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Tayter Swift posted:Payout per play is nowhere near 12 cents. Thanks for sharing. If you take out what appears to be music purchases (the Amazon downloads) the average drops to about 0.00654 per stream, meaning that between all the services you'd need an average of 102 plays to make the same amount you would make from a single purchase. That's absolutely wild.
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Jul 15, 2023 02:00
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Jesus III posted:Most artists are less valuable to Spotify than Spotify is to those artists. Most songs aren't worth even a penny to listen to. I bet most of you have "stolen" songs, so the value really is zero to a lot of people. I don’t even have a CD player any,ore, but I support indie artists buying their albums in bandcamp
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Jul 15, 2023 02:13
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BiggerBoat posted:
Honestly thats... not the most terrible idea in the world, the stores already have water hookups for most of them so adding a shower/tub/washer and dryer set ups are not the worst jobs, frankly they have enough exits for in case of a fire that you wouldn't have much of an issue with that either. Figuring out what to do with the back of store areas and the anchor locations would be harder. With my work doing inventory, in some of those older malls, there is enough hidden back space to hid a small army in that in a lot of cases is just.... empty these days. You could convert the anchors into like community spaces with some effort.
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Jul 15, 2023 02:20
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Yeah I've seen people float the idea of rehabbing abandoned malls into living centers and on paper it seems feasible if you can get the building inspectors to make a lot of exemptions, malls aren't designed to be living spaces, after all.
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Jul 15, 2023 02:27
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Main Paineframe posted:Yeah, some people pirated. But plenty of people actually went and bought stuff. While the record industry complained loudly about piracy, they were still raking in plenty of dough from CDs. In 2000, the golden age of Napster, the record industry sold 942 million CDs in the US, for a total revenue of $13.2 billion in 2000 dollars (or $22.5 billion in 2022 dollars). While I believe that artists should be paid fairly, I have to disagree with you that just because someone creates something that it inherently means it’s “worth” something, which is what it sounds like you are arguing for. E: I mean sure if universal basic income was a thing and/or money didn’t exist in this world then yeah, ok. Soandso can “make a living” drawing stick figures on used toilet paper, I don’t care. But UBI isn’t here and money exists so…? Boris Galerkin fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 02:44
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Main Paineframe posted:Based on the numbers posted by Tayter Swift, someone listening to your song 100 times would get you a whopping 30 cents. To make 12 bucks off Spotify listens, you would need the song to be streamed 4000 times. Unless you were in a huge band, you would be getting pennies on the dollar for a CD sale. The average band would not get more than a dollar per CD sold. Most significantly less. The real money was always in concerts and merch. Also, due to the lack of an upfront cost, way more people listen to songs on streaming than would buy an album. If my friend said “hey check out this band” I certainly wouldn’t have bought their CD, but I might listen to a few of their songs on Spotify. We’ll just have to agree to disagree on the value of music. Just because some random band can churn out some songs and upload them doesn’t mean they are entitled to a certain amount of compensation. If the songs suck why should someone be paid for something that is essentially worthless? That doesn’t make any sense. Seph fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 02:55
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starkebn posted:Jesus gently caress there have been a lot of words about something simple. Yeah, I'd say it's less a matter of "everybody should be given money no matter how crappy their music is" and more "if someone is making profit off your music, you should be entitled to a fair cut."
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Jul 15, 2023 03:25
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Seph posted:Unless you were in a huge band, you would be getting pennies on the dollar for a CD sale. The average band would not get more than a dollar per CD sold. Most significantly less. The real money was always in concerts and merch. I think my biggest point of disagreement is probably the sucking part, because it's so objective. Music is so amazingly diverse and capable to catering to so many divergent tastes that it seems there should be something to serve as a floor somewhere between "sucks" and "popular enough to not have to worry about paying bills."
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Jul 15, 2023 03:45
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Open mic night subsidies?
