My letter to Spotify

[jb]

I am a subscriber to Spotify, and like their service. I don't like their royalty structure, and this morning I read a great article about an alternative proposal. I liked that proposal so much that I just sent it to Spotify via their contact form, which you can find here: https://www.spotify.com/us/about-us/con ... y-support/

===Here is what I wrote to Spotify:===

A lot of my subscription fee goes to pay artists that I don't listen to. I looked at the Top list for the US, and I can't remember listening to (almost) any of those people, ever.

So why does every artist get an equal share of your funds per play?

I have friends who are very small artists managing to eke out a living. Spotify doesn't help them pay the bills. While every article seems focused on the upper tier artists who get millions of plays, there is very little attention paid to those who get thousands or tens of thousands of plays. Shouldn't Spotify benefit them too, beyond the price of a latte at Starbucks? Especially considering these smaller artists, like Maia Sharp (not a friend, but I listened to her quite a bit yesterday) are what makes up my playlist.

If Spotify takes 30% of my fee (which certainly is reasonable), shouldn't the artists that I actually do listen to get the rest or some fair share of the rest of my subscription rather than someone like Maroon 5 or Nick Jonas whose music I actively dislike but who have songs at #2 and #3 on the Top US list?

I strongly encourage somebody at Spotify to read this proposal on Medium, which lays out what appears to be a truly equitable new royalty structure that could make our beloved music scene richer in variety and quality and allow some artists to actually see meaningful revenue from Spotify, while being more fair in how my subscription fee is distributed.

Here is the article: https://medium.com/@sharkyl/how-to-make ... 38cd862f66

Please take this seriously. Your executives are asking for help in the media-- here is a proposal.

Getting this right-- better than it is today-- means a lot to a lot of us, and it probably involves the very survival of music as we know it.

[ken]

Interesting. He doesn't really address what to do with all the non-subscribing plays. Spotify is a "Freemium" model, which is based on luring in listeners with free, commercial driven content and trying to upsell them into purchasing a subscription. Artists who get streamed by the non-subscribers would also have to be paid in some way from the revenue generated from the ads.

(Also, well written letter JB. I've written them a couple of times, mostly to complain that the ads are INCREDIBLY TOO LOUD compared to the music and have yet to receive a response.)

[jb]

Thanks. Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's better than what they have now-- which I consider to be unsustainable.

I've shared that article in a few places. Which is, almost literally, the least I can do.

Maybe we should have title called "Spotify is Bullshit" (which it's not, but you get the point)...

MC Frontalot's "Captains of Industry" says it well: https://embed.spotify.com/?uri=spotify: ... rUa7y4dGu6

[fluffy]

It's amazing how every few years the streaming world gets "reinvented" but it's always the same song and dance where everything only benefits the entrenched ones who are already making a killing. For example.

Of course the other big injustice with Spotify is that you can't submit your music directly - you have to go through an aggregator like CDBaby, which take another stupidly gigantic cut off of the income for doing literally nothing beyond sending the files to Spotify in the first place (which isn't exactly a difficult process, or shouldn't be).

[Caravan Ray]

Interesting. Though I suppose that the obvious counter is that it is the "big" names that attract the most punters to the service, so they should get the bigger slice of the pie. Even if I only listen to Caravan Ray on there - I use the service because it is the biggest, and it is the biggest because you can hear everything on there.

I recently received about $18.50 from CDBaby - about half of which seemed to be generated by Spotify. Far more impressive was the $350 payment I just got from APRA!! (for song writing royalties). I spend a lot of time drunk at various pubs, climbing on stage from time-to-time to sing obscene songs I have written. Turns out, if I make a note of every time I do that and at the end of the year send the info to APRA - they give me money!! Awesome!

[jb]

Spotify's response:

Hey John,

Thanks for getting in touch and for your feedback on Spotify.

For further information on our business model please check out Artists website at https://www.spotifyartists.com/. I'll also make sure to forward your comments to the relevant team for you.

If there's anything else I can help with please let me know.

All the best,

Justin
Spotify Customer Support

[fluffy]

And the pricing model is still ridiculous.

