[bediger4000]

> Artists need to remember the alternative isn't 2-4x higher payouts - it's piracy.

The implication here is that people as a whole don't value streaming music very much at all, right? I'm not much of a music listener, I've followed the whole evolution inattentively, why is online music of such low value?

[chgs]

I pay for Spotify streaming and I strongly suspect I could buy every song I’ve listened to and save a lot of money

Perhaps Spotify overheads are too high, perhaps that 70% goes to the wrong people.

Certainly in my view the disbursement is very wrong. I spend £20 a month and listen for one hour a day. if I listen to 4 artists equally (either by number or by seconds) then each of those 4 artists should get 70% of £5 a month each.

That’s not how it works though, and I fund artists I’m not interested in and never listen to, who are listened to for 8 hours a day by others

[graemep]

> Perhaps Spotify overheads are too high,

Its says 70% of revenues, so even if they reduced overheads and their profit to zero artists would only get 42% more.

> perhaps that 70% goes to the wrong people.

Possibly. Who are the wrong and right people? Some people get a lot:

https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/

[chgs]

If I spend £10 and listen to only Lily Allen I would expect her to get £7

If you spent £10 and listen to only Taylor Swift I’d expect her to also get £7

Howver I believe if I listen to Lily for 10 hours in the month and you listen to Taylor for 90 hours, then instead Taylor gets 90% of the £14 (£12.80) and Lily gets 10% (£1.40)

That doesn’t seem right.

[crazygringo]

> why is online music of such low value?

Partly because it's such low cost to produce.

A single episode of television requires hundreds of people working for a couple weeks minimum and costs from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions.

How much does effort does it take to write and record a song? It's closer to a handful of people. And it's usually measured in thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands or millions.

A few hit artists spend more because they can afford to, but even that still doesn't compare at all with hit TV/movies.

[goosejuice]

Is that you Daniel Ek?

[meibo]

It's ubiquitous. It's the only way people listen to music - there's nothing else, bar the few nerds that still have their fb2k library or vinyl collection. I think it's easy for people to forget that having legal, instant access to all the music on the planet absolutely wasn't the norm a decade ago.

[sokoloff]

> It's the only way people listen to music - there's nothing else

It’s far from the only way people listen to music. I listen to music on FM radio way more than I do free streaming services (mostly Amazon music’s free tier) for the overwhelmingly majority (essentially all) of my music consumption, and have no user-paid subscriptions. Both are ad-supported and probably pay little to artists, similar to paid streaming.

[idiotsecant]

Yes, there's probably someone somewhere listening to pirate shortwave radio broadcasts, too.

You're being pedantic. Most people do not consume FM radio as their main source of music.

[sokoloff]

The worldwide radio market revenue is about $35B/yr. I think that’s larger than the audio streaming market; the reference point I found for that was $25B/yr.

Granted, not all radio is music (nor is streaming), but (assuming I didn’t get the research wrong) radio is larger, making it at least slightly weird to call it a pedantic argument that the larger of the two markets even exists as a source of music for people.

[nalinidash]

>It's the only way people listen to music - there's nothing else, bar the few nerds that still have their fb2k library or vinyl collection

Not really.Other services exist, like Youtube music.

[fragmede]

hate to break it to you, but Spotify launched in 2008 right after the original iphone in 2007, so it's been a bit more than a decade.

[meibo]

Time flies! Though I guess it really reached critical mass in the early to mid 10s.

[tomashubelbauer]

I miss my foobar2000 layout with foo_facets.

[radpanda]

I don’t know if we fully understand the human psychology there. It seems to me that when there are more options available, not only does our perceived value of each option drop, but our perceived value of the whole drops as well.

[carlosjobim]

People were used for decades to listen to music for free on the radio.

[_yb2s]

Except you only got to listen to a few industry approved ultra popular artists, and it was virtually impossible to ever discover unsigned or unpopular music you might personally enjoy more. About half of the music I listen to on Spotify, I only discovered because of Spotify, and isn’t popular enough that I could have ever hoped to encounter it otherwise, but it has really enriched my life, and hopefully enriched those artists a bit as well by getting another paying fan- that will now also buy lossless albums and concert tickets.

[carlosjobim]

Before streaming, you'd then probably be the kind of person to purchase your music. Most streaming users will listen to industry approved artists, the only difference for them is that they can choose when they listen. And that's why Spotify can't make them pay more, because radio is still free.

[dartos]

This is a big factor that nobody seems to be considering.

Music has been very cheap to consume for many many years.

[KaoruAoiShiho]

I think people still love music but the economic value has been destroyed first by piracy then by the various efforts to make distribution easier than piracy, like youtube or spotify. For me personally the value of books have also gone away due to Anna's Archive and #ebooks on irchighway but YMMV.

I think the value of music and books will soon go to 0 though because of AI.