Music artist: "Why I prefer piracy to Spotify"

http://derekwebb.tumblr.com/post/13503899950/giving-it-away-how-free-music-makes-more-than-sense

by e03179 • 15 years ago

160 103 15 years ago

derekwebb.tumblr.com

Those numbers are shocking. $0.00029 per streamed song. I just back-of-the-enveloped my iTunes library, and with 8649 plays, it's worth $2.51 on Spotify.

That's disgusting, considering the value I've gotten from it.

res0nat0r• 15 years ago

I thought that these small numbers everyone is quoting from Spotify are not so accurate. I thought there is more data related to artist compensation which isn't public knowledge, so this shouldn't be taken at face value?

JshWright2• 15 years ago

Derek seems to imply that major labels get paid more, but it seems this particular small number is accurate for this particular independent artist.

earl2• 15 years ago

Other known numbers, mostly sourced from wikipedia [1]

"There are indie labels that, as opposed to the majors and Merlin members, receive no advance, receive no minimum per stream and only get a 50% share of ad revenue on a pro-rata basis (which so far has amounted to next to nothing)." Spotify also bought off the labels by giving them a bunch of shares (18%?) Better yet, even if an artist is with a major label, apparently the revenues labels might realize from share sales are non attributable to artists and hence stay purely with the labels. This seems like utter bullshit but there you have it. [2]

A swedish band Magnus Uggla -- apparently well established -- said "after six months on the site he'd earned 'what a mediocre busker could earn in a day'" [2]

A Norwegian record label called Racing Junior earned "NOK 19 ($3.00 USD) after their artists had been streamed over 55,100 times" [1] (english) [3] (swedish)

British musician Jons Hopkins earned 8 pounds ($12.48 at current rates) for 90k plays, or $0.00013 per play [4,5]. Even if a normal purchaser played a song 250 times, (9e4/250 * 0.7) = $252, or 20 times more money.

All in all, pretty appalling. I'm a Spotify subscriber but I'm going to have to rethink it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Criticism

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/aug/17/major-...

[3] http://www.dagbladet.no/2009/08/11/kultur/musikk/spotify/mus...

[4] https://twitter.com/#!/Jon_Hopkins_/status/13714775382964633...

[5] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293641

mturmon• 15 years ago

Here's a link from the OP saying Spotify royalties really are as bad as he's saying:

http://matthewebel.com/2011/07/20/spotify-let-the-money-pour...

paulrademacher• 15 years ago

"Derek, this is your manager. Let's start with the good news: your royalty check this month has a LOT of zeros..."

theallan• 15 years ago

I'd completely agree. However, imagine the next news item is that Spotify increases their prices 5 fold, to pay out more to the artists. The comments would be full of "there is no way it should cost that much" and "I'm not paying that"!

wmf3• 15 years ago

That's the real problem: Spotify seems to be anchoring prices at an unsustainably low level. Netflix streaming is trying to do the same to video, but Hollywood is resisting.

(Although some are claiming that Spotify's pricing is similar to the amount that the average person used to spend on CDs, so why are labels getting less from Spotify than they did from CDs/iTunes?)

ColdAsIce• 15 years ago

No, Spotify has enough money to pay all their artists.

They do not want to, the money you pay to spotify goes to the owners of spotify which are the recording labels and other stock holders. Spotify is not artist-owned, the money will always go to the stock holders and owners before they reach the artist.

smackfu2• 15 years ago

The artists could easily get paid 5x, completely out of the label's share, without affecting prices. Labels screw over artists, end of story.

sleepyhead• 15 years ago

I'm not arguing that what Spotify pays artists is reasonable, but what many fail to understand is that streaming is very different from buying. I don't own the songs I listen to on Spotify thus pricing must be different. And I listen to a lot of music I would normally not buy making it more similar to radio in many ways.