The only choices that even make sense to consider:

• RecordUnion costs $13/year/album to Spotify only, or $16/year/album to all the big services
• Emubands is a one-time fee of $84[/url]

CDBaby charges an outrageous setup fee ($60/album) and still takes another big chunk of money (10%, not 30% as I misremembered earlier), and Tunecore charges $50/year/album. Both of them will at least do the legwork for doing ASCAP/BMI registration for you as well (another $30 on CDBaby, and $75 on Tunecore). Of course, you can also do ASCAP for a whole whopping $0 if you want to go through filling out a buttload of bizarre forms. (Obviously it does cost them money to go through those forms but I suspect that they have a much more efficient workflow for it.)

[Lunkhead]

Have you tried Distrokid?

https://distrokid.com/

Pay only $19.99 to upload unlimited albums & songs for a year (our competitors charge at least 2x that just to upload just one album)

Anyway, John, what are you going to do to hold Spotify accountable? Stop using their service? Go back to buying mp3s or CDs?

[Lunkhead]

Here's a fun attack piece from the Oakland weekly hating on Pandora:

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/t ... lText=true

[fluffy]

Hm, Distrokid looks like a much better choice. I wonder why Spotify doesn't link to them on their aggregators page.

It's pretty telling, incidentally, that the founders of both CDBaby and TuneCore (who had both left their respective companies long ago) say that DistroKid is the best service out there now.

And, wow, $20/year for unlimited uploads to all services, no royalty cut? Holy cow, yes, that is the way I will go from now on.

[RangerDenni]

holy cow! I've been looking for something like Distrokid all my life!!! wow!

[ken]

Here's a fun attack piece from the Oakland weekly hating on Pandora:

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/t ... lText=true

Yikes! That article scares the hell out of me. It reminds me that the only way to get your music buying dollar to the artist is to hand it to them directly.

[jb]

This thread was worth it just to learn of distrokid.

I'm considering Patreon for direct support of some people. http://patreon.com

I don't think that's the future though, for the same reason I don't think that kickstarter is the future, for the same reason I don't think that self-policed recycling is the future-- people need to be basically forced into things, even things that are good for them. We're always going to take the path of least resistance-- which is why Spotify and their compatriots have driven piracy down so far.

I don't know whether or not I'll ditch Spotify, as much as it galls me. I'm certainly a hypocrite (this is probably the smallest example of things I'm a hypocrite about).

I think streaming is the future, I think most people who make entire "albums" don't deserve $15 of my money. I think most singles get a couple of listens and I'm done with them. I do think that the music industry should stop looking like an income equality chart and should start thinking about the long tail and remunerating what I do listen to rather than what everybody else is listening to. That's basically it-- ever since that guy pointed out that a lot of my subscription fee is going to this Hozier guy (whose hit song I haven't listened to, and might-- once), I've been annoyed.

I recently read this blog post by the Spotify CEO, which to me comes off as whiny. He makes this point in there:

Myth number two: Spotify pays, but it pays so little per play nobody could ever earn a living from it.

First of all, let’s be clear about what a single stream – or listen – is: it’s one person playing one song one time. So people throw around a lot of stream counts that seem big and then tell you they’re associated with payouts that sound small. But let’s look at what those counts really represent. If a song has been listened to 500 thousand times on Spotify, that’s the same as it having been played one time on a U.S. radio station with a moderate sized audience of 500 thousand people. Which would pay the recording artist precisely … nothing at all. But the equivalent of that one play and its 500 thousand listens on Spotify would pay out between three and four thousand dollars. The Spotify equivalent of ten plays on that radio station – once a day for a week and a half – would be worth thirty to forty thousand dollars.

That argument's so full of holes you couldn't catch a tuna with it.

There's this weird assumption, from the pirates on down to the Spotify people, that art will always be there and the challenge is getting the art to the people. I'm not sure that's true. Well, I know that SOME art will always be around, so sure, maybe they're right in that way. But I'm certain that people are gonna be kind of pissed if someday their Spotify subscription is filled with nothing but Song Fight songs.

[Lunkhead]

I really think streaming and sales are apples and oranges though because of that key difference that every single stream to one person incurs a royalty fee, which is not equivalent to a person buying an album/song and listening to is as many times as they want "for free" after that. I'd love to see some artists or journalists putting together some more comprehensive comparisons of revenues from sales vs streaming that try to examine that key difference.

[fluffy]

I think streaming is the future, I think most people who make entire "albums" don't deserve $15 of my money. I think most singles get a couple of listens and I'm done with them.

This is why I release all my stuff now on a pay-as-you-want basis. However, I only make the full album downloadable for $0, because Bandcamp limits the number of items you can have downloaded free per month (unless you, the artist, pays more), and for whatever reason they count an album the same as a track for that limit.

