For reference: Radiohead's pay-what-you-want model for In Rainbows was the first of its kind, and groundbreaking. It's entirely possible this starts a trend.
On the other end: I don't like the idea of new artists not getting paid (I try to go out of my way and buy tickets for indie musicians I like or, failing that, purchase swag), but as a consumer I like Spotify a lot. It's also hard for me to conflate the ideas that new artists are being trampled by Music 2.0 with success stories like Karmin and Chance the Rapper, who put out free material (via YouTube and a free mixtape, respectively) and the massive coverage launched them into the national spotlight.
You know what would be awesome? A Flattr-esque system for music. You pay $XX/mo, can listen to whatever, and your money gets divvied up to artists based on play count. (if half of my play count in July comes from Blind Pilot, for instance, then they get half my money.)
You hook up your last.fm profile and each week you get to divide an x amount of money between the artists you listened to. I've been using it myself for about a year now.
The only catch is that you need to find the email addresses of artists you want to pay to yourself, so they can be paid with PayPal.
This 'catch' allowed me to use it as single user for a year though so its very usable for me in this stage. Feel free to try it! Let me know what you think!
And this is why I love HN. I just came to the conclusion that I really should think about doing something like this and pondering if there was a way I could automate it as I wrote my comment(1). And here it is. Awesome.
Did you take a look at the way gittip does this ? You basically donate to a twitter handle and its owner can 'claim' the account whenever they want. No money is actually transferred until the account is claimed. I don't know if it can be applied to artists/bands though.
I was also wondering: is there no transfer fees with paypal ? Don't they make small amounts transfer useless ?
And one last thing: is it not weird for bands/artists to suddenly receive money from people without being informed about the site and all that ?
'the way gittip does this': I naively assumed Gittip was sitting on the money until it was claimed, but charging the moment its claimed is probably better. I'll have to look into it!
'transfer fees with paypal': Yes and yes. I'm currently spending about 8-10 dollars a week divided over 5 artists. So the slice Paypal gets is significant but bearable. This of course isn't ideal and I've been thinking about other ways of doing this. Bitcoin maybe?
'receive money (...) without being informed': I've got this covered! When an artist receives money they also receive an email explaining why they receive it and how many times the listener played their songs.
I worked in the bitcoin space for a while (cofounded an exchange), and this was a proposal that often came up. so awesome to see someone actually building it. Could I convince you to send me an email: Jordanbirn at gmail.com ?
That hurts somewhere to say this, but I've been thinking about this subject, and that's better that the idea I had. I'm going to use this, and this will get me back on Last.fm, which I kind of abandoned.
That gittip suggestion down there is also great. I'm in touch with a bunch of artists who would totally love that.
This is brilliant. I've been thinking about making this for a while. If I add a band's email address, would that then be available to other people who listen to the same artist? How would you stop wrongly donating to artists with the same name?
Artists' email addresses aren't shared right now (bc then it would be easy to pollute with wrong addresses). So this also answers your second question (Unless someone listens to two bands with the same name). It remembers for your own account though, so you don't have to fill out the same address twice.
$10/month for infinite access to all music ever created just isn't reasonable. And the ad revenue from a majority free user base for infinite access to all music ever created is definitely unreasonable.
It's hard to argue with th connivence factor. However right now Spotify is destroying an existing model, not paying artists, and losing money hand over fist. It's lose/lose/lose. I'd rather consumers just pirate the music that way they at least know they aren't supporting the artists.
But its not $10 for all music ever created any more than its $15 for all the food on the buffet at Golden Corral. Its all you can eat, not all the food. There's only so much music that can stream through one set of speakers in a month.
Blind Pilot was half the OP's playlist. They'd get $5. How many artists would kill to get $5/month from their fans?
The real problem is that Blind Pilot might have gotten a whole penny from the OP's month of patronage. That's the part of the system that's broken. The part where fans can choose from all the artists that have ever created is a feature (and a damn good one), not a bug.
I'm starting to think that beyond "not pirating", we have some moral responsibility to make sure that the money we do "pay" for our music actually makes it through to the creator of that music, otherwise we're just buying moral absolution from immoral middle-men along with some (lazy) convenience.
