Information Is Beautiful has a wonderful infographic on how bad the Spotify model is for artists.
Honestly, why should I care? I want what is best for me and the population in general- the consumers. So unless you are going to actually back up the piracy streaming is going to destroy all music bogey man we've been hearing about for almost 20 years now....who gives a fuck.
Hasn't it been long established that the majority of the artist income is from merch/touring anyways?
That's the attitude that leads to the tragedy of the commons - because if you only care about what is good for the customers, and ignore the rest of the ecosystem that the system relies on, you shouldn't be surprised when everything collapses in on itself, and the rest of the people involved decide it's not worth it.
No, it's directly the opposite of that attitude. It's asking what is best for everyone, rather than the recording industry as it is constructed now. I don't understand why in this one niche, so many people just echo an industry groups talking points as gospel.
American Coalition for Clean Coal energy, tells me all sorts of things about how bad life is becoming for laid off coal miners. Doesn't mean I believe them or will do what they say I should.
No, you're not asking what's best for everyone - you're just saying "the customer is always right". It's the Omelas problem - you're asking people to take a bad deal to benefit "everybody", then act shocked when they balk.
An equitable deal balances the needs of all stakeholders. And consumers are only one stakeholder.
Once again, show me that these actual dire consequences are happening. We've been told how piracy, and now streaming, were going to kill the music industry since Taylor Swift was 10.
I don't see any distinction between what you are pedaling and every other industry lobby's rent-seeking bullet points.
What data would you like to see? The Information is Beautiful has a bit of commentary on how this affects the bottom rung - Taylor Swift isn't going to stop making records because of this and the most obvious music is going to be unaffected as it's still profitable, does mean it might be harder to get into music as an alternative or niche musician.
But I'm honestly not even sure what kind of data you'd be able to collect to show this is happening, let alone where to find it. Whether online distributors are offering artists a fair deal, is completely divorced from the question as to whether they are better than the old industry machine.
Isn't that also true of every other kind of media too? I'm sure it would be much easier for indie game devs if Steam charged $200 for every game and gave 100% of the revenue to the developer. This doesn't really suggest anything to me in itself, other than that it's hard to stand out as an unknown artist.
Except that these aren't "unknown artists". They are mid-tier and niche artists who used to be able to build small, solid fanbases, and make a decent living on that. In fact, your phrasing illustrates the problem - it used to be that there were many different levels in the industry, and a working musician could do well on any of them. Now, you're either big, or you're nothing.
This particular issue did remind me why I hate, in general, the commenter community at sites like Ars. I can tell you that.
I've made this point elsewhere, but what she's really objecting to, seems to me, is what I've kinda dubbed the "Netflixification" of content. Everybody loves Netflix. But Netflix is cheap. Too cheap. It's why they get into fights with ISPs, and why when I go to look for a specific film half time time it's not on there, and why their shows aren't as good as HBO's and won't be anytime soon. Netflix is about paying a small amount of money to choose from some limited selection and just watch some stuff when you don't necessarily much care what stuff you watch. But what it also does is create the perception that "all the movies" cost eight bucks a month. And creates a reluctance in the customer to ever pay more.
I see this every time my girlfriend balks at paying $3 or $4 for an online rental of a movie that isn't on Netflix/Prime yet/anymore.
Swift's position is even more reasonable than that. She's willing to be on the "Netflix tier" of Spotify's library, or at least that's her claim. She just refuses to be on the (non-plus) "Hulu tier," and they won't give her the choice. She feels that by forcing her to accept an ad-supported model, they're reinforcing the idea that her music doesn't cost money. And she's right, IMO. That's poor for your business, long-term, if part of your business is selling music.
Information Is Beautiful has a wonderful infographic on how bad the Spotify model is for artists.
Honestly, why should I care? I want what is best for me and the population in general- the consumers. So unless you are going to actually back up the piracy streaming is going to destroy all music bogey man we've been hearing about for almost 20 years now....who gives a fuck.
Hasn't it been long established that the majority of the artist income is from merch/touring anyways?
That's the attitude that leads to the tragedy of the commons - because if you only care about what is good for the customers, and ignore the rest of the ecosystem that the system relies on, you shouldn't be surprised when everything collapses in on itself, and the rest of the people involved decide it's not worth it.
No, it's directly the opposite of that attitude. It's asking what is best for everyone, rather than the recording industry as it is constructed now. I don't understand why in this one niche, so many people just echo an industry groups talking points as gospel.
American Coalition for Clean Coal energy, tells me all sorts of things about how bad life is becoming for laid off coal miners. Doesn't mean I believe them or will do what they say I should.
No, you're not asking what's best for everyone - you're just saying "the customer is always right". It's the Omelas problem - you're asking people to take a bad deal to benefit "everybody", then act shocked when they balk.
An equitable deal balances the needs of all stakeholders. And consumers are only one stakeholder.
Once again, show me that these actual dire consequences are happening. We've been told how piracy, and now streaming, were going to kill the music industry since Taylor Swift was 10.
I don't see any distinction between what you are pedaling and every other industry lobby's rent-seeking bullet points.
What data would you like to see? The Information is Beautiful has a bit of commentary on how this affects the bottom rung - Taylor Swift isn't going to stop making records because of this and the most obvious music is going to be unaffected as it's still profitable, does mean it might be harder to get into music as an alternative or niche musician.
But I'm honestly not even sure what kind of data you'd be able to collect to show this is happening, let alone where to find it. Whether online distributors are offering artists a fair deal, is completely divorced from the question as to whether they are better than the old industry machine.
What's happening is that the industry is getting hollowed out. That's why it looks like everything is okay - we see the outermost layer, which is the top of the industry, and everything looks okay - because the damage is happening within, at the lower levels.
