this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
556 points (90.1% liked)
Technology
60062 readers
3097 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ugh, yes poor poor spotify, fuck that. Artists can't even make a living making music anymore thanks to spotify. Fuck off blaming artists for trying to get paid. Fuck this article. Oh no it only gets a third of the revenue?! Abhorrent, no it should get ALL the revenue, for doing what, having a server with music on it. Amazing. Fuck spotify.
Is Spotify the villain here or is the “big three”? Because it sounds like Spotify is delivering a service and deserves some profit from that.
But what are the big three doing? Seems like they are just skimming because they hold the IP rights. Are they providing any service?
Spotify is definitely not the villain here, they have created the best music streaming platform in the world. The big publishers also can't be called the villains per say, but it wasn't so nice of them to force a small startup (Spotify in it's early days) to sign contracts that will permanently force it to payout about $0.66 out of every $1 it makes.
The most popular musoc streaming service. Definitely not the best. They still don't offer lossless musoc streaming and their lossy files use an outdated encoder.
The "best music platform in the world" sure hates paying artists, tho. I know you are obsessed with labels, they pay indie artists fuck all too
Spotify picks it's price point. It's picked a price point (free) that meams artists can't get paid. And it's price point (free) means that artists can't compete either.
So yeah fuck spotify, pay artists what they are worth and having servers to download mp3s on isn't worth taking 1/3rd of the revenue. They should get less not more. Adjust their prices (maybe it shouldn't be free so artists can fucking pay rent and spotify can pay employees)
Blaming artists for wanting to pay rent and eat food is some bootlicking bullshit.
Blaming artists? What are you smoking?
I was asking if it’s Spotify which is relatively new and, as pointed out in the article MUST get this contract or die, or if the problem might be the big three that hold all the power in this negotiation.
Speaking of which. Isn’t it the big three that actually pay the artists. So how would Spotify, if they were so inclined, manage that payout? (It’s an interest idea though. I wonder what would happen if they offered a tip-the-artist button).
Spotify is not new.
Spotify already manage their payout. To labels and indies. They screw over both massively.
Unfortunately, my understanding is that at least part of the blame lies with the labels. Most labels have contracts with their artists that mean the artists make very little, if anything, off studio recordings. That means they make very little from vinyl sales, CD sales, Spotify streams, etc. If you wanna actually support an artist, you buy merch and go to live shows. My understanding is that this is how it's always been and people are barking up the wrong tree. People are bitching about Spotify when they should be bitching about labels taking a massive chunk of their money. They've only become aware of how much money they're missing out on because Spotify supposedly makes so little that they get sticker shock when they get their royalty check, but it's really not entirely Spotify's fault.
That's not saying Spotify is blameless; but if Spotify's hands are covered in shit, then the labels' hands are covered in diarrhea and vomit.
No, labels are shits. Spotify pays indie artists shit too though.
This is not a case of labels being greedy. This is a case of spotify being greedy and making a bad situation worse.
It’s not free. There are ads.
It's free. You are the product.
Free is literally why they have the market they have. Completely silly point.
You can't assume the price point changes and the market remains the same as well. It's more complicated than that. We literally have talks of people leaving Netflix every other week from the constant changes being made this year.
Yes, and they don't deserve a market if they can't pay artists to make the content. They should not exist if they can't do that.
That just leaves us nowhere to go though. We know artists aren't paid enough, but if our only answer is the one that clearly takes them out of business, then it's just sitting on a soapbox while another company comes in and does the same thing.
Either the solution has to be feasible or someone will eventually show up to ignore it.
To reemphasize, this is regarding "they have the market because they're free", it's not regarding something else like just paying the artists more, or getting a better deal with labels.
You can buy music. You can use subscription services that are less shit to artists.
I do buy music.
I know most people don't and won't though.
You can't make a solution that ignores evil and apathetic exists.
Have you ever looked into the operating costs of having a server with music on it which over 400M monthly active users use?
I actually work in cloud engineering and regularly price this kind of thing up.
Their costs are salaries not aws bills.
But that's practically true of any large tech company. It's been conventional wisdom in the tech industry for over a decade that tech is cheap, people aren't.
