So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song?
In the old days, artists would join a label and put out an album. The artist would earn about 10% of sales or so (varies of course, but on average). So a $15 CD would earn an artist $1.50.
The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. So it would take about 300 streams of a song to earn the same amount as selling a CD used to make.
I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? There are many albums I own that I have listened to way more than 30 times, which is what it would take for a 10 song album to get 300 song 'streams'
Is that a fair compensation? Why or why not?
I think artists should be able to earn money from creating music, but I don't know how we decide how much they actually deserve if we aren't just going based on the price the market sets.
> how little money per stream artists make ... What is fair compensation for writing a song?
Those are two different things. Recording artist does not always equal songwriter. So how much should the songwriter make? The recording studio? The audio engineer? All the other people involved in creating the recorded song? Now that it's made, how do you get people to know the song exists and want to listen to it, much less purchase it?
The reason compensation isn't a settled thing is it's a very complex thing to answer.
The simplest possible answer is "the artist sets their own price" - assuming they just DIY'd the entire production, advertising, distribution, etc themselves. But that is so much work that they would need to already have an income stream to give them the time to do it all, not to mention all the non-music skills if they're not paying professionals to do the rest.
If they're not just going to play at the local coffee shop, or bus from city to city barely making enough for gas and beer, they need some way to professionally produce, mass-market, and mass-distribute their songs. It's not feasible for most musicians to do this themselves, so there exists a music industry to do it... which gives them all the cards... letting them set the price, and contract terms... which are often unfair. That's what happens when an industry is given the power to exploit people: they do.
> Those are two different things. Recording artist does not always equal songwriter. So how much should the songwriter make? The recording studio? The audio engineer? All the other people involved in creating the recorded song? Now that it's made, how do you get people to know the song exists and want to listen to it, much less purchase it?
Why are any of these the distribution medium's (or better, listener's) problem? The songwriter, recording studio, audio engineer, marketing firm, etc should be paid for their services at their standard rates at the time the service is performed. The artist is the one who should accept this risk. Just like.. basically everything else in the world. The plumber who installed an office sink is not entitled to some fraction of the occupying organization's revenue, right?
> But that is so much work that they would need to already have an income stream to give them the time to do it all
Which is why labels exist. They take the risk on, and pre-pay for (everything), in exchange for the lion's share of potential revenue. Artists are, of course, welcome to stay unsigned and handle all the risk and rewards themselves, but that typically isn't a good value prop.
IMO everything here is working as designed, including Spotify. The author just doesn't understand that "artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream" is exactly what should happen.
> should be paid for their services at their standard rates at the time the service is performed
Because by and large they don't want that. They are creatives who would prefer to be invested in their work: Charge less now, putting more into their work in the hope and belief that it will pay off over time. Sometimes it does.
Part of what's wrong with the industry. Steve Albini had a flat fee and was one of the most sought after recording engineers (aka producer but he hated the term). And that was based on the quality of his work moreso than his modest, flat fee.
A producer is not remotely the same thing as a recording engineer?
He usually did the job of a producer but he didn't like the term, as he wanted the artist to get all of the credit for creating the art, even through the producer often plays a big role in the final product.
Producers also often contribute singing, instrument playing, and songwriting, so the distinction between them and the "artist" is pretty flimsy. In ways, artist is as much defined as "the person that gets all of the credit for creating the art" as anything else.
This is still rent seeking behavior in an industry that pivoted from a live services and paid ownership model.
Nothing wrong with rent-seeking when you actually offer something people want, it's optional, and you don't force them with bait-and-switch (all of which are cases of the bad rent-seeking).
Renting a house is rent-seeking too, for example.
Switching Adobe to a subscription service, on the other hand...
I don't think you can call it rent seeking when it's both completely nonessential and 100% the fruit of their labors. If anything, Spotify is rent-seeking.
how is that rent-seeking?
they actually contribute to the song.
