Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Also I'm curious if Ek's comments are actually about shortening album cycles to 12 - 18 months, or does he think that artists should be releasing singles every month (or constantly)?

On the one hand I would mourn the devaluing of the album, because I like the idea of musicians building a discography of long-form works. And making a career out of a steady stream of more disposable music seems kinda depressing. But on the other hand, I totally recognize that this idea of the album that we all grew up with is also totally artificial and a product of capitalism and technology.

Still, while technology and the market will always affect how people make music, it's not like this is a natural and inevitable process, it doesn't have to be this way.

I will try not to repeat this too many times, but the numbers suggest that subscription streaming services have actually done not too badly at convincing people to spend money on music again. It would take 4-5 more years of continued growth for streaming revenue to reach the CD-era peak, adjusted for inflation, and it's hardly certain that that will happen. But it doesn't look as impossible as it once did.

The RIAA has an interactive chart thing you can play with here, including an inflation adjuster: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

(This chart is "music industry" revenue, not royalties, which overstates higher-margin CD sales vs lower-margin streaming; and it's just the US.)

@ LBI

Yes, I am concerned about this as well. This is why I'm curious about this secret-arrangement-between-Spotify-and-major-labels that I once heard whispered about. These billions of dollars of revenue have to be going somewhere

Also, I'm definitely aware of the possibility of doing more harm than good with algorithmic tools. But the music industry was totally fucked when I got to it, so the bar is...reassuringly low.

(xpost: Spotify is a public company, you can read the extremely boring financial reports if you want to know where the money goes...)

And to be clear: I am enthusiastic about streaming services strictly as a consumer, and as an artist who desires for my work to have high levels of accessibility. This enthusiasm does not negate or skew my simultaneous criticism that we need for Spotify's payout model to change, or for people to be urged to move to a more "benevolent" platform such as TIDAL. This criticism also does not negate or skew my pessimism that things will actually get ineffably worse regardless, and that we'll have to consider other methods of creating a sustainable way for recording artists to get paid-- which, as I've proposed above, is state funding-- which makes up for a significant portion of my own personal income as a Canadian. (Interestingly, I don't think that this is too much of a stretch for similar models to be developed/implemented/improved in USA, despite a poster's expressed pessimism upthread.)

@ glenn, can you link to those boring reports? I'm interested!

https://investors.spotify.com/financials/default.aspx

I had an idea for a tiered system of payouts based on numbers of monthly streams, such as:

0-1000 = $0.01 a stream
1001-5000 = $0.009 a stream
5000-10000 = $0.008 a stream

and so on, until the highest tier is below Spotify's current mean payout = $0.0002 a stream, for example.

That said, such a model presents so many ways that it can be exploited that it'd require a heavy amount of oversight and auditing, I think-- probably too much to properly administrate

And you're right! it is really boring. I'll try and barge through it in the a.m. when I have caffeine in me haha

Also, I'm definitely aware of the possibility of doing more harm than good with algorithmic tools. But the music industry was totally fucked when I got to it, so the bar is...reassuringly low.

― glenn mcdonald

i get where you're coming from on this. as much of a doomer as i have a reputation of being, as much as i repeat my mantra "things can always get worse", all you can do is whatever you do, the best you know how to do it. sometimes it seems like we've tried doing all the terrible things we can imagine with data, and you know, maybe we should see if we can do some good things with data for a change.

Like Kate said, this thread is moving too fast for me to argue every point or high-five everyone I agree with. But the point about major labels making a ton of cash from legacy acts is probably grossly understated. Dylan, the Beatles, Pink Floyd et al. likely raking in so much money for these media companies that fighting for the new artists, outside of the 1% top earners, is probably not high on their priority lists. Because they are capitalists and people's livelihoods are second to profitability for shareholders. PS this has always been the case.

I do just want to say that I HATE when this conversation turns to blaming the consumer. I think that is a total straw-man argument that imagines some past world where all the True Artists were well off and comfortably supported by small cadres of record nerds. That has never been true.

