Author Topic: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...  (Read 10388 times)

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #35 on: August 03, 2020, 09:35:11 PM »
Bandcamp is great - I hope it sticks around for the distant future. Part of me kinda wonders if all of these "Bandcamp fridays" where they waive 100% of their share of revenue and give it all directly to the artists is shooting themselves in the foot, despite it being super generous of them. Though I guess they wouldn't keep doing those if it weren't a net positive for them at the end of the day.
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Offline HOF

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #36 on: August 03, 2020, 10:29:58 PM »
Bandcamp is great - I hope it sticks around for the distant future. Part of me kinda wonders if all of these "Bandcamp fridays" where they waive 100% of their share of revenue and give it all directly to the artists is shooting themselves in the foot, despite it being super generous of them. Though I guess they wouldn't keep doing those if it weren't a net positive for them at the end of the day.

Seems like the best way for them to compete with the bigger services is to attract more artists, and getting people to buy something one day a month gets them to the site and helps build a user base. I like Bandcamp a lot, and if I’m going to download something that’s where I look to buy first (and sometimes you can buy a CD direct from an artist there too).

Offline erwinrafael

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #37 on: August 04, 2020, 12:06:13 AM »
The artists have to understand that Spotify is not really competing with revenue they could have gotten from direct album purchases. Instead, Spotify and streaming in general should be seen as services that allow them to recover a bit revenues that they could have lost from illegal downloads.

I am in a part of the world where money spent on a CD purchase is enough to feed me for a whole day. If it wasn't for streaming services, I would not have gotten to listen to and support bands like Haken, Fates Warning, etc. because it just is too expensive. Since 2011, I basically only purchased DT albums, ITGD, Icefish, Haken's Visions, and Fates Warning's Theories of Flight. Everything else is streaming and I stream a lot. I purchased one of Neal Morse's albums and I regretted the amount I spent because I listened to that album less than 10 times. If Neal had a stream, then I would at least have an option to test if it's worth it.

Offline Kotowboy

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #38 on: August 04, 2020, 12:26:50 AM »
I buy physical albums but singles from iTunes obviously.

If I want to randomly listen to one song - I use Spotify. I'm not going to spend £1 or whatever each and every time I fancy listening to 1 song from 20 years ago...

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #39 on: August 04, 2020, 12:55:31 AM »
The thing with streaming is that the money isn’t distributed fairly at all. If I spend €10 on Spotify a month and in that month I would listen to just two different artists equally, it would make sense that my €10 is split between those two artists (and maybe Spotify should get a small fee as well for providing the service).

Instead what happens is, my €10 is thrown on a pile with everybody else’s subscription money and they look at the total amount of streams every song got in a month. They then distribute everybody’s money over those tracks. This means that my €10 doesn’t go to those two artists I listened to (well, a small part of it does), but the majority goes to Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran or whatever artists got tons of streams because other people listened to them.

This system is not sustainable, because small artists barely get any revenue (what’s more is that you would need about €50 of streaming money before Spotify even pays you) and big artists get the money. If I really want to support the smaller artists with €10 a month, Spotify subscription is not the way to go.

That said, the majority of people (not on this forum) don’t view music as something that needs to be payed for at all. The music ‘business’ has killed its own business by allowing ‘free’ music to happen in the first place. Artists should look for other creative ways of making money, because become rich (or even just getting by) solely by selling music is a myth, only attainable by the top few selling artists.
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Offline Progmetty

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #40 on: August 04, 2020, 01:12:05 AM »
Well we've know for a while that the kinda artists we listen to; mainly make their living from touring. I'm wondering how much is "mainly" though, like 90%?
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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #41 on: August 04, 2020, 02:11:25 AM »
The thing with streaming is that the money isn’t distributed fairly at all. If I spend €10 on Spotify a month and in that month I would listen to just two different artists equally, it would make sense that my €10 is split between those two artists (and maybe Spotify should get a small fee as well for providing the service).