Can I get a tl:dr on that article? I got like 50 paragraphs in and so far the only actual points I have seen are that new technology has not made the price for recording albums cheaper since it's mostly labor costs which are untied to technology, and total revenue across the board is down since the advent of file sharing.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
Except that these aren't "unknown artists". They are mid-tier and niche artists who used to be able to build small, solid fanbases, and make a decent living on that. In fact, your phrasing illustrates the problem - it used to be that there were many different levels in the industry, and a working musician could do well on any of them. Now, you're either big, or you're nothing.
Haven't read your linked article, and I'm about to. But I will say that I used to spend $20 or $30 a month on CDs pre-Napster. Now I spend $10 a month on Spotify. And that's it. I tried getting off Spotify, and going back to albums, and just budgeting $10 or $15 a month to buy the songs and albums I really liked. But that didn't work out, it cost to much. So I'm back on Spotify.
So clearly Spotify, and their model (even the paid model) is exerting some serious downward pressure on revenues for recorded music. This is only exacerbated by the free tier.
We can say this is "better," and from the POV of the consumer sure it is. For smaller artists that don't want to depend on being on the road nine months out of every year, in perpetuity (or until the revenue dries up entirely), less so.
So she has a problem with Spotify's rate structure in particular. This isn't even about internet radio vs album sales. Why are people reading that angle into this, then?
Because the reason she had a problem was because Spotify refused to pull her albums from their "free" service.
But she's still on Pandora's free service, indicating to me that if Spotify paid out at a higher rate, she'd be fine with them to.
And that's fine, that's business. I don't see why the Tech Village has decided that this has broad repercussions for the twenty-first century music industry or whatever. It's like deciding that Steam is destined for failure because Minecraft isn't there.
So she has a problem with Spotify's rate structure in particular. This isn't even about internet radio vs album sales. Why are people reading that angle into this, then?
Because the reason she had a problem was because Spotify refused to pull her albums from their "free" service.
But she's still on Pandora's free service, indicating to me that if Spotify paid out at a higher rate, she'd be fine with them to.
And that's fine, that's business. I don't see why the Tech Village has decided that this has broad repercussions for the twenty-first century music industry or whatever. It's like deciding that Steam is destined for failure because Minecraft isn't there.
She's on Pandora's free service in part because it works differently, and most likely in part because she has no choice (yay for statutory licensing!)
Information Is Beautiful has a wonderful infographic on how bad the Spotify model is for artists.
The problem with that infographic is that plays vs purchases is comparing apples to oranges. I would love to see more figures from Spotify, specially regarding average plays or payouts.
How is it comparing apples and oranges? They're comparing the payout rate for each method by the method's base unit.
One method is an event that will be repeated multiple times by an individual consumer while one will be a one and done for any given consumer.
Which fundamentally misunderstands what that graphic is illustrating. What that graphic shows is how many units any one sales channel has to generate to give a specified level of revenue (specifically, minimum wage.)
So say that streaming cannibalizes one album sale. In order to replace that one album sale, the artist would have to get enough plays to recover that lost revenue. Which numbers in the thousands.
177.
What's an order of magnitude, eh?
That's how many free streams are needed to earn the same revenue as a record sale.
I'm not sure how we get to lump in record companies being evil as spotify's fault.
Spotify's rate as listed is $.00029/play. To recover $1.00 (the listed performer share for a retail album), you would need 3449 plays.
While the larger point - you need a lot of plays to equal the revenue of an album sale - is true, that infographic is still using extremely shady techniques to make it's point.
You are meant to directly compare the size of those circles and go "wow, the streaming circle is so much bigger than the album sales circle!" And that requires that you equate one album sale to one play on streaming.
It's just a plain shitty and disingenuous way to present data, and the fact that their larger point is valid does not make it less shitty.
In the context of revenue generation, they are the same, though - the unit of revenue for a specific channel. The point is that it illustrates why certain sales channels are much more valuable than others, which in turn leads to why someone would turn their back on one channel to protect another.
I don't see how making that point is disingenuous at all. I think that it makes people uncomfortable, but that is something very different.
The unit of revenue at McDonald's is one burger. The unit of revenue at the local independent grass fed butcher is one cow's worth of beef. If you made an infographic comparing those things directly, it would also be shitty.
And yes, that picture makes me uncomfortable to the extent that dishonest presentations of data make me uncomfortable.
Look, I'm on your fucking side, so stow the You Can't Handle the Truth bullshit. The streaming data needs to be weighted based on the number of times the average listener could be expected to stream a particular song. If the average user listens to each of the ten songs on an album twenty times over the course of the year, AND it can be established that they would not have done so had they owned the album, then an argument could be made that the streaming numbers should be divided by 200, since that is how many times a musician is receiving their cut.
That said, you need to figure in how many times someone who owns the album might use the streaming service, how to calculate lifetime usage, and a bunch of other factors. It gets complicated.
The moral of the story us that data presentation is hard to do well, but that doesn't mean you get to barf up some pink circles on the internet and call it good.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
So she has a problem with Spotify's rate structure in particular. This isn't even about internet radio vs album sales. Why are people reading that angle into this, then?
Because the reason she had a problem was because Spotify refused to pull her albums from their "free" service.
But she's still on Pandora's free service, indicating to me that if Spotify paid out at a higher rate, she'd be fine with them to.
And that's fine, that's business. I don't see why the Tech Village has decided that this has broad repercussions for the twenty-first century music industry or whatever. It's like deciding that Steam is destined for failure because Minecraft isn't there.
Again, Pandora's free service is not equivalent to Spotify's.