earl2• 15 years ago

I'd buy an argument like that for pandora, where you can't control play order or exactly what you listen to, but come on. Spotify is a total substitution for purchase: listen to pretty much whatever you want in the order you want as many times as you want up to and including 24x7. The $5/mo subscription gives you most even moderately popular music you want for the price of 4-5 cds, with shipping, per year. So obviously spotify shouldn't be forking out $.70 per track per play, but hearing things like artists like Jons Hopkins getting the price of a cd for 90 thousand plays (ie if a song is 5 minutes long listening to it for three hundred and twelve days) is far far too low. [1] I don't know how to set the right rate, but this isn't it...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293892

lt3• 15 years ago

Does "owning" a song makes any sense in the digital world, or is it a relic of the physical album days?

Even besides the licensing/ownership fact (you have always purchased a license to listen to the music privately), I bet there's more music released in a given day than hours in that day. I keep thinking that the model where you can just listen to whatever you want for a flat flee makes a lot more sense in this universe.

bad_user• 15 years ago

You NEVER "own" the songs you buy. You only "own" the right of listening to those songs whenever you want.

So how is "owning" a CD any different from Spotify?

Also, the value of a song diminishes the more you listen to it. Seriously, even if you love a song, put it on repeat for a day and you probably won't listen to it again for a couple of months.

So it's not like Spotify customers will one day buy the music, unless they really have very specific needs, like being somewhere with a bad or expensive Internet connection, but if you subscribed to Spotify in the first place then I doubt that.

sammyo• 15 years ago

I heard a recent song writers music playing at the grocery the other day, how much per play do you think the artist gets for that? It would make a more accurate metric than trying to compare CD sales.

ticks• 15 years ago

One thing to bear in mind is that you are comparing the price of buying something to a one-off rental. The rental business has always paid poorly, with retailers only purchasing a single copy and reusing it (i.e. they pay once, then rent it until it becomes too damaged). At least with Spotify, they hopefully pay each time.

thomasgerbe• 15 years ago

Relevant: https://twitter.com/#!/Jon_Hopkins_/status/13714775382964633...

MatthewPhillips• 15 years ago

> Music does have monetary value.

The market says otherwise. People are willing to pay almost nothing for music, even risking huge penalties, because it does have value (the other types you listed). Just not monetary.

bluekeybox2• 15 years ago

All types of value can be monetized; the only trick is how. So unless music has no value whatsoever (which would be absurd, since no one would bother making it in that case), it can be monetized.

jarek3• 15 years ago

Does putting ads on a torrent site count?

bobwaycott2• 15 years ago

This is absolutely disgusting.

Value != money.

What a sad bit of reasoning. Monetizing destroys value. The value of music and other arts has nothing to do with how well or poorly it is monetized.

chii• 15 years ago

they are risking "huge" penaties not because the value of music is zero, but because the chance of getting caught is next to zero.

risk = penalty * chance of getting caught

If there is a no risk way of getting something which otherwise has to cost you money, you'd do it. Hence piracy.

InclinedPlane2• 15 years ago

So tens of billions of dollars in sales per year for music is "almost nothing"? By such logic Amazon.com and google "almost" don't exist at all.

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

Considering nearly every single person on the planet listens to music of some sort, I would assert that that number really is rather small.

aaronbrethorst• 15 years ago

That's funny, I recently paid $120 for two tickets to see Death Cab for Cutie perform songs live that I've heard a thousand times before on my computer.

(I've seen them live probably 7-8 times, and have likely shelled out something around $600-700 total for the privilege. Music absolutely has monetary value.)

lt3• 15 years ago

You're paying for the performance. You wouldn't pay that just to hear the studio songs be played over the amps. And I guess you'd be fairly satisfied even if they only played songs you haven't heard before.

sp3323• 15 years ago

So you pay almost nothing (on average) to listen to the music, but you pay hundreds for other things.

chunkyslink4• 15 years ago

Not true. I collect music and pay for it 2 or 3 times a week.

ptmx• 15 years ago

In this case, observing the actual spending practices of people can only set a lower bound on willingness to pay. If you're obtaining something for free, it certainly doesn't preclude you from being willing to pay for it as well. The fact that people spent significantly more on music (per capita) in the past[1] -- when it wasn't nearly as easy to obtain music for free -- suggests that how much people are currently paying is probably a poor measure of their willingness to pay.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real...

mehwoot• 15 years ago

Hooray, now all the people stealing music can feel good about themselves because one particular artist agrees with them. Ergo, it is ethically ok.