I'd imagine you could create some "fair" kind of Spotify clone where half the money go to artists and half the money go to the service. The streaming know what music it plays, so it would be easy to bill. It just need someone to do that, and I'm not sure the general public cares about fairness.
All music ever created? I cringe when I read stuff like that.
I'm sorry, but this is not simply nitpicking. We will change our perception of music history and music itself if we fool ourselves that what these outlets carry is the entire history of music. I'd say around 40% of the music that I have on my HDDs are not available on Spotify. That's just guesstimating, it could be even higher.
Especially if you consider performances that didn't get recorded for one reason or another. All music on the four or five majors that has seen a CD release in the US? Yes, this is fairly reasonable.
> $10/month for infinite access to all music ever created just isn't reasonable.
Why not? Most people go through a period of their life where they buy lots of albums, then they stop altogether. Flattening that out to be $10/month forever, divvied across artist based on content, would be a net win for everyone.
Then how unreasonable is $0/month for radio? I'm happy there's people who can look at services like Spotify and Rdio critically, but I don't think appeals to intuition like "that can't be right?!" help us much.
Because radio is not a substitute for recorded music. The inability to choose what you're listening to was always the stick that compelled listeners to purchase a recording. If you have Spotify, there is no reason to ever purchase that music in a download store.
Fast, reliable, and unmetered wireless is by no means ubiquitous. There is still the benefit of being able to play offline, burn to CD for the car, share with friends, etc.
Admittedly, the incentive to want offline music may continue to diminish over time.
Radio may be far more interesting that you expect. Once upon a time you had Payola[1] where radio plays were designed to influence record sales in a nontransparent way. Now you have the issue of consolidation where you'd have no idea which plays were influenced by royalties etc.
Anyway, my point is that your comment could be interpreted to mean that radio is democratic and it is a democratic way for meritorious music to be elevated.
By democratic I don't mean anything more virtuous than screaming masses, but I don't think commercial radio even rises to that.
Anyway, I have to read more to get an overview of how Spotify and others compensate the talent that makes content, or even cheat them, but I also want to make sure that popular radio isn't treated like something we'd prefer.
Because there is not such a thing like $0/month for radio, as you are forced to hear ads, and the advertisers pay for it, and you are forced the songs you hear, witch some people paying for controlling it.
Yes, in the old days some companies controlled which music was heard and which not, and those gatekeepers were not as cheap as you thing.
Radio is like an ad service for the music industry, where you listen to demo tracks and hopefully buy the full album. Rdio and Spotify give you full access to the end product for virtually nothing. It has totally screwed up the perceived value of albums.
I might be a minority, but I'm paying more for music with Spotify than I've ever done buying CDs. (I do pay $16.50 a month, being in Norway). Doesn't seem all that unreasonable given my habits.
Exactly. It's also pretty dangerous since their users probably feel like doing the right thing by going with Spotify and ditching pirating. Practically it doesn't really matter though if those two are the only options many users will consider.
Exactly. I've got an Rdio subscription but I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. As a small label owner where we put in more investment than we've ever gotten out, it's crazy to see a thousand streams generating a couple of pounds given that those are all lost sales... but you think 'ah well, at least people are listening to it'.
Also, as a commenter below noted, pay-what-you-want is not new at all. Off the top of my head The Crimea shifted about 100,000 free downloads of their second LP after leaving Warners, quite a bit before In Rainbows.[0] As a second aside, I interviewed a pretty big artist a year or so after whose backing band knew Radiohead and, though this is hearsay obviously, they suggested the reason In Rainbows wasn't toured much beyond festivals was lack of tour support capital. I always sort of suspected that they fudged the numbers on sales/profit for that record, so that could be an indicator, who knows.
A little off topic; in the late 70s a popular Christian singer named Keith Green inked a deal with his label that allowed him to give his records away for whatever people could afford - - even free. So while what they did was recognized as groundbreaking, it was only new for the internet age.
I like the Flattr-esque idea, it would make me feel better knowing that my monthly subscription payment was only being payed out to the artist whose tracks I actually played.