People don't actually care about answering this question, they just want to steal music and keep a 'clean' conscience.
I think the opposite is actually true - people want to pay for music, but in a way that compensates the artists they like without enriching someone who 'only' provides the mechanism that they use to listen. People rail against Spotify, music labels, and TicketMaster for extracting so much money from the music industry that there's very little left for people who actually make the music.
The music industry has made millionaires out of people who would otherwise just be playing or singing in a room.
The software industry has made millionaires out of people that would otherwise just be hacking or debugging in a room.
Nope! I just think the business model is rotten. I worked at Amazon MP3 back in the day, mostly because I adored the concept of people paying to download DRM-free files. Same reason I use GOG for my games: I have a lot of money waiting for people that want to sell me files that I have control over.
But the industry moved another direction, and they want ultimate control over everything: not just the songs themselves, but the clients to play them and everything in between. And the tragedy is they screw the artists just as much as customers. Copyright has been captured by the middlemen at the expense of the artists and audiences: that's the real reason people have no respect for the industry, and why copyright is so reviled.
Without giving specific numbers, I think the following situation is inherently unfair:
I pay Spotify $20. They take their cut (say, 50%) and there's $10 left for the artists. I've only listened to one small artist throughout the entire month. The artist does not get $10 but much less despite Spotify knowing precisely which artists I listened to.
They on average pass approximately 70% on, but the record labels also eat heavily into that before the artists get their share.
I'm reminded of an effort a few years ago to legislate the creators getting 50% - which of course meant the "platforms" and the "labels" would collectively share only the other 50%. Which is presumably why the initiative failed.
> The three major labels - Sony, Universal and Warner Music - faced some of the toughest questioning of the inquiry, and were accused of a "lack of clarity" by MPs.
> They largely argued to maintain the status quo, saying any disruption could damage investment in new music, and resisted the idea that streaming was comparable to radio - where artists receive a 50/50 royalty split.
> "It is a narrow-margin business, so it wouldn't actually take that much to upset the so-called apple cart," said Apple Music's Elena Segal.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473
These days Spotify has hundreds of millions for Joe Rogan and podcast investments, and Apple reports a 75% profit margin on services, so I guess it is quite profitable for everyone except the actual artists.
If I pay Spotify $20 and listen to one song one, surely they don't send that artist $14...
They don’t. What happens is that your listen is pooled with all listens of all songs, and every payout the artist/label gets a check for the percentage of that total listening pool. For small artists that have relatively few listens, they don’t get almost any money.
So it doesn’t matter if Spotify passes on 70%, most artists aren’t going to see any substantial portion of that, label or not.
indeed - record company exec salaries don't come out of the ether, that's money that could otherwise go in the artists' pockets
The record company representing that one artist also does not get $7 of the $10.
Apple Music is a miniscule part of service revenue compared to App Store, payments from Google ($20 Billion a year), AppleCare, etc.
Right, and before you even get into password sharing you have stuff like this: Apple Family Plan: Costs $25.95 per month, includes Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 200GB of iCloud+ storage, and allows sharing with up to five other people
So $5.20/mo per head and you get TV, games and storage with it.
Or Spotify Family Plan - 6 Premium accounts for family members under one roof. $11.49/month
So family plans seem to discount unlimited music streaming down to $2/mo per head.
$24/year or what a single CD used to cost, before even doubling it for inflation..
There's just one problem with your model. There's no royalty difference between a Spotify subscriber playing one song vs 1000 songs if it's just % of subscriber's listening time. Someone who gets more plays by absolute numbers is going to be upset when they don't get a proportionate amount of money. The only way to make more money on Spotify is to get more fans and/or convince your existing fans to listen to fewer artists.
This is a popular HN suggestion for disbursement but it makes the math super weird.
This isn't likely to happen or change, but what if subscribers were instead billed by usage? If you streamed 24 hours a day for the whole month, that could round out to $10 a month, but if less, then simply a proportional percentage.