It may be true that her specific gripe is that she gets too few dollars from Spotify, and enough dollars from Pandora.
But I think she also has an ideological problem with Spotify's model, that Pandora's model does not have. Granted, that ideological problem may be rooted in business concerns as well, but it is a much longer term and broader in scope problem than "my check from Spotify is not large enough."
If you really still don't understand the difference between Spotify and Pandora (free tiers respectively), despite the fact that I've already explained it, I'll ask you again: go into Pandora, and create a new station based on "Love Story" by Taylor Swift. I will bet you my entire year's paycheck against a McRib sandwich that I can tell you what song will not be played first when you do so.
"Love Story," by Taylor Swift.
Mmmmmm.....McRib.
She's on Pandora's free service in part because it works differently, and most likely in part because she has no choice (yay for statutory licensing!)
Hmmm...hadn't considered that Pandora might be doing statutory licensing. Not sure on that one. But a good point as well.
Information Is Beautiful has a wonderful infographic on how bad the Spotify model is for artists.
Honestly, why should I care? I want what is best for me and the population in general- the consumers. So unless you are going to actually back up the piracy streaming is going to destroy all music bogey man we've been hearing about for almost 20 years now....who gives a fuck.
Hasn't it been long established that the majority of the artist income is from merch/touring anyways?
That's the attitude that leads to the tragedy of the commons - because if you only care about what is good for the customers, and ignore the rest of the ecosystem that the system relies on, you shouldn't be surprised when everything collapses in on itself, and the rest of the people involved decide it's not worth it.
No, it's directly the opposite of that attitude. It's asking what is best for everyone, rather than the recording industry as it is constructed now. I don't understand why in this one niche, so many people just echo an industry groups talking points as gospel.
American Coalition for Clean Coal energy, tells me all sorts of things about how bad life is becoming for laid off coal miners. Doesn't mean I believe them or will do what they say I should.
No, you're not asking what's best for everyone - you're just saying "the customer is always right". It's the Omelas problem - you're asking people to take a bad deal to benefit "everybody", then act shocked when they balk.
An equitable deal balances the needs of all stakeholders. And consumers are only one stakeholder.
Once again, show me that these actual dire consequences are happening. We've been told how piracy, and now streaming, were going to kill the music industry since Taylor Swift was 10.
I don't see any distinction between what you are pedaling and every other industry lobby's rent-seeking bullet points.
What data would you like to see? The Information is Beautiful has a bit of commentary on how this affects the bottom rung - Taylor Swift isn't going to stop making records because of this and the most obvious music is going to be unaffected as it's still profitable, does mean it might be harder to get into music as an alternative or niche musician.
But I'm honestly not even sure what kind of data you'd be able to collect to show this is happening, let alone where to find it. Whether online distributors are offering artists a fair deal, is completely divorced from the question as to whether they are better than the old industry machine.
What's happening is that the industry is getting hollowed out. That's why it looks like everything is okay - we see the outermost layer, which is the top of the industry, and everything looks okay - because the damage is happening within, at the lower levels.
Can I get a tl:dr on that article? I got like 50 paragraphs in and so far the only actual points I have seen are that new technology has not made the price for recording albums cheaper since it's mostly labor costs which are untied to technology, and total revenue across the board is down since the advent of file sharing.
Those are some of the big ones. The biggest, though, is that the relationship between the musician and the label was fundamentally different from the one between the musician and the online services. The labels saw themselves as being in the music business, and as such had some investment in protecting and developing the industry. In comparison, the tech companies at best see themselves in content, and as such see content as fungible in their view. (At worst? They see themselves in advertising, and the content is solely a means to the end of producing their real product - viewer eyeballs.)
This particular issue did remind me why I hate, in general, the commenter community at sites like Ars. I can tell you that.
I've made this point elsewhere, but what she's really objecting to, seems to me, is what I've kinda dubbed the "Netflixification" of content. Everybody loves Netflix. But Netflix is cheap. Too cheap. It's why they get into fights with ISPs, and why when I go to look for a specific film half time time it's not on there, and why their shows aren't as good as HBO's and won't be anytime soon. Netflix is about paying a small amount of money to choose from some limited selection and just watch some stuff when you don't necessarily much care what stuff you watch. But what it also does is create the perception that "all the movies" cost eight bucks a month. And creates a reluctance in the customer to ever pay more.
I see this every time my girlfriend balks at paying $3 or $4 for an online rental of a movie that isn't on Netflix/Prime yet/anymore.
Swift's position is even more reasonable than that. She's willing to be on the "Netflix tier" of Spotify's library, or at least that's her claim. She just refuses to be on the (non-plus) "Hulu tier," and they won't give her the choice. She feels that by forcing her to accept an ad-supported model, they're reinforcing the idea that her music doesn't cost money. And she's right, IMO. That's poor for your business, long-term, if part of your business is selling music.
I think you're correct that these kinds of services (Netflix, Steam, Spotify, ect) tend to lower prices dramatically.
You haven't explained why that's a bad thing. There is still a huge amount of content on those services, likely more than the average user can ever use. I literally can't play all the games I own on Steam. I can't watch all the movies and shows I'd like to watch on Netflix. I can't listen to all the music I'd like to listen to on Spotify. Despite the low prices, there is no shortage of supply. Quite the opposite - supply hugely outpaces demand, which is why the prices remain so low.
The music industry loves to suggest that if everyone doesn't give them more money that people will somehow decide to stop making music, because reasons. But people are making plenty of music under the current model and show no actual sign of stopping. Can you explain how we would get from A (Spotify/Netflix/Steam having massive libraries) to B (nobody making games/art/music)? Can you show me data that suggests we are progressing towards this dark fate?
