked in the music business for twenty years now, the last twelve as my day job - I don't obsess over digital distribution so this is a casual observation, not an "I looked at all the data and I'm telling you all the TRUTH" or anything, but many smaller labels (Hells Headbangers and NWN! are the ones I'm most familiar with because that's stuff I listen to a lot, but this is also seems to be true among the label owners I know) have made Bandcamp a pretty huge part of what they do; nobody's becoming a millionaire off Bandcamp, but it's making an actual I-noticed-that difference in people's monthly paychecks. It compares to the P&D/distro places that dropped like flies in the post-Napster era: it gets the stuff up & available on a place people know about and feel comfortable using. I'm an outlier but I've been buying new music almost exclusively from Bandcamp this year. People can minimize "oh, cool, you got twenty dollars instead of a dollar, go buy 1/4 of a cart of groceries" but that's kinda the Bandcamp difference imo. Its impact isn't minimal, I think -- it'll remain niche, I guess, but it has given actual relief to already-extant labels and bands.

i enjoy buying on bandcamp. since I have the disposable income I still buy all my music, esp since most of it is made by bands who are lucky to sell 10,000 copies of anything.

Bandcamp also has FLACs available and I like the format of the site - BandCamp is getting notorious enough to where if you can't immediately find the album you just type the band's name and bandcamp in google.

LOL 90's...

https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/11902430_10154189395117137_3466540928732263849_n.jpg?oh=115a170cbd930b7c9340b860336314a4&oe=5680A69E

Ï don't understand how this would work. (Not saying it wouldn't work, it's just not well explained in the article.)

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/13/musicians-back-pay-as-you-play-coding-solution-to-win-fair-deal-artists-streaming

But there's a few tidbids:

“They claim to share their vast advertising revenue with creators, but they make the rules. YouTube only shares 55% of advertising revenue with those who achieve over 700,000 views per upload in a quarter [3mths], so it is in YouTube’s interest for multiple people to upload the same content to dilute the viewers so they pay out less money to creators.” (Hélène Muddiman)

I was gonna post this in the forks thread, but fuck that thing. I'm posting here instead.

Spotify have no control over what record labels or publishing companies do with royalties once they hand them over. It's funny how people villify Spotify while using YouTube, since YouTube pays significantly less in royalties even though it has more than 10x the users and streams than Spotify has. YouTube also takes 80% off the top of all ad revenue earned by a YouTube video and only pays royalties on "monetized" videos, a.k.a. videos with ads. It's usually only the official artists' YouTube videos that receive ads in the first place, meaning that artists often do not earn royalties on most unofficial YouTube streams. It's possible that the industry and the artists are fighting against the wrong enemy here. The labels, who use outdated borderline-crooked methods for paying royalties and YouTube/Google who can't bother to pay artists a fair rate even though they have all the money in the world.

Nice post.

I can't possibly read this whole thread but anyone who thinks that Spotify is any better or worse than the music industry has always been should google the name "Morris Levy."

they're just more of the same, which is the problem.

i feel like people consume things differently on youtube. yes you can listen to almost anything on it, but it doesn't function as smoothly as a replacement music library. i'm probably building a strawman here but fuck it.

let's tax inherited wealth at rates that produced the 1950s blues and 1960s rock booms again. oh wait, wrong thread!

I thought this was a good summary of where things stand in 2019:
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/22/743775196/the-success-of-streaming-has-been-great-for-some-but-is-there-a-better-way

This article repeats, again, the reasonable-sounding but incorrect assertion that the pro-rata payment model is biased towards the most popular artists. In fact, as a general pattern the people who stream more than average on Spotify tend to stream less-popular artists, so the current pro-rata model acts as a slight subsidy of the less-popular by the most-popular, rather than the other way around.

The thing that has a bigger effect on streaming equity is the current industry practice of counting any stream of :30 or more of a song as a "play". This penalizes artists for producer longer/fewer songs, and allows abusive gaming of the system like this:

https://open.spotify.com/album/3glK7aKuf8ZccIvLTQBGC2?si=N_srvhXaRm-L8pnL0zOZJQ

(an 18-hour German audiobook delivered as 2,037 :31-:35 tracks)

Spotify’s payment rates to all artists are bad, and pointing out that consumers based on your data stream less popular artists more doesn’t change that. Seems like you’re just saying less popular artists algorithmically could be be paid less and should just just be grateful for this insignificant subsidy they allegedly receive based on amounts of streams.