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Jul 15, 2023 03:47
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Yeah, I'd say it's less a matter of "everybody should be given money no matter how crappy their music is" and more "if someone is making profit off your music, you should be entitled to a fair cut." What is missing from this conversation is that the music companies (or at least their owners) are making just as much money as ever, and the lump sum that must be shared and fought over between all artists is not proportional to the profits the company is making.
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Jul 15, 2023 03:51
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Open mic night subsidies? Governments funding the arts is one of those things where conservatives won the culture war. They see no value in art other than what value can be extracted from it.
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Jul 15, 2023 03:52
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Professor Beetus posted:Governments funding the arts is one of those things where conservatives won the culture war. They see no value in art other than what value can be extracted from it. Yeah, to be clear I am in favor of this. Community theater, open mic nights, those are the bedrocks of a thriving local culture.
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Jul 15, 2023 03:53
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Spazzle posted:Come on, thus is total nonsense. This means anyone putting out any song is entitled to a pile of money. If nobody wants to listen to a song, the musician isn't suddenly entitled to anything. Where did I say anything about entitlement? I'm not saying that you should be forced at gunpoint to buy things at specific prices. If you personally wouldn't pay more than 0.3 cents for a song, that's fine, you're free to not buy it - but don't turn that around and start claiming the song (the product of all the labor that went into it) is only "worth" 0.3 cents. It's only worth 0.3 cents to you, but that doesn't mean it's somehow bad or evil for the artist to list it at thirty cents. I'm not a hardcore devotee of the labor theory of value, but Seph's original claim of "the value of a song is determined by the people listening to it" is a fair bit more ridiculous than that. Especially when prices aren't being set by either artists or consumers - they're being set by megacorps and media cartels engaged in a desperate race-to-the-bottom in an attempt to capture subscribers with bargain-basement prices in hopes that they'll be able to take a dominant position in the streaming industry. Seph posted:Unless you were in a huge band, you would be getting pennies on the dollar for a CD sale. The average band would not get more than a dollar per CD sold. Most significantly less. The real money was always in concerts and merch. A dollar per CD sold is a couple of orders of magnitude higher than what streaming services are paying out now, though. They're both poo poo compared to Bandcamp letting artists set their own prices and only taking a 15% platform cut, though. The good future would have been embracing digital delivery as a way to cut the titanic middlemen out of the industry altogether, putting artists in charge and letting them directly or almost-directly sell to consumers and get most or all of the money themselves. But it's effectively been supplanted by streaming services charging massively unprofitable prices in hopes of driving competitors out of the market through pure price competition.
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Jul 15, 2023 03:58
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Spazzle posted:Why should people who get trivial amounts of play get paid? There is always a frontier of musicians who will get low amounts of money regardless of the payout per song. It kinda seems like you're saying "gently caress struggling artists." Why should already-successful musicians hoover up all the money? Is getting 10,000 streams of a song in a month "trivial" just because Taylor Swift got a million streams? It seems like kind of a disconnect between your statement and leftist values.  Edit: Clarste posted:What is missing from this conversation is that the music companies (or at least their owners) are making just as much money as ever, and the lump sum that must be shared and fought over between all artists is not proportional to the profits the company is making. This too, I just figured this was pretty much understood by all involved. Agents are GO! fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 04:02
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Spotify's licensing structure is essentially: - Throw all the subscription money in a pot - Spotify takes a percentage off the top for themselves - The remainder is paid out according to what percentage of the total listening hours you were that month. If 1% of the total hours was people listening to you, you get 1% of the money That doesn't seem like an unfair way to divy out the money for an all-you-can-listen subscription. Even if Spotify's cut was 0%, it still wouldn't qualitatively change anything for a small artist. The overwhelming majority of what people listen to is top 40, so top 40 gets the overwhelming majority of the money. Spotify is also just very cheap compared to the CD era. A 1995 CD was about $17, which is about $30 or three months of spotify in 2023 dollars. Most people who were regularly buying music were buying more than four albums a year
