I don't know how to feel about any of this.
First and foremost, I feel like Spotify is scummy. I don't like what they did when they were founded, I don't like what they do to artists.
I hate the hyperscalers being in this business (Google, Apple, Amazon) as that's another thing they do that devalues an otherwise healthy market. Bringing in outside business division revenues to dump on another market's prices is ecologically unhealthy for optimal capitalism and healthy competition.
On the one hand, while I want cheap media, I also want artists to make money. While Spotify puts real price pressure on artists, piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all.
I get Gabe's value prop with Valve. Make the service easy, cheap, convenient, good, and piracy begins to diminish.
But if there are cheap services and cheap avenues (that still underpay artists), why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all?
Do Bandcamp. Buy merch. Do something to support the artists. I feel like paying piracy services is the opposite of that.
But ethical quandary - doesn't Anna's Archive also support spreading research papers, etc.?
Complicated feelings.
I wish we had better ways to pay originators of things. Art, music, authors, researchers, ICs, ...
I feel like studios and middlemen and companies themselves are entities that exist because rewarding work or value or happiness at the site of exchange is hard/intangible.
I’d love to see a streaming service where my payment goes to artists I listen to.
Spotify pays 70% of their music revenue to publishers based on the total number of listens. All revenue is put together and split based on the global numbers. Which means that niche band I like will get next to nothing. Instead if they account for 50% of my listening time in one month, they should get 35% of what I paid to Spotify that month. Unfortunately big labels will never agree to that.
darkwater
today at 6:14 PM
But, unless they put some thresholds on minimum listens, isn't basically the same thing what they do and what you propose?
35% of 1 is the same as 0.000000035 of 10.000.000
squeaky-clean
today at 7:39 PM
If you and I both pay $10/mo to listen to Spotify, and we are the only subscribers. If I listen to 1 song by Sabrina Carpenter, and you listen to 99 songs by Taylor Swift. Then of our $20 (after Spotify's share) 1% of the money will go to Sabrina and 99% of the money will go to Taylor. Because Taylor was played 99x more than Sabrina. Even though for both of us as users, our respective artist was 100% of our listening.
It doesn't calculate your amount of listening and determine the payout based on that. All listens are pooled together and all subscription money is pooled together. And the payout is determined based on that.
No, because let's say OP pays USD 10 and listens to only one song one time -- obviously, Linkin Park In the end -- right now, the payout is almost nothing.
With OP proposal, they would get USD 7.
PunchyHamster
today at 6:57 PM
no. if you listen only to niche musicians, all of the fee goes to most popular one regardless.
It also promotes botting, as spotify only counts listens, bot listening a ton to a fraudulent artist will siphon money away from essentially everyone.
"Money only goes to artists you listen" would be very good change
mikepurvis
today at 6:42 PM
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.
darkwater
today at 7:19 PM
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.
mikepurvis
today at 7:39 PM
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.
To play the devil's advocate, if we do this, your favorite artist will get paid less if you listen to others using Spotify radio shuffle feature vs if you stay on the artist page and only listen to that one artist?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
AlecSchueler
today at 6:18 PM
If you listen to the artist less then they will receive less of your money. What's the issue you're seeing there?
Well, if I listen to a shuffle radio then the artists I listen to will get paid, right? Which I’m fine with, it’s not that I want to support one specific artist (I can buy their album or merch if that’s my goal), I just want the money I pay to go to artists I listen to, not to the people from top charts that I don’t care about
That sounds like the intended effect. I think the objection is that the user's payment is being diluted by all the other listeners. Someone who listens to spotify constantly is going to influence the payouts much more than someone who listens to it occasionally, even though they are paying the same amount to spotify and the latter user might have only subscribed to listen to one band.
> I don't like what they do to artists
Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify:
> It pays roughly two-thirds of every dollar it generates from music, with nearly 80% allocated to recording royalties and about 20% to publishing, though how much artists and songwriters ultimately receive depends on their agreements with rights holders, which Spotify does not control. [0]
Spotify is frantically trying to escape the record label's death grip (hence podcasts), because they know they can squeeze it for just about anything with licensing deals. It's a terrible business model! Spotify keeps a third for their costs (& finally some profit in the past year or two), ie. about the same that Apple takes from App Store for basically nothing[1].
How the record labels convinced the world that Spotify is the bad guy here is beyond belief.
--
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofiachierchio/2026/01/28/spoti...
[1] Certainly app store costs are nothing when compared to the infrastructure that Spotify needs.
PunchyHamster
today at 6:55 PM
> Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify:
*not only Spotify
They had plenty of problems from people abusing their system to steal listens from actual artists.
