Alright well when I win the lotto I'll make sure to pick up the AVR with Spotify for my home theater
On a more serious note, Spotify needs an Apple Watch or Apple TV app
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U.S. Music Industry Revenue Grew 11% in 2016 Thanks to Streaming Music Services
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On a more serious note, Spotify needs an Apple Watch or Apple TV app
I don't want to pay for the right to use music. I want to own the disc. I have physical records I've owned almost my entire life. Things that exist in the physical world, that you own... they take on meaning. Paying to stream music is too sterile, soulless and cold for me. I pay all this money and what do I have to show for it? Nothing. Because you're not actually acquiring a damn thing.
Plus, the entire idea of playing music at 256kbps via the DAC in a smartphone makes me want to vomit. Do you realize how poor that sounds coming out of a great system like the one I own? Even Tidal sounds horrible using a phone's DAC. It's such a waste of money.
That is true, but there is also the issue of availability and convenience. I have a decent physical collection (around 3000 titles in all) and haven't played a single song from the physical media itself for over 10 years now. The exception being new purchases (typical 'support buys' from concerts) that I of course play to rip it to digital if it for some rare reason isn't already available.
Of course my physical collection is more important to me than my Spotify subscription, but it is not my actual source for either listening to or discovering music anymore. If anything, services like Spotifys Discover Weekly makes me discover more music that is new to me at a rate that I have never been close to before, even though I spent a significant amount of time and money to do just that in the late 80s and 90s.
The actual music is more important to me than the way it is delivered.
But that's your choice. You chose to go the convenience rout. It's optional. No one is making you trade convince for quality yet. Spotify, even at its highest bit rate, isn't even one third of a compact disc. If that's fine with your ears, then so be it but it sounds horrible to me.
That last part isn't true. More music is consumed today than at Amy point in history. The issue is we have de valued it.
Uh people ARE listening to it. The artists just aren't making money from it through streaming.
Quoted from https://www.wired.com/2014/11/aloe-blacc-pay-songwriters/
"Consider the fact that it takes roughly one million spins on Pandora for a songwriter to earn just $90. Avicii’s release “Wake Me Up!” that I co-wrote and sing, for example, was the most streamed song in Spotify history and the 13th most played song on Pandora since its release in 2013, with more than 168 million streams in the US. And yet, that yielded only $12,359 in Pandora domestic royalties— which were then split among three songwriters and our publishers. In return for co-writing a major hit song, I’ve earned less than $4,000 domestically from the largest digital music service.
If that’s what’s now considered a streaming “success story,” is it any wonder that so many songwriters are now struggling to make ends meet?
The reality is that people are consuming music in a completely different way today. Purchasing and downloading songs have given way to streaming, and as a result, the revenue streams that songwriters relied upon for years to make a living are now drying up.
But the irony of the situation is that our music is actually being enjoyed by more people in more places and played across more platforms (largely now digital) than ever before. Our work clearly does have value, of course, or else it would not be in such high demand. So why aren’t songwriters compensated more fairly in the marketplace?"
Sad...
Wanna guess his salary if just ONE PERCENT of those 168 million listeners had bought the $0.99 single via iTunes instead of listening through a cheap, devaluing dis-service?
Streaming is death. And it is NOT made up for by "getting free advertising" for concerts and merchandise (those pay nowhere near what music sales paid in the past). So stop being apologists about things you don't understand.
The myth that fans will make up for not buying music by buying t-shirts and attending shows instead is easily disproven by the facts that (a) hardly anybody has band shirts, or even near as many band shirts as they have albums, and (b) record labels used to have to subsidise tours as a promotional expense because gigging loses money for lesser-known acts (due to the hotel, travel and other expenses being much higher than the salary from a show) - the shows were there to raise awareness to be able to sell albums in-store/online.
Everyone who defends streaming is saying that big, evil streaming corporations have a right to build revenue from de-valuing other people's work (to make people flock to their particular "race to the bottom dollar" service), and that consumers have a right to subscribe cheaply to get endless music to make their lives happier... But that the people who create the music have no rights to fair compensation for their work that is being exploited by the big corporations and enjoyed by you.