Yes. Spotify needs to figure out their burn rate for their salaries because taking more money away from artists isn't the solution like op wants.
But taking money away from employees is?
No one is saying pay employees less. Spotify needs to figure out how to make its business work. That's for sporify to figure out. If you think Spotify deserve more of the pie when they contribute... a download server, vs. the artists who do all the actual work, then you can honestly just fuck off. We live on totally different sides of the conversation, you want to shill for big tech, I want the artists that make the music to get paid.
Not that high. Spotify uses some pretty tight compression (not good, just tight); most users get 96-128kbit/s AAC, premium can go a bit higher if opted in. That works out to about 16KB/s or 58MB/hour, assuming nothing's cached.
Bandwidth pricing very much goes down with scale, not up. But even the non-committed AWS pricing at Spotify's scale is 2 to 3 cents/GB. You end up paying way less than that with any kind of commitment and AWS isn't the cheapest around to begin with.
Man, you weren't alive before napster were you?
Yes, I was alive in the time when artists could barely scrape by. Now, I'm alive in the time when artists can't even do that.
You live in the opposite world of all of us. Or are just very confidently incorrect...
Before Spotify and the like the only artists that could make any money were hand selected by the record labels. Virtually all profits artists made were from merch sold at live shows, because the record labels took all the profits otherwise.
Now, artists that are independent can make money and get listeners much more easily. This is directly thanks to Spotify and the like. However the record labels are still the ones stealing most of the profits for artists they sign and record.
It is ONLY better for the artists now, despite it still sucking. You are blaming the improvement not the problem.
You need to speak to an independent artist sometime about how they make money so easily thanks to spotify. (Spoiler, they don't. At all. And they can't sell physical anymore because of spotify)
Wooh. 👀. This isn't Spotify's fault. They can't pay artists if they don't have money.
To be fair- Spotify priced the service that doesn't make enough profit to pay artists adequately.
Like the article explains, they can't price their services too expensively, because of competition. If Spotify becomes $25/month, most users will move to Apple Music or YouTube Music, etc.
Is that your blog or whatever you keep posting?
Yes, it is. It's entirely spotifies making. It's the situation spotify has created. And the answer is absolutely not 'starve artists even more than we do today'.
Okay, lets say I accept the thesis that Spotify is directly to blame for the demise of physical media and the rise of streaming. In the current moment, what is Spotify supposed to do that would satisfy you?
For every dollar I pay to Spotify for their music service, Spotify sees 33 cents of it. Much of that goes to running the service that people want access to. The label takes the other 67 cents. They pass about 2 cents of it on to the artists.
Let's go full fantasyland, say Spotify cuts their own take entirely and somehow subsidizes the entire thing. The label is now making the full dollar, a full 150% of what they were making before. Well, is that better for artists? 150% of what they were making before is 3 cents on the dollar. Is that a solution? No, it's barely a difference.
Let's say Spotify triples sub prices so they can take only 10% for infrastructure. Most of their current subscribers won't pay that, but let's just pretend. Is 5.3 times what the artists were making before an acceptable amount? Six cents on the dollar? Weird Al would've made $60 off Spotify this year instead of $12. Is that satisfactory? Because that's literally the most Spotify can do, even theoretically.
Spotify can't solve the problem.
The problem is labels locking artists into contracts where the label gets to keep 90% or more of everything they make. Spotify has no say in that.
Conversely, if we go back to the current split, but have the labels share their cut with the artists 50/50, the artists are suddenly making 1650% what they were before. Snoop'd be taking almost a million dollars for his billion streams. These contracts made some shred of sense in the physical era, when you needed to own a studio and audio engineers and marketers and media factories to push and print a band, but even back then they were widely known to be exploitative. Nowadays, when any tiny town has a studio for rent and anyone can edit a killer track in their bedroom and go viral on social media? They're a fucking joke.
The villain in this scenario is blindingly obvious, and anyone who believes otherwise is either a plant or a useful idiot.
Haha. Don't be shocked by the reaction. We live in a world where a certain portion of 'people' Believe every thing should be free and corporations don't need money at all and should just be willed in to existence and live off of the ether.
Etc. Etc. Rich people bad
Way to go mask off with the 'people' comment bud