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
So she has a problem with Spotify's rate structure in particular. This isn't even about internet radio vs album sales. Why are people reading that angle into this, then?
Because the reason she had a problem was because Spotify refused to pull her albums from their "free" service.
But she's still on Pandora's free service, indicating to me that if Spotify paid out at a higher rate, she'd be fine with them to.
And that's fine, that's business. I don't see why the Tech Village has decided that this has broad repercussions for the twenty-first century music industry or whatever. It's like deciding that Steam is destined for failure because Minecraft isn't there.
Because content services like Spotify (and Steam, and Netflix, and...) depend on content in order to draw in listeners, and that means broad, popular, blockbuster stuff. That's why Netflix has a rather poor streaming selection of, say, obscure 90s dramas but you can definitely watch The Avengers and World War Z. Blockbuster material draws in listeners who contribute revenue that the service uses in part to attract blockbuster material. If people like Swift hear her argument and decide it makes sense for them, too, then blockbuster artists flee Spotify in droves, Spotify attracts fewer listeners and becomes a worse proposition for blockbuster artists, and pretty soon they're locked into a downward spiral. The same logic applies to the industry as a whole. If people decide that internet radio isn't worth it, internet radio's future will not look good (whether that means slashing profits to raise payment rates or whatever).
So she has a problem with Spotify's rate structure in particular. This isn't even about internet radio vs album sales. Why are people reading that angle into this, then?
Because the reason she had a problem was because Spotify refused to pull her albums from their "free" service.
But she's still on Pandora's free service, indicating to me that if Spotify paid out at a higher rate, she'd be fine with them to.
And that's fine, that's business. I don't see why the Tech Village has decided that this has broad repercussions for the twenty-first century music industry or whatever. It's like deciding that Steam is destined for failure because Minecraft isn't there.
Again, Pandora's free service is not equivalent to Spotify's.
It may be true that her specific gripe is that she gets too few dollars from Spotify, and enough dollars from Pandora.
But I think she also has an ideological problem with Spotify's model, that Pandora's model does not have. Granted, that ideological problem may be rooted in business concerns as well, but it is a much longer term and broader in scope problem than "my check from Spotify is not large enough."
If you really still don't understand the difference between Spotify and Pandora (free tiers respectively), despite the fact that I've already explained it, I'll ask you again: go into Pandora, and create a new station based on "Love Story" by Taylor Swift. I will bet you my entire year's paycheck against a McRib sandwich that I can tell you what song will not be played first when you do so.
"Love Story," by Taylor Swift.
Mmmmmm.....McRib.
She's on Pandora's free service in part because it works differently, and most likely in part because she has no choice (yay for statutory licensing!)
Hmmm...hadn't considered that Pandora might be doing statutory licensing. Not sure on that one. But a good point as well.
I guess I never considered that to be an enormous difference, but if she does, then... good for her, I guess?
Some business models will work for some artists, and others will work for others.
If anything, the big story here is that she can actually do this at all, because she owns her own music, whereas in the traditional record label relationship, the label owned the music as a "work for hire", and if the artist didn't like how the label sold it then the artist could fuck off.
Information Is Beautiful has a wonderful infographic on how bad the Spotify model is for artists.
Honestly, why should I care? I want what is best for me and the population in general- the consumers. So unless you are going to actually back up the piracy streaming is going to destroy all music bogey man we've been hearing about for almost 20 years now....who gives a fuck.
Hasn't it been long established that the majority of the artist income is from merch/touring anyways?
That's the attitude that leads to the tragedy of the commons - because if you only care about what is good for the customers, and ignore the rest of the ecosystem that the system relies on, you shouldn't be surprised when everything collapses in on itself, and the rest of the people involved decide it's not worth it.
No, it's directly the opposite of that attitude. It's asking what is best for everyone, rather than the recording industry as it is constructed now. I don't understand why in this one niche, so many people just echo an industry groups talking points as gospel.
American Coalition for Clean Coal energy, tells me all sorts of things about how bad life is becoming for laid off coal miners. Doesn't mean I believe them or will do what they say I should.
No, you're not asking what's best for everyone - you're just saying "the customer is always right". It's the Omelas problem - you're asking people to take a bad deal to benefit "everybody", then act shocked when they balk.
An equitable deal balances the needs of all stakeholders. And consumers are only one stakeholder.
Once again, show me that these actual dire consequences are happening. We've been told how piracy, and now streaming, were going to kill the music industry since Taylor Swift was 10.
I don't see any distinction between what you are pedaling and every other industry lobby's rent-seeking bullet points.
What data would you like to see? The Information is Beautiful has a bit of commentary on how this affects the bottom rung - Taylor Swift isn't going to stop making records because of this and the most obvious music is going to be unaffected as it's still profitable, does mean it might be harder to get into music as an alternative or niche musician.
But I'm honestly not even sure what kind of data you'd be able to collect to show this is happening, let alone where to find it. Whether online distributors are offering artists a fair deal, is completely divorced from the question as to whether they are better than the old industry machine.
What's happening is that the industry is getting hollowed out. That's why it looks like everything is okay - we see the outermost layer, which is the top of the industry, and everything looks okay - because the damage is happening within, at the lower levels.
Can I get a tl:dr on that article? I got like 50 paragraphs in and so far the only actual points I have seen are that new technology has not made the price for recording albums cheaper since it's mostly labor costs which are untied to technology, and total revenue across the board is down since the advent of file sharing.
Those are some of the big ones. The biggest, though, is that the relationship between the musician and the label was fundamentally different from the one between the musician and the online services. The labels saw themselves as being in the music business, and as such had some investment in protecting and developing the industry. In comparison, the tech companies at best see themselves in content, and as such see content as fungible in their view. (At worst? They see themselves in advertising, and the content is solely a means to the end of producing their real product - viewer eyeballs.)