Spotify would never forgo current profits from flat monthly plans, but then why shouldn't artists be granted the same advantages in royalties proportional to a subscriber's ratio of playtime if the subscribers are charged a flat rate any how?
shameless plug:
SoundCloud implements a "fan powered royalties" model, so that $10 in your example goes to those who artists who you stream
https://community.soundcloud.com/fanpoweredroyalties
I have often thought this method made more sense. It should not be total revenue / total streams, it should be what a single person pays going to exactly what they listen to.
It isn’t fair that someone who listens to a ton of things has a much greater say in how the money is distributed even though they pay the same as someone who only listens to one artist.
By that logic the most fair would be pay per play for every song, with some fraction to the artist. But subscribers really like the single payment for unlimited plays model.
Whether that is the most ‘fair’ method or not, a pay per play model wouldn’t be the best for either listeners, artists, or streaming company.
There is always this challenge for creating a business model around digital goods; there is a non-zero cost to create the good, but there is a near zero cost per unit of the good.
No one is going to want a pay per listen model. The heaviest users aren’t going to want to pay that much and will likely turn to piracy, and the lightest users don’t have that strong a desire to listen to music (as demonstrated by their light usage) to want to pay for each stream.
The advantage of a single price, all you can stream, model is that it generates revenue for artists AND it properly recognizes the fact that each stream has a near zero unit cost.
In my model, each listener generates a fixed revenue that is divided up amongst all the artists who create something that user listens to in the same proportion that they listen to it.
It would just mean your total fixed subscription cost is apportioned across all of the artists you play in the month in proportion. It’s not an extremely difficult calculation.
Yeah that would work, but then the more you listen the less each artist gets per stream. Which is less fair to the artists, especially for subscribers who listen to a wide range of artists.
Why is it less fair? The artist gets less revenue per stream, but it doesn’t cost the artist more per stream, and they are earning the revenue per user.
For example, let’s imagine a subscription service with just two users, paying $10 a month and each only listens to a single artist. The first user listens to their favorite album once a day, while the second user listens to their favorite album 9 times a day.
Would it be fair for the artist the first person listens to to only earn $2 while the other artist earns $18? Why should the money spent by the fan of Artist A be used to subsidize the support of artist B, even though they never listen to their stream?
This quirk of “divide by total streams” instead of “divide each users subscription by their particular stream” has lead to a type of fraud where someone will submit a song to Spotify, then create thousands of accounts that just listen to that song 24/7. Those 24/7 listening accounts have unfair say in who gets paid, so much so that you can make more than the subscription price just by having that user stream your songs.
I just found out Spotify is $20? In my country it's less than $3. Why the huge pricing difference.
It usually comes down to cost of living in the county.
Speaking of Spotify, they apparently just updated their Terms of Use as of September 3, 2025, effective September 26, 2025. From the email I received:
> We have clarified that you may only access the version of the Spotify service available where you live at the applicable price set for that version of the service.
> We have clarified how we bill you for subscriptions and how subscriptions may be canceled.
> We have provided more information about different ways in which content may be posted or shared on the platform.
> We have also provided more information about our content policies and practices, and our personalized recommendations.
> We have included links to important user policies and guidelines for your ease of reference.
> We are making some updates to the arbitration agreement.
Found some more discussion of pricing issues:
https://old.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/comments/1n4x58f/spoti...
And this change was not called out in the email, but seems interesting to note:
https://musictechpolicy.com/2025/09/02/ai-implications-of-sp...
YouTube have done the same with the Premium subscription. From the email I received:
> We are updating the Terms of Service for YouTube Premium, YouTube Music Premium and YouTube Premium Lite subscriptions ('Terms'). These new Terms will be included in the YouTube Paid Service Terms of Service and will come into effect on September 26, 2025.