In the pre-streaming era of the 1990s, I bought loads and loads of records every week because yes I was a huge fan. Which is to say, it was a consumer-consumption thing. At no point in my life would I have rejected the idea of getting as much or more music for a fraction of the price. That's why I actively bought used records, and often would refrain from buying something new just because I knew eventually it would show up used. Oops, no royalties for the artists in that scenario. I guess I've been anti-artist from the start, and used record stores were parasites.

Post-Napster it became the fan's fault that artists were making less money (see my post from a few days ago why I think that's a load of shit). It stopped being about consumerism and instead became about philanthropy. Like, I'm not choosing between seeing a movie or buying an LP, I'm weighing my support of the New Pornographers vs throwing some dollars toward a GoFundMe for a friend with cancer. I mean, if we're going to be honest about it and say we are supporting these artists out of a philanthropic duty, then let's do that. But the infrastructure for supporting musicians is not a non-profit model. And if we're gonna live in a world where Zola Jesus and Holly Herndon are eye-rolling Daniel Ek and ILM posters have to proclaim that they *always* buy music directly from the artist if they've listened to it on Spotify a certain number of times.... well, that ain't sustainable and yr shaking your fist at a cloud.

I don’t totally buy “albums are an invention of capitalism” thing... the idea of listening to the same performer for 40 minutes wasn’t a new thing but of course obviously it’s a violent capitalist simulation of the real thing

That's why I actively bought used records, and often would refrain from buying something new just because I knew eventually it would show up used. Oops, no royalties for the artists in that scenario. I guess I've been anti-artist from the start, and used record stores were parasites.

Excellent point.

I keep coming back to the notion that streaming services (DSPs???) are a fusion of radio and purchasing. Many, many tracks I listen to on Spotify I never listen to again. Because I'm basically just checking them out, like I might on a specialist radio programme, or in a YouTube wormhole. Sometimes, though, I find something I really like, and I'll favourite it, or add it to a playlist. A few really exalted tracks will become trusty favourites that I really return to again and again.

It seems crazy to me that the DSPs don't make any distinction in this usage for the purposes of billing me. i.e. the tracks I don't particularly care for and listen to once are free. And the tracks I come back to again and again are also free. (When I say free, I mean part of my subscription). Why not... ask me to pay 99p the third time I listen to a particular song in full? I would totally do that.

Didn't Garth Brooks try to ban the sale of used CDs once?

glenn please do the board a solid and link the secret second ledger, thanks

Why not... ask me to pay 99p the third time I listen to a particular song in full? I would totally do that.

Well OK, but at that point you'd kind of expect to own the file, as for 99p you could just buy it off iTunes or wherever. And Spotify have never been in the mp3 (or Ogg Vorbis) selling business, right?

The... file?

I'm just an unfrozen caveman, Alba

What is this FLAC of which I have heard the learned speak

That's why I actively bought used records, and often would refrain from buying something new just because I knew eventually it would show up used. Oops, no royalties for the artists in that scenario. I guess I've been anti-artist from the start, and used record stores were parasites.

I've heard this argument before and it is nonsense. Fact is that someone, at some point in the chain, paid $16-$18 for that CD / record, the artist share of which would require thousands of streams to equal

well, these streaming services are providing a mechanism for people to hear your music to potentially buy or go see you in concert. if you don't want to agree to that bargain, don't do it. complaining after the fact, after you've signed a contract, is just a bunch of sour grapes and entitled behavior. Don't like the cut you get per stream, don't sign up for streaming. it's simple. alternately, write music as popular as Beyonce or Radiohead and you'll be making millions from streaming with absolutely zero additional effort required on your part.
― brotherlovesdub, Monday, August 3, 2020 3:50 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't think you have the slightest idea what you are talking about

Ok, i could accept that i'm wrong. Care to tell me where my comment strays from reality? I'm not a musician and have never read or signed a contract. Perhaps you have and can shed some light on it.

