The only thing I ever see are people comparing against the money that 90's rockstars used to be able to bring in from album sales.
That ship sailed a long time ago, Spotify take everyone's money, substract a percentage for themselves and distribute the rest based upon number of plays.
If you were a big artist it's probably worse because you aren't getting a sweet deal to pull you onto a label (which we would then have you bitching about in the music press every week), or your a smaller artist and don't make much off it because you don't get the plays but you would have never seen the big money from tape/CD sales anyway.
I've also seen people argue that they never see the sort of money that they would get with a single play from BBC Radio, completely misunderstanding that BBC radio would probably never play their song, there is a much smaller bandwidth for playing music. Per person listening to your song, it works out not far off a play on Radio 6.
Maybe I have a different memory of record deals, but I've never heard of a band that made money from album sales. This is why they are always touring. It's not to promote the album, but to make money themselves. That's why there are jokes about bands "coming out of retirement" to do a tour after so many years being because one of the members needs to make a payment for something or other.
Spotify follows the same game-book as the record companies did in the early 00's.
Pay nearly-nothing to the artist, take money for themselves and charge the consumer. Nothing has changed other than an online-internet enabled application than a CD.
You don't even have your own physical copy, once you hit cancel you loose all. So your locked in to a model where if you wish to listen to music you are forced to pay, otherwise unless you head for the sea's and download which IS illegal and where the artist gets completely nothing, you've got nothing. Where at any point is that fair?
If Spotify sent you a CD of your top-listens of the year then that would be something.
> Pay nearly-nothing to the artist, take money for themselves and charge the consumer.
No they don't, they pay out 70% of all their taking.
The problem is that almost all artists work through labels still. Spotify pays the label who then screws over the artist in the same way they always have.
You are misdirecting your anger, just like the RIAA wants you to.
Maybe so, could of done royalty google-fu before hand but still, my anger is more focused at today's subscription models and my point still stands where you own nothing in return.
I don't use Spotify, nor any subscription model for that matter. If I can't own it, then oh well. This goes for consumer products too.
It used to be the other way around. The bulk of income was from album sales, and touring was considered advertisement for the album sales. Many tours had to basically sell out completely before they would turn a profit. Arena tickets were $20 and significantly less for smaller venues.
Not surprisingly, the reason it was this way is because the label got most of the profit from the albums and the artists got most of the profit from touring. And since the labels were in control, they optimized for album sales. They loved it when a tour lost money, because then the artist owed them money.
I believe it was the 90s when tours started becoming more profitable than albums.
Streaming platforms (let's not just pick on Spotify, though they also pay worse than others) just do this arbitrarily. They decide how much to skim off for themselves before graciously paying artists. This isn't how it works in basically any other industry where one group of skilled individuals create content that is then sold on some marketplace - instead, the sale price and proceeds are visible to all, and the middleman takes a well-defined, reasonable cut of that.
There's no need to compare streaming platforms to other models of paying musicians, in order to know they're getting a bum deal. This model is not fair in the slightest, and it's perfectly alright to be upset about it.
Ironically it's widely known that the labels get 70% of all music revenue and Spotify gets to keep 30% for itself (which famously hasn't been enough to even turn a profit). You couldn't be more wrong.
You're right, I didn't know this. I was under the impression that Spotify self-reported its split and that it wasn't really auditable in any way. Can you link to a source?
The cited source there is some old Spotify PR. Which, if you dive into, eventually states:
> Our current payment agreements lead us to distribute (~)approximately 70% of our gross revenues to master recording and publishing rights (both mechanical reproduction and performance) holders. The precise division between these types of rights holders varies by territory in accordance with local laws and negotiated agreements.
So, 70% / 30% is actually just a self-reported figure, and also just a ballpark based on current agreements at the time. Also, I couldn't find a current version of this page, only the archived one cited. All current versions of this page seem to have nothing but deflection, which might indicate that their self-reported figure has become less flattering.
iTunes had a formal sale price, and it still led a catastrophic collapse in music sales revenue (https://money.cnn.com/2013/04/25/technology/itunes-music-dec...) which only ended when Spotify became big. The point of a comparison is to understand whether Spotify is doing something that could be fixed to get more revenue to artists, or whether the economics of selling songs for money just don’t work very well in a digital world.
Online app stores, craft stores (Etsy), contracting services (Fiverr), even some other streaming services with direct subscription sales (like Twitch). All also marketplaces where skilled creators are selling the actual value that drives it.
Ah gotcha. These are the site where creators don't have another middleman like record labels ?
I am not sure how payouts work if you can even publish directly on spotify.
The only thing I ever see are people comparing against the money that 90's rockstars used to be able to bring in from album sales.
That ship sailed a long time ago, Spotify take everyone's money, substract a percentage for themselves and distribute the rest based upon number of plays.
If you were a big artist it's probably worse because you aren't getting a sweet deal to pull you onto a label (which we would then have you bitching about in the music press every week), or your a smaller artist and don't make much off it because you don't get the plays but you would have never seen the big money from tape/CD sales anyway.
I've also seen people argue that they never see the sort of money that they would get with a single play from BBC Radio, completely misunderstanding that BBC radio would probably never play their song, there is a much smaller bandwidth for playing music. Per person listening to your song, it works out not far off a play on Radio 6.