> We are making these changes to improve clarity and transparency regarding your subscription, including:
I believe that the date may be the end of Q3 for the financial year, if I had to guess, which might explain the similar moves by both parties, though I'll admit that I'm speculating on that point. There's a lot of overlap in vested interests on Spotify and YouTube, when it comes to music especially.
I guess it's time to cancel my youtube premium sub since it's US-based but I no longer live there and it's not available where I live now.
One of the big differences between the old days and today is that you have exponentially more musicians releasing music every day due to how easy it is for bedroom producers to create and release tracks with very little barrier to entry. I can create 10 songs in a weekend on my laptop in my basement and send them out to all of the major streaming services for about 20 bucks.
This floods the market with many, many independent musicians trying to get heard. And the only way to get heard today is to make it onto curated Spotify playlists, build a following, and hope that someone at a record company somewhere hears you and takes interest. Not only is Spotify a tool for consuming music by the public, it is also the main way that musicians have to promote themselves anymore.
As a musician (who gave up the dream of making this a job long ago), it really sucks. There is infinitely more competition out there now, and when you factor in all the AI crap making it on to Spotify (some of which they are responsible for), it is even worse.
What style of music were you making? I suspect, and this goes for more than just the music industry, that it helps if you're a natural self-promoter.
I make 90'S-ish indie rock. I play all the instruments (drums, guitar, bass, keys) and sing.
Having to self-promote is the main struggle, and that's the only way to "make it" anymore. Similar with the book publishing industry. My wife spent a year writing an amazing book, paying an editor, but when shopping it around to publishers, none of them would bite because she didn't already have a social media following. They expect you to have 20k followers knowing that X percent of those will buy the product.
And any time spent self-promoting (especially before launch) is time not spent on the key creation itself. I imagine having a natural interest in it and/or then a very low-touch habit of creating and promoting is important. e.g., set up a camera as part of the writing or recording process, and find a highly-imperfect option for editing the resulting media for upload.
Not GP, but I believe Polyphia [1] self-produces on a laptop in a bedroom (or at least did when they started out?).
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_gkpYORQLU
Why do you choose the CD era as your comparison point? Why not cassettes, or the LP decades? The industry has changed a lot and choosing a different baseline is illuminating to any discussion of "fair" compensation.
What hasn't changed is the fact that vertically integrated distribution-and-promotion with large market share has all the leverage, all the information, and all the legislative influence. In any time period where that exists, the same result plays out through different media.
That is to say, in terms of negotiating power, free market economics, and political influence the artist is not just strongly disadvantaged, but artificially so. It's not a David and Goliath, it's more like David and the Death Star.
When Roger Fischer, Adam Smith, and Jack Abramoff would all agree that one side probably needs some extra support, it's a good bet that "fair" lies so far on the other side of the scale that we don't have to worry about precision or philosophy of "fairness" to make a big improvement.
Because CD has not been superseded by any other physical media? Nobody sells music on an USB stick or on a microSD card. If I go to buy music, it will be always CD.
I recall reading a report somewhere that vinyl sales are higher than CD sales in the US.
Right, and the same argument applies: "But a USB/MicroSD format would carry more bits in a smaller space than CDs, and be less fragile, it's just a more convenient physical format for music!"
But a) there is no mass market for any physical format any more. It's driven by nostalgia. And b) There's more nostalgia for Vinyl than for CDs simply because they were the main medium for much longer. Of course CDs are less fragile and bulky than Vinyl, just like SD cards are less fragile and bulky than CDs, and streaming on existing devices is even more convenient. But that's not the driving factor. It's all fun until someone leaves their Vinyl record collection in a hot car for a few hours.
I think microSD cards are a bit to small to be convenient. They easily get lost or broken. USB has a nice form factor for storing and transport but the UX for the player is worse, as the stick doesn't vanish in the player like a CD or a microSD card. I think the best UX, would be an SD card the size of a bank card, that can be put in a slot, but the marginal difference to a CD is really low.