So like every radio station ever?
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TraceGNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam WeRegistered Userregular
Anyone who has ever read a biography about their favorite musician/band knows that the executives and people in the suits are basically greedy assholes. I mean that in the most literal way too. Think of one of those creepy tube things from Legend of Zelda that try and eat Link. That's basically what an executive at a record producing company is.
And unless you make a big fucking record and become a household name they're gonna do some pretty nasty things.
This particular issue did remind me why I hate, in general, the commenter community at sites like Ars. I can tell you that.
I've made this point elsewhere, but what she's really objecting to, seems to me, is what I've kinda dubbed the "Netflixification" of content. Everybody loves Netflix. But Netflix is cheap. Too cheap. It's why they get into fights with ISPs, and why when I go to look for a specific film half time time it's not on there, and why their shows aren't as good as HBO's and won't be anytime soon. Netflix is about paying a small amount of money to choose from some limited selection and just watch some stuff when you don't necessarily much care what stuff you watch. But what it also does is create the perception that "all the movies" cost eight bucks a month. And creates a reluctance in the customer to ever pay more.
I see this every time my girlfriend balks at paying $3 or $4 for an online rental of a movie that isn't on Netflix/Prime yet/anymore.
Swift's position is even more reasonable than that. She's willing to be on the "Netflix tier" of Spotify's library, or at least that's her claim. She just refuses to be on the (non-plus) "Hulu tier," and they won't give her the choice. She feels that by forcing her to accept an ad-supported model, they're reinforcing the idea that her music doesn't cost money. And she's right, IMO. That's poor for your business, long-term, if part of your business is selling music.
I think you're correct that these kinds of services (Netflix, Steam, Spotify, ect) tend to lower prices dramatically.
You haven't explained why that's a bad thing. There is still a huge amount of content on those services, likely more than the average user can ever use. I literally can't play all the games I own on Steam. I can't watch all the movies and shows I'd like to watch on Netflix. I can't listen to all the music I'd like to listen to on Spotify. Despite the low prices, there is no shortage of supply. Quite the opposite - supply hugely outpaces demand, which is why the prices remain so low.
The music industry loves to suggest that if everyone doesn't give them more money that people will somehow decide to stop making music, because reasons. But people are making plenty of music under the current model and show no actual sign of stopping. Can you explain how we would get from A (Spotify/Netflix/Steam having massive libraries) to B (nobody making games/art/music)? Can you show me data that suggests we are progressing towards this dark fate?
One, I want new content. I get that there's a huge pile of content we can all get access to, but I want the pile to grow, for a number of reasons. And taking away incentive to create means that the pile won't grow as fast, and more importantly that the new additions won't be as diverse.
Which leads into my second point, which is that B is not the only shitty scenario. Right now, we're heading to C - hollowed out industries where the only options are large scale blockbusters geared towards mass consumption, and small products built on shoestrings by semiprofessional creators. The vast middle ground of well designed and professionally created content geared to focused audiences, and which has challenging content (in many ways!) has become unsustainable, because you either have to go big, and get revenue from everywhere; or you budget small and get constrained.
If you really still don't understand the difference between Spotify and Pandora (free tiers respectively), despite the fact that I've already explained it, I'll ask you again: go into Pandora, and create a new station based on "Love Story" by Taylor Swift. I will bet you my entire year's paycheck against a McRib sandwich that I can tell you what song will not be played first when you do so.
"Love Story," by Taylor Swift.
Mmmmmm.....McRib.
She's on Pandora's free service in part because it works differently, and most likely in part because she has no choice (yay for statutory licensing!)
Hmmm...hadn't considered that Pandora might be doing statutory licensing. Not sure on that one. But a good point as well.
I guess I never considered that to be an enormous difference, but if she does, then... good for her, I guess?
If it wasn't an enormous difference, there'd be no story here. Pandora is still free. Swift is still on that. So who cares, right?
People do occasionally want to be able to listen to the song they want to listen to at the time of their choosing. That is a product distinct from a "radio" format that has value. That value used to be $15 or $20 for an album. That value was then $0.99 or $1.49 for a song. Now Spotify has placed that value somewhere between $9.99 a month for all the albums ever at your fingertips, to "free and listen to some ads."
Swift is probably not happy with the former, along with many other artists. The latter she was unwilling to accept.
I do agree that it is at least nice she has the choice, owning her own music. I do find it amusing how many of the "take it or leave it" defenders of Spotify's payouts suddenly cried foul when a major artist decides to actually exercise that choice.
This particular issue did remind me why I hate, in general, the commenter community at sites like Ars. I can tell you that.
I've made this point elsewhere, but what she's really objecting to, seems to me, is what I've kinda dubbed the "Netflixification" of content. Everybody loves Netflix. But Netflix is cheap. Too cheap. It's why they get into fights with ISPs, and why when I go to look for a specific film half time time it's not on there, and why their shows aren't as good as HBO's and won't be anytime soon. Netflix is about paying a small amount of money to choose from some limited selection and just watch some stuff when you don't necessarily much care what stuff you watch. But what it also does is create the perception that "all the movies" cost eight bucks a month. And creates a reluctance in the customer to ever pay more.
I see this every time my girlfriend balks at paying $3 or $4 for an online rental of a movie that isn't on Netflix/Prime yet/anymore.
Swift's position is even more reasonable than that. She's willing to be on the "Netflix tier" of Spotify's library, or at least that's her claim. She just refuses to be on the (non-plus) "Hulu tier," and they won't give her the choice. She feels that by forcing her to accept an ad-supported model, they're reinforcing the idea that her music doesn't cost money. And she's right, IMO. That's poor for your business, long-term, if part of your business is selling music.
