[fooooobarbaz]

> And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans.

People love to say stuff like this, but having gone through that grind myself, it's not nearly as easy or accessible as you describe. These platforms also make it easier than ever for artists to face things like copyright strikes and takedowns, which people are more than happy to abuse.

Additionally, streaming royalties pay peanuts for the vast, vast majority of artists and they get to determine how artists are paid based on calculations they determine. For example, Spotify pays artists by calculating their "stream-share", not a fixed amount per stream.[0]

Sure, it's easier to platform your music, but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier to generate meaningful income, particularly when you need the service to be priced as cheaply as possible in order to get reach. In the long run, I think this is going to further incentivize entertainment that is created passively and augmented by things like AI, which I'm personally not that excited about.

0: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2022/10/22/how-much-per-...

[post-it]

> For example, Spotify pays artists by calculating their "stream-share", not a fixed amount per stream.

Well, obviously. I don't pay Spotify per stream, I pay them per month. So my $10 must get split up across every song I've listened to that month. No other model is possible given a monthly subscription.

[bjelkeman-again]

Your money goes to the most played music on that platform. The artist you played may get nothing.

> The Pro Rata model, currently used by all major streaming platforms, means that monthly revenue from premium subscription costs and advertisement revenues is collected into one pool of money. Spotify takes 30% of that revenue and distributes the rest based on artist’s total listening numbers, rather than the listening times of individual users. Meaning that, even if a user never listens to the most streamed artists on the platform, a percentage of the money they pay will be given to the most streamed artists.

https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/10/a-breakdown-of-music...

[Chinjut]

What's the difference between whether my money is individually given to the artists I personally listened to and similarly for all other subscribers, or whether all subscribers' money is pooled and then re-apportioned out based on the cumulative listening tallies of all subscribers? Aren't these the same results in the end?

[jefftk]

Imagine we are the only two subscribers:

* You spend an hour a day listening to A during your commute

* I spend 9 hours a day, my whole workday, listening to B.

In the current system, B gets 90% and A gets 10%, but some people would prefer to see a system in which they each get 50%.

Additionally, I believe they use total streaming time and not total streaming time for paid subscribers. So an artist who is popular among paid subscribers doesn't earn any more than an artist who is popular only among free subscribers.

[woah]

I don’t get why this is always the talking point. The least streamed artists are also getting money from the listeners who only listen to the most streamed artists.

[amelius]

This is outrageous.

[spacemadness]

I can’t tell if this is sarcasm.

[post-it]

It isn't. It would be impossible for Spotify to guarantee any kind of fixed payment per stream, since customers don't pay per stream.

I guess they could pay based off the theoretical maximum a user could stream. So if the cost of a subscription is $10/month and an artist's song is 3 minutes long, then Spotify could pay ($10 / (31 * 24 * 60/3)) per stream. Thus guaranteeing that if a user streams an artist's song for the entire month, the artist gets the user's entire $10 subscription fee. But that's $0.00067 per stream, which is much less than they currently pay.

[WalterBright]

An opportunity for musicians to get paid is to seek out video authors that get taken down for incidental copyright violation of the music in it. Offer to make a custom tune for them at a nominal cost.

Sort of like "send me your slide deck and preferred music style, and I'll compose for it an intro and outrow soundtrack for $XX."

[actionfromafar]

Sounds like a machine learning job. :-/