I don't know anything about the data. But I literally just purchased a record player that my soon to be 14 year old daughter requested for her birthday. She doesn't have and has never requested a CD player.
> CD has not been superseded by any other physical media
What's a Blu-ray DVD disk then?
If there still was a mass market for music on physical media, CDs would have been superseded, either by an optical disk or some kind of SD card.
But there isn't. so it hasn't.
Where can I buy music on a Blu-ray DVD? They are simply more expensive, while nobody needs the extra space for music data. At least where I live music is only sold on CD. There are new vinyl disks being produced for a retro market, but a player for these needs significantly more space then a Compact Disc. In addition to buying a new player I would also be bound to only play music at home. Every car has a CD tray, my laptop has one, I have several players at home.
> Where can I buy music on a Blu-ray DVD
The format and equipment exists, it's called "blu ray audio"
The fact that it's not in widespread use is my point exactly: the mass market isn't there any more.
> Every car has a CD tray,
I think that will go the way of a headphone jack on a iPhone. Cars have bluetooth.
> my laptop has one,
CD players on laptops literally have gone the way of a headphone jack on a iPhone. They're rare to non-existent on new models.
> I have several players at home.
So do I - they're in a box somewhere.
You're not refuting my point at all - there's not successor to CDs, not because it's a perfect, modern medium for physical music. But just because there is no longer a mass market for music on any physical media.
> The fact that it's not in widespread use is my point exactly: the mass market isn't there any more.
Their might not be a mass market for neither, but these are not available in the same scale at all. You maybe can find blu ray audio somewhere on the internet, but I've never seen them, while the the music store has hundreds of CDs and every street musician and band sells CDs.
I honestly do not know what the selling point of a Blu-ray disk is. The form factor is exactly the same and nobody needs the capacity. The capacity of a DVD is already too large, why should anyone use a Blue-ray disk? Neither want the musicians produce and sell more than some hours of music, nor do consumers need music for days without interruption. There simply is no kind of music which takes more than a few hours.
So the only difference is that the disk is more expensive and the player is likely incompatible, so hardly a benefit.
> So do I - they're in a box somewhere.
I was only talking about players in use.
[dead]
I used to work with a former member of a moderately successful rock band (they had a song in Guitar Hero, for example). He'd talk a bit about the royalties he'd received. His royalties from Spotify were negligible. Like single digit dollars per month.
Think about a ~$15/hour job. A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that. Only the top fraction of a percentage of artists on Spotify hit that.
Music has always been a tough business with middle men taking the lion's share of the upside. Streaming services just add another layer of middlemen.
how much did their label get?
> A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that
How many hours did it take to create the songs? You can write a song and then keep making money off it for years. There are also other revenue streams, with live performances and merchandise, etc.
I don’t think you can really compare music streaming to a full time job unless someone is ONLY making music for streaming and doing it 40 hours a week.
I’m not sure about this accounting. I know some artists with very successful songs and they made nothing substantial from millions of streams
Could it be that the streaming platform pays 0.005 which then gets divided amongst the whole band, and then the label takes their cut for producing and marketing it?
Whereas before, the label was simply giving 10%?
I managed a few artists in the past. Usually Spotify paid something like $0.0035 per stream but it ranges based on where the listen took place. One artist owned part of their catalog so earned the 100% on those streams. The rest of their catalog was owned by a major label where they were credited 15% of the streaming take (which was slightly higher than the direct rate) towards their unrecouped major label account.
I'd say overall though, streaming can be good for artists. It helps keep them fresh in fans ears (via auto-generated & editorial playlists) and provides a revenue stream for the older stuff that would never be selling in stores or iTunes now.
Question (You may or may not have insight): What happens when I download a playlist and listen to it offline in my car on an hours long roadtrip? Do my “streams” get counted once I get back online? Does the artist get credit for an estimated number of streams based on typical patterns? Does the artist get bupkis since I might play a song ten times but it wasn’t technically streamed to me?