> A Flattr-esque system for music. You pay $XX/mo, can listen to whatever, and your money gets divvied up to artists based on play count. (if half of my play count in July comes from Blind Pilot, for instance, then they get half my money.)
This is exactly what I would love. ~30% of my monthly fee to Spotify for running the service, the rest divided to the artist I listen to.
But do you think this is up to Spotify? Could Spotify force these terms to the record companies? I always thought this kind of stuff in the contracts that artists make with the big record labels; "We own your music, we pay you as we please".
This is essentially how Magnatune works. You pay $15 per month, can download and stream any amount of music from the Magnatune catalog and 50% of your monthly fee gets paid to artists in proportion to how much of their music you downloaded and streamed.
>It's also hard for me to conflate the ideas that new artists are being trampled by Music 2.0 with success stories like Karmin and Chance the Rapper, who put out free material (via YouTube and a free mixtape, respectively) and the massive coverage launched them into the national spotlight.
Those stories are BS though. Sure, a tiny minority might get on the spotlight thusly (a tiny minority is ever on the spotlight anyway, by definition).
That doesn't change the negatives for: those already on the spotlight, those not in the spotlight but with a decent-ish following.
> For reference: Radiohead's pay-what-you-want model for In Rainbows was the first of its kind, and groundbreaking. It's entirely possible this starts a trend.
I've always used swag to mean 'stuff' or 'gear', based on the Australian "swag-man" who carried all his belongings in a swag (prototypical backpack). Here the word also sometimes specifically refers to a light sleeping mattress that formed part of a swaggies essential kit.
So for me, the #yolo application of swag to mean "has his shit together man" derived as a metaphorical application of the literal "has his gear together". And the OP's use to refer to swag as gear a band sells makes sense in the original definition.
I understood the #yolo version of 'swag' as being a contraction of 'swagger'. The sort of ballsy, narcissistic, uncaring persona that a a rock star or Jack Sparrow might have, for example.
This is only for Thom Yorke solo tunes, Atoms for Peace music from Thom and Nigel, and Nigel's side project Ultraista. The two make the argument that new music is hurt in the Spotify revenue equation.
With the large stake of Spotify that is owned by the Majors and other large corporate entities such as Coca-Cola, it would be interesting if the 'independent labels' were to come out with some sort of streaming service of their own, whether it be on a label by label basis or on a combined level.
Anyways, let's see what happens with this in the news cycle.
Edit: Found an interesting Thom Yorke quote on his feelings about digital content:
Radiohead have often riffed on the edge of that thoroughly modern disjunction. From their landmark album OK Computer on, the band seemed like evangelists for the revolutionary possibilities of a digital world, self-releasing 2007's In Rainbows on a pay-what-you-want download. Yorke is a bit more sceptical about all that now.
In the days before we meet, he has been watching a box set of Adam Curtis's BBC series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, about the implications of our digitised future, so the arguments are fresh in his head. "We were so into the net around the time of Kid A," he says. "Really thought it might be an amazing way of connecting and communicating. And then very quickly we started having meetings where people started talking about what we did as 'content'. They would show us letters from big media companies offering us millions in some mobile phone deal or whatever it was, and they would say all they need is some content. I was like, what is this 'content' which you describe? Just a filling of time and space with stuff, emotion, so you can sell it?"
Having thought they were subverting the corporate music industry with In Rainbows, he now fears they were inadvertently playing into the hands of Apple and Google and the rest. "They have to keep commodifying things to keep the share price up, but in doing so they have made all content, including music and newspapers, worthless, in order to make their billions. And this is what we want? I still think it will be undermined in some way. It doesn't make sense to me. Anyway, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. The commodification of human relationships through social networks. Amazing!"[1]
This is only for Thom Yorke solo tunes, Atoms for Peace music from Thom and Nigel, and Nigel's side project Ultraista. The two make the argument that new music is hurt in the Spotify revenue equation.
Dear Thom,
I wish you had thought about this after you got very rich but before you decided that that made it a good idea of give away music for free. When lack of access to a reliable revenue model makes it difficult for build an audience for your own projects, the problem is primarily one of low return on your artistic endeavor.