Also your subsidy argument doesn’t account for the other factors :

Streaming payouts to artists vary wildly however, depending on whether they are signed to a major or independent label, and whether or not they're songwriters of an individual tune, as well as the performers. And within these situations, the terms of these contracts can make one artist's pay stub unrecognizable to another's.

Also your subsidy argument doesn’t account for the other factors :

Streaming payouts to artists vary wildly however, depending on whether they are signed to a major or independent label, and whether or not they're songwriters of an individual tune, as well as the performers. And within these situations, the terms of these contracts can make one artist's pay stub unrecognizable to another's.

I thought it was a given that Spotify et al. were just a convenient way to steal music for a small fee, as opposed to the less convenient but completely free methods that the under-40 set have been using to steal music for the last 20 years.

How is streaming a song stealing it? You don't have a copy of it to keep when you're done.

lol good point

how is leaving the restaurant without paying stealing, you don’t get to keep a copy of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZ

that was not a serious post, please don’t respond

I don’t understand the section of the NPR article where they talk about how great the Bandcamp model is, but then dismisses it (and other alternatives) because they won’t “topple Spotify.” This paragraph in particular:

And while many independent musicians, artists, and critics have positive things to say about Bandcamp, and how its model allows for more equity than anywhere else right now, they're hesitant to hinge the future of streaming on it. "My great optimism would be that more people who have engagement with the archive, for example, or more of an emphasis on the kind of deep cultural aspects of music would think like that, rather than trying to pin their hopes on something like Bandcamp. Which I completely like," says Dryhurst. "But long-term, I don't see it as being viable, it feels like... retiring into your fantasies or something, to think that will ever compete at the level of a venture monster like Spotify."

It seems to me that if every artist and label (with the power to do so) pulled their music from other streaming services in favor of Bandcamp, then its model would win out, no?

"And actually, the internet and music might be a whole bunch more exciting if artists were given the tools to make the experience of consuming their work as unique as, arguably, the work is in itself."

this is a gross and perplexing sentence

no wonder https://breakermag.com/mat-dryhurst-musician-iconoclast-on-helping-artists-with-blockchain/

My main frame of reference here is Hollywood, where there’s nothing artsy-fartsy about these issues, it’s very cut-and-dried — actors, writers, etc. belong to guilds which negotiate, with the studios, residual rates from distribution of movies & TV shows across all platforms, including “streaming.” But I understand that doesn’t apply to the music biz, for many reasons.

Bandcamp is absolutely the better model

I’m a bit sceptical that this trend for shorter songs works, except if you’re a mega selling artist - if nearly everyone gets paid close to zero anyway, why make it 1.5x zero by making your songs two minutes instead of three?

Because “close to zero” is not zero

I mean, as a regular non-mega star, why not tailor your songs to your live shows which can make you loads of actual money instead of squeezing out another three bucks a year from Spotify?

I don’t understand the section of the NPR article where they talk about how great the Bandcamp model is, but then dismisses it (and other alternatives) because they won’t “topple Spotify.”

I interpreted it as being about the fact that Bandcamp is still a download-based model, and most people don't care about downloads these days. They don't pay anything for a stream, the streaming function is just 'try before you pay'.

So people paying for music on Bandcamp are either doing it because they still like to own mp3s, are a DJ, or use it as a tip jar for musicians that they otherwise stream.

Actually, I'm not factoring in the Bandcamp app, that must be more about offline streaming? I've never used it.

You can stream on Bandcamp (website & app); it just makes you pay after you’ve streamed an album for free x number of times. At least, that’s the setup I most frequently encounter there.

(And yes, you also get to download the album once you’ve paid)

Bandcamp is the only place I routinely pay for digital copies of music, in part because they offer lossless as well. In this high bandwidth age the trivial savings of mp3 compression vs the audible defects make this a line-in-the-sand issue. I want to hear the audio the artist made, not an approximation the engineers at Fraunhofer tell me is good enough because "Tom's Diner" sounded fine through the codec.
I used to nearly always buy the physical releases as well, until the US postal service lost its mind and started charging $15 shipping (Australia) for a $10 CD. Now I buy the digital and add a few bucks for good measure. I don't know if the perception is wrong but I feel like it goes more directly to the artist on Bandcamp. I used Spotify for a month a few years back, but deleted my account and have never been interested again.
But then I have the overhead of maintaining a digital library of more than 40 000 tracks - it's my equivalent of gardening.