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Jul 15, 2023 04:40
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Agents are GO! posted:It kinda seems like you're saying "gently caress struggling artists." The problem is that you're now trying to apply an objective benefit (resources) against a subjective good (art). What if an artist is struggling because they suck, and who makes that determination? Why shouldn't the rewards go to the person that brings the most pleasure to the masses? An UBI is a partial solution but it leaves a lot of gaps. Somewhat related, although sidestepping the entire marketing/industry/etc element, but a modern "struggling artist" in Boise* with access to Spotify has vastly more chances of success (and resources) than the old model where the odds of anyone outside of Boise hearing that music was literally 0% because The Wherehouse definitely wasn't going to stock it and it's pretty unlikely that Tower Records would even get to it, whereas now for zero(?) cost BoiseBongo can have their music hosted, available, and pushed to an audience that never heard of them. *for all I know BoiseBop is the new grunge
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Jul 15, 2023 06:25
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Professor Beetus posted:I mean the bottom line is that if artists can't be compensated fairly for their work, we'll have less artists. Like, I want to say about a year ago the young people were really into Columbo - I mean Columbo is fine, but that means they aren't watching new stuff, which means that new stuff isn't getting views. And then they probably started watching Muder, She Wrote! What's next, Matlock???
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Jul 15, 2023 06:35
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Main Paineframe posted:People used to go all the way out to the store to spend ~$12 on CDs with ten or so songs on them. That's ten times the rate you're saying people won't pay for infinity songs on-demand in their own home. While it'd cause a fair bit of pain (which these companies are counting on), seeing the entire parasite economy bubble burst would be welcome (stuff like Uber and AirBnB can gently caress right off and burn, especially AirBnB) . Streaming services can work but they need to change and properly compensate the actual workers instead of funneling every last penny to shareholders who add nothing of value to the company. I hope the writers and actors striking together bring the entertainment industry to its knees because it's long overdue. If UPS and the UAW strike and put the screws to their respective parasites as well then even better. Professor Beetus posted:Lmao what the gently caress am I going to play a CD on in 2023? You can get a USB CD/DVD drive for  or less. Buy one, plug it into your PC. Done. CD drives are not some mystical relic of a long forgotten age.
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Jul 15, 2023 06:46
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Really, the problem is basically all the media conglomerates clinging tooth and nail to formats that they consider convenient for them and them exclusively, and cutting literally everyone else out of the deal. There was a fun article a while back about how it seems they seem to have open contempt both for artists and for consumers, and would cut both out of the deal and make content by robots for robots if they could. It's middlemen strangling the industry to death because they want all the money and they want double all the money tomorrow. Also still funny that video games figured this out, even if dragged kicking and screaming and trying to push things as hard as they can get away with. Steam for TV would make billions, they don't want to do it. gently caress, they already did it with iTunes. Kwyndig posted:Yeah I've seen people float the idea of rehabbing abandoned malls into living centers and on paper it seems feasible if you can get the building inspectors to make a lot of exemptions, malls aren't designed to be living spaces, after all. Yeah, repurposing malls is something that at least should be a strictly temporary solution. They are not designed to be anything other than malls. It's not going to be cheap, but it's simply that when things like malls and office space become no longer viable or useful for any purpose, then they need to be made into or replaced with something that is. The wants of the owners have nothing to do with it. That's the free market, baby.
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Jul 15, 2023 06:54
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Evil Fluffy posted:You can get a USB CD/DVD drive for You can still buy USB floppy drives too and that format is absolutely a relic. If anything, requiring a USB adapter is one of the biggest signs that it's no longer relevant; it's not built into most products anymore, most tower designs don't even come with 5.25" bays, and new CD, DVD and BD players are bargain bin trash. SCheeseman fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 07:11
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I haven't owned anything that could play a CD in a decade. If you think the world is going to go back to Dvd and CDs you are delusional. It's streaming or systems like bandcamp/iTunes.