Instead what happens is, my €10 is thrown on a pile with everybody else’s subscription money and they look at the total amount of streams every song got in a month. They then distribute everybody’s money over those tracks. This means that my €10 doesn’t go to those two artists I listened to (well, a small part of it does), but the majority goes to Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran or whatever artists got tons of streams because other people listened to them.

This system is not sustainable, because small artists barely get any revenue (what’s more is that you would need about €50 of streaming money before Spotify even pays you) and big artists get the money. If I really want to support the smaller artists with €10 a month, Spotify subscription is not the way to go.
Not sure I understand your logic here. The way you've described suggests that the pooling of artists means your money is taken away from the two artists you listened to, but by the same token money from people who only listen to Bieber, Sheeran etc is taken away from those big artists too and given to the artists you listened to. The distribution is "fair" in the sense that the more your music is listened to, the more you make. The issue isn't the distribution between different artists, it's between artists and others (management, labels, distribution platforms, etc.). And that's been an issue for ever, it's not new. I mean Pink Floyd were writing songs about it in the 70s (Welcome to the Machine) and I'm sure others have been writing about it for longer than that.

In terms of Ek's comments, I find them quite weird. Other than huge artists, has there ever been a time when more mid-sized bands/artists could make a living from simply releasing an album every 3-4 years and not doing other stuff to raise money?

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #42 on: August 04, 2020, 02:15:15 AM »
Also, I basically agree with every single thing HOF has said in his posts in this thread. There's a lot of very reactionary stuff online that I'm not really getting, to be honest.

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Offline erwinrafael

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #43 on: August 04, 2020, 02:38:46 AM »
People have been listening to "free music" for a long time. It's called FM radio.

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #44 on: August 04, 2020, 02:46:38 AM »
Well we've know for a while that the kinda artists we listen to; mainly make their living from touring. I'm wondering how much is "mainly" though, like 90%?
It will of course depend a huge amount on the artist, the genre, etc. Some interesting stats though:




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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #45 on: August 04, 2020, 03:01:24 AM »
Another interesting graph too:



What's interesting is that share of revenue is rising and is higher than it's been since the analysis went back to (1984), and absolute artist revenue is higher than it's ever been. But the share is still low (at only 12%), and there are also many more artists than ever because it's so easy to record and publish music now, meaning each individual band/artist will get a smaller slice of the pie (but I'm not convinced that's worse than the "good old days" when smaller bands simply couldn't produce any music at all).

Anyway the 2017 report from Citi is really interesting if anyone wants to check it out: https://ir.citi.com/QnhL09FARMDbvMhnCWFtjkqYOlPmgXqWS5Wrjts%2B6usU7suR9o7uUEFwZNjmUfyrAn10iZxCkYc%3D

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #46 on: August 04, 2020, 03:06:44 AM »
My logic is that despite me paying €10 for Spotify and deciding to use that to listen to just two artists, the majority of my money doesn’t go to those two artists at all. I don’t get to say what happens with my money, Spotify does this. So yes, the more a song gets listened, the more the artist gets payed, that’s kind of logical, and even ‘fair’, but can you not see how my system would be fair too, at least to some extent?

Of course, this is not sustainable as soon as someone (a lot of people) listen(s) to thousands of tracks each month. But that’s exactly my point as well; this is not a sustainable system.
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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #47 on: August 04, 2020, 03:36:27 AM »
My logic is that despite me paying €10 for Spotify and deciding to use that to listen to just two artists, the majority of my money doesn’t go to those two artists at all. I don’t get to say what happens with my money, Spotify does this. So yes, the more a song gets listened, the more the artist gets payed, that’s kind of logical, and even ‘fair’, but can you not see how my system would be fair too, at least to some extent?

Of course, this is not sustainable as soon as someone (a lot of people) listen(s) to thousands of tracks each month. But that’s exactly my point as well; this is not a sustainable system.
Ok I think I get your point now, but I still think the number/size of artists is kind of irrelevant, as it's about the number of songs you listen to, right?