But for those who don't happen to be associated with an existing success such as Radiohead, that low return often means no prospect of making money at all. Whereas you can have the guitar amp of your choice or feel sure of an audience when you announce a gig, the lack of a revenue model for new music means many will never taste the leverage that you enjoy, with corresponding limitations on their musical development.
This isn't all your fault, of course. But it might be good if you could devote some of your energy to finding a model that works for people without name recognition, eg by relying on your great musical talent but operating under a pseudonym while you search for new ways to sell it.
Thom and Nigel seem to be lamenting new bands' inability to bring in money, they're not grieving about how they themselves don't make enough through Spotify.
> They have to keep commodifying things to keep the share price up, but in doing so they have made all content, including music and newspapers, worthless, in order to make their billions.
This strikes me as typical Luddite hysteria. Of course they still have worth, the commodified version is the same as the original, and people are getting the same thing they got when buying a cd. The barrier is just drastically lowered.
I do agree on the commodification of human relationships, it's a fairly disgusting trend that I hope exhausts itself in the current social network form soon.
I may be wrong, but is seems like a central part of the complaint is that newly released/recorded music isn't getting a big enough piece of the pie.
I'm not sure if this is just a trollish interpretation but it sounds like they are they asking for a return to the system where "this summer's new hits" get played relentlessly until everyone is sick of them and ready for "this year's christmas albums?"
I understand the argument that sales of new music funds new albums getting recorded while new sales of Hotel California don't promote any kind of artistic work. That's a purely producer side perspective though. For a listener, there is a lot of recorded music that exists. Very little of the best stuff was recorded this year (or in any given year).
I think a great analogy is/was the porn industry. Every time a new technology made it big, the industry was turned upside down. Ferraris bought by new guys. Ferraris repossessed for others. Home VCRs created an industry that dwarfed adult cinemas. Selling DVDs over the internet was even better until streaming/download video killed that model. The porn industry collapsed and immediately started trying building a new economy on newer technology. How about interactive and realtime? Can that work? If it can, they'll figure it out pretty quick.
No one takes an indignant pornographer seriously so the industry doesn't spend much energy being indignant. It just grows and shrinks as it can or has to.
Thom and Nigel are great artists. I'm glad they're out there making music. But I'm a little turned off by the tone of their comments (now and at other times) it all rings of a feeling that the world owes them or (more often than not) younger artists a certain business model.
> No one takes an indignant pornographer seriously so the industry doesn't spend much energy being indignant. It just grows and shrinks as it can or has to.
If only indignant moralistic artists were appropriately looked at as foolish. We live in a capitalist world, where the things sold are only limited by what they can give the customer. The artist loses the second they allow their music to be stored in a big, copy able file, and lose all value. Convenience is by far what drives my listening habits, so if you aren't on spotify, to me, might as well not exist (unless I pirate it.)
I have always wondered why Spotify does not raise their subscription fees (maybe after one year for example). If they asked me to pay more than $10/month, which seems a totally unreasonable number for everybody in this market, I would just do it because the convenience is awesome, and it is so much cheaper than any other legal alternatives for music lovers...
I think they could certainly raise their prices in the US. Unless I'm mistaken it's cheaper there than anywhere else. e.g. In the UK it costs £9.99 which is just over $15.
They could also differentiate their plans better and add in higher end ones. I think they would make more money and not impact consumers too badly if they charged for use. e.g. $5 per month for 20 songs per day. $10 per month for 40 songs per day. $20 per month unlimited.
i'm an avid spotify user (~4+ hours a day) and honestly have no idea how this is a sustainable business. how much are the 20+ artists a day that I listen to making from my $10 a month? genuinely don't understand how this is working. there are so many artists that come out with new albums that I would buy except for the fact that I can get them free on spotify. It's saving me probably 100-200/year and that's being conservative. That means it's costing artists that much * users.
