Is this true? From what I've read musicians are hardly making anything off of streaming whereas they used to make much more prior to the popularization of Spotify. And AFAIK Spotify has never had a profitable quarter.
Disney sends me someone else's tax forms and information every year to my Gmail address.
There's a couple spreadsheets on their royalties for songs and their streaming revenue broken out by region, then by provider. It's for multiple items that get a couple million listens a year, one song has 7 million in one month in the UK, of which "she" sees 50% revenue. Totally payout for the 7 million month? 54 cents USD.
These are songs for a mid 00s - early 10s animated TV series.
I assume "they" in the parent refers to the labels.
Almost certainly one of the things that allows streaming to be priced in a range that's palatable for consumers is that most artists make less money than ever. At $50/month, it presumably wouldn't fly. As it is, it's probably priced in about the range that a lot of people spent on physical media in pre-Napster days. (And streaming seems not to be a money printing press for at least some of the streaming services either.)
Paid streaming is somewhat lower than peak CD but about the same as peak vinyl (inflation adjusted). There are peaks and valleys but consumer music spend hasn't changed that much over time.
Because streaming in pretty much the distribution channel today. Even if they sell a few CDs at live shows, increasingly younger people don't even have a CD player. And very few people buy MP3s.
When the artists only get a couple hundred dollars per year from their streams, why even bother putting the music on Spotify? If your listeners don't want to buy your mp3s or CDs when that's the only option, then what's the point?
Compare it to any other profession. Let's say a bricklayer decides to go work for a company. He works the entire year and builds houses for many people. Then he's paid a hundred dollars. He'd be an idiot to keep doing it. And he says that if he started his own brick laying business he wouldn't get even a single client. Okay, but why keep doing this?
It’s advertising to drive people to concerts and merch.
Of course, generally people make music because they like making music, and streaming is a way to share it. If it connects with people, and they blow up, great. But if that’s the only drive they’ll probably have a bad time.
The same could be said about GitHub… why would anyone put their code up there for free, or work on these hobby projects, when they aren’t making money from it, or just get $100 in donations per year? It’s fun, the people enjoy it, they want to share the work they’ve done, and for some it’s a way to advertise themselves and what they can do.
Not everything needs to make someone a multimillionaire, especially in the arts.
Okay, but why does the artists have to make Spotify multibillionaires with their art?
I'm talking specifically about the artists that are complaining about getting a raw deal from Spotify. And I agree 0% with your assessment that just because they are not happy with a hundred dollars per year means that they demanded to be multimillionaires. Maybe people just should to get their fair share for their work?
I am friends with some career musicians and I am forced to pirate their music if I want to listen to it, because they refuse to sell their music online and only have it on streaming services. Which gives them almost nothing in return.
> Okay, but why does the artists have to make Spotify multibillionaires with their art?
ghaff already covered why: because Spotify is the distribution channel.
40 years ago, they would've put their music on the radio. Today, they put it on Spotify. Why? Because if they don't, very few people are ever going to even know they exist.
And if you think the fact that Spotify is giving them a terrible deal means they shouldn't engage with them, then I'll point to any of a dozen other examples today of massive corporations profiting excessively off of people who have very little choice but to engage with them. Being able to choose to do otherwise, and remain in the music business, is a very privileged position to be in.
I'd say streaming is the distribution channel. Apple (especially because their bundles) and maybe Amazon probably have opinions about Spotify specifically being the distribution channel. But that's probably being pedantic because the deals are almost certainly similar.
If you're not getting paid, you're not doing "business".
Yes, there are many other examples of companies having exploratory practices the same way as Spotify. That still does not explain very well why people put up with it.
If a farmer exploits a migrant worker, the migrant worker gets paid enough for shelter and food. He is depending on that job for surviving. When artists are exploited by Spotify, the money they usually receive is nowhere close to paying for shelter or food, so they have to survive by other means anyway. Keeping their music on Spotify or removing it from Spotify doesn't make any difference for their livelihood.
Because the other thing Spotify gets them is exposure. Whether or not it's worth what they have to deal with from Spotify, I have no idea—but I can absolutely see many artists putting up with it in hopes that being heard on Spotify will get people to buy their merch, come to their concerts, etc.