This sick unfairness pisses me off almost as much as the people who don't understand it and keep making excuses, which is actually just regurgitating programming fed to them by the "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" streaming corporations. "Look how much we are paying! Look, industry revenue from streaming is going up! Don't look at how digital sales are down and how revenue as a whole has dropped massively because of our de-valuing streaming services making music lose its value and programming people to refuse to buy a great $9.99 album since they can just steal millions of albums for the same price via us. Looking at that whole picture would be taking the ever-draining livelihoods of the actual musicians into account and we don't like that. Then they might get the masses to support forcing us to give them a fair compensation for practically stealing their work; and that would hurt our corporation..."
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I'm not going to argue with your general point; I think there's reason for some rights-holders to be concerned about how the new music distribution models will work out for them.
That said, I would like to point out a few things with regard to the numbers that Aloe Black offered in that piece.
(1) Those numbers are from a couple of years ago, before the paid subscription model really started to catch on as it is doing now. There is considerable disparity between what rights-holders get from non-interactive (typically add-supported) services and what they get from interactive paid subscription services. That's especially true when it comes to songwriter / publishing rights.
(2) Those numbers are only from Pandora's service in the United States. They don't include royalties from other services or from outside the U.S., and he indicates there that he's splitting them with 2 other songwriters (with a publisher taking some portion of them).
(3) Those are only the royalties for the songwriter rights. That is, by far, the smaller portion of the rights-holders pie. The recording / master rights are typically worth many multiples of the songwriters rights.
(4) When it comes to the interactive paid subscription services that I referred to earlier, the songwriters' share of the total revenue created is roughly the same as it is for digital purchases and, for that matter, physical media purchases. In some cases it's a little higher. For physical media and digital sales, the songwriter gets 9.1 cents per song (unless the song is longer than 5 minutes). That's less than 10% if the song sells for $0.99 or more or if an album sells for $9.99 and only has 10 songs on it. For interactive paid subscription services such as Apple Music and Spotify, the songwriter gets about 10% of the revenue brought in (the formula isn't that straightforward, but that's about where it would typically land). Of course, if there are multiple songwriters and if they have a deal with a publisher, that 10% gets split up - but that's true with physical media and digital sales also.
(5) When it comes to holders of the recording rights, they get around 60% of the revenue brought in by services like Apple Music and Spotify.
(6) Looking at just the songwriters' royalties again: For that 1% of 168 million that you refer to, with digital sales (of 1.68 million) the songwriter would get a little over $150,000 (which, again, might be split between songwriters and/or songwriter(s) and their publisher; and which would be higher for songs over 5 minutes). The numbers for even interactive paid subscription services aren't as easy to pin down, but from a number of sources we have a decent idea of the ballpark. For 168 million streams the songwriter would get something similar - $150,000 or so, maybe a little less, quite possibly more. They're getting something in the ballpark of 0.1 cents per stream rather than 9.1 cents per sale.
An important thing to keep in mind, however, is that the rate per stream will change based on how much music is streamed (and how much total revenue is brought in by subscriptions). So the keys, when it comes to what rights-holders get, are how much total revenue is brought in as compared to how much was brought in by the older models (e.g. through digital and physical media sales) which are being displaced, and how popular their songs are relative to others'. We may (and I would expect that we will) see more music consumption such that the per listen compensation is less, but such that the total compensation is around the same. Rights-holders end up making just as much (though which ones get what share of that could certainly be dramatically affected) while consumers end up getting more music as they're more willing to pay for what they perceive as a better value proposition. Is that a good thing or a bad thing, even for music creators? I'll leave that for others to decide.
I would note that, with the paid subscription model taking hold, the total revenue generated seems to be stabilizing - e.g., the revenue being brought in by paid subscription streaming services is offsetting the lost revenue from sales. And rights-holders are getting more or less the same portion of that revenue, or will if the paid subscription model continues to catch on.
@Carnegie Thanks for bringing details and reason into the discussion, I love it!
