I always found these kinds of hit pieces interesting. Because Spotify does not exactly take a lot of money to the bank, around $200M a quarter.
Spotify pays around 70% of its revenue to their artists. This means if they just fired everyone and only paid for bandwidth it would barely move the needle.
Artists need to remember the alternative isn't 2-4x higher payouts - it's piracy.
> Artists need to remember the alternative isn't 2-4x higher payouts - it's piracy.
It’s more complicated than that. The music industry has famously abused artists almost since the beginning so there’s also room for artists to dramatically increase their income by cutting into the share that the middlemen have been taking. This was true even before most people had computers or went online:
One big change, however, is that the alternatives have dried up. A musician used to be able to make more of their income from live performances and merch sales but since the early 90s Ticketmaster/live nation has dramatically removed competition from that market and jacked up their share of what fans pay. These aren’t “hit pieces” (let Spotify PR earn their paychecks, don’t do it for free) but rather the latest in a long story of creators seeing increasingly low returns for their work, and now everyone is wondering how likely they are to get sandbagged by AI splurge being used to drive down their income even further.
In fact streaming is what saved the music industry from piracy. Total industry revenue in the USA peaked in 1999 and was on a steady decline since then all the way till the mid 2010s. It only then recovered when steaming became a thing, and now revenue has finally surpassed those highs and is seeing record growth YoY.
I think there are 2 very important things missing from your analysis:
1. I'm not sure if Spotify still does this, but I think it does, but a couple years ago there was a big kerfuffle over how Spotify allocates its revenue. The way it works now is that only huge artists make anything, because given the power law distribution of music, what Spotify does is take the number of streams for an particular song and divides them by the total number of streams, and then uses this to proportion total revenue accordingly. What smaller artists wanted was division of revenue by individual subscriber. That is, say I pay $10/Mo for Spotify, but I only listened to 10 songs that month, all from the same artist. Under a "divide individual subscriptions" model, that artist would have received the full amount (i.e. approximately $7) of that user's subscription revenue (obviously depending on who has the rights to the song). But the way Spotify does it (again, not sure if this has changed), since that user listens to much less that the average user, when you pool everything together, that obscure artist makes a lot less.
2. The other issue is that Spotify has been using their power to force artists to accept their music being played for free in the first place. Taylor Swift famously removed all her music from Spotify years ago because Spotify wasn't willing to only let her music be played to paid subscribers (and not free users). Few other artists had the power to do this, both because they're teeny compared to Taylor Swift, and because Swift (very smartly obviously) controlled much more of her music rights than most artists.
> Spotify pays around 70% of its revenue to their artists
They pay 70% of revenue to rights holders. For an artist signed to a major label like Lily Allen, they'll get ~20% of that number after they've cleared their advance.
I'd probably pay more for Spotify if they raised prices, I use it way more than any other streaming service like Netflix and get a ton of enjoyment from it.
Maybe they should do that, or offer a premium tier with discounted concert tickets or something?
The business model hasn't changed in like 15 years...
I dislike how Spotify is seen as evil when they charge a low price people can actually afford, and pay almost all of it in artist royalties. They make music accessible and affordable, and actually provide a path for new artists to get music out there without having to sign awful recording industry contracts- which are the real reason most musicians don’t actually get much of the money fans spend. It can help you discover a new artist you have never heard of, and they actually get paid each time you listen to them- pretty amazing really.
> Artists need to remember the alternative isn't 2-4x higher payouts - it's piracy.
And Spotify needs to remember that if it ceased to exist tomorrow, the artists whose music it depends on would care less than if they lost the ability to sell pictures of their feet.
There was an article somewhere about how labels fleece their artists through Spotify. So Spotify might not make that much, the artists don't, but the labels do.
> Artists need to remember the alternative isn't 2-4x higher payouts - it's piracy.
The implication here is that people as a whole don't value streaming music very much at all, right? I'm not much of a music listener, I've followed the whole evolution inattentively, why is online music of such low value?
I'm guessing she owns her feet photos, but she doesn't own her songs' publishing rights. There's really no reason to sign with the recording industry at all these days.
The argument would be that the marketing done by the label(s) she has signed with is a big part of why she has 7.5M monthly Spotify listeners (and the related fame is why so many people will pay to see her feet).
Not sure if that's a good argument, maybe she would've grown just as popular w/o help from a label, but that's why artists sign.
All this shade constantly thrown at foot fetishists, and yet this article shows they're one of the few internet denizens that are genuinely willing to pay for content!
> In August 2022, a series of lawsuits were filed which alleged that OnlyFans had bribed employees of Meta to add Instagram accounts of OnlyFans creators who also sold content on OnlyFans' competitor websites to a terrorist blacklist. According to the lawsuits, adult performers including Alana Evans had traffic driven away from their Instagram accounts after being falsely tagged as terror-related, effectively shadow banning them and diminishing their ability to promote their content on rival websites.
Read she's rated 10/10 on some wiki about feet, so I had to image search "Lilly Allen feet", and some pictures had her feet blurred as NSFW. What stupid times we are living now.
Art valuation has never been fair. It's all zeitgeist and marketing. Spotify or not, it will always be that way.
This however comes down to a matter of scarcity right? How many pop stars have feet on onlyfans vs songs on Spotify?