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Jul 15, 2023 08:01
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Foxfire_ posted:Spotify's licensing structure is essentially: If it was as simple as "The artist cut is 9X.XX%" way fewer people would be mad.
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Jul 15, 2023 08:18
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The whole point is that media companies are using streaming as an excuse to take all the money but pittances and kicking and screaming at the idea of having to pay people regardless of how easy it would actually be and how they'd still make plenty of money, and unconvincingly pleading ignorance to things that are incredibly easy to track and would in fact be required for their advertising deals. It's definitely at the point of 'It can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong'.
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Jul 15, 2023 08:42
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Rent-A-Cop posted:I think the issue people have here is that Spotify doesn't take a percentage off the top. They arbitrarily decide each month what artists will get, and then leave them to fight over it. And when prompted to justify their decision or provide any data their answer is "gently caress you." The tech companies deserve heckling but come on, this took me like 10 seconds to google.
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Jul 15, 2023 08:56
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The whole point is that media companies are using streaming as an excuse to take all the money but pittances and kicking and screaming at the idea of having to pay people regardless of how easy it would actually be and how they'd still make plenty of money, and unconvincingly pleading ignorance to things that are incredibly easy to track and would in fact be required for their advertising deals. It's definitely at the point of 'It can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong'. The argument about music is largely settled, but it's ongoing in film/tv. There is a very good, and very real argument that the studios have failed to adequately adapt to the new reality of streaming - especially during COVID. There is an even better argument that their shift to this new model shouldn't punish the creative people that are the business. Disney will survive with a 30% reduction in executives. It won't survive with a 100% reduction in writers and actors. Some rear end in a top hat coming out and saying that the current endgame is to wait until October, when they expect the writers to be kicked out of their apartments and homes does the studios no good. It galvanizes the workers, and it galvanizes a public who is currently very sympathetic to labor against them. When Bob Iger comes out and says this: quote:Iger gave his interview at Sun Valley just hours before Drescher officially called for a SAG-AFTRA strike, with picketing beginning July 14. Motherfucker, you're at what's called "summer camp for billionaires." You just laid off 7k people from Disney. Nobody has any sympathy for you, and you just proved that you have no loyalty to employees. Why should the writers and actors take anything than the absolute best deal they can squeeze - even if it means shutting down your film division for the next year?
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Jul 15, 2023 09:01
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Are the people saying to “just buy a cd drive and plug it into your pc” for real here?
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Jul 15, 2023 10:26
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Why the hell are people directly comparing the cost of playing a song once to the cost of buying a CD and playing the songs on it as many times as you want, anyway? If I’m listening to songs from an artist a hundred times per year, that’s going to give them pretty comparable amounts of money to their cut from a CD even at Spotify’s rates, and almost no-one puts out more than one CD per year.
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Jul 15, 2023 11:16
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Shooting Blanks posted:The argument about music is largely settled, but it's ongoing in film/tv. But ron desantis told me bob iger and Disney are too woke
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Jul 15, 2023 12:48
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pumpinglemma posted:Why the hell are people directly comparing the cost of playing a song once to the cost of buying a CD and playing the songs on it as many times as you want, anyway? If I’m listening to songs from an artist a hundred times per year, that’s going to give them pretty comparable amounts of money to their cut from a CD even at Spotify’s rates, and almost no-one puts out more than one CD per year. Yes, exactly, this is what I’ve been saying. If the artist’s cut from a CD is $1 (it’s usually less) and the album has 10 songs on it (it’s usually more) you would only need to listen to that CD about 10 times for its entire existence for the artist to have a similar per-listen equivalent payout to Spotify. If you listen to the CD more than ~10 times, suddenly it is worse compared to the per-stream model. I have no idea where the notion is coming from that artists were getting orders of magnitudes more money from CDs. The other factor here is that streaming brings in new revenue for artists that wouldn’t exist otherwise. I would never purchase an album from a one hit wonder band, but I might listen to their one song on Spotify a bunch. Nor would I buy an album for a band where I only liked a few songs - I had to be super into the band to purchase their albums. In those situations the streaming model is bringing in new revenue that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Seph fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 13:45
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Seph posted:The other factor here is that streaming brings in new revenue for artists that wouldn’t exist otherwise. I would never purchase an album from a one hit wonder band, but I might listen to their one song on Spotify a bunch. Nor would I buy an album for a band where I only liked a few songs - I had to be super into the band to purchase their albums. In those situations the streaming model is bringing in new revenue that otherwise wouldn’t exist. People never bring radio into this discussion. Radio (usually) didn't pay anything out, but just getting played could give you a decent boost in popularity to help with album and ticket sales. Without radio, can we even have one hit wonders like that anymore? That popularity boost seems to be much harder to obtain with streaming than it was with radio.