So let's say you and I are both paying $10 each a month. You don't listen much, and only rack up 30 song plays in total that month (to only two artists, to go with your example). Whereas I listen constantly (which in fairness isn't inaccurate), racking up 500 song plays. There's $20 of total revenue from us, and let's assume that $4 goes to the artists. As you only listened a bit, your artists only get $4 x 30/530 = $0.23, while the artists I was listening to constantly got the remaining $3.77. So even though we're paying the same amount for our subscription, the fact that I listen much more means that the artists I'm listening to get more money.

As I said though, that's entirely about the amount of listening, nothing to do with the size or status of the artists. And it's the nature of subscription services, for any type of service. With all that listening I did, it was probably 20 different artists (again, probably quite accurate, particularly when I'm doing roulettes which is when I do the most Spotify listening) in which case each artist is going to make a similar amount to the two artists you listened to.

I would argue that we do have a say over where our money goes. If there are only a handful of artists we want to listen to, and we can't listen to music very often, then maybe subscription services aren't the right way to spend our money and we're better off spending on buying albums by those bands. Personally, I do both. I listen to Spotify an absolute ton, but I also buy albums that I really love as well.

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #48 on: August 04, 2020, 03:50:54 AM »
But you don't pay Spotify for content. You can listen to the content for free especially in the desktop version. The fees are paid to allow you to listen to the music ad-free. That is why you can not correlate directly the fee paid by premium users to artist payments. The revenue model is really still like radio, it is ads-based. The premium fees are like ad revenues.

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #49 on: August 04, 2020, 04:53:11 AM »
But you don't pay Spotify for content. You can listen to the content for free especially in the desktop version. The fees are paid to allow you to listen to the music ad-free. That is why you can not correlate directly the fee paid by premium users to artist payments. The revenue model is really still like radio, it is ads-based. The premium fees are like ad revenues.
You can, but the vast majority of streaming revenue now comes from paid subscriptions. So the revenue model is very much a subscription model, topped up with ad revenues, rather than the other way round.

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #50 on: August 04, 2020, 05:36:10 AM »
I'm confused by all the comments saying Spotify is at least better than piracy. All Spotify did was convince enough labels into giving them their catalogs to the point where everyone else would have had to get on it too, and then convinced consumers that this way of listening to endless amounts of music only available on torrents is almost as good for the artist as buying it on iTunes, and they got rich off of it. At this stage I'm honestly less embarrassed about the pile of pirated music I have on a hard drive somewhere than the fact I used to pay for Spotify to give me access to music by my favorite artists because my listening/tech habits changed and using Spotify was suddenly very convenient to me and I also had this idea that it's better than nothing. It's not. It's not because Spotify is keeping a business model that only benefits them and the big cats they wanna mollify, and now they wanna lecture the musicians who have provided them with content, too.

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #51 on: August 04, 2020, 06:01:35 AM »
But you don't pay Spotify for content. You can listen to the content for free especially in the desktop version. The fees are paid to allow you to listen to the music ad-free. That is why you can not correlate directly the fee paid by premium users to artist payments. The revenue model is really still like radio, it is ads-based. The premium fees are like ad revenues.
You can, but the vast majority of streaming revenue now comes from paid subscriptions. So the revenue model is very much a subscription model, topped up with ad revenues, rather than the other way round.

Yes, but I was actually responding more to Elite who was proposing splitting the fee he paid only to the artists he lostened too. My point is you are paying for subscription to an ad-free service, not subscribing specifically to an artist's content which you could access from the free service. It really is more of like a Cable TV subscription.

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #52 on: August 04, 2020, 06:19:36 AM »
I'm confused by all the comments saying Spotify is at least better than piracy. All Spotify did was convince enough labels into giving them their catalogs to the point where everyone else would have had to get on it too, and then convinced consumers that this way of listening to endless amounts of music only available on torrents is almost as good for the artist as buying it on iTunes, and they got rich off of it. At this stage I'm honestly less embarrassed about the pile of pirated music I have on a hard drive somewhere than the fact I used to pay for Spotify to give me access to music by my favorite artists because my listening/tech habits changed and using Spotify was suddenly very convenient to me and I also had this idea that it's better than nothing. It's not. It's not because Spotify is keeping a business model that only benefits them and the big cats they wanna mollify, and now they wanna lecture the musicians who have provided them with content, too.
I'm not sure I understand why you think Spotify's model is worse than what labels/distributors/etc have been doing for pretty much as long as the music industry has existed. Particularly in the context of the graphs I posted above.