JshWright2• 15 years ago

I take it you didn't read the article?

The entire point of the post is that _Spotify_, rather than piracy, is the option that lets users "feel good about themselves". With piracy, at least the user _knows_ they're not compensating the artist.

wmf3• 15 years ago

I think you can take both interpretations. Someone might think "if Spotify is paying artists virtually nothing, I might as well cut out the middle man and just pirate music".

shibboleth2• 15 years ago

These are just my views from what I've experienced during my time in the industry, but the figure being given by Derek Webb is extraordinarily low for a service like Spotify, even for an (assumed?) independent artist. The price he gives for Spotify's artist payment per listen ($0.00029) is even lower than Last.FM's ($0.00070). For additional comparison, Spotify pays labels $0.002 while Last.FM pays $0.005. I'm not exactly sure how/why Last.FM pays better than Spotify, but I would wager to guess that it is a combination of Spotify having larger operating expenses and advertisers willing to pay less per session. Nonetheless, these figures are awfully low and I would like to see more artists coming forward with information like this (even though it probably won't matter).

After looking through some notes, I found that Rhapsody is closer to Spotify when it comes to artist payments. Rhapsody pays artists ~$0.0002 but pays labels significantly more at ~$0.03 (!)

sp3323• 15 years ago

I think Spotify gave the labels a large amount of stock when they made the deal. So it's not $.002/play, it's a bunch of stock + $.002/play.

shawnc• 15 years ago

Wish I could forward this over to some of my favourite, although small, bands and have them take notice. But they won't - the label deal is too important.

omfg• 15 years ago

Is the story the same with other services like Rdio? I only seem to see stuff like this talking about Spotify but the models seem similar.

blasdel• 15 years ago

Artist royalties have gone from dollars (physical albums), to dimes (digital singles), to fractions of pennies (streaming). Once you can track how much it actually gets used, it becomes readily apparent just how overvalued it's been.

See the progression in advertising from print and broadcast to adsense.

mattmanser• 15 years ago

Correlation does not imply causation.

Also the idea that listening to a song once is worth fractions of a penny is really stupid further making your 'revelation' totally fatuous.

BasDirks• 15 years ago

Title is arguably inaccurate; is freely distributing by the artist still piracy?

rdl• 15 years ago

He said in the article (admittedly toward the bottom) that he'd prefer people pirating using bittorrent to using spotify because at least it was intellectually honest.

lloeki• 15 years ago

Well it's accurate in that at some point, the author says piracy is a "worse is better" case because the pirate knows someone is not getting paid, whereas Spotify makes one think that artists get paid properly for their work.

ordinary• 15 years ago

This is not about the article, but about the page itself: can someone explain to me why you would load all the content statically, hide everything through CSS, and then show it by Javascript? I mean, I realise that I'm an exception and that most people simply have Javascript enabled all the time, but isn't it simply bad design to take the worst of both the AJAX load-everything-dynamically and the static HTML full-page-reloads-at-every-click worlds?

sp3323• 15 years ago

It might be an overly-aggressive response to "Flash of uninitialized JS UI" www.kendoui.com/blogs/teamblog/posts/11-10-06/foujui_flash_of_uninitialized_javascript_ui.aspx

chunkyslink4• 15 years ago

I'm one of those people that buys CD's and Vinyl over mp3 or streamed music. This is how it works for me.

1. I download legal podcasts / radio shows and listen for stuff I like.

2.Then I'll maybe go an MP3 site and check I have the right stuff / listen a few times to make sure I'm happy.