Their system is basically "one big bucket of listens" - if your song gets listens, you get money. So if you pay your sub, and listen to say 5 niche musicians only, it still all goes mostly to the most popular songs.
Now you might already notice the flaw here - if you say, make a bunch of bots that just listen to songs to boost their revenue, not only your sub doesn't pay artists you listen, but also to fraudulent ones.
Then there was problems with using fake collaboration tags, AI music to hijack artist profiles, and few others.
> Their system is basically "one big bucket of listens" - if your song gets listens, you get money. So if you pay your sub, and listen to say 5 niche musicians only, it still all goes mostly to the most popular songs.
That's basically how radio is accounted for in royalties, as well.
With Spotify knowing exactly who listened to what, it could be more precise (and arguably more susceptible to the fraud), but tbh what they do is standard (compulsory licensing) industry practice.
Spotify paid out ten billion dollars to artists in 2024. This is not small potatoes - total 2024 music industry merchandise sales was around $14b.
These big platform payouts matter a lot.
lostlogin
today at 7:07 PM
Whenever an actual artist reveals their earnings, it’s absolutely pitiful.
A quick search suggests a very steep drop off from the top earners.
‘At 100 million streams, artists can earn approximately $300,000-$500,000 in gross royalties. However, the actual amount reaching the artist varies dramatically based on their contracts. Major label artists receive $90,000-$150,000 after the label’s cut, while independent artists could keep $255,000-$425,000 after distributor fees.’
https://rebelmusicz.com/how-much-do-artists-make-on-spotify/
Correction: to record labels.
When you read artists' blog posts you can see they get peanuts. Not due to Spotify - due to the recording deals.
If you want an exhaustive but eye-opening account of all of the details, I recommend "All you need to know about the music business" by Don Passman.
people that get their music from AA would never buy it or pay spotify for it, so the "loss" is completely imaginary. same goes for movies, videogames etc
in some sense yes, as long as there are sources of good enough cheaper alternatives millions of people won't ever pay for Spotify (or even use the free version with ads, but the free-with-ads version is in itself a good enough for many many many people), but of course in a vacuum with only Spotify people would probably pay for it!
though the determination of damages is usually completely all over the map (and usually skews high to serve a punitive purpose, though I doubt it has any real deterrent effect).
This is bad epistemology. Incentives change the behavior on the edges.
I've always liked China's business model for music. In China, all music is free to stream and download. Musicians make their money the more traditional way, through performances, merchandise, promotions/advertising, etc.
999900000999
today at 7:44 PM
If I like an artist I buy a physical copy of the album.
I just brought Light Years on cassette by Nas.
I’m an hobbyist musician and I’m going to sell actual cassettes and donate the profits. I’m never going to get the 500 million streams you need to make money off Spotify
> piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all.
This has historically been unclear. Lots of artists make more money from touring and merchandise than from record sales, and piracy is likely to boost those.
throw0101d
today at 6:29 PM
> Lots of artists make more money from touring and merchandise than from record sales, and piracy is likely to boost those.
Reminder of the recent "The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'":
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473673
lostlogin
today at 7:10 PM
In a similar vein, the recent thread on bootleg recordings - with both the article and the comments suggesting a more complicated relationship between piracy and band warnings.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765604
paulddraper
today at 6:52 PM
A lot of this has to do with the fact that many more people want to create music, than the number of artists that people want to listen to.
So there’s a heavy supply/demand imbalance, and distribution/discovery thrives there.
matthewkayin
today at 6:35 PM
> why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all? Do Bandcamp. Buy merch. Do something to support the artists.
I don't like this perspective because it puts the onus on the individual consumer. Many people who listen to music struggle to make ends meet. They do not have the extra money to afford buying albums off of bandcamp, yet they are contributing members of society and they deserve to be able to listen to music.
Meanwhile there are billions of dollars floating around in the music industry. Spotify absolutely has the spare cash to pay their artists more; they just choose not to.
As much as I love the idea of Gabe's "piracy is a service issue" philosophy, I think the real truth is likely that piracy is an issue of capitalism and wealth inequality.
Peritract
today at 8:31 PM
> yet they are contributing members of society and they deserve to be able to listen to music
By the same token, artists are contributing members of society and they deserve a host of things, including enough to make a living.
You can't demand one group's output as a right for everyone else unless you also grant them rights in return.
procaryote
today at 7:59 PM
There would be no money floating around the music business, spare or otherwise, if no one paid for music
I guess you could fund it with taxes?
The entire record industry is scum and Spotify is just a part of that. It can just die a swift death, would be for the best. Bandcamp is much better. Much lower barrier to entry for everyone and it has my favorite artists.
greatpost
today at 6:03 PM
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