[basseq]

If Spotify wants to send me a representative, scrubbed dump of their streams table (id, userid, trackid, artistid), we could run some interesting what-if scenarios rather than guessing.

It's an interesting trade-off: "punishing" artists with fans who only listen to a small amount of music, but who are dedicated to that artist vs. artists with fans who listen to a LOT of music.

My gut is that very few artists are getting "screwed", and those who are represent artists with very few streams (at which point the net revenues are very small and who cares about the difference between 2 cents and .7 cents). For most "edge cases" like the one in the article, there's a user on the opposite end of the spectrum who would balance them out.

That's my hypothesis, anyway.

[bsder]

The real issue is simply that anything other than Top 40 isn't relevant to the public at large (power law). I don't really know how you correct that.

Even if the indie artists created their own service, several orders of magnitude less people would listen to it.

> My gut is that very few artists are getting "screwed"

Huh? How does that follow?

My gut is that a LOT of artists are getting screwed for exactly the reasons mentioned in the article.

This payment scheme isn't an accident. It favors the big, popular copyright holders to keep them off of Spotfy's back.

Of course, those big copyrights are also who bring in the majority of revenue for Spotify.

[basseq]

> My gut is that a LOT of artists are getting screwed for exactly the reasons mentioned in the article.

The article makes the hypothesis that people who listen to "indie" music also listen to less music. I don't think that's true.

(I don't have hard evidence to back up the counter-factual, but neither does the author in proving the hypothesis. He just sets up a straw man example, then bashes yoga studios, Daft Punk, and the idea of a subscription model as a whole.)