Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I dunno. I own 6 drag city records from back when I downloaded music. I haven't bought a drag city record since spotify happened in America, and I buy about 1 record a week these days.

That's a lovely anecdote, but i'm talking simple math. You have to get a TON of spins for a label to make the kind of money they'd get from a handful of sales, and I think we can reasonably assume you lose a handful of sales when people are able to spin your whole record a ton of times without buying it. Spotify's value as a promo, radio-like tool would not be diminished by lopping off 2/3 of an album's tracks.

granted, the majors have an advance on the royalties and equity in the company, but it's indies that I think are going to suffer from only the most sentimental dorks having any reason to get the album.

i do think allen's right in that it's mistake to ignore new tech entirely. but it's equally wrong to just shrug, give your shit to a tech company and assume the good will out.

what do you all use it for? I don't think the things I use it for are the same as most folk. I still heavily spend on albums (mostly because I would like to see the scene continue), but I use Spotify a lot for either:

1) making playlists of older individual pop tunes I liked
2) playing full albums that I own elsewhere but can't find my copy of and just want to hear
3) finding old soul albums to go to sleep with

i use spotify like mad, also for playlist-making, spinning albums i'm too lazy to pull out of my collection, and checking out obscure old shit. I still buy albums (used ones, but if i had more money i'd buy new) but i'm the definition of that "sentimental dork." Look at the Top Tracks of any indie artist and it's clear that even acts like Galaxie 500 and Fugazi have breakaway "hits" that get 5 to 10 times the spins of the other album tracks. Keeping the album tracks on doesn't bring in new income as much as decrease old.

But people don't want what you're selling. Isn't that Allen's main point?

Of course people would prefer to rent the entire music industry for 10 bucks than buy your album for 10 bucks. but unless you're damn certain no one will buy your album for ten bucks (and forgive thom yorke for being so bold), that's no reason to do it!

I really wonder if we'll see a rollback to the times where artists just release single after single and the albums are a compilation of said singles. or bands might start releasing a series of short EPs and then release the collection as an album (already seeing some do this).

some genres are still albums genres (like metal), but for those that aren't, may be a better means of making money while still recording what you want to.

spotify is speculative tech - they gave the major labels a ton of money as an advance on royalties for its content (the same way labels get songs from artists, though the labels also got equity). If you're an artist and your label DIDN'T get an advance or equity, just the piddly royalty rate, you AND they are getting fucked.

and yeah, i can see that rollback to a singles/ep era too. The reason I have this conservative stance on spotify is BECAUSE i like the album format, and I know it's a money-loser in the context of streaming.

well I can definitely see that, friends of mine blow through album after album on there according to the stream and then look at me crosseyed when I told them I bought an album

Agree with croup here...I still spend money on music (physical and downloads) but 80% of that is for releases that aren't on Spotify and 20% is for things that I really want to support. My spending is also a fraction - definitely less than half - of what it used to be. There are cases where I discovered something on Spotify that I wouldn't have heard otherwise and subsequently purchased it (most recently, the Still Corners album), but that's maybe five things per year.

At the same time, Spotify is amazing and I'd be super-reluctant to go back to a time when I couldn't (legally) check out 10 new releases every Monday or delve into the entire back catalogue of whoever is starring in this week's ILM ballot poll.

like, i'm listening to the newish thermals album on spotify right now. it's not bad! a lot like the albums of theirs i have from 5-10 years ago. but i don't like it enough to go spend 12 bucks on it, ESPECIALLY when I've already heard the damn thing and can hear it again whenever i feel like it. maybe, just maybe, if i only had access to four songs and the rest were vinyl-only at a reasonable price, there'd be a shred of curiosity left to possibly drive me to get it. maybe i'd be quicker to play the push tracks over and over, know them better, wear them out and get hungry for more, rather than just get to track 9 and be hankerin' for another band. spotify could be a great promotional tool, but as it stands its basically a fire sale.

I don't think I agree.

I'm wondering what people think was the average number of plays a given LP or CD purchased new would have had. In my example a few days ago, I used ten plays, but what if we raise the bar and say that a GOOD album purchase (i.e., a positive transaction from the buyer's viewpoint) would have resulted in an average of thirty plays?

Take that album and put it into the Spotify payment model and you now have 30 X 15 = 450 song streams. At the half-penny per stream rate, that's now $2.25 in revenue per album. Maybe that's not a lot, and it's still being split up between the company, artist royalties, songwriter royalties (and anything else that might be in there), but again, that's $2.25 in revenue without any manufacturing or distribution costs.

Sorry - using an average of fifteen tracks per album in that example.

i don't know why breaking down the smaller royalty explains your "disagreement" but damon k suggests the royalty is even smaller irl

http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8993-the-cloud/

As for Spotify, since it is not considered radio, either of this world or any other, they have a different additional royalty to pay. Like any non-broadcast use of recordings, they require a license from the rights-holder They negotiate this individually with each record label, at terms not made public. I'm happy to make ours public, however: It is the going "indie" rate of $0.005 per play. (Actually, when I do the math, that rate seems to truly pay out at $0.004611-- I hope someone got a bonus for saving the company four-hundredths of a cent on each stream!) We didn't negotiate this, exactly; for a band-owned label like ours, it's take it or leave it. We took it, which means for 5,960 plays of "Tugboat", Spotify theoretically owes our record label $29.80.

in practice Spotify's $0.004611 rate turns out to have a lot of small, invisible print attached to it. It seems this rate is adjusted for each stream, according to an algorithm (not shared by Spotify, at least not with us) that factors in variables such as frequency of play, the outlet that channeled the play to Spotify, the type of subscription held by the user, and so on. What's more, try as I might through the documents available to us, I cannot get the number of plays Spotify reports to our record label to equal the number of plays reported by the BMI. Bottom line: The payments actually received by our label from Spotify for streams of "Tugboat" in that same quarter, as best I can figure: $9.18.

