Music artist: "Why I prefer piracy to Spotify"(derekwebb.tumblr.com) |
Music artist: "Why I prefer piracy to Spotify"(derekwebb.tumblr.com) |
That's disgusting, considering the value I've gotten from it.
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.
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.
(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?)
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.
http://matthewebel.com/2011/07/20/spotify-let-the-money-pour...
"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...
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 :)
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
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.
(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.)
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]
[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
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 (!)
I discovered him after he gave away his 2005 album, Mockingbird (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockingbird_(album))
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.
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).
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."
I'm sure there's a lot more at play here but this is what I've understood from the research I've done.
See the progression in advertising from print and broadcast to adsense.
Also the idea that listening to a song once is worth fractions of a penny is really stupid further making your 'revelation' totally fatuous.
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.
If not, maybe someone could start it up. This field is definitely ripe for disruption.
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.
Last time I've checked to discover music on iTunes you had to purchase it.
It appears that previews can now be up to 90 seconds:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real...
Because if you quit Spotify you lose all the music. The CD you can keep for life without having to pay $10 every month.
As a professional musician of the last 14 years, and a professional web developer of the last 2 years, I can tell you that this is not a good analogy.
There are many good analogies to be drawn between the music scene and the OSS scene, but the simple fact is that there is a fraction of a fraction of the money slushing around music that there is in software. There is a fraction of a fraction of the demand for talent in music as there is in software. It'd be like saying "I'm not making enough money as a Latin scholar, so I need to study harder." It's (for all intents) a dead industry, and no amount of individual effort is going to change that.
The fundamental paradigm of the music business - fans on one side, artists on the other, labels/gatekeepers in between - has to be changed. Neither Spotify nor iTunes nor any other offering that I know of out there do anything to advance that goal.
Spotify and its likes is a place for people to discover and share music. If your music gives you fans, they will come to your concerts and buy your records.
People are used to test running stuff before they buy it these days. The chance of buying a new magazine is bigger if you can flip through it and see what it's about, than if it is wrapped in plastic. I look at Spotify as a legal place where you get some money from the test runners also, which is those who wouldn't have come to your concerts anyway.
When I buy clothes, how much of it goes to actual factory worker / designer?
At no point is that number "almost nothing" though. Hundreds of billions of dollars is more than enough to finance the global music industry and provide a generous living for all of the world's musicians.
Also note that you are comparing an entire industry to individual technical companies.
From the record labels' point of view, Spotify is excellent. Artists tend to have contracts where their paycheck is related to the number of records sold and times their songs are played in the radio. Some countries even have laws to protect the artists in this. However, there is no mention of online streaming, so artists don't really have to be compensated for that.
When you pay for or listen to ads in Spotify, you're mostly giving the money to the record labels and pretty much nothing to the artist. That money is going to spent for lobbying for laws that will life-support the deprecated business model of the record companies. Of course this is a bit exaggerated but in my eyes paying for Spotify is kinda like supporting SOPA.
Think about the prices for a moment. Suppose you pay $7.99 per month for streaming. According to some recent estimates (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/january-20...), the average Netflix customer watches 11 hours of streaming video per month. That means about $0.73 per hour of video watched. Seems relatively reasonable. Even for users who watch several times that many hours, it still seems reasonable.
I'm guessing one of the reasons is that iTunes is simply more popular right now, plus it's different demographics and so on.
Spotify's great promise to labels is that once it will become ubiquitous (see: Facebook integration) they (labels) will get money from more people than ever, kids that grow up getting used to free music (YouTube, torrents, etc.) included. There's even a slim chance it will change some habits of these people (for example: convince them to pay some). Who knows, I spend more on music now than before I became a subscriber so maybe there is some ground to that pledge.
One thing that amazes me though is the ability to download an album (= make a playlist out of it and turn "available off-line" option on) in Spotify's mobile apps. Thought labels will strongly oppose that - it nullifies a potential need to buy music completely. Even though I love this feature I sometimes feel it's too much (considering how little artists get from that).
With Netflix, you have to pay to access the content.
If you mean my definition is outdated, you mean that there is no such thing as ownership in the future anymore? Ownership is outdated?
Ignore the word ownership and its definition for a second: Is the amount of stuff you can do with files compared to CDs really a problem? It’s clear to me what I can and cannot do, I can make an informed decision and I really can’t understand people who think that what they give up with files is a problem.
They might personally prefer to – for example – re-sell their music. That’s fine. I don’t need that. But that’s a question about taste, not any kind of earth shattering problem.