But you don't pay Spotify for content. You can listen to the content for free especially in the desktop version. The fees are paid to allow you to listen to the music ad-free. That is why you can not correlate directly the fee paid by premium users to artist payments. The revenue model is really still like radio, it is ads-based. The premium fees are like ad revenues.
You can, but the vast majority of streaming revenue now comes from paid subscriptions. So the revenue model is very much a subscription model, topped up with ad revenues, rather than the other way round.

Yes, but I was actually responding more to Elite who was proposing splitting the fee he paid only to the artists he lostened too. My point is you are paying for subscription to an ad-free service, not subscribing specifically to an artist's content which you could access from the free service. It really is more of like a Cable TV subscription.
Aha, gotcha, yes I agree.

It's interesting to consider the differences between music subscription services and TV/movie ones. With music, people generally subscribe to a single service, and most artists make their music available on all those different services. So they don't get much money but they do make the decisions on what to make available. Whereas TV is very different - most shows are only on one service, and it is up to that service to commission shows and decide what to make available, so when a show gets cancelled, that's it, nothing.

Obviously music and TV are produced very differently, and have very different production costs, so there are logical reasons for the differences, it's just something I find interesting.

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #53 on: August 04, 2020, 06:42:26 AM »
I'm confused by all the comments saying Spotify is at least better than piracy. All Spotify did was convince enough labels into giving them their catalogs to the point where everyone else would have had to get on it too, and then convinced consumers that this way of listening to endless amounts of music only available on torrents is almost as good for the artist as buying it on iTunes, and they got rich off of it. At this stage I'm honestly less embarrassed about the pile of pirated music I have on a hard drive somewhere than the fact I used to pay for Spotify to give me access to music by my favorite artists because my listening/tech habits changed and using Spotify was suddenly very convenient to me and I also had this idea that it's better than nothing. It's not. It's not because Spotify is keeping a business model that only benefits them and the big cats they wanna mollify, and now they wanna lecture the musicians who have provided them with content, too.

Spotify helped me put the nail in my pirating coffin. Been a proud premium sub for 8.5 years now. Spotify is incredible for hardcore music fans like myself. I don't want to pirate again and likely won't ever because Spotify makes it very easy, quick, and convenient to find almost anything.  Piracy is still wrong.

Also this post goes back to my point about how people take advantage of how easily obtainable music is, that they'll justify piracy in any way they can.
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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #54 on: August 04, 2020, 07:10:37 AM »
But you don't pay Spotify for content. You can listen to the content for free especially in the desktop version. The fees are paid to allow you to listen to the music ad-free. That is why you can not correlate directly the fee paid by premium users to artist payments. The revenue model is really still like radio, it is ads-based. The premium fees are like ad revenues.
You can, but the vast majority of streaming revenue now comes from paid subscriptions. So the revenue model is very much a subscription model, topped up with ad revenues, rather than the other way round.

This is interesting because it means that the streaming services have a significantly higher number of paid subscribers than they have of "freebooters". Usually services make more money out of a free user than a paid user because the average ad revenue is higher than the monthly fee. I would love to see those numbers if you happen to have them handy, or one of those charts you love so much  ;D
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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #55 on: August 04, 2020, 07:46:32 AM »
Does anyone know if the ad revenue from the free service goes to the artist you are currently listening to or does it just go into "the money pile" that gets distributed based on listening count? 

I don't really use spotify, youtube does the same thing (it's not as good as a platform for just straight music listening though) and at least with youtube, your ad revenue on your videos goes to you.

