[tlyleung]

I’ve read a lot of people griping (quite validly) that Spotify doesn’t distribute each subscriber’s monthly fee according to the streams they listen to that month. Does anyone why they don’t do that? Is it complex artist deals or difficulty in computing attribution at scale?

[Raed667]

I don't have any insider knowledge, but I can't imagine this to be a technical limitation.

I think this is the outcome of contract negotiations, with big labels being shareholders of Spotify the power balance is not in favor of the smaller artists.

Edit:maybe there is some overhead in paying so many smaller artists

[fragmede]

It's not too complex for them to do it because they used to do that. The problems is scammers caught on to it and abused the system. They'd create music and get it listed on Spotify, and then create fake listeners that would listen to their music non-stop and then get paid out as an artist with a lot of listens. After getting tired of playing whack-a-mole, Spotify changed the system to what it is now.

[Raed667]

I'm not sure thats how it works. For the artist to get paid, the fake listener has to be paying a subscription.

Unless it is money laundering, this excuse makes no sense

[deltaknight]

Matt Levine actually wrote a post about somebody who did this and got caught a while ago. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-09-09/fake-s...

The gist is that your listening hours for your subscription are pooled with everybody else’s, then artist payments are made out of ratios from that pool. That means if you subscribe and listen to music 24hrs a day, and somebody else subscribes and listens to 1hr a day, you essentially have more influence over the pool of money and so can pay out to the artist you are listening to more than you pay Spotify.

[joshstrange]

Agreed, at best they could “make” is the cost of the subscription minus Spotify’s fee in this system. So I put $10 in and get $7 out (making up numbers). For money laundering it could make sense but I agree, nothing else makes much sense.

[deltaknight]

See my comment as a sibling to yours for a link, but Matt Levine made a post about how the pooling seems to work at Spotify. All the subscription money is pooled together, and all listening hours are pooled together. Artists are paid out at the ratios of everybody’s listening hours pool, not just each individual subscriber.

This means what individuals pay doesn’t matter at all to the artists they listen to. All you need to do is rack up a lot of listening hours, to have an outsized impact on the resultant listening hours pool. Then if enough other subscribers barely listen to any music, you can earn more than the $10 you put in.

[fragmede]

Free listeners listen to ads which turns into dollars.

here's an industry blog report on the problem:

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/great-big-spotify-sca...

[Raed667]

easy, make the ad-money pool different from the subscription money pool

[conartist6]

The simplest answer is probably that they've never seen an upside to it worth the cost.

If articles like this get a lot of traction, one would hope they might see the upside in not stomping on culture