Why don't more artists take the Jay-Z approach? Build an app for your album, make people buy it, or sell it in bulk to a big brand like Samsung. This seems like a way for artists to take back the industry. Pirating music from a Jay-Z app seems much much harder than from a desktop. I think we're on the verge of a total shift back to the world of pre-CD burners where you simply had to pay 10-20 to listen to an album.
Pirating music from a Jay-Z app seems much much harder than from a desktop.
There are already dozens of torrents with thousands of peers on The Pirate Bay. It doesn't really matter how hard it is, as long as a single individual can do it.
I think we're on the verge of a total shift back to the world of pre-CD burners where you simply had to pay 10-20 to listen to an album.
God no!! Would you seriously want 50 different apps to listen to a different artist on your phone?
I also listen to a lot of Spotify every day at work but I never used to buy albums before. I do buy shirts and concert tickets from my favorite smaller bands (and back them on Kickstarter). So I guess the math comes down to, are there more people like me who used to pay 0$ for albums and now pays 120$ a year or people like you who used to buy lots of albums before.
You're not missing anything. Spotify is horrible for artists.
I usually discover new music through SoundCloud and niche web sites. I buy music directly through services like Bandcamp. I make a conscious effort to find musicians and producers that I like and which have a low play count.
I started making electronic music 15 to 20 years ago. There's no way in hell I'd ever want to do this as a full time job and risk my livelihood on it. I know how time consuming the creation of a song or track can be. That's why I want to support people who have the guts to invest their very hearts and souls into such an endeavor, I'm way too big of a coward to ever do that.
People have such a strong sense of entitlement when it comes to music. They are too unimaginative to fill their own empty lives with meaning and require the imagination of other people to fill this void with 'content', and it better be free. Society is very ungrateful to most of the artists out there.
The streaming-music business reminds me of Netflix in its early days, before movie studios became worried that it was cannibalizing rental/VOD revenue for new releases. There are a certain group of fans who are willing to pay $10-20 per album for access to music the moment it's released. With Spotify, those fans are treated like any other stream even though they're willing to pay more. It's inefficient pricing, except from Spotify's perspective as they're able to use immediate access to new release music as a lure for subscribers. So really, you can look at Spotify as capturing that demand and converting it into free advertising for themselves. I don't see that as sustainable in the long run. Some artists are already holding back new releases from streaming services. Like Netflix, I think that in the future you will see few new releases from popular artists until they've been available through premium services long enough to capture demand from hardcore fans.
Spotify treats all songs as if they have equal value, but that's obviously not true from the listener's perspective. For any given person, there are going to be some songs that they're willing to pay a premium to hear, and some that they'll only listen to if it's free. Spotify is a good deal for the latter case, but not if it offers a discounted version of the former to people who could pay for it. Just because Spotify counts every stream as a single interchangeable unit of value doesn't mean that listeners value every stream equally.
I think Spotify is in a great position right now, they are building up a huge userbase right now (first step for Facebook etc. too). But the service will monetize very well. For example I would pay extra per album to get to stream a couple albums on the day of their CD release just because it's convenient to have all my music in one application.
Or charge me 15$ a month for a gold account and add a feature on the artist page to leave a 1$ tip. This extra 5$ goes into my "wallet" that I can then disperse straight to my favorite artists each month. Like a microtransaction.
I wonder if artists who withdraw their music from services like this because they don't make "enough money" from them, realize they are getting paid again and again for me listening to albums I've already bought.
You may not be getting paid in buckets and buckets of cash, but what you're getting is really just a freebie. You cannot complain about getting free money.
If enough artists do this, services like Spotify will not offer me enough convenience, and the other option (simply mirroring my 100GB music collection to my work PC) will then be good enough that no artists stands to earn free money for albums I've already paid for.
As far as Thom Yorke's argument goes: That artists are severely underpaid in the streaming-world, I'm not going to debate that or even oppose that. He probably knows better than me.
But we've already established that this was a problem with the album-model as well. You have record companies taking $10 per album and the artist getting paid $1. With a $100,000 "credit" for studio-engineers to repay.
It seems the only truth and rule in the music-industry is that the artist always gets screwed.
