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by mikepurvis 65 days ago
Not all listens show the same intention. If I go to the barbershop and they're playing Spotify top-40 playlists running all day long, that is very different from me actively choosing what I want to listen to for a few hours a months while I'm listening in my car, or putting on Friends Per Second while doing the dishes.

My $7/mo should be going to the artists I actually chose to listen to, not the stuff that droned passively for hours in background environments. Particularly when I'm actually a high margin customer for Spotify; the cost to them of my subscription is low since I spend so little time on the service. That makes it all the more galling that my subscription cost is mostly going to Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.
1 comments
darkwater 65 days ago
I mean, I understand and agree, and I'm pretty sure that Spotify Premium users are very skewed towards less mainstream tastes, so I agree it would be better for smaller artists and would probably change the power balance (well, if we forget that music labels exist). But yeah, if as others pointed out you were to give 70% of your subscription cost to the artist that composed/performed the single track you listened this month, it would be very different.
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iso1631 64 days ago
It would be better.

If my listening is to Ed Sheeran for 9 hours a day and I pay $10, spotify take $3 for a platform fee, and Ed should get 10% of the rest - $7

If your listening is to Dave Smith for 1 hour a day and you pay $10, spotify take $3 for a platform fee, and Dave should get 10% of the rest - $7

That would be a fair way of distributing the revenue

But it's not. Instead Ed Sheeran gets 90% of listens and Dave Smith 10%, the listen pot is $14, so Ed gets $12.60 and Dave gets $1.40

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mikepurvis 65 days ago
At the end of the day, indies need to be on Spotify much more than Spotify needs them there. But for mainstream artists, it's the opposite; so the representatives of top-40 artists are the ones dictating the terms of how the system works for everyone, and unsurprisingly the system they've settled on is one that seems fair enough as long as you don't think too deeply about it, but ensures that the biggest slice of the pie goes to themselves.
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