"We may (and I would expect that we will) see more music consumption such that the per listen compensation is less, but such that the total compensation is around the same. Rights-holders end up making just as much (though which ones get what share of that could certainly be dramatically affected) while consumers end up getting more music as they're more willing to pay for what they perceive as a better value proposition."
I certainly hope so. The Spotify "$10" monkey-wrench has clogged up the system for a while and devalued music (by killing the idea of buying albums anymore), but I certainly hope that things will keep stabilizing until the number of subscribers is so large that the revenue pool (60-70% of all total subscriber fees) is large enough to offset the lost sales that were there before streaming existed.
I wonder what would happen if the services changed, so that the $7 (from a user's $10 subscription) is split evenly among *that user's* personal plays for the month. So let's say the user is inactive one month and only listens to 30 songs in total, 10 of which were their favorite song. That's (10/30 plays) * $7 = $2.33 USD to the creator of *that* song.
I haven't done the math and thought about whether this would anger all of the other musicians, but I think YouTube Red is doing something like this already? The subscriber fee is split among who that particular user watched that month.
Right now, I think Spotify and the rest just look at "Song X's total plays this month, divided by all plays on the whole platform that month" and adding together all of that musician's songs in this way to calculate that musician's share of the 70% pie. Which means that if a user is inactive and only listen to 30 songs one month, the $7 from their subscription fee still gets split among all songs on the whole platform.
I have not done the math and checked which would be better for musicians, but splitting the subscription fee per-user, among each individual user's listens would perhaps help, if that isn't already the case. Because there are certainly a lot of inactive users who don't listen much, and if their fees get split among who they decided to listen to, then that would mean a larger chunk for those musicians.
Then again, what would happen if a user has 0 listens one month? Just carry over the last time they listened? ;-) Hmm, I have not done the math on this at all but someone is welcome to investigate this, because I'd be curious to know how this per-user system would look.
"We may (and I would expect that we will) see more music consumption such that the per listen compensation is less, but such that the total compensation is around the same. Rights-holders end up making just as much (though which ones get what share of that could certainly be dramatically affected) while consumers end up getting more music as they're more willing to pay for what they perceive as a better value proposition."
I certainly hope so. The Spotify "$10" monkey-wrench has clogged up the system for a while and devalued music (by killing the idea of buying albums anymore), but I certainly hope that things will keep stabilizing until the number of subscribers is so large that the revenue pool (60-70% of all total subscriber fees) is large enough to offset the lost sales that were there before streaming existed.
I wonder what would happen if the services changed, so that the $7 (from a user's $10 subscription) is split evenly among *that user's* personal plays for the month. So let's say the user is inactive one month and only listens to 30 songs in total, 10 of which were their favorite song. That's (10/30 plays) * $7 = $2.33 USD to the creator of *that* song.
I haven't done the math and thought about whether this would anger all of the other musicians, but I think YouTube Red is doing something like this already? The subscriber fee is split among who that particular user watched that month.
Right now, I think Spotify and the rest just look at "Song X's total plays this month, divided by all plays on the whole platform that month" and adding together all of that musician's songs in this way to calculate that musician's share of the 70% pie. Which means that if a user is inactive and only listen to 30 songs one month, the $7 from their subscription fee still gets split among all songs on the whole platform.
I have not done the math and checked which would be better for musicians, but splitting the subscription fee per-user, among each individual user's listens would perhaps help, if that isn't already the case. Because there are certainly a lot of inactive users who don't listen much, and if their fees get split among who they decided to listen to, then that would mean a larger chunk for those musicians.
Then again, what would happen if a user has 0 listens one month? Just carry over the last time they listened? ;-) Hmm, I have not done the math on this at all but someone is welcome to investigate this, because I'd be curious to know how this per-user system would look.
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You can LOTERALLY google Spotify + artist royalties to read thousands of articles on it. I'm not sure why you find this surprising.
That's the model that I would favor.
It wouldn't change how much rights-holders as a whole get, but it would change how much particular ones get. Some would no doubt love the result while others would not.