The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Hey All,

This article is a good read about how artists get paid by streaming services, but from the listener's perspective. It also has a call to action that asks you to stream indie artists 24/7 during the month of September. Of course, you could do that immediately as well.

https://medium.com/cuepoint/streaming-m ... .44r2mp6wp

I'm confused as to how paying royalties per stream could be wrong. Isn't that how royalties have always worked? Per unit, unit being a radio play, a purchase of physical or digital media, etc. Also, not to sound like a broken record, but, it's not the streaming companies job to get artists an audience. Why would/should they care if you have one fan or 10000 fans...? Their primary customers are listeners, not artists. The record labels are nominally in the business of supporting and promoting their artists. If they're not doing that job well, that has nothing to do with the streaming services. This guy's hypothetical scenario also seems to assume that the imaginary artists' 10000 fans are only subscribing to the service just to play that artist's one song one time each. That doesn't make sense to me.

This is another iteration of the Spotify royalty discussion. The issue people have with it isn't that it's a per-stream payment model, but that the stream payments are priced based on the overall subscription base, but paid based on aggregate counts. So, someone who pays $20/month and listens only to a small amount of indie music would expect that $20 to go to indie musicians, when really it gets spread out and subsidizes the people who pay $0/month and listen to a crapton of [insert mainstream music bogeyman of the week].

This article is from last year and is the same thing I was writing about a few months ago.

Basically, if you're going to release an album on Spotify or any streaming service, try to do so in a month where there are no blockbuster releases coming out, to minimize the dilution of your value-per-stream.

No matter what, some money from fans of GWAR will go to Clay Aiken. That bugs me.

I personally feel that my subscription should go to the bands that I personally listen to. Not just whoever had the most streams that month. And if I don't listen to anybody that month, Spotify should just keep my subscription fee like any other service would.

But I've already gone on at length about this, so bleh.

JB

I enjoyed reading the article and it puts the limitations on streaming into a coherent argument. I'm not sure that they aren't dismissing the limitations of their suggestion, though. But it can't be any worse for the average artist, can it?