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #56 on: August 04, 2020, 07:52:35 AM »
I'm confused by all the comments saying Spotify is at least better than piracy. All Spotify did was convince enough labels into giving them their catalogs to the point where everyone else would have had to get on it too, and then convinced consumers that this way of listening to endless amounts of music only available on torrents is almost as good for the artist as buying it on iTunes, and they got rich off of it. At this stage I'm honestly less embarrassed about the pile of pirated music I have on a hard drive somewhere than the fact I used to pay for Spotify to give me access to music by my favorite artists because my listening/tech habits changed and using Spotify was suddenly very convenient to me and I also had this idea that it's better than nothing. It's not. It's not because Spotify is keeping a business model that only benefits them and the big cats they wanna mollify, and now they wanna lecture the musicians who have provided them with content, too.

Spotify helped me put the nail in my pirating coffin. Been a proud premium sub for 8.5 years now. Spotify is incredible for hardcore music fans like myself. I don't want to pirate again and likely won't ever because Spotify makes it very easy, quick, and convenient to find almost anything.  Piracy is still wrong.

Also this post goes back to my point about how people take advantage of how easily obtainable music is, that they'll justify piracy in any way they can.

Yeah, the differences between Spotify and Piracy are:

1) Spotify has the rights to make the music available

2) the artists get *some* revenue directly from streaming on Spotify

3) Spotify likely has a broader reach than any of the illegal downloading sites (at least after the industry started shutting down sites like Napster), can be advertised, and can easily be shared with anyone who at least uses the free platform.

Those are all better for the artist than the file sharing sites. Especially if you actually control the rights to your music. You don’t have to be there is you don’t want to (Neal Morse is a good example).

I’m not really arguing that the current streaming model is the best thing possible for artists. I do think it is probably at least better than the previous industry models for all but a select few big label artists though.

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #57 on: August 04, 2020, 07:59:15 AM »
What if a mega artist does his own Spotify? For example, could Lady Gaga launch "Streamgaga" or "Spotygaga" and make money directly off it, with the same moderate monthly subscription? I don't know however how would anyone buy an album anymore since you can stream it legally, maybe each new album could be kept off this platform for, say, 2 years before becoming available...
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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #58 on: August 04, 2020, 08:00:50 AM »
What if a mega artist does his own Spotify? For example, could Lady Gaga launch "Streamgaga" or "Spotygaga" and make money directly off it, with the same moderate monthly subscription? I don't know however how would anyone buy an album anymore since you can stream it legally, maybe each new album could be kept off this platform for, say, 2 years before becoming available...

I’m sure they could. Neal Morse has his own streaming app, and it appears to at least makes enough money to sustain itself with his fairly small fan base.

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #59 on: August 04, 2020, 08:08:13 AM »
What if a mega artist does his own Spotify? For example, could Lady Gaga launch "Streamgaga" or "Spotygaga" and make money directly off it, with the same moderate monthly subscription? I don't know however how would anyone buy an album anymore since you can stream it legally, maybe each new album could be kept off this platform for, say, 2 years before becoming available...

Jay-Z made his own streaming service (Tidal) and I believe some high-profile records were exclusive there for some time. From what I can remember, it didn't go very well.
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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #60 on: August 04, 2020, 08:11:27 AM »
What if a mega artist does his own Spotify? For example, could Lady Gaga launch "Streamgaga" or "Spotygaga" and make money directly off it, with the same moderate monthly subscription? I don't know however how would anyone buy an album anymore since you can stream it legally, maybe each new album could be kept off this platform for, say, 2 years before becoming available...

I’m sure they could. Neal Morse has his own streaming app, and it appears to at least makes enough money to sustain itself with his fairly small fan base.

Neal Morse has a very large catalog of music.  Most artists don't have so much content to make it worth having their own site set up for it. 