I think you're correct that these kinds of services (Netflix, Steam, Spotify, ect) tend to lower prices dramatically.
You haven't explained why that's a bad thing. There is still a huge amount of content on those services, likely more than the average user can ever use. I literally can't play all the games I own on Steam. I can't watch all the movies and shows I'd like to watch on Netflix. I can't listen to all the music I'd like to listen to on Spotify. Despite the low prices, there is no shortage of supply. Quite the opposite - supply hugely outpaces demand, which is why the prices remain so low.
The music industry loves to suggest that if everyone doesn't give them more money that people will somehow decide to stop making music, because reasons. But people are making plenty of music under the current model and show no actual sign of stopping. Can you explain how we would get from A (Spotify/Netflix/Steam having massive libraries) to B (nobody making games/art/music)? Can you show me data that suggests we are progressing towards this dark fate?
Netflix makes the bulk of their business out of shows and movies that have already long since been monetized through other outlets into profitability (which is to say theaters, television, and disc sales). And at their super-cheap price point, they are still (controversial statement ahead!) kind of a shitty service. Their selection of things I haven't seen and want to see, for instance, is woeful. There's more content on Netflix than I could ever watch. But I canceled my subscription because on a given night half the time I couldn't find a single fucking thing that I wanted to watch. And their original content is middling at best (and at worst godawful). You get what you pay for.
And Spotify, by comparison, wants Swifts album on release day. That's concerning.
As for data rather than anecdote, the data on music revenues is easy to find, and I think you can guess what it looks like. I feel like this has had a negative effect on the quality of music out there, but of course I'm also an old guy telling kids to get off my lawn. So that's harder to point to objective data on.
Information Is Beautiful has a wonderful infographic on how bad the Spotify model is for artists.
The problem with that infographic is that plays vs purchases is comparing apples to oranges. I would love to see more figures from Spotify, specially regarding average plays or payouts.
How is it comparing apples and oranges? They're comparing the payout rate for each method by the method's base unit.
One method is an event that will be repeated multiple times by an individual consumer while one will be a one and done for any given consumer.
Which fundamentally misunderstands what that graphic is illustrating. What that graphic shows is how many units any one sales channel has to generate to give a specified level of revenue (specifically, minimum wage.)
So say that streaming cannibalizes one album sale. In order to replace that one album sale, the artist would have to get enough plays to recover that lost revenue. Which numbers in the thousands.
177.
What's an order of magnitude, eh?
That's how many free streams are needed to earn the same revenue as a record sale.
I'm not sure how we get to lump in record companies being evil as spotify's fault.
Spotify's rate as listed is $.00029/play. To recover $1.00 (the listed performer share for a retail album), you would need 3449 plays.
As a gigantic caveat, the low end royalty retail album and Spotify both have 15% to the artists, whereas the high end royalty retail album has a 50% royalty, so you're comparing apples to apple trees.
This particular issue did remind me why I hate, in general, the commenter community at sites like Ars. I can tell you that.
I've made this point elsewhere, but what she's really objecting to, seems to me, is what I've kinda dubbed the "Netflixification" of content. Everybody loves Netflix. But Netflix is cheap. Too cheap. It's why they get into fights with ISPs, and why when I go to look for a specific film half time time it's not on there, and why their shows aren't as good as HBO's and won't be anytime soon. Netflix is about paying a small amount of money to choose from some limited selection and just watch some stuff when you don't necessarily much care what stuff you watch. But what it also does is create the perception that "all the movies" cost eight bucks a month. And creates a reluctance in the customer to ever pay more.
I see this every time my girlfriend balks at paying $3 or $4 for an online rental of a movie that isn't on Netflix/Prime yet/anymore.
Swift's position is even more reasonable than that. She's willing to be on the "Netflix tier" of Spotify's library, or at least that's her claim. She just refuses to be on the (non-plus) "Hulu tier," and they won't give her the choice. She feels that by forcing her to accept an ad-supported model, they're reinforcing the idea that her music doesn't cost money. And she's right, IMO. That's poor for your business, long-term, if part of your business is selling music.
This is a good thing for consumers. The marginal cost of everything digital is about $0, so it's all marginal profit. Now, artists still need to eat, as they always have, but the savings of digital distribution have far exceeded cost of living increases by magnitudes of order.
Hell, look at the infographic. Out of the $10 cd sale, the music people got $2 in the past, and now they are up to $6.28. Over 3x, and the mp3 store is making a mint at the same time, despite the drastically lowered percentage.
But really, rather than worrying about millionaires not making enough millions, we should be asking ourselves if the way we treat music (and other arts) makes sense anymore. When almost everyone in the world can have access to a digital Library of Alexandria for nothing, the idea of using shitty monopoly pricing to hope people can make cash on music seems outdated, to rather understate it.
But really, rather than worrying about millionaires not making enough millions, we should be asking ourselves if the way we treat music (and other arts) makes sense anymore. When almost everyone in the world can have access to a digital Library of Alexandria for nothing, the idea of using shitty monopoly pricing to hope people can make cash on music seems outdated, to rather understate it.
Sure, but the alternative is basically enforcing communism on a single sector. Are we going to have a department of the federal government who gets to decide how much Taylor Swift and the Black Keys need in order to live at the lifestyle we feel is fair for them? Do they need to keep producing music to receive their allowance? Or must they perform, in perpetuity, to get their check? Will we have something akin to the MGIB for artists?
I'm just skeptical that there's a better alternative than some sort of functioning market for music.
