Spotify - anyone heard of it?

by marc ribot:

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/11/06/is-streaming-good-for-musicians/if-streaming-is-the-future-you-can-kiss-jazz-and-other-genres-goodbye

In its first year of streaming on Spotify, my band Ceramic Dog earned 112.80 euros in Europe and $47.12 in the United States from our album "Your Turn." The album cost over $15,000 to make. By contrast, CD sales on earlier albums netted us between $4,000 and $9,000.

hey look Tim here's some real math

(not the most well-reasoned contribution, i guess, but still good to hear from an actual working musician)

xpost

it sounds like they probably shouldn't have been making albums even before spotify

I am comfortable with kissing new jazz music goodbye

that's a shitty thing to say but i guess he asked for it

I am comfortable with kissing lots of music I don't listen to goodbye too. Seems like a dick move to actively participate in the prevention of other people listening to it though.

he did basically say it himself in the next sentence

"Now, maybe the market knows best, and the world is in fact better off without artists like me."

xp

I mean http://open.spotify.com/track/0ll1q3aoxhA7n4hydmhvof

guys, knock nu-jazz all you want, but Marc Ribot is a fantastic guitarist and has probably played on albums even and your cold hearts cherish

*even you

it sucks that the internet killed journalism, it sucks that the internet killed the music industry, fewer people will be working in those industries, that sucks.

spotify is not really the bad guy here, they just happen to be the ones doing the price discovery. I am sure they would love to charge $50 a month.

In its first year of streaming on Spotify, my band Ceramic Dog earned 112.80 euros in Europe and $47.12 in the United States from our album "Your Turn." The album cost over $15,000 to make. By contrast, CD sales on earlier albums netted us between $4,000 and $9,000.

hey look Tim here's some real math

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, November 12, 2014 11:18 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol yes that is real math, and it's red either way you add it up.

I think by "netted" he means they made that figure on top of recouping the costs for cd making/distro.

^^^

Ceramic Dog's Your Turn on Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/artist/2EKKgp12AZDmsFbMU59X0C

Spotify royalties explained: http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/

If you only put one album on Spotify, and evasively switch your artist name from "Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog" to "Ceramic Dog", and don't even link to the Spotify album from your own website, and its most-played track has only 3500 streams, and the stream-counts for its other 12 tracks basically decline as a function of track-position, revealing that more than half of the people who started your album didn't make it to side two, I think it's fair to say that you aren't really making the most of your opportunity.

But Ribot's report of his revenue from this tiny amount of Spotify activity does agree with the approximations in Spotify Explained, so his problem has nothing to do with rates or disingenuousness or deception, it's that basically nobody is listening to this record on Spotify. It's definitely true that Spotify doesn't make it possible for you to make a living from music that nobody knows about or plays.

Which doesn't prove that streaming won't kill jazz, but his one anecdotal data-example doesn't support anything else he says there, and it's the only piece of evidence he offers.

("Martha, My Dear", a Madeleine Peyroux song that Ribot played on, has 488,761 plays. "Anadamastor", a Dead Combo song Ribot played on, has 72,829 plays. Your Turn has more like 21,000 total plays from all 13 songs put together.)

I have no interest in Marc Ribot solo albums but moodles is right he is a great guitarist who deserves to make a living at it

xp

what does 'deserves' mean here

[Should disclaim: I work at Spotify, but I don't have anything to do with payment issues, and I'm referring solely to the publicly-visible stream-counts shown in Spotify itself.]

what does 'deserves' mean here

idk give him a gov't stipend or something

that would make a better article

I'm all for gov't arts funding yup let's have it

that would be a result of his deserving and not what constitutes deserving

obv the only future of music is a patronage model which means amanda palmer sadly otm

Once an artist dies, all their music should get streamed free for all eternity

Is there a way to remove downloaded music from your device and reclaim storage space?

One aspect of the streaming revenue issue I haven't seen discussed a lot is how the old pre-MP3 music business model based on the constraints of physical media relied on demanding the full purchase price for an album before allowing the listener the privilege of even accessing most of what they'd bought to determine whether what they'd already paid for was actually worth owning.

I probably just resented the many crappy $18 CDs I bought from Sam Goody as a dumb kid, but I bet I was far from alone in that feeling. And if reliance on consumer ignorance and dissatisfaction is key to propping up the whole industry, or at least segments of it, idk is that really worth saving

old model was bad, new model is worse

it sounds like they probably shouldn't have been making albums even before spotify

― iatee, Wednesday, November 12, 2014 2:19 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm actually curious about this re: how economics of albums worked in "ye olden days" - did an artist expect to make their full living off the album, or was it supposed to make some money for them, but primarily be something around which you could organize other things off which they made the real bucks? (Touring? T-shirts? Op-eds?) Sincere questions here, I really don't know how this worked/works. And obviously this would vary a lot between artists and their markets - I assume Pearl Jam made more off CD sales (proportional to their larger pie) than the Dismemberment Plan.