Bandcamp is the online indie label. Everything they do, from stressing downloads over streaming, to the relatively artist-friendly profit split, to the user interface, to the carefully rolled out editorials/curation, to not checking for samples with bots, reflects independent sensibilities. Users love it, and increasing numbers of professional musicians feel comfortable there. But it remains a place for self-driven music fans who enjoy the hard work of searching for things themselves.

Yes, Bandcamp is filled with the same kind of recommendations that Spotify is. But there are 10,000 underlying business & UX decisions that keep the content indie, keeps the music feeling unmediated, and keep out blatant monocultural intrusions / recommendations. And if Bandcamp ever started tilted towards those 'trusted' (subsidized) recommendations that allowed it to scale, and Drake links started showing up when I went there to buy a Blue Gene Tyranny CD - the game would be up. It's already astonishing to me that Bandcamp has scaled as big as it already has, while staying what it is.

I think the low-key most impressive thing about Bandcamp is that once you've paid for an album once, you can upgrade for free if you want. You can download it as 320kbps MP3s when you first purchase it, then come back later and download it again as WAV files, without having to pay twice.

It's already astonishing to me that Bandcamp has scaled as big as it already has, while staying what it is.

yeah. I mean it's just spectacularly good. I hadn't even considered the possibility of Bandcamp turning heel in my mind until your post, honestly, and I get depressed contemplating it

You can stream on Bandcamp (website & app); it just makes you pay after you’ve streamed an album for free x number of times. At least, that’s the setup I most frequently encounter there.

― the last Berry La Croix in the work fridge (morrisp), Sunday, July 28, 2019 5:59 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, but artists don't get paid per stream (just for downloads), so I hope there aren't people feeling good about themselves for only streaming on Bandcamp instead of Spotify.

Also the limited number of plays thing is configurable by the artist, I believe.

(just to be clear, I really love Bandcamp, but I get that it's always going to be a niche music nerd thing in some sense)

I guess I’m still confused — if I pay for an album on Bandcamp, I’m certainly not going to feel “bad about myself” for continuing to stream it from there... that’s the payment model.

And if certain artists allow unlimited streaming without payment (which I haven’t encountered) — well, obviously you should buy the album if you enjoy it. Seems those artists have chosen the promotional / “honor system” model.

As for Bandcamp being “niche” — that’s the point I made above... if Taylor Swift had kept her music off Spotify & Apple and went to Bandcamp, it wouldn’t be “niche” anymore, right?

(And not to put this all on Taylor Swift; but clearly it’s not all ok the “users,” either — the industry has chosen to embrace the streaming services, and fans are going to use them. The article discusses these better models that exist, but then dismisses them because... the industry won’t embrace them? So what are listeners to do? I still buy my favorite albums on CD, but that’s obviously not happening for most listeners anymore.)

*...not all on the users

I was talking about streaming without paying for a dl, not after.

And it would be great if a huge artist went bandcamp-only, but most people still aren't interested in downloads (which I think of as bc's focus). But like I said, I personally don't use Bandcamp for streaming all that much, mostly dance music downloads, I just wasn't thinking of it like that.

Saying it's not all on the users because "fans are going to use them" never held water with me - the argument basically being "can you blame ppl for not being able to resist this great temptation?" I don't expect people to resist temptation, but just bc they cant be expected to resist the unethical thing being offered to them doesn't make them blameless.

I mean, as a regular non-mega star, why not tailor your songs to your live shows which can make you loads of actual money

People have been repeating the argument "replace your lost revenue via live shows" since the dawn of file sharing, and yet so many of these clueless artists still haven't chosen to just unilaterally decide to make more money via "live shows"... sad!

Blameless for what? For accessing music via the Spotify/YouTube links that their favorite artists are tweeting out?

We spent the 2000s gently clicking at friends that they really shouldn’t be downloading music, b/c it’s screwing the artists. Now that that the industry has a new model, our message is supposed to be, “The artists promoting this are still getting screwed, so you should... go back to iTunes or buying CDs?”

*gently clucking

And like I said, I do still personally buy some CDs and downloads (in addition to subscribing to YT Music); but I’m not gonna tell a 15-yr-old to do it, that ship has sailed.

Kind of imho, yeah! The artists are only being forced to go all-in on participating in this new model that vastly undercompensates them bc consumers are unwilling to buy CDs anymore? And the reason no one is willing to buy CDs anymore is because they have access to this new cheaper way of hearing music, which has the side effect of vastly undercompensating artists.

Saying "what are people supposed to do, actually buy CDs?!", as if thats some kind of bizarre behavior akin to eschewing electric lights for oil lamps or something, is part of the problem and exactly what the big labels & tech companies wanted to trick us all into thinking.