> I wonder if artists who withdraw their music from services like this because they don't make "enough money" from them, realize they are getting paid again and again for me listening to albums I've already bought
I wonder how common that is? At least 90% of the things I listen to on Spotify are things that I have not bought on vinyl, CD, or any non-streaming online format.
I think I'm about 70:30 stuff I already own to new stuff. Possibly even 80:20.
This is probably because I have a huge music collection already, and I'm in my 30s and don't like you kids and your darned modern music so much any more. Music was so much better in my day, mumble mumble, get off my lawn etc etc.
'New artists' always had it hard, I don't think it was easy to get your record printed and distributed all over the world, at least now people can find them easier with youtube, spotify and other services without a big risk (investment). If an artist is good, they will probably get viral (see Justin Bieber) and then earn all the big bucks like Thom and Nigel. Maybe I'm missing something else since I haven't read anything related to spotify in the last few weeks.
It was certainly always hard to become a megastar, but it used to be a lot easier to put out a genre record (eg techno, drum'n'bass, jazz) because a well-run label had a pretty good sense of what would sell enough copies to turn a modest profit for everyone involved. An album that sold 4 or 5000 copies to a niche audience could make about 25k each for the artist and the label (record deals in genre music are generally a more equitable than major label ones). That's not a lot, but it's not terrible either, you could pay your rent with it. Nowadays you'd be lucky to sell 1000 copies, so small labels are correspondingly less willing to take a risk on unknown artists, and there are fewer labels with the expertise in distribution, marketing, and developing an artist's career than there used to be.
If an artist is good, they will probably get viral
Don't be absurd. Justin Bieber is talented, but he's also extremely attractive and happens to be proficient at the sort of music that appeals to teenage girls. That's a bit like expecting J. Random Developer to enjoy the same sort of success as Bill Gates, and concluding that if he doesn't it must be because he's no good as a programmer.
Well then maybe the way the market is only certain people can get paid that much (just like a random developer becoming the next Bill Gates). Also I said artist not musician, Bieber got to where he's at not for being a talented musician but for being an artist (attractive, catchy, etc).
Avid Spotify-user here (paying about $15 a month in Sweden). I just wish they can work it out so the artists get paid fairly - it shouldn't be that hard, should it?
On the topic of pirating as an alternative - it is just sooo nice not having to manage a bunch of MP3s. Playlists are just way more convenient.
I had no idea that individual artists had any say in this (thought that the mega labels determined the fate of everything related to their signed artists).
Or are Yorke and Godrich's solo arrangements with the labels nonstandard, which makes this possible?
Radiohead had a 6-album contract with EMI, but from In Rainbows onwards Radiohead were able to call the shots a bit more, hence being able to release it with a 'pay-what-you-want' model.[1]
The article states that Radiohead's old stuff is still on Spotify, and that the albums removed were Thom Yorke's solo projects. So I imagine that EMI controls the first 6 albums, and so they are still on Spotify, while newer Radiohead content and Yorke's personal projects are more under his control.
This isn't a typical arrangement for new artists, they only got that because they were a huge superstar band already.
The Atoms for Peace project is on XL Recordings which is distributed by Beggars Group. Beggars Group gives all of their artists 50% of streaming revenues.
From what I remember with Yorke and Radiohead, they're at a point where they have pretty much complete control. Whatever label they go with is just who they choose to do distribution.
Could someone throw up a pie chart showing exactly how much of your $10 actually goes to an artist? I'm guessing you're going to need to make it pretty large for it to be even visible.
On the other end: I don't like the idea of new artists not getting paid (I try to go out of my way and buy tickets for indie musicians I like or, failing that, purchase swag), but as a consumer I like Spotify a lot. It's also hard for me to conflate the ideas that new artists are being trampled by Music 2.0 with success stories like Karmin and Chance the Rapper, who put out free material (via YouTube and a free mixtape, respectively) and the massive coverage launched them into the national spotlight.
You know what would be awesome? A Flattr-esque system for music. You pay $XX/mo, can listen to whatever, and your money gets divvied up to artists based on play count. (if half of my play count in July comes from Blind Pilot, for instance, then they get half my money.)