[mi_z]

Spotify isn't a great example because barely anyone makes money with it. It only works because the musicians are exploited to the max. The reason this won't happen with film and TV is because of unionisation. Why not just buy discs? People keep repeating that discs are dying but so many releases are coming out there is way more than I can buy.

[elijaht]

> People keep repeating that discs are dying but so many releases are coming out there is way more than I can buy.

That’s the issue I think. I listened to music from ~1000 albums last year. At $10 a pop that’s $10k which is just not possible. Spotify is really the only way that listening like that is enabled.

[rekoil]

Yeah I know discs still exist for now, I'm talking about when they suddenly don't anymore. Hopefully that's far far into the future.

And as for Spotify exploiting artists, I don't know how accurate this[1] is, but if it is then it seems pretty fair to me? Maybe slightly on the lower end of what I had expected, but not that far off.

If you have a million monthly listeners (and today you have access to over 574M monthly active users[2] via Spotify) then you're making $5,000/month in static income, meaning you have zero hours of work and still have enough to live on (depending on the size of the band I guess).

The notion that artists (or movie stars for that matter) should be making 10x that or more is a little ridiculous if you ask me.

1: https://purecalculators.com/spotify-money-calculator

2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/367739/spotify-global-ma...

[mandmandam]

I don't think you have any idea how much work, luck, work, talent and work it takes to get to a million monthly listens.

"Zero hours of work" - I know artists get underestimated, but this is next level.

Btw, taking the very top .1% of earners in a field, like movie or pop stars, and using their returns to imply that musicians and actors are fairly compensated, is a very silly thing to do. Tbh, as someone who knows a lot of talented and struggling artists (and teachers and janitors and nurses etc), it's revolting.

If you want to give out about overcompensated people why not look at CEO's, like Daniel Ek (Spotify CEO) and his $3.8 BILLION net worth. That's about as clear a signal that there's exploitation happening that you could ever ask for.

[rekoil]

Totally agree with you CEOs are overcompensated. There should be a law regulating how much more a CEO can make over the lowest rung in the company, the problem is there are just so many workarounds to that (stock options, spinning off the actual workforce into a sub-entity, etc) that it would never work.

I do understand that a million monthly listeners is a large amount, sorry I was over-exaggerating a bit in my last comment. My point was that Spotify helps with discoverability through their playlist-generation, but I guess that doesn't automatically mean anything more than the odd play here and there, and not necessarily more "monthly active listeners".

I'd love if artists made more on Spotify than they do today, but isn't the big problem all the middle-men in the music industry? It's my understanding that companies like Spotify shorten this ladder at least a little bit, but thinking about it again I guess I agree that the pay is a little too low.

[mlrtime]

1) "Exploitation" of artists has happened long before Spotify. Even the popular ones with music deals. So Spotify isn't making this better or worse.

2) Talent and success in music have never been tightly correlated. Marketing is what sells music, not just talent. Marketing requires a lot of money (And payola).

If anything Spotify levels this playing field a bit.

[mandmandam]

> 1) "Exploitation" of artists has happened long before Spotify. Even the popular ones with music deals. So Spotify isn't making this better or worse.

How exactly does the fact that artists have been exploited before mean that Spotify isn't making things worse?

> 2) Talent and success in music have never been tightly correlated.

That's not remotely true. And even pop stars lip syncing songs other people wrote are working very hard, and often exploited.

> Marketing is what sells music, not just talent.

Sure; like nearly everything else. And guess what - most of the artists on Spotify are doing their own marketing.

> If anything Spotify levels this playing field a bit.

"Artists can be paid as little as 13% of the income generated, receiving as little as £0.002 to about £0.0038 per stream on Spotify" [0]. That's not leveling the playing field, that's exploitation; and if you want to defend it I think you need to start bringing actual evidence instead of just spouting your own (deeply unpopular) opinion as fact.

0 - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/apr/10/music-streamin...

[Repulsion9513]

Continuing to list your existing music on Spotify does indeed require 0 hours of work.

[apwell23]

> Why not just buy discs?

because they are bad for the environment.

[spacebear]

Are they worse than streaming? I don’t know the math, but it seems like constantly sending the same album over the network would use a lot of energy.

[recursivecaveat]

I was interested so I looked up some numbers: $0.3 per kwh in California * .005Gb mp3 (3m at 128kbps) mp3 * .06 kwh/Gb for internet traffic = .00009 dollars in energy to sling 1 song to your device. Heavy margin bands there for the traffic estimate especially, but Spotify probably has a 95%+ cache hit rate so I think they would struggle to come out worse than the physical disc.

[godshatter]

Buy mp3s.

[apwell23]

tell that to person buying cds, not me.