Musicians/DJs/etc. also often do corporate gigs to eat. I'm sure they'd often much rather be playing for passionate fans in a bar than playing at some event where half the time the attendees are largely ignoring them except to wish they would turn down the volume so they could have a conversation.
Somewhat different situation than the Spotify case which is arguably mostly an advertising channel while corporate gigs actually pay directly. But creatives of all stripes doing things they'd rather not do so they can live, do what they want to do, and have a sliver of a sliver of a chance to breakout is extremely common.
Discovery is one important reason. Not that that's guaranteed to work. You probably need to do your own marketing--including playing at local bars etc. for pennies and tips. Of course, the same things is mostly true these days for writers with a publishing contract.
People pursue creative pursuits for a lot of different reasons, including personal fulfillment. But you pretty much have to win the lottery to make a decent full-time living off of it. People may somewhat enjoy laying bricks--but it's a job they expect to make a living at. If they can't, they'll try to do something else.
I get it, but I just think it's strange. Like it would be wrong for a brick layer to let himself be taken totally advantage of, even if he enjoys laying bricks.
If it's for personal fulfilment, artists can be happy with the sales they can make on their own, even if the numbers are small. Or even give their music away for free, if they want to get as many listeners as possible. But what is the sense in letting a billion dollar company exploit you and make bank on your work, while paying you almost nothing in return?
Imagine if other professions were like that? "Just keep laying the bricks for free for my company, and maybe one day you'll be a famous bricklayer and I'll pay you millions".
You keep returning to bricklayers and that's a really odd way to analogise it. The bricklayer is tangibly giving away the results of his labour - once he's finished building a house, he doesn't have it any more. Musicians are not giving Spotify their music! They're not sitting there slaving away at an album, handing it over to Spotify, and being left with nothing. It's still their album.
If musicians were actually left without their music, like the bricklayer, I'd agree with you and I think so would most people. But conversely, if a bricklayer really loved building houses, spent a great deal of time building houses, owned all of them himself and they were empty and he was doing nothing with them, and a company came up to him and said "hey, we like your houses, we have a business letting people go on tours through houses and we make money off it, would you let us run tours through your houses in exchange for a cut of the profits, which will probably be very small but could be large?" then I don't think you can be too scandalised by him taking the deal and making at least some money off these houses that he'd already built and was doing nothing with! Even if you think selling photos of the houses directly to customers is a better model! Especially since he can still do that!
Recorded music of any kind has, for musicians, been nothing more than a way of basically advertising for quite some time now. The money is in concert tickets, which is why they go on tour so much. The record labels keep almost all the profit from streaming or CD sales, but the musicians keep a significant chunk of the money from concert tickets and merchandise sales.
There are horizontal rotary encoders with click functionality (The component is called EVQWGD001). Unfortunately the pin layout differs from the vertical rotary encoders so you need a custom PCB or hack some custom wiring together. They're more common on split keyboards from what I've found.
You can buy a preassembled split keyboard with this from https://ergomech.store (I've been looking at purchasing one from them). There's also a seller on etsy who offers split keyboards with the horizontal encoder.
I don't know what it is about Ruby that turns every HN thread that mentions it into a flame war about how it's not the perfect language. People don't do this with other languages. What gives?
I think python is the only language where the inevitable flamewar isn't about the language itself (it is instead about static vs dynamic typing). Java might be in this list too (usually the war is about OOP in general, but there's plenty of criticism levied at Java itself).
Discussions about C devolve into a religious war about simplicity and portability vs safety and an inadequate standard library.
Discussions about C++ devolve into a religious war about memory safety, bloat, developer competency, UB, and more.
Discussions about Haskell devolve into a religious war about powerful type systems and language constructs vs performance concerns, development complexity, and "endofunctors, lol."
Discussions about JS devolve into a religious war about npm, web dev in general, "== vs === lol" and more.
Discussions about Rust... oh boy.
In my experience, most discussions of specific components of languages inevitably spill into these broad and neverending religious wars.
Discussions about Go devolve into a religious war about simplicity and portability vs "the creators of the language said its only for dum dums and it shows", "it took them 10+ years to get generics", and more.