3. Once I know I want the music I order the CD or sometimes if I feel like splashing out, and its available, I'll order the vinyl.

The joy I get from music and the importance it has to my happiness and productivity means I'm getting a good deal.

I have no idea if the artist gets a better deal because of it, but I hope so. The real reason I do this. MP3 sound quality is not the same and Spotify just sounds flat to me. (excluding your compressed to all fuck pop songs)

edit: Also I can honestly say, I do not have one pirated piece of music on my machine. That makes me feel good :)

hessenwolf• 15 years ago

My girlfriend's Father was like that, and then he died suddenly one day. They were moving to Israel post soviet breakup, and needed money, and they literally could not give away the thousands and thousands of rubles of music that nobody was interested in, and had to leave it in the bin.

chunkyslink4• 15 years ago

Thats a sad story :(

comex• 15 years ago

Just curious: Have you considered iTunes or other high-quality digital music sources? I've heard that most people can't distinguish 256kbps AAC from CD quality.

chunkyslink4• 15 years ago

I do own AAC tracks and they are fine, but if I'm going to buy an AAC track - I'd rather have the physical CD.

ugh5• 15 years ago

You have to personally test that. (You should obviously do a blind test. When I did this I didn’t go all out and fired up R, but some statistical analysis would certainly not be overkill.) I can’t tell them apart but other people might.

It would be absurd, though, for me to buy CDs over AAC files because of the audio quality. Additionally to the indistinguishable audio quality I get a better price (I guess I’m paying about one third less on average), instant delivery wherever I am and the music is nice and compact. I don’t have to deal with boxes full of CDs.

Streaming doesn’t fit the way I listen to music (nor are any great streaming services available in Germany). I like my curated music collection.

adestefan• 15 years ago

I also buy physical CDs and it has nothing to do with quality. It's because I can usually get the CD used for cheaper than I can get the digital music. I'm also a whole album listener over individual tracks on random.

bunderbunder2• 15 years ago

In my experience, that depends heavily on both the listener and the music. Rock and pop music, which cram everything into the midrange, compress well. But music which strays further into the treble and bass doesn't. Even when a difference shows up, whether it's noticeable is going to depend on who's listening.

The most noticeable example I can think of offhand is the David Bowie album Outside - there are a few spots where entire tracks drop out in 256kbps AAC. However, they consist of the kind of very high-pitched sounds that are the first to go when your hearing degrades, so a lot of listeners won't miss them because they never knew they were there in the first place.

obtu• 15 years ago

http://mp3ornot.com/

smackfu2• 15 years ago

According to the chart in the article, that retail CD you pay $10 for gets the artist $0.30. They'd be much better off if you pirated it and then bought some merchandise from them.

bunderbunder2• 15 years ago

Well, it was linked to from the article. Here's the specific url: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...

How a retail CD works out for the artist actually varies pretty widely, according to that chart. An album sold on CDBaby will net the artist a bit over 7.5x as much as an iTunes album download. A more traditionally-distributed CD nets anywhere between a few cents more on the high end to under a third as much on the low end.

dlikhten• 15 years ago

Giving an artist 30 cents is already better. If making a dollar = playing a song 3500 times. That means that I can not possible listen to my most favorite artist enough to give them 1 dollar EVER. Maybe in my entire life. If they self-publish and I buy just 5 songs from them, I already did better than Spotify, and spotify gave me so much more. Spotify appears to be worse off because using Spotify its "free" and I have even less incentive to buy the real track.

tl;dr I could not agree with smackfu/article more, just pirate everything and donate $5 directly to your favorite artist, you already made them more money than spotify ever would for you. And your conscious is clear.

coliveira• 15 years ago

I think more and more people are starting to do this, but there it takes some time for people to adjust their consumption habits. Right now people are still thinking about mp3 only, but this will shift as we have more buying options.