The article says they purchase from bandcamp which takes less than 20%, and support them on patreon.
> The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005.
Not saying it's perfect, but Qobuz is paying[1] ~3.5x that.
I've been trying it out as a Spotify alternative, fairly pleased so far, though the "radio" feature in Spotify is better at finding new tracks I like.
That said I buy albums on Bandcamp for stuff I really enjoy.
[1]: https://community.qobuz.com/press-en/qobuz-unveils-its-avera...
I was always a fan of not per stream but of percentage based minutes listened. I spend 15€ every month, take off taxes and Spotify operating expenses, which would be like 10€ left: - I listen to X 90% of my total listening minutes this month, so they get 9€.
- I listen to Y 10% of my total listening minutes this month, so they get 1€
I think this would be fair, because I kinda listen the same minutes every month, and most people with a fixed daily schedule probably do it too.
> I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen?
Fundamentally, inflation-adjusted there are 1/2 as many dollars coming in the front end to the US music industry in the 2020s as there were in the 90s peak, per most sources... even though population is 30% higher. So per-capita music spend in inflation adjusted dollars is down like 60-65%. And there's probably far more artists to spread that around to now with the long tail of bedroom producers / part timers / etc all the way up to Swift.
So surely artists are making less than they used to, regardless of how the pie is sliced up because there is a smaller pie. Given the trend in everything else in our economy, I am dubious that the newer streaming arrangements are incrementally more artist-friendly than the old physical media music industry.
Spotify isn’t setting a market price, so I’m not sure what your argument is here.
Setting a market price means a band in really high demand can charge X dollars but a new band, that isn’t well known and doesn’t have high demand could charge X/4 dollars.
Spotify OTOH, charges exactly the same price to the user no matter what song they listen to, and the price is “Monthly cost/number of songs listened to”. Unsurprisingly, instead of leading to the promotion and creation of a whole new set of bands, which is what the democratization of tools and knowledge of music through the internet should have led to, this has instead led to consolidation because the removal of the market price and setting a flat structure means people continue to flock towards the songs that are perceived to be the highest value, ie the most popular stuff.
>So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song?
The amount they'd get for royalties if you couldn't pirate but had to buy their album/single to hear it. So similar to what they got at the pre-mp3/pre-Napster era. Remove a little for the (non existing) physical costs.
(Whether they'd actually get 100% or 0.5% of those royalties would be between them and their record company contract).
"But this is streaming"
And my argument still is: you should pay the amount analogous to buying it once, and then stream it forever or zero times. Streaming should just add the convenience, not change the pricing.
That isn't how Spotify distributes their revenue
> Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors.
From here: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/understanding...
That's why I like bandcamp. Artists choose the price for their music and I'm free to pay that price, or more, if I think that's fair compensation.
>… should be able to earn money from <activity>…
I wonder what forms our perception of what activity should be able to earn money from and what should not. I know that me being a professional nap taker should not be able to earn money from it, but when does one activity turn into ‘should be able to earn money from’?
Now ask how much global distribution used to cost. It's $40/yr right now with Spotify. That alone makes Spotify a massive boon for artists. Any bedroom artists complaining about Spotify just don't understand the industry at all. It's a performance art and always will be. If you can't get people to come to your shows or don't even play shows, well, look inward.
I think I may think about it in the opposite direction. It's not that the artist makes too little, for me it's just that the platform makes too much. Spotify _should_ be taking a 5-10% cut, and anything above that is unfair.
That's not enforcable or anything, but it is why I think artist are paid too little while also thinking the subscription is expensive.
It is also implied that the author is now pirating their music, so now instead of the artist getting some money from the author, they get none.
The author says they buy the albums.