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #61 on: August 04, 2020, 08:21:49 AM »
Keep in mind the benefit of Spotify (and let's include Apple Music in there too) isn't just being able to listen to music for free, it's being able to listen to music for free all in one place. Nobody's going to buy a whole separate streaming subscription just to get access to one or two more artists. At that point you might as well just buy the album. In some ways we're lucky that music streaming services are so all-encompassing, compared to movie / TV streaming where everything's split across dozens of competing services and you're at the mercy of whatever happens to be available on the service(s) you have at the present.
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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #62 on: August 04, 2020, 08:33:28 AM »
But then again Spotify (and all other streaming services that exist, let’s not pretend Spotify is the only one) has a death grip on new, emerging, small artists. They need people to listen to their music, so instead of putting it in just one place (say bandcamp or youtube, it doesn’t matter), smaller bands need to put their music everywhere, because otherwise they don’t get heard. In turn, they don’t get anything back other than possible exposure (and we all know exposure doesn’t pay bills) and it makes people less likely to buy records, because why should they? It’s on every single platform for free.

There is no real money to be made from music, unless (or until) you are an established artist with a fan-base that’s willing to spend money on your products. Note I’m saying ‘products’ here and not necessarly ‘music’.
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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #63 on: August 04, 2020, 08:39:09 AM »
But you don't pay Spotify for content. You can listen to the content for free especially in the desktop version. The fees are paid to allow you to listen to the music ad-free. That is why you can not correlate directly the fee paid by premium users to artist payments. The revenue model is really still like radio, it is ads-based. The premium fees are like ad revenues.
You can, but the vast majority of streaming revenue now comes from paid subscriptions. So the revenue model is very much a subscription model, topped up with ad revenues, rather than the other way round.

This is interesting because it means that the streaming services have a significantly higher number of paid subscribers than they have of "freebooters". Usually services make more money out of a free user than a paid user because the average ad revenue is higher than the monthly fee. I would love to see those numbers if you happen to have them handy, or one of those charts you love so much  ;D
I do bloody love charts.

Ok here's some US data from the RIAA, which they've provided lots of really detailed data for in terms of formats. On their website there's an interactive chart where you can select whether to adjust for inflation or not, and can just highlight a specific type of format. Check it out here: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Here's the full chart, the first one is actual cash terms, the second is adjusted for inflation.

 

The darkest green line is fully paid subscriptions.

It's also interesting to consider these charts in combination with other charts I posted. What we see from the RIAA's data is that in real terms (adjusting for inflation) the music industry has just about got back to the same amount of revenue it was making in the 70s and 80s. The chart from Citi's 2017 report that I posted earlier indicated that the share of revenue that went to artists was at a similar level back then too. What then happened in the 90s and early 00s was a huge peak in revenues from surging CD sales. But we also know from the Citi graph that the share of that revenue that went to artists dropped during that period.

Here's that chart again so it's all in one place:


What's interesting is that share of revenue is rising and is higher than it's been since the analysis went back to (1984), and absolute artist revenue is higher than it's ever been. But the share is still low (at only 12%), and there are also many more artists than ever because it's so easy to record and publish music now, meaning each individual band/artist will get a smaller slice of the pie (but I'm not convinced that's worse than the "good old days" when smaller bands simply couldn't produce any music at all).

Anyway the 2017 report from Citi is really interesting if anyone wants to check it out: https://ir.citi.com/QnhL09FARMDbvMhnCWFtjkqYOlPmgXqWS5Wrjts%2B6usU7suR9o7uUEFwZNjmUfyrAn10iZxCkYc%3D

So by considering these in combination, essentially what happened was that in the 90s and early 00s, there was a big increase in revenue for the music industry but that increase mostly didn't go to the artists, it went to labels, promoters, whoever else. Whereas the amount going to artists (as Citi's report also showed) has steadily increased in cash terms, but probably not changed significantly in real terms.

This isn't to suggest that artists are getting a good deal. Just that the bad deal they've been getting has been the case for decades and isn't really getting better but isn't really getting worse either.

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Offline Ben_Jamin

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #64 on: August 04, 2020, 08:39:40 AM »
The thing with streaming is that the money isn’t distributed fairly at all. If I spend €10 on Spotify a month and in that month I would listen to just two different artists equally, it would make sense that my €10 is split between those two artists (and maybe Spotify should get a small fee as well for providing the service).