BerislavLopac• 15 years ago

Hm, is there a Web platform for musicians to give away their music away in return for the fans' social info? With an added feature of discovering new music and artists?

If not, maybe someone could start it up. This field is definitely ripe for disruption.

lt3• 15 years ago

NoiseTrade, referenced in the original post, seems to be exactly that:

http://www.noisetrade.com/info/about

mashmac2• 15 years ago

Derek Webb (article author) has been pushing alternative distribution for music for a long time... well before it was popular. Take a look at his most recent album's store: http://derekwebb.com/store/feedback Different options for different levels of fan, fairly common these days, but Derek has been doing this a long time.

I discovered him after he gave away his 2005 album, Mockingbird (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockingbird_(album))

jamesgeck0• 15 years ago

I first saw him at a concert at my university in 2006. He did a Q&A session afterward, during which time he said he was OK with the audience copying his music if they couldn't afford it.

His rationale was that he first learned about a lot of his favorite bands via illegal mix tapes, but later bought their work. He views it as marketing, as far as I can tell.

VonLipwig• 15 years ago

Something is going to have to give. Either artists quit bemoaning Spotify OR they withdraw their music.

Spotify has created a business model that works for them. If it isn't working for individual labels or artists they can withdraw their music and provoke a change in Spotify's business model.

Spotify's value exists because of the huge range of music it supports. If you take that away Spotify will be forced to react.

Perhaps the simplest thing Spotify could do is charge more for power users. I've listened to 46,000 tracks on Spotify. Charging people like me more would mean they could up the price paid to artists.

haraball3• 15 years ago

I lose a bit of interest in artists who complain about not making money on people listening to their music. It then seems that they make music to make money, instead of making money because they make music.

Jgrubb4• 15 years ago

If programming suddenly became worth $0.00029 per line of code written, would you still do it for a living?

powrtoch• 15 years ago

Did you actually read the article?

Making music takes a lot of time, effort, and money. Promoting it (as opposed to just playing for you and whoever you live with) takes more of all three. The author specifically says he isn't talking about getting rich, only about making enough to continue doing it ("blue collar musician").

In fact he created and uses a service that gives away his music for free, in exchange for some info about the customer downloading it. "Complaining about not making money" really isn't a fair summary.

haraball3• 15 years ago

Maybe I'm looking at making music in the same fashion as open source programming. It also takes a lot of time, effort and some times money, and it does not give you any income directly. People may fork your code and you don't get any money from it. But it may also land you some programming gigs that can pay much more because of your effort.

Making a living out of making music is like making a living out of open source programming. If it does not pay enough, you have to either put more effort into it and make some sacrifices, or you have to play by some other mans notes/specs.

555imon• 15 years ago

Musicians and labels need to find new ways to monetize instead of distributing copies of master recordings. If artists have records that are widely listed to they can play well payed gigs or get endorsment deals. Seems like the average consumers thinks, that listening to music must be free.

bgarbiak3• 15 years ago

It’s true that iTunes is a place for people to purchase music, but it offers all the same benefits of Spotify in terms of discovery.

Last time I've checked to discover music on iTunes you had to purchase it.

arethuza• 15 years ago

You do get to preview songs on iTunes - can't remember how long it is, but it's certainly long enough for me.

It appears that previews can now be up to 90 seconds:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/02/itunes-previews/

bgarbiak3• 15 years ago

For me: if it's not entirety - it doesn't count. Lala figured it out and I had hoped Apple will follow this path after they bought them. Sadly, they didn't.

will_critchlow• 15 years ago

I'm intrigued: what massive negotiating power does spotify have to force labels / artists onto their platform? Is there a market failure here? What keeps the pricing unfair?

Why not just pull your music from spotify if you don't want it "sold" there?