Dunno if telling Ceramic Dog that he should have somehow used Spotify better really gets at the question, though - I mean, how many more plays do we think he would have gotten if he'd linked to Spotify from his website a lot, or tweeted about it? How many more pennies would that translate to? Should he have ended his shows by saying "Hey, there's a merch table at the back, we have CDs - - - but don't forget, you can stream it on Spotify!"? Clearly that would be a worse financial move for him, so, more generally: why exactly should he try to drive additional traffic to his Spotify if the marginal increase in plays is worth eight to ten cents upfront and maybe a whole lot of lost revenue? It seems to me the only way streaming can actually be good for the artist is if the streaming acts as a kind of loss-leading front-end advertisement for something else you do, like selling people the physical album or linking them to your donation page.

As for saying that people didn't make it to side two, that just seems like a low zing to me, like "want to make a living on the music of yours that's widely-listened-to? Well, better make sure all your music is just as popular - it could mean upwards of twenty to sixty cents more in your pocket!" This is not a standard to which people were held in the physical-album era: if you could hook people with some big hits and get enough buzz going that the rest of the album wasn't just complete dross, you could make money. And yeah, "side two" - I don't find it surprising in stream-land that people are more likely to click away to something else than if they just paid $15 for the CD. How typical are those kinds of dropoffs in album-listening?

(most of that is to glenn, not iatee)

I read an interview with Neil Peart of Rush a while back where he explained how their business model has changed completely over time. Back in the 70s and 80s, they made most of their money off of record sales and radio. Touring was something you did to promote the album and get more sales. Nowadays they don't make any money off of their albums and consider recording a luxury or indulgence and all of their money is made off of touring and merchandise.

Now that's just for a hugely popular band. If you are more at the indie level, I can only imagine it is that much more difficult all around.

Should disclaim: I work at Spotify

get thee behind me, Satan!

there /should/ be much more public arts funding but a world where james inhofe chairs the senate environment committee is not a world where venues get many public dollars to put on avant-jazz concerts.

many xps,

it's more like a zero sum game that musicians used to do pretty well in, and not 100% fairly, but where leverage is now overly lopsided in the consumer's favor

I hear Inhofe is a huge Don Cherry fan fwiw

there /should/ be much more public arts funding but a world where james inhofe chairs the senate environment committee is not a world where venues get many public dollars to put on avant-jazz concerts.

― I dunno. (amateurist), Wednesday, November 12, 2014 1:18 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just think of all the barber shop quartets that'd get funding from a republican chair

nah, those barbershop quartets better pull themselves up by their bright-red bootstraps or they'll be singing on the street.

rockapella has a fresh baritone/tenor http://www.rockapella.com/

that barbershop quartet is called Straight No Chaser btw (xp)

haha

I think the interesting thing about the stream-count decline over the course of the Ceramic Dog album is that it suggests that many or even most of those people weren't pre-existing Ceramic Dog fans (I assume people who already knew and liked Ceramic Dog would tend to listen to the whole album). Pretty sure selling CDs mainly reaches (and extracts money from) existing fans, rather than making new ones. So this is an interestingly different dynamic.

And no, you're not under any obligation to "invest" in your Spotify presence. But the question of whether Spotify pays you fairly for people listening to your music is a very different one from whether Spotify is magically finding you enough new fans despite your complete lack of involvement and public disdain.

well this is cute

lol at ignoring 90% of what people say on this thread so you can push the standard spotify pr "whatever else is going in the music industry that owns 25% of us, a royalty rate is a royalty rate, fair and true" statement in rebuttal to a link

"sorry for interrupting, i just want to debate with the person who can't respond for a second"

couple xposts, didn't you used to become a fan of an artist in part by buying their CDs? And thus getting to know their songs besides the single you heard on the reader? I'm not sure how much we can really glean from the Ceramic Dog streams but assuming that they mean that Spotify has turned more people onto Ceramic Dog seems a little spurious. It could also be the established Ceramic Dog fans checking out the album and not being that into it. In either scenario dude is making a lot less than he would have otherwise, right? Not going to touch the "complete lack of involvement and public disdain" line, it pisses me off but I feel like it's a side-line to the real discussion.

let's not pretend there is any real discussion to be had with an employee of the company in question. who would probably be fired if he posted anything in violation of the party line.

yeah! glenn is just a cog in the big spotify machine! seriously this shit is so tired.

boo to any post that begins "let's not pretend..."

so condescending

lol Sufjan do you not think corporations monitor what their employees post on the internet about their employers