Information Is Beautiful has a wonderful infographic on how bad the Spotify model is for artists.
The problem with that infographic is that plays vs purchases is comparing apples to oranges. I would love to see more figures from Spotify, specially regarding average plays or payouts.
How is it comparing apples and oranges? They're comparing the payout rate for each method by the method's base unit.
One method is an event that will be repeated multiple times by an individual consumer while one will be a one and done for any given consumer.
Which fundamentally misunderstands what that graphic is illustrating. What that graphic shows is how many units any one sales channel has to generate to give a specified level of revenue (specifically, minimum wage.)
So say that streaming cannibalizes one album sale. In order to replace that one album sale, the artist would have to get enough plays to recover that lost revenue. Which numbers in the thousands.
177.
What's an order of magnitude, eh?
That's how many free streams are needed to earn the same revenue as a record sale.
I'm not sure how we get to lump in record companies being evil as spotify's fault.
Spotify's rate as listed is $.00029/play. To recover $1.00 (the listed performer share for a retail album), you would need 3449 plays.
As a gigantic caveat, the low end royalty retail album and Spotify both have 15% to the artists, whereas the high end royalty retail album has a 50% royalty, so you're comparing apples to apple trees.
This particular issue did remind me why I hate, in general, the commenter community at sites like Ars. I can tell you that.
I've made this point elsewhere, but what she's really objecting to, seems to me, is what I've kinda dubbed the "Netflixification" of content. Everybody loves Netflix. But Netflix is cheap. Too cheap. It's why they get into fights with ISPs, and why when I go to look for a specific film half time time it's not on there, and why their shows aren't as good as HBO's and won't be anytime soon. Netflix is about paying a small amount of money to choose from some limited selection and just watch some stuff when you don't necessarily much care what stuff you watch. But what it also does is create the perception that "all the movies" cost eight bucks a month. And creates a reluctance in the customer to ever pay more.
I see this every time my girlfriend balks at paying $3 or $4 for an online rental of a movie that isn't on Netflix/Prime yet/anymore.
Swift's position is even more reasonable than that. She's willing to be on the "Netflix tier" of Spotify's library, or at least that's her claim. She just refuses to be on the (non-plus) "Hulu tier," and they won't give her the choice. She feels that by forcing her to accept an ad-supported model, they're reinforcing the idea that her music doesn't cost money. And she's right, IMO. That's poor for your business, long-term, if part of your business is selling music.
This is a good thing for consumers. The marginal cost of everything digital is about $0, so it's all marginal profit. Now, artists still need to eat, as they always have, but the savings of digital distribution have far exceeded cost of living increases by magnitudes of order.
Hell, look at the infographic. Out of the $10 cd sale, the music people got $2 in the past, and now they are up to $6.28. Over 3x, and the mp3 store is making a mint at the same time, despite the drastically lowered percentage.
But really, rather than worrying about millionaires not making enough millions, we should be asking ourselves if the way we treat music (and other arts) makes sense anymore. When almost everyone in the world can have access to a digital Library of Alexandria for nothing, the idea of using shitty monopoly pricing to hope people can make cash on music seems outdated, to rather understate it.
Why?
I see this attitude pop up over and over, and it utterly baffles me. It really comes across as "we're devaluing your labor, but it's for the good of society!"
And then you wonder why musicians don't trust you.
Edit: And as the nice folks at Cracked pointed out, the Great Library was less about knowledge, and more about cultural dominance. It was policy in Alexandria to seize any new books that came into the city, without reimbursement.
On second thought, maybe that metaphor does work. Though not the way you thought.
I see this attitude pop up over and over, and it utterly baffles me. It really comes across as "we're devaluing your labor, but it's for the good of society!"
And then you wonder why musicians don't trust you.
Edit: And as the nice folks at Cracked pointed out, the Great Library was less about knowledge, and more about cultural dominance. It was policy in Alexandria to seize any new books that came into the city, without reimbursement.
On second thought, maybe that metaphor does work. Though not the way you thought.
Well, I mean I do see it as an enrichment of culture to have access to all those works. I don't think you can look at a Star-Trek-esque "computer, play <thing>" that just works and say "man, that sucks."
But yeah, I don't see any fair way to both ensure artists a decent and fair wage while also not compromising the output aside from a market. I'm all for shortening terms and such (in fact I think it needs to happen), but if Swift wants her work to be purchased rather than rented or streamed (on-demand) free, that should be her choice. We have no particular right to that.
Finally, no, touring and merchandising have never been the main revenue sources for more than a subset of acts. That argument has been long since debunked, yet it continues to get passed around as fact.
I mostly agree with what you're saying, but when has this been debunked? Things may've changed in the ten years since I was playing music, but pretty much all the dudes I knew who were in bands (ranging from guys who played local firehouse shows once a month to guys who regularly sold out at the Tower Theater in Philly) made almost all their money on shows and merch. Albums really were just a promo tool for the attached tour
Like I said, this may've changed since I left the music scene, but are there any numbers you can point to that back up your assertion?
I'd point out that your past experience is tainted with confirmation bias - you were and hung out with touring musicians, so that's what you mainly saw. But those are only a subset of working musicians - you have gig players, musicians whose works don't lend themselves to touring and public performance, etc. Music was never the razor - it was always the blade.
I mean yeah, fair enough. But you said the claim's been debunked, like there's empirical evidence that a band generally makes their money on shows and merch. If there is, I'm interested in seeing it
Information Is Beautiful has a wonderful infographic on how bad the Spotify model is for artists.
Honestly, why should I care? I want what is best for me and the population in general- the consumers. So unless you are going to actually back up the piracy streaming is going to destroy all music bogey man we've been hearing about for almost 20 years now....who gives a fuck.