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Jul 15, 2023 14:22
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duz posted:People never bring radio into this discussion. Radio (usually) didn't pay anything out, but just getting played could give you a decent boost in popularity to help with album and ticket sales. Without radio, can we even have one hit wonders like that anymore? That popularity boost seems to be much harder to obtain with streaming than it was with radio. Radio stations do have to report to the copyright collective what their profits are, how many listeners they have and how many hours they play protected materials per month. Additionally they have to report monthly their entire playlist so the copyright collective can then distribute the money to the right people. In addition anyone who plays radio or streamed music or a record publicly, whether in a taxi or supermarket or pizza place, needs to purchase a permit from the organisation.
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Jul 15, 2023 14:36
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Seph posted:Yes, exactly, this is what I’ve been saying. If the artist’s cut from a CD is $1 (it’s usually less) and the album has 10 songs on it (it’s usually more) you would only need to listen to that CD about 10 times for its entire existence for the artist to have a similar per-listen equivalent payout to Spotify. If you listen to the CD more than ~10 times, suddenly it is worse compared to the per-stream model. I have no idea where the notion is coming from that artists were getting orders of magnitudes more money from CDs. Part of this is true, but per the actual spreadsheet numbers posted by an artist your numbers are way off. 10 songs x 10 listens at .003 dollars/song play is thirty cents from Spotify. Whole lot of CDs out there that have been listened to less than the full 33.3ish times that would match the actual number of Spotify plays (333-334) that get it up to the $1 level in your example.
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Jul 15, 2023 16:01
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pumpinglemma posted:
Yes. This is why Leonard Cohen was essentially touring nonstop for the last several years of his life. His business manager embezzled his entire life savings, forcing him to sell his house, move in with his son, and just tour the globe relentlessly.
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Jul 15, 2023 16:23
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I don't understand the people who seem to be arguing that bringing back physical media would be good for artists, don't you realize this puts even more power in the hands of the record labels? Right now if an artist can afford to have a decent recording of their work made they can put it on streaming/itunes/bandcamp for zero cost. In a physical media world you need to have enough cash to record the album, get a bunch of CDs burned, then have those distributed to shops or housed somewhere to be sent out by mail. Artists can now bypass the gatekeepers in a way that was impossible before unless you already had a bunch of money.