Discussion about Zig devolve into a religious war about living in a universe where C exists and not wanting to write it versus "there's too many C-likes", "why isn't this Rust", and more.
Discussions about Erlang devolve into a religious war about standing up fault tolerant and scalable distributed systems, Joe was the nicest guy ever vs "you can do that in X all you have to do is Y".
Discussions about Elixir devolve into a religious war about Erlang and Ruby's love child, José Valim is the nicest guy ever versus "you can do that in X all you have to do is Y", "but what about types" and more.
Discussions about Clojure devolve into a religious war about people writing impressive programs in their spare time, "I actually get paid to write Clojure" versus "does anyone actually get paid to write Clojure".
Discussions about Elm devolve into a religious war about type safety and staying sane versus Richard Feldman lost his temper once, the 0.19 release and "everyone has Stockholm syndrome over there".
Discussions about V devolve into a religious war about "this is not a scam" versus "this is a scam".
Discussions about Nim generally don't, or the language creator is going off on D-forums / Twitter / X again.
Yeah, absolutely. Ruby just has its own unique flavour of holy wars because it somehow manages to make people either to be totally enamoured with it or utterly sickened by it, with almost no middle ground ― which is quite an achievement TBF. So when the latter group reads something like "This is absolutely delightful! As a non-ruby developer I see things like this and get jealous of ruby developers", they can't help buy conclude that the other side is straight up demented and should probably be disallowed to handle sharp objects like scissors and monkey-patching, and the holy war may commence.
I think any language with big fans will inspire equally motivated critics. Especially if the critics believe the accolades are undeserved.
You can see that in Go. It was a hugely hyped language, backed by Google, but without a lot of wishlist items that C++/Java/Python/Ruby/etc developers would have liked.
You can see that with Rust. There is the “rewrite everything in rust” crowd, which inspires anti-rust people to speak up.
I find it crazy how much criticism Rust, Go, Ruby, etc receive when Python has such glaring flaws. From the 2-to-3 migration, to package management. The consensus seems to be that’s just the cost of doing business.
By the way, I’m a Python developer. I don’t hate Ruby. But it seems like most Ruby fans love the elegance and consistency of its design, whereas that never resonated with me. E.g calling obj.length rather then len(obj) is surely more elegant. I never really cared though?
I guess I just find it interesting how some languages cons are excused while others aren’t. And how people can be drawn to some languages while others hate them.
There is a significant anti-Ruby sentiment in the tech industry right now, especially in certain fields like InfoSec, that is being pushed by a very vocal subset of the community. Whenever they see Ruby come up, they will try pushing the meme that Ruby is dead/dying/irrelevant and cite TIOBE; despite Ruby developers continuing to release new libraries, frameworks, and tooling. Or they will claim no popular websites use Ruby; apparently GitHub, LinkedIn, and AirBnB are not popular enough? Or claim MetaSploit is the only security tool written in Ruby; off the top of my head I can think of BeFF, CeWL, Evil-WinRM, and Ronin. Or claim no company uses or supports Ruby; GitHub, Shopify, Stripe all use and support Ruby. Or they will derail any positive discussion about Ruby into some intractable debate about Static vs Dynamic Typing, GC, interpretive languages, etc; even though many of the arguments against Ruby can equally be applied to Python, and yet there's no similar criticism of Python. It's really annoying and inconsistent.
Their recommendation algorithm has gone to complete shit. I used to get a stream of good songs I was actually interested in whenever the album I was listening to ended. Now It seems to just play the same 4-5 songs immediately after my album finishes which fills me with an intense rage and has made me hate some songs that I otherwise would enjoy.
Not much of a point since Apple ][ has the SWEET16 interpreter already as part of its BASIC ROM. But yes, it would be nice if the LLVM-MOS6502 folks put some effort towards feature parity with this toolchain. LLVM almost certainly has better auto-optimization than a new bespoke compiler.
According to Wikipedia the SWEET16 Interpreter is significantly slower than native assembly (Wiki says 1/10th the speed). A C compiler that targets 6502 would make sense if I want to code something to run on the Apple ][ that's relatively performant