Instead what happens is, my €10 is thrown on a pile with everybody else’s subscription money and they look at the total amount of streams every song got in a month. They then distribute everybody’s money over those tracks. This means that my €10 doesn’t go to those two artists I listened to (well, a small part of it does), but the majority goes to Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran or whatever artists got tons of streams because other people listened to them.

This system is not sustainable, because small artists barely get any revenue (what’s more is that you would need about €50 of streaming money before Spotify even pays you) and big artists get the money. If I really want to support the smaller artists with €10 a month, Spotify subscription is not the way to go.

That said, the majority of people (not on this forum) don’t view music as something that needs to be payed for at all. The music ‘business’ has killed its own business by allowing ‘free’ music to happen in the first place. Artists should look for other creative ways of making money, because become rich (or even just getting by) solely by selling music is a myth, only attainable by the top few selling artists.

Also, those artists are bought for. Meaning, they're owned by their contracts and only get that money for doing what the record company says of them to do. It's why you see them plastered everywhere. It actually made it harder for musicians to get known as there's no marketing for them and no one wants to spend money on them.

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #65 on: August 04, 2020, 08:39:57 AM »
There is no real money to be made from music, unless (or until) you are an established artist with a fan-base that’s willing to spend money on your products. Note I’m saying ‘products’ here and not necessarly ‘music’.
Yes but how is that different to what has always been the case?

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #66 on: August 04, 2020, 08:52:07 AM »
I would think to some extent oversaturation of the medium factors into this as well. I seriously don't have the income to spend on even a tiny fraction of the artists I love to listen to anymore. There's just too many, and ironically Spotify has massively contributed to that problem. Almost every single day I find awesome new music to listen to from artists I've either never listened to or never even heard of. Paying a nice legal subscription fee to, as already noted, have everything in one place (with some exceptions) gives me peace of mind, but with that comes the realization that I have to be very choosy with which artists get my money - both for the music, live shows, and merch, if I'm that much of a fan.
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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #67 on: August 04, 2020, 09:04:10 AM »
I would think to some extent oversaturation of the medium factors into this as well. I seriously don't have the income to spend on even a tiny fraction of the artists I love to listen to anymore. There's just too many, and ironically Spotify has massively contributed to that problem. Almost every single day I find awesome new music to listen to from artists I've either never listened to or never even heard of. Paying a nice legal subscription fee to, as already noted, have everything in one place (with some exceptions) gives me peace of mind, but with that comes the realization that I have to be very choosy with which artists get my money - both for the music, live shows, and merch, if I'm that much of a fan.

It would be nice if Spotify made an effort to make it easier to directly donate to an artist on their site. I’m not sure I see the downside in having a “tip” button that lets you PayPal a buck or ten to an artist you want to support. Of course some artists do have their own patreon or other ways you can just contribute cash directly as you like. But having the option right from the app where you listen to music would probably be a good way to help artists out.

Offline erwinrafael

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #68 on: August 04, 2020, 09:13:01 AM »
How much is a Spotify Premium subscription in your country? Here, it is just 2USD per month.

If my concern is really I want all the subscription I paid for went to streaming revenue for the artists, I had to stream 667 songs a month ($2 monthly fee / $0.003 payout per stream) or 22 songs a day.

I average 40 songs on Spotify a day.

Artists just have to know how to game the system to maximize streaming revenue. Like Haken, with their intro tracks designated as a separate song, and a single epic, Messiah Complex, tracked into six parts.

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Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says...
« Reply #69 on: August 04, 2020, 09:14:44 AM »
Another wrinkle in all of this. I’m probably not the only one here who has built up a large portion of their music collection buying used CDs. I’ve never felt particularly bad about it, but it’s not much different from streaming. Someone acquired the rights to the product and then legally is selling it without the artist getting a cut. There are some artists who I’ve gone on to really love and support because I was able to find them for the (relatively) low cost of a used CD. At the same time, I’m sure there are many who have never gotten any money from me despite me having and enjoying their music.