"Moving away from Spotify doesn't mean abandoning artists. In fact, I now support musicians more directly by:
Purchasing music directly from platforms like Bandcamp where artists receive 82-90% of sales Buying physical media from official stores Supporting Patreon/subscription services for favorite artists Attending concerts and buying merchandise Buying a $10 album on Bandcamp puts about $8.20-$9.00 in the artist's pocket. To match that on Spotify, you're talking roughly 1.6k-3k streams of that album per listener. If the artist has a label taking a cut on Spotify, the stream counts needed go up further.
My self-hosted setup is about controlling my listening experience and owning what I pay for, not avoiding fair compensation to artists."
I assumed a lot of that was a disclaimer to try and avoid encouraging illegal activity outright.
Lidarr seems to be a cornerstone of the setup. I assume Bandcamp is for more obscure indie stuff that isn't as available from the pirates.
Lidarr isn't just for piracy, it's a good tool for keeping your library organised.
It does musicbrains matching, fixes the metadata based on that, fetches pretty pictures of the artist etc.
There are other tools for it, but Lidarr is what works for me.
They specifically mention: lidarr is connected to sabnzbd. They add 'to download music I bought' but I find that very hard to believe.
Since when do sites like band camp etc expose your bought library over usenet?
He is implying that he only downloads music from usenet that he purchased in some form somewhere else. Whether that is any less illegal, I don't know.
Artists no longer make money from selling music. They make money from live performances, or niche products like vinyl records/merch. But from streaming services? Not really.
Live performances also have the added benefit of shielding artists from AI music.
Maybe a market-based approach is inherently flawed for things like art, research, various services (health, education, etc)
I'd say I pay 10€ per month and it gets evenly split by the artists's songs I've listened to that month.
If I only listen to one song or rather one artist. They get all the money (minus the fees for running the service).
If I listen to 100 songs by 100 artists, each gets only 10 cents (minus the blablabla).
That's how it should be, really.
I can't say whether the music industry fairly compensates artists or not. I can say that the film industry, for example, has leveraged each subsequent evolution in distribution technology as on opportunity to shift profits towards distributors and away from those involved in production.
How much they should make I'd say is up to how much you value them. If you really like an artist and want to support them, a objectively better way than just streaming their music is purchasing their albums, vinyls, merch, etc.
> So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making?
The value of recorded music is now zero.
Recorded music having A value was a result of markup on distribution profits. There is now no money in distribution. (There are a lot of parallels between how globalization works and how the record industry worked but thats another conversation).
ML, generative music is coming for the music industry.
Its not hopeless but your Spotify is just a loss leader. It's a gateway to your social media, to your (paid) endorsements and to your shows (another problematic facet of the industry) and merch. There are plenty of ways people with talent and a "voice" can profit. But you better be consistent and authentic.
A better comparison is the pre-streaming royalties from radio and Muzak.
Does the record company make more money than the artist? That’s unfair to me.
The people making the art, should be paid the most.
> The people making the art, should be paid the most.
Why? There's a fair market value for the art. There's also a fair real world cost* for distributing and advertising, set by the market (the people working those positions need to eat too). It's trivially easy to go negative, if you try to market something that isn't popular.
If it weren't a net benefit for the artist, they wouldn't go under a label, or stream on a certain platform. They're not being forced to. They do it because it results in more money in their pocket.
>There's a fair market value for the art
Fair ain't got nothing to do with it. Markets don't give a shit about 'fair'.
Fair from the perspective of the person doing the work. I'm using the dictionary definition of "fair" here: A fair exchange is an interaction or agreement where both parties feel they are receiving something of equal value for what they give, resulting in satisfaction and balance rather than resentment or guilt. I'm not using the "living wage" definition, which is a phrase that's not related to the definition of the individual words that it uses.
If they didn't find the compensation fair, for their effort, they wouldn't do the work, and would do something else instead. You want to see positions that that are at the boundary of "fair"? They have incredibly high turnover rates, because people think "this isn't worth it" and quit. Where I am, fast food is a great example of this, where the companies weren't paying wages people wanted to work for, leading to unsustainable turnover, labor shortages, then pay increases.