(Written as a spotify premium subscriber who loves the service, but assumed that the music was legitimately obtained through a negotiation with the labels and / or artists).

crockstar• 15 years ago

My understanding is that the platform has been pitched primarily as a "proof of concept" type thing to artists and labels with assurances that if enough people subscribe/stream the service and your music you can get paid out. My guess is that the forecasts and hopes aren't stacking up in payouts to the labels/artists quite how they hoped and the result is frustrating these individuals.

I'm sure there's a lot more at play here but this is what I've understood from the research I've done.

Jgrubb4• 15 years ago

It's not about that. It's about "Oooo, shiny new music toy that's included for free with Facebook. Awesome! Now I don't have to buy music ever again!"

This inevitably erodes purchases from any other online outlet, which leads to less money flowing to artists. This is made worse by the fact that Spotify's royalty rate is absolutely abysmal. This is well known, and leads to less money flowing to artists.

Spotify is such a good thing for the consumer of music. I say that as a consumer of music who was a Premium Spotify subscriber until last week. But as an artist, it's just another mechanism for record labels to whittle down the money they owe you for your working for them. That's why I cancelled my subscription last week.

This is the key bit to me -

"...I actually prefer illegal downloading over Spotify because when you get music illegally it’s at least implicit in the transaction that what you’re doing is potentially harmful to the artist. But with Spotify, your conscience is clear because you’re either enduring ads or paying to use the service and access the music."

Jgrubb4• 15 years ago

It seems to me that there is a major market opportunity in a co-operatively owned version of this sort of service, one that placed getting $ to the artist as it's highest goal. A more or less P2P exchange that let consumers stream/discover to their heart's content, but after a certain number of plays prodded them to buy. It'd be open only to artists without label/licensing encumbrances, and would therefore be able to funnel most of the money back to the artist themselves.

It seems really obvious if not simple, but the chief goal isn't to make piles of money for whomever builds it. That's the only reason I can see that it doesn't already exist.

Semi-side note - It irks the shit out of me that even something as cool as Spotify is still just a means of propping up the same old major label system.

gizzlon• 15 years ago

A redable version: http://www.readability.com/articles/9lzok3re

Gustomaximus• 15 years ago

Comparing Spotify to a one-off fee on itunes / album sales is not a fair gauge. For example; if I like a song I might listen to it 1000 times over my lifetime (...does that sound right...). If I used Spotify this would be a life value of $0.29 to the artist. This is very low but is a fairer comparison amount to revenue the artist receives from an itunes sale.

Also it is worth understanding the label will be paid $1.60 for these 1000 spotify song plays and the artist gets from this $0.29. So it's not the steaming services doing all the screwing here. If you compare this to a itunes sale where the label gets $0.64 per song sale you would need 400 plays over someones lifetime to get this revenue on Spotify or 160 plays on Last.fm. This to me is is a fairer simple comparison without bringing in factors like future value of money or if spotify reduces piracy....etc

Darningn• 15 years ago

Hey musicians: Stop trying to make money and focus on creating great music.

If you're focused on the business angle, you're doing it wrong. In fact, it's none of your concern. Success will come if you create great music.

bootload• 15 years ago

"... The whole business used to be focused on the head of the sales curve, the handful of artists who were selling records in the millions of copies. ..."

Selling records, LP's (33rpm) only really took off after FM radio started playing up to 20 minutes segments of ad-free music, uninterrupted. Prior to FM, the single (45's) was king.

  "President Kennedy got shot. It wasn't only the 
   president that got shot, 50's rock-n-roll died... 
   then they started playing mourning music... then 
   emerging out of the mourning music was FM radio...
   because during those days it was singles, you were 
   selling singles. Nobody cared about LP's." 
   Link Wray [0],[1]

A combination of technology & societal disruption allowed records to sell.

[0] Link Wray, interview "Link Wray video interview-pt 3" starting at 4.00min. Exert from "Rumble Man" cf [1].

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViHdDE0ks3E&feature=relat...

[1] Link Wray, "Rumble Man"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1650853964354373174

Music artist: "Why I prefer piracy to Spotify"

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