"Well, that's still not bad," you might say. (I'm not sure who would really say that, but let's presume someone might.) After all, these are immaterial goods-- it costs us nothing to have our music on these services: no pressing, no printing, no shipping, no file space to save a paper receipt for 25 years. All true. But immaterial goods turn out to generate equally immaterial income.

maybe the average person's disposable income available for music has been crowded out by cell phone bill/price for a new phone every year or two, which coincidentally can also contain all the mp3s one requires

Was breaking it down because I'm not sure it equates to a fire sale that almost every company has agreed to. And I'm not sure people should be paying a whole lot more for content that they're not physically owning.

If Galaxie 500's label only got one third of the half penny rate, then that's problematic - I certainly wouldn't disagree with that.

you're either ignoring or missing the point. putting full-lengths on spotify destroys the need for physical ownership, and selling physical ownership is really the only way to make any money off recorded music (I never said anything remotely like "customers should be paying more for content they're not owning"). the majors agreed to it because they got an advance on the royalties (and equity), plus the drums had been beating for a while for them to finally embrace technology rather than fight it. spotify is reporting losses at the moment, and paying out shit as far as royalties go. basically the labels, who've treated artists this way for years, have signed to a label themselves, making themselves even more of a needless middleman (and, if indies aren't getting advances or equity, they're screwing themselves over AND the artist). the reason I called it a "fire sale" is that the only reason to make the physical purchase of music needless, to wholly trade real dollars for digital pennies, is if you've given up on selling physical music.

putting full albums on spotify is great for customers, but horrible for artists. whatever their pretensions and poses (and though i'd argue they should leave on the singles), people like david byrne and thom yorke have damn good reason to leave it and I wouldn't be surprised if more indies wake up to that. the only reason that should bother the listener is that this was a CRAZY good deal for us.

Renting is great for something you don't have much attachment to but ownership (physical or digital) is the only way to ensure your music will still be available at any point in the future.

it's not even a debate really. Either long-players will go the way of the dodo and the release of songs will become more fluid, labels existing only to draw attention to songs/brands/etc, or labels who want to keep the "album" alive will stop giving albums away.

I'm pretty sure we'll look back on the phrase "physical ownership of music" with great affectionate amusement. And I'm also pretty sure that the lowering of technical barriers to music distribution is a significant part of what's making there be exponentially more new music now than ever before. Music, as a human activity that involves both makers and listeners, seems to me to be in wildly fantastic shape. Yes, the new order probably means that St. Vincent can't make a lavish living by recording an album every two years and then sitting at home counting money, but how many people could do that before? Or ever? Who can do it with poetry or painting or basketball or acting? Not very many people. That does not, in itself, prove that the new order is the end order, but I think it suggests that fearing the future is maybe not the right starting position...

also to answer the OP's question, no i've never heard of spotify

or basketball

haha waht

I mean are you fucking insane

actors and athletes possibly the most overpaid people ever in the history of the planet

that there even is still a "debate" about musicians' decline in incomes 10+ years on is kidna sad imho

Think Glenn was talking about the # of people who get paid

you add up actual hours on the court, pretty much every pro b-ball player performs for a very brief period and then sits at home counting their money

and it's been like that for decades

another thread. Your analysis is pretty shallow, but that's still another thread.

erm the season runs from October to April/May (June if your team is good), summer camps and training camp happen a few months after the season ends, and the team practices on offnights during the week. their season is 82 games. they are fairly busy folk, even if the majority of the work isn't the actual game itself.

only a minuscule fraction of actors are overpaid, shakey.

yeah and musicians write/rehearse/tour but hey that should all be on their own time amirite (cf the original St Vincent example)

xp

That does not, in itself, prove that the new order is the end order, but I think it suggests that fearing the future is maybe not the right starting position...

who's fearing the future though? Like, could you really see David Byrne and Thom Yorke as people who FEAR the future? They just realize Spotify is a shitty deal for them.

bands should get paid an annual salary based on their placing in Pazz and Jop IMHO

actors salaries should be slightly below janitors and teachers imho but whatever. athletes shouldn't be paid anything.

haha what

the only way you can deny that spotify sucks for musicians is to vague out into techno-optimism that completely ignores how money changes hands in the current system.

the other way for artists to get money would be via government funding, which works pretty well in Canada (and perhaps other european countries), but good luck implementing that in the US.

(spotify as the primary outlet for full-lengths, I mean. It's a phenomenal replacement for radio)

croup otm x1000

I'm all for gov't arts funding. and gov't healthcare. and gov't-funded higher education. socialism, yep let's have it.

spotify sucks for musicians now. But it's the future, and the challenge is to find a way for it not to suck while also not removing too much awesomeness

haha "the challenge is for you guys to figure out how to live without denying me everything in the world for $5 a month"

there will be a netflix-like bump in the spotify monthly charge in the future. Hopefully ad revenue also increases.

spotify is LOSING money. if they ever turn a profit, artists (and labels without equity) will only make a meager, meager fraction of it. Spotify and other internet radio/streamers are actively working to circumvent royalty policies, allowing them to pay even less.

spotify's gonna suck for musicians right up until they manage to go public/get bought at which point their service will collapse as they up subscription rates/change their model to increase revenue and their audience moves on to the next free service

this has happened so many times with internet companies it boggles my mind that people think they will be around forever or something.

nah man it's the future

I would pay more than $9.99 a month for what I currently get on the premium level plan, but I wonder how many would.

Anyway a more fundamental issue is most people who grew up in the mp3 era view music as inherently cheap, and that attitude will only get worse as time goes on.