Too true. For clarification, unhinged "free market" is how you end up with capitalism, try the the same with the "fair market" you get communism.
With unhinged free market you get monopolists and no free market.
With streaming, distribution costs are effectively zero. There is marketing but only up front. Nobody’s marketing 1970s rock bands anymore but they still get a lot of listens.
> They do it because it results in more money in their pocket.
more than zero can still be too little money in exchange for the labor provided and the profit produced.
If the value that others get from it is not worth the effort that someone puts into making it, then we say it's unsustainable. You can't make people give you money, to cover the cost of something they don't want. And, that goes for the entire chain of human effort that is from the artist to the listener.
There's a team that maintains the internet connection so the author can upload. * maintains a storage array/metadata catalog to hold the song. * creates the algorithm to recommend the music to people. * creates ads to recommend the service to people. * ...etc
If any part of this chain finds their effort not worth the value they receive, the whole chain stops. The point before it stops is the market value of that service. Someone charges more than the market value? Then someone else, who finds the effort worth the cheaper pay, will do it (ok, besides monopolies that have captured the government, but they're not really relevant in this case).
If you think it's possible to do what you want, then put the effort into starting a service! You don't want to? Well, nobody else does either, because what they get in return will not be worth the effort.
We live in a society.
and yet, artists are paid fractions of pennies for the privilege of allowing their music to be streamed while streaming company owners make millions and millions of dollars and put that money into machines that kill children. some society.
Or, the reality is that everyone in the chain of effort wants, and deserves, a bit of money in their pocket, for their efforts. If that chain means nothing comes out the other end, it doesn't mean there's a problem with society, it means that the tech isn't there yet to make the chain shorter/cheaper. I'll leave that advancement to you! You can do the right thing, the thing nobody else wants to do, and make the service that solves this issue. As others have said, distribution costs are near zero, so, it must be easy!
If I buy a machine, then hire a worker to make a widget. And I sell that widget for $20 but pay him $10 is that fair? The machine, shipping, sales, marketing, inventory arent free.
I'm a pretty dyed in the wool anarchist, and I'd say most leftists would say, "of course costs for capital should be considered in prices." The objection is when your costs are $5 for non labor, $10 for labor and you sell the part for $20. Where's that excess value going? Maybe once the costs of the machines are paid off, the workers should all get raises, right?
I don't know a ton of the specifics for music, but I am not sure if I agree your statement is always true. A lot can go into producing and distributing music, and I don't think it is fair to say the artist should always make more than all the other people who work on making the music happen combined. It isn't just a 'company' making that money, it is all the people working behind the scenes, all the investment in equipment and things, etc. I would need a lot more info on cost breakdown before I say the blanket statement of "the artist should make more"
This is often the case where one side is an expert at contracts and business and the other side is an artist.
I went to a show recently and the band was performing old material and they stopped to make a big deal about how they finally won back their music after 10 years. Famously Prince and Taylor Swift also went public with their disputes.
Good for them, but they signed the contract that locked up their rights for a decade. It seems weird to get too upset at the label for what you thought was a good deal at the time.
In the world we've built, mainstream success isn't defined by ability or quality, but rather polish and marketing reach. Marketing works because the average human is pretty shallow.
Would it be different if we started over? Maybe.
It seems like no one understands what a record deal is. Or an advance. Or publishing rights.
No one needs to sign a record deal. Or take an advance (which is a loan).
It’s like VC money. There are plenty of threads here which recommend not taking VC money and bootstrapping instead.
And yes, some artists self fund, self publish and self-upload. I’m not defending Spotify or streaming rates, just saying platitudes don’t seem sufficiently nuanced or informed.
I agree. The networking, distribution and expertise is a huge leg up in most cases. Not everyone can vulfpeck.
Why?
That's the way they feel. Why do you think it shouldn't be that way?