I've been a Spotify user for a few years now. It's a discovery platform for me. It drives vinyl, merch, and live sales. If you enjoy an artist go see them live and buy their merch.
Remember when there were many, many articles from MSM against OF? And then it got sold to some other people and, suddenly, no more attacks. Only stupid shock stories on how much money some woman is making on OF. What a coincidence.
[+] [-] bearjaws|1 year ago|reply
Spotify pays around 70% of its revenue to their artists. This means if they just fired everyone and only paid for bandwidth it would barely move the needle.
Artists need to remember the alternative isn't 2-4x higher payouts - it's piracy.
[+] [-] acdha|1 year ago|reply
It’s more complicated than that. The music industry has famously abused artists almost since the beginning so there’s also room for artists to dramatically increase their income by cutting into the share that the middlemen have been taking. This was true even before most people had computers or went online:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music
One big change, however, is that the alternatives have dried up. A musician used to be able to make more of their income from live performances and merch sales but since the early 90s Ticketmaster/live nation has dramatically removed competition from that market and jacked up their share of what fans pay. These aren’t “hit pieces” (let Spotify PR earn their paychecks, don’t do it for free) but rather the latest in a long story of creators seeing increasingly low returns for their work, and now everyone is wondering how likely they are to get sandbagged by AI splurge being used to drive down their income even further.
[+] [-] paxys|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|1 year ago|reply
1. I'm not sure if Spotify still does this, but I think it does, but a couple years ago there was a big kerfuffle over how Spotify allocates its revenue. The way it works now is that only huge artists make anything, because given the power law distribution of music, what Spotify does is take the number of streams for an particular song and divides them by the total number of streams, and then uses this to proportion total revenue accordingly. What smaller artists wanted was division of revenue by individual subscriber. That is, say I pay $10/Mo for Spotify, but I only listened to 10 songs that month, all from the same artist. Under a "divide individual subscriptions" model, that artist would have received the full amount (i.e. approximately $7) of that user's subscription revenue (obviously depending on who has the rights to the song). But the way Spotify does it (again, not sure if this has changed), since that user listens to much less that the average user, when you pool everything together, that obscure artist makes a lot less.
2. The other issue is that Spotify has been using their power to force artists to accept their music being played for free in the first place. Taylor Swift famously removed all her music from Spotify years ago because Spotify wasn't willing to only let her music be played to paid subscribers (and not free users). Few other artists had the power to do this, both because they're teeny compared to Taylor Swift, and because Swift (very smartly obviously) controlled much more of her music rights than most artists.
[+] [-] fallingsquirrel|1 year ago|reply
Nit: They pay ~70% to labels, not to artists. The artists make much less.
> The actual recording artists? “They’re keeping anywhere between 5% and a quarter.”
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-...
[+] [-] jcdavis|1 year ago|reply
They pay 70% of revenue to rights holders. For an artist signed to a major label like Lily Allen, they'll get ~20% of that number after they've cleared their advance.
[+] [-] davedx|1 year ago|reply
Maybe they should do that, or offer a premium tier with discounted concert tickets or something?
The business model hasn't changed in like 15 years...
[+] [-] _yb2s|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mcphage|1 year ago|reply
And Spotify needs to remember that if it ceased to exist tomorrow, the artists whose music it depends on would care less than if they lost the ability to sell pictures of their feet.
[+] [-] auggierose|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bediger4000|1 year ago|reply
The implication here is that people as a whole don't value streaming music very much at all, right? I'm not much of a music listener, I've followed the whole evolution inattentively, why is online music of such low value?
[+] [-] fullshark|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bvirb|1 year ago|reply
Not sure if that's a good argument, maybe she would've grown just as popular w/o help from a label, but that's why artists sign.
[+] [-] paxys|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] EasyMark|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] okasaki|1 year ago|reply
> In August 2022, a series of lawsuits were filed which alleged that OnlyFans had bribed employees of Meta to add Instagram accounts of OnlyFans creators who also sold content on OnlyFans' competitor websites to a terrorist blacklist. According to the lawsuits, adult performers including Alana Evans had traffic driven away from their Instagram accounts after being falsely tagged as terror-related, effectively shadow banning them and diminishing their ability to promote their content on rival websites.
[+] [-] ASalazarMX|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] goosejuice|1 year ago|reply
This however comes down to a matter of scarcity right? How many pop stars have feet on onlyfans vs songs on Spotify?
I've been a Spotify user for a few years now. It's a discovery platform for me. It drives vinyl, merch, and live sales. If you enjoy an artist go see them live and buy their merch.
[+] [-] JSDevOps|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hulitu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Oarch|1 year ago|reply
Why not. Might be hilarious.
[+] [-] immibis|1 year ago|reply
I sign away my rights, so I can get promoted, and then they buy a Royce, and it's apparent I'm paid exposure.
It's not fair, and I think it's really mean. I think it's really mean. I think it's really mean.
Oh, they're supposed to share, but they ruined all my dreams. They ruined all my dreams.
[+] [-] fragmede|1 year ago|reply
https://youtu.be/fUYaosyR4bE
[+] [-] 1oooqooq|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] alecco|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Mistletoe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeyouse|1 year ago|reply
Use one of your favorite paywall-bypasses if you’re interested in a good deep dive into sex trafficking and CSM..
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/06/16/the-s...