In the 80s, I bought way more bootleg records than I do now

Ok, i could accept that i'm wrong. Care to tell me where my comment strays from reality? I'm not a musician and have never read or signed a contract. Perhaps you have and can shed some light on it.

For starters, many artists don't negotiate those terms - their labels do. And very few labels take a poll of the artists on their roster before agreeing to these deals. I don't know if anti-streaming artists like Zola Jesus are on Spotify but I'm willing to bet many of them are because they had no say in the matter.

write music as popular as Beyonce or Radiohead and you'll be making millions from streaming with absolutely zero additional effort required on your part

and this is just silly. No one sets out to write unpopular music. The freakiest of free jazzers still want an audience. There are obviously many factors that determine success, and very few of them have anything to do with talent, ability, or hard work. Surely you know this

I mean, that’s not what they were suggesting so much as “no money? try harder” which is... wrong but not wrong.

My experience with “giving advice to potential professional musicians” is actually the opposite— to maintain an amateur relationship to one’s music-making for as long as possible. The sweet spot is “have a day job, keep music as a lucrative hobby”. I’ve only ever encountered two emerging musicians and told them “do this as your job you’re doing great” and one of them was Grimes in 2011, ha.

Music-making just isn’t lucrative enough for anyone to consider it as a career option, and furthermore, pegging a requirement of saleability/profitability on your art practice literally makes you crazy, makes music-making feel hollow and empty, and eventually leads all music-makers to die broke, alone, depressed, and buried in a pauper’s grave.

hmm idk sounds kinda rock n roll

soundslike, it feels like you're preaching to the choir here, idk if there are any regular ilm posters who don't buy lots of music from bandcamp or elsewhere.

Don't know if I'm a regular ILM poster anymore, but I've been here long enough. And I literally have not bought an album in years because I have a Spotify subscription, which I make use of every single day.

It sucks that the business model isn't friendly to artists, but buying music out of guilt just feels like a waste of time. (How do I decide whose music to buy and whose to stream? What do I do with it once I've bought it? Put it on a hard drive in a drawer?)

I pay $120/year for Spotify. In the pre-streaming era, I'd guess there were maybe only a couple of years when I spent much more than that on new music. I bought a handful of new albums but acquired most through trading and file-sharing. With streaming, I'm happy not to have to scrounge as much as I used to. And for that convenience, I would gladly spend twice as much on Spotify as I do.

Maybe I never actually *loved* music because I never dropped half my paycheck at a beloved record store every week. But I'm also not sure that I would have continued to care about new music past my 30s had I not been able to access it as easily.

as someone who has been working music industry adjacent for the past fifteen years, i would suggest that i have never known an artist who has gotten by on record sales.
everybody i know who makes a living making music makes money on commission, composing, touring, licensing, merch, songwriting, celebrity, marrying rich, being born rich.
which is not to say it doesn't happen! but i think it's about as likely as getting a job playing in the nba.
which is not to say it shouldn't happen more often! but pretending that streaming is what's put an end to the halcyon days of artists living of royalties is ahistorical.

which is to say, fgti and pgwp otm

I bought a lot of CDs once upon a time (more than jaymc but probably well down the ILM ranks) but I haven't owned anything that could play a CD in more than half a decade - I tried to get into vinyl and I completely get the special joy of putting on The Shape of Jazz to Come or Dopesmoker and listening to it in its entirety vs. skipping around as iTunes and now streaming pushes me to do but I just don't like dedicating the space and resources.

I pay for Spotify, I have Apple Music via a family sharing thing that my brother pays for, and I buy stuff from small artists on Bandcamp just to support them... but there's really nothing else musicians/the industry could do to get more out of me. I don't want merch or special access to an artist's social media, ticket discounts wouldn't mean much because I don't go to anything large enough for tickets to be expensive.

Jaymc's post is eerily word for word what I could have written about my own experience.

When I was in my 20s I was probably spending about £200 a month on vinyl/CDs but then you get older and have car/house/kids etc there's just no way I could afford to spend that much anymore.

