this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Ugh, yes poor poor spotify, fuck that. Artists can't even make a living making music anymore thanks to spotify. Fuck off blaming artists for trying to get paid. Fuck this article. Oh no it only gets a third of the revenue?! Abhorrent, no it should get ALL the revenue, for doing what, having a server with music on it. Amazing. Fuck spotify.

[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is Spotify the villain here or is the “big three”? Because it sounds like Spotify is delivering a service and deserves some profit from that.

But what are the big three doing? Seems like they are just skimming because they hold the IP rights. Are they providing any service?

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Spotify is definitely not the villain here, they have created the best music streaming platform in the world. The big publishers also can't be called the villains per say, but it wasn't so nice of them to force a small startup (Spotify in it's early days) to sign contracts that will permanently force it to payout about $0.66 out of every $1 it makes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The most popular musoc streaming service. Definitely not the best. They still don't offer lossless musoc streaming and their lossy files use an outdated encoder.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

The "best music platform in the world" sure hates paying artists, tho. I know you are obsessed with labels, they pay indie artists fuck all too

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Have you ever looked into the operating costs of having a server with music on it which over 400M monthly active users use?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I actually work in cloud engineering and regularly price this kind of thing up.

Their costs are salaries not aws bills.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But that's practically true of any large tech company. It's been conventional wisdom in the tech industry for over a decade that tech is cheap, people aren't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes. Spotify needs to figure out their burn rate for their salaries because taking more money away from artists isn't the solution like op wants.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But taking money away from employees is?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

No one is saying pay employees less. Spotify needs to figure out how to make its business work. That's for sporify to figure out. If you think Spotify deserve more of the pie when they contribute... a download server, vs. the artists who do all the actual work, then you can honestly just fuck off. We live on totally different sides of the conversation, you want to shill for big tech, I want the artists that make the music to get paid.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

Not that high. Spotify uses some pretty tight compression (not good, just tight); most users get 96-128kbit/s AAC, premium can go a bit higher if opted in. That works out to about 16KB/s or 58MB/hour, assuming nothing's cached.

Bandwidth pricing very much goes down with scale, not up. But even the non-committed AWS pricing at Spotify's scale is 2 to 3 cents/GB. You end up paying way less than that with any kind of commitment and AWS isn't the cheapest around to begin with.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Man, you weren't alive before napster were you?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Wooh. 👀. This isn't Spotify's fault. They can't pay artists if they don't have money.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair- Spotify priced the service that doesn't make enough profit to pay artists adequately.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Like the article explains, they can't price their services too expensively, because of competition. If Spotify becomes $25/month, most users will move to Apple Music or YouTube Music, etc.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Is that your blog or whatever you keep posting?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, it is. It's entirely spotifies making. It's the situation spotify has created. And the answer is absolutely not 'starve artists even more than we do today'.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Okay, lets say I accept the thesis that Spotify is directly to blame for the demise of physical media and the rise of streaming. In the current moment, what is Spotify supposed to do that would satisfy you?

For every dollar I pay to Spotify for their music service, Spotify sees 33 cents of it. Much of that goes to running the service that people want access to. The label takes the other 67 cents. They pass about 2 cents of it on to the artists.

Let's go full fantasyland, say Spotify cuts their own take entirely and somehow subsidizes the entire thing. The label is now making the full dollar, a full 150% of what they were making before. Well, is that better for artists? 150% of what they were making before is 3 cents on the dollar. Is that a solution? No, it's barely a difference.

Let's say Spotify triples sub prices so they can take only 10% for infrastructure. Most of their current subscribers won't pay that, but let's just pretend. Is 5.3 times what the artists were making before an acceptable amount? Six cents on the dollar? Weird Al would've made $60 off Spotify this year instead of $12. Is that satisfactory? Because that's literally the most Spotify can do, even theoretically.

Spotify can't solve the problem.

The problem is labels locking artists into contracts where the label gets to keep 90% or more of everything they make. Spotify has no say in that.

Conversely, if we go back to the current split, but have the labels share their cut with the artists 50/50, the artists are suddenly making 1650% what they were before. Snoop'd be taking almost a million dollars for his billion streams. These contracts made some shred of sense in the physical era, when you needed to own a studio and audio engineers and marketers and media factories to push and print a band, but even back then they were widely known to be exploitative. Nowadays, when any tiny town has a studio for rent and anyone can edit a killer track in their bedroom and go viral on social media? They're a fucking joke.

The villain in this scenario is blindingly obvious, and anyone who believes otherwise is either a plant or a useful idiot.