I also (currently) don't allow individual track sales because what often happens is someone listens to one song, decides they like it, buys that, and then ignores the rest of the album without even listening. Maybe that's a mistake on my part, but I don't see why people would turn down a download of a whole album for the same price (they can always delete the songs they don't like). I suppose I could just enable non-free PWYW on individual tracks too. But it's hard to explain that on a Bandcamp page with the way they have it set up. I also worry that someone pays $3 for a track, and then feels "gypped" because they could have paid $3 for the whole album, and that turns them off.

I really think streaming and sales are apples and oranges though because of that key difference that every single stream to one person incurs a royalty fee, which is not equivalent to a person buying an album/song and listening to is as many times as they want "for free" after that. I'd love to see some artists or journalists putting together some more comprehensive comparisons of revenues from sales vs streaming that try to examine that key difference.

Yeah, streaming services are structured like the radio, download services are like record stores. But what the streaming services SHOULD do is take a fixed cut of the listener's subscription fee, and then distribute the rest to the artists based on the tracks that individual listener listens to, instead of this bullshit where they set the per-stream price based on the sum total of all streams across the service. If I were to pay $20/month to Spotify and then listen to nothing but Tyler Zahnke, Tyler Zahnke should get the $15 (or whatever the artists' cut is).

[Lunkhead]

I haven't read the Spotify article yet about their royalties model, but yeah, I don't understand that approach. I could be wrong by my understanding about Pandora was that Pandora pays royalties on a per "spin" (one song being played for one user) basis, even for songs played to subscription users.

[Caravan Ray]

[quote="Lunkhead"]Have you tried Distrokid?

https://distrokid.com/

[quote]
Does Distrokid do the "putting ads on your Youtube videos" thing that CD Baby does through Rumblefish? I seem to get more money through that than Spotify or iTunes etc.

[fluffy]

You don't need CDBaby for that - use AdRev. It's absolutely free and there is no reason to pay money for it.

[roymond]

I haven't read the Spotify article yet about their royalties model, but yeah, I don't understand that approach. I could be wrong by my understanding about Pandora was that Pandora pays royalties on a per "spin" (one song being played for one user) basis, even for songs played to subscription users.

I'm a little late to this, I know, but...

Pandora used to pay per spin (actually, delivered bits) but I believe this changed with the new ASCAP agreement last year. Also, it wasnt exactly a 1-for-1 deal, as they'd aggregate plays and pay fees based on the agregate amount, then send the playlist as a separate file simply listing titles. ASCAP dumped their license fees into the great big pool to be divided up according to a magic formula.

This is the performance model vs purchase model of downloads.

[JonPorobil]

I'm also late to the party, but I wanted to thank Lunkhead for introducing us to Distrokid. I signed up for an account and used it to distribute my new album.

Now it's on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Google Music, and a few other outlets I'm less familiar with. I still had to wrestle with Bandcamp and Soundcloud on my own (each its own particular brand of frustration), but Distrokid took care of all the moneymaking outlets! Maybe I'll get a small royalty check in a decade or two!

[fluffy]

I've never had a problem with Bandcamp's uploader, and I still think it's the most artist-friendly of all the sites for the actual setup experience and payment model (not to mention listener-friendly for all the extras you get and so on). But Distrokid is nearly as nice on most counts, and has places that people actually buy shit. :)

My own experience with Distrokid is that they do have trouble getting my music associated with my Amazon artist page for some reason, but that might also be because Radio Ready was previously handled by Createspace before they pulled out of AmazonMP3 distribution (which was literally the only reason createspace was worth working with anymore, especially since THEY ARE FUCKING OWNED BY AMAZON WHAT THE FUCK) so that left Radio Ready in a weird inconsistent spot. I did contact distrokid support and they resubmitted like 30 minutes later, so even though the album still isn't showing up on my artist page at least they goddamn tried.

[JonPorobil]

It's funny, I also have a conflict, because apparently there's some country/gospel crooner submitting songs to the various outlets under the name Jon Eric, and I can't figure out how to alert them that we're not the same person. Google and Spotify are content to just lump all of our content together, so whatever I guess. They just think I'm the same as the person who recorded "In Heaven Tonight" and looks like this:

unnamed.jpg (53.23 KiB) Viewed 2166 times

It probably hurts him more than me.