So I now have Spotify and I maybe buy one or two CDs a year, usually direct from small record labels (and I reckon at least the last six or seven I bought are still unopened in their cellophane wrapping)

And for that convenience, I would gladly spend twice as much on Spotify as I do.

This to me is a huge component. Spotify/streaming being so much cheaper than just about any other media service (cable, hulu, netflix, amazon, etc, etc,) while at the same time being orders of magnitude more comprehensive than any of these other services (i.e. you pretty much get nearly all new big releases with a single streaming service whereas for tv/film you would need a minimum of 2-3 services to get even decent coverage).

In my view Spotify should be at least in the $40-50 per month range before you even get into the record company shenanigans on accounting. And I am going to venture that the main reason why it is not in that range is that Spotify have researched and found that they would have vastly fewer subscribers than they do, it would have taken longer to become a market leader, and it would have delayed them from getting to their precious IPO, which was the end goal all along.

The Spotify IPO was, very unusually, a direct listing with no additional stock sold. So pretty much the laborious opposite of a cash-out.

And Spotify have never been in the mp3 (or Ogg Vorbis) selling business, right?

I definitely remember a time, possibly about a decade ago, when there were "buy" buttons in the track listings, for downloading the corresponding mp3s for an extra fee. It may only have worked for parts of the catalogue for all I remember, and I don't think it lasted more than a few months.

Ah, I'd forgotten that.

and this is just silly. No one sets out to write unpopular music.

― Paul Ponzi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Unwanted_Song

<3

The Spotify mp3 buy was real. Spotify didn’t distinguish between full length mixes and a 3 minute track so I was able to download the full length mix of some of the Late Night Tales albums for a fraction of the cost of buying each track seperately.

i guess i found my hill to die on pic.twitter.com/Sgv3AkgnHs

— ZOLA JESUS OF TSUSHIMA (@ZOLAJESUS) August 5, 2020

made me think of fgti itt:

For 100,000 streams Spotify pays $400.....Apple pays $600.....Tidal pays $2,800. Unfortunately none of y’all fuck with Tidal....it’s either Spotify or Apple Music....lol the black business pays more and gets the least amount of love. Smh

— Trizz (@Tr1zz) July 31, 2020

they also charge more, came late to the party, bellyflopped their initial publicity push and have been playing catch up since. which is not to say i couldn't see switching over to them at some point in the future! just that their lack of market share is not inexplicable.

This is unfair but the "founding member" artists of Tidal are almost all people I loathe and want to see go bankrupt.

I liked Tidal when I tried it, though its interface is almost an exact Spotify clone (for better or worse). If I had to give up YTM for some reason, I would probably go with Tidal.

Tidal pays 70% of their revenue in royalties, divided up by streams the same way Spotify and Apple pay. The "rate" is not a thing in itself, it's just the result of dividing total royalties paid by total streams. Tidal's main draw is the $20/mo HiFi plan, which nobody else offers, so presumably a significant share of their subscribers pay for that, but if 100m Spotify users all moved over to Tidal's regular $10 plan because Tidal's "rate" is higher, the rate would go down.

Also, at last report Tidal had single-digit millions of subscribers, so if you're getting 100k streams on Tidal, you're probably Jay Z.

Tidal's main gimmick was a circuit city home theater A/B room

Reading through those quarterly shareholder reports, it seems as if the main issue with Spotify (insofar as artist compensation is concerned) is the free-with-ads service. I'm torn. Saying "get rid of the free-with-ads program" is kinda classist, but how else can we get around the fact that the main DSP is giving away the music for free and making crazy profits off of it?

$10 a month for free music forever is so... reasonable, too. And ulysses otm, TIDAL's launch was embarrassing

A music enthusiast friend of mine, however, who had both a TIDAL and a Spotify account, said that he much preferred TIDAL's playlist creation and so forth-- he said it was generally just much higher quality than Spotify's. Anyway

Can artists put their own ads in the middle of albums like podcasts?

that would be an interesting hell