[computerdork]

Had a similar thought, yeah, Spotify is like this. I don't know what the numbers are, but a very, very large majority of musicians make very little money off of Spotify (Weird Al Yankovic said he made enough in a year to buy dinner for himself).

On the other hand, Youtube is pretty good. You can make some money off of youtube viewings, but what it's really great for is building an audience. Musicians know that Youtube is a good tool for building a successful music career.

As for devaluing content with oversaturation, yeah, agree with this. Ironically, media is both the bread and butter of the internet, but it has also become devalued with the shear amount of it. Still, this isn't a problem of the media companies. Content creators can either chose to engage and or not, and hope they breakthrough.

And you kind of said it, "The great commoditization of eyeballs continues." Money makes the world go round, and nothing is free. If we want a vibrant internet, companies have got to find a way to make money (although, monopolies aren't a good thing, but paying for good content and services seems like a good idea).

[carlosjobim]

A question: Why do musicians put their music on Spotify if they make so little of it.

If the answer is that it's the labels who owns the rights and puts the music there, then the next question is why do the labels do it if Spotify pays so little.

If the answer is that Spotify pays decently to the labels, then isn't all of this just the labels exploiting the artists as usual?

[computerdork]

Am not an expert at Spotify, but for at least the musicians i know, they self-publish these days, so it's really not about the labels. For us, Spotify is just another way of getting our music out there. Yeah, we can build a very small audience who'll follow our music, but more over, it's just a way to point interested producers, venues, musicians or listeners to our music.

And actually Spotify hasn't been profitable until 2024. It seems like the problem is streaming music is not a great business model. They pay a tons to labels and (big name) artists, but only get a set subscription fee from its listeners.

It's a the lesser of two evils, because without it, people would go back to bittorrenting music or using things like the Apple Store, where you don't have to buy an entire album, you can just buy only the songs you like for a couple bucks.

[computerdork]

Btw, to all that are reading this, actually, found out the that Weird Al's music makes a lot more from Spotify than buying himself a sandwich - His rights holders get paid by spotify. These middlemen then take a cut and pay Weird Al. But on top of this, since Weird Al does parodies, the musicians he parodies also take a share (Michael Jackson, Nirvana...).

He got 80 million streams of his music in 2023, which paid out $386k to his rights holders according to a Spotify payout calculator. Not great, but not bad. https://musically.com/2023/12/01/weird-al-yankovics-spotify-...