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Jul 15, 2023 17:01
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Irony.or.Death posted:Part of this is true, but per the actual spreadsheet numbers posted by an artist your numbers are way off. 10 songs x 10 listens at .003 dollars/song play is thirty cents from Spotify. Whole lot of CDs out there that have been listened to less than the full 33.3ish times that would match the actual number of Spotify plays (333-334) that get it up to the $1 level in your example. Right, and if you want to nit-pick the numbers, most albums have more than 10 songs and most artists got less than $1 per CD (except for the very biggest acts). The typical take for a smaller artist is around 10% of the wholesale price, which is far lower than the retail you would pay for a CD. I'd wager most smaller artists were getting $0.50-0.80 per CD sold. So maybe it's closer to 15-20 listens rather than 10 to break even. But that doesn't really change the point that each CD only provides a single, fixed payment to the artist while streaming keeps paying as long as the song is being listened to. And again, this whole break even exercise is assuming that every person who listens to a song on Spotify would have bought the album. In reality, Spotify is generating new revenue that would not exist if streaming were not an option. The streaming model benefits artists who have songs that get listened to a lot on repeat or get put on a bunch of playlists, but aren't necessarily big enough to move albums on their name alone. The old model favored well-known artists with lots of institutional backing, which allowed them to move a bunch of albums based on hype and name recognition, even if the songs weren't that great and only got listened to a few times. You can argue that streaming companies are keeping too much of the pie to themselves (I'd agree!) but I don't really buy that the new streaming model is inherently less fair than the old way, which gave a ton of power and money to the record labels rather than the artists. Seph fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 17:06
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thekeeshman posted:In a physical media world you need to have enough cash to record the album, get a bunch of CDs burned, then have those distributed to shops or housed somewhere to be sent out by mail.
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Jul 15, 2023 17:34
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Seph posted:Right, and if you want to nit-pick the numbers, most albums have more than 10 songs and most artists got less than $1 per CD (except for the very biggest acts). The typical take for a smaller artist is around 10% of the wholesale price, which is far lower than the retail you would pay for a CD. I'd wager most smaller artists were getting $0.50-0.80 per CD sold. So maybe it's closer to 15-20 listens rather than 10 to break even. But that doesn't really change the point that each CD only provides a single, fixed payment to the artist while streaming keeps paying as long as the song is being listened to. And again, this whole break even exercise is assuming that every person who listens to a song on Spotify would have bought the album. In reality, Spotify is generating new revenue that would not exist if streaming were not an option. Instead of theorycrafting about potential situations that could possibly lead to larger payouts, we could just talk to actual artists and see whether streaming services are actually bringing in higher payouts. And we don't have to look very hard - we've had an artist post in this very thread about how they've made far more from direct Bandcamp sales of their song than they have from all streaming services combined. And they're not the only one, either - there's no shortage of articles chronicling artists' complaints about how little they earn from streaming (and particularly Spotify) compared to other revenue channels, even if they have high play counts. The theoretical user who puts your song on loop and streams it several hundred times on Spotify just doesn't seem to actually exist, at least not in quantities remotely comparable to how many people were buying physical CDs or digital downloads of the music. The streaming model also favors well-known artists with lots of institutional backing, because Spotify pays the major labels license fees to even get access to their music. While the specifics of their current contracts aren't fully known, their contract with Sony Music was leaked in 2015, which revealed that Spotify paid $42 million in cash and $9 million in free advertising to even get access to Sony's catalog, on top of the normal payouts they did based on how much songs were streamed. which is why the big players in the music industry tolerate the low payouts to begin with. It's also known that major labels negotiate exclusivity windows with Spotify, in which new songs are restricted or unavailable for a certain period after release (so that streams don't cannibalize actual sales of the song).
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Jul 15, 2023 20:00
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I hope Freezepop appreciates the four dollars they've gotten from me essentially having doppelganger on repeat all summer
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Jul 15, 2023 21:39
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duz posted:People never bring radio into this discussion. Radio (usually) didn't pay anything out, but just getting played could give you a decent boost in popularity to help with album and ticket sales. Without radio, can we even have one hit wonders like that anymore? That popularity boost seems to be much harder to obtain with streaming than it was with radio. Tiktok seems to be the new way music blows up.
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Jul 15, 2023 22:40
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Mega Comrade posted:Tiktok seems to be the new way music blows up. TikTok payola is as bad as radio ever was. I don't believe that they have any rules about paying to play music, so that's what people do. It's a small part of this NPR story about the music business: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/17/1164300124/inflation-song-records-music-business-profit
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Jul 15, 2023 22:42
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