Hasn't it been long established that the majority of the artist income is from merch/touring anyways?
That's the attitude that leads to the tragedy of the commons - because if you only care about what is good for the customers, and ignore the rest of the ecosystem that the system relies on, you shouldn't be surprised when everything collapses in on itself, and the rest of the people involved decide it's not worth it.
No, it's directly the opposite of that attitude. It's asking what is best for everyone, rather than the recording industry as it is constructed now. I don't understand why in this one niche, so many people just echo an industry groups talking points as gospel.
American Coalition for Clean Coal energy, tells me all sorts of things about how bad life is becoming for laid off coal miners. Doesn't mean I believe them or will do what they say I should.
No, you're not asking what's best for everyone - you're just saying "the customer is always right". It's the Omelas problem - you're asking people to take a bad deal to benefit "everybody", then act shocked when they balk.
An equitable deal balances the needs of all stakeholders. And consumers are only one stakeholder.
Once again, show me that these actual dire consequences are happening. We've been told how piracy, and now streaming, were going to kill the music industry since Taylor Swift was 10.
I don't see any distinction between what you are pedaling and every other industry lobby's rent-seeking bullet points.
What data would you like to see? The Information is Beautiful has a bit of commentary on how this affects the bottom rung - Taylor Swift isn't going to stop making records because of this and the most obvious music is going to be unaffected as it's still profitable, does mean it might be harder to get into music as an alternative or niche musician.
But I'm honestly not even sure what kind of data you'd be able to collect to show this is happening, let alone where to find it. Whether online distributors are offering artists a fair deal, is completely divorced from the question as to whether they are better than the old industry machine.
Isn't that also true of every other kind of media too? I'm sure it would be much easier for indie game devs if Steam charged $200 for every game and gave 100% of the revenue to the developer. This doesn't really suggest anything to me in itself, other than that it's hard to stand out as an unknown artist.
Except that these aren't "unknown artists". They are mid-tier and niche artists who used to be able to build small, solid fanbases, and make a decent living on that. In fact, your phrasing illustrates the problem - it used to be that there were many different levels in the industry, and a working musician could do well on any of them. Now, you're either big, or you're nothing.
haha no, this is never how it was, at least in the radio era. The entire distribution model was based on relentlessly promoting 30-40 artists and marginalizing everything else.
The best argument the Lowery article makes is that under the 'old' model, the recording industry assumed (some of) the risk of creating new music. But they also assumed a much larger share of the reward reaped by a 'mid-tier' artist than the artist can potentially retain today, and also much more creative control.
There is a market for music right now; it's working fine, and taylor swift choosing to withdraw from spotify in favor of other distribution is evidence that it's working.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Information Is Beautiful has a wonderful infographic on how bad the Spotify model is for artists.
Honestly, why should I care? I want what is best for me and the population in general- the consumers. So unless you are going to actually back up the piracy streaming is going to destroy all music bogey man we've been hearing about for almost 20 years now....who gives a fuck.
Hasn't it been long established that the majority of the artist income is from merch/touring anyways?
That's the attitude that leads to the tragedy of the commons - because if you only care about what is good for the customers, and ignore the rest of the ecosystem that the system relies on, you shouldn't be surprised when everything collapses in on itself, and the rest of the people involved decide it's not worth it.
No, it's directly the opposite of that attitude. It's asking what is best for everyone, rather than the recording industry as it is constructed now. I don't understand why in this one niche, so many people just echo an industry groups talking points as gospel.
American Coalition for Clean Coal energy, tells me all sorts of things about how bad life is becoming for laid off coal miners. Doesn't mean I believe them or will do what they say I should.
No, you're not asking what's best for everyone - you're just saying "the customer is always right". It's the Omelas problem - you're asking people to take a bad deal to benefit "everybody", then act shocked when they balk.
An equitable deal balances the needs of all stakeholders. And consumers are only one stakeholder.
Once again, show me that these actual dire consequences are happening. We've been told how piracy, and now streaming, were going to kill the music industry since Taylor Swift was 10.
I don't see any distinction between what you are pedaling and every other industry lobby's rent-seeking bullet points.
What data would you like to see? The Information is Beautiful has a bit of commentary on how this affects the bottom rung - Taylor Swift isn't going to stop making records because of this and the most obvious music is going to be unaffected as it's still profitable, does mean it might be harder to get into music as an alternative or niche musician.
But I'm honestly not even sure what kind of data you'd be able to collect to show this is happening, let alone where to find it. Whether online distributors are offering artists a fair deal, is completely divorced from the question as to whether they are better than the old industry machine.
What's happening is that the industry is getting hollowed out. That's why it looks like everything is okay - we see the outermost layer, which is the top of the industry, and everything looks okay - because the damage is happening within, at the lower levels.
Can I get a tl:dr on that article? I got like 50 paragraphs in and so far the only actual points I have seen are that new technology has not made the price for recording albums cheaper since it's mostly labor costs which are untied to technology, and total revenue across the board is down since the advent of file sharing.
Those are some of the big ones. The biggest, though, is that the relationship between the musician and the label was fundamentally different from the one between the musician and the online services. The labels saw themselves as being in the music business, and as such had some investment in protecting and developing the industry. In comparison, the tech companies at best see themselves in content, and as such see content as fungible in their view. (At worst? They see themselves in advertising, and the content is solely a means to the end of producing their real product - viewer eyeballs.)
So like every radio station ever?
seriously
there seems to be a large-ish segment of the music industry that really needs to get off its high horse about this kind of thing; you make a mass media product. The monetization of that product has included advertising and other secondary sales and always has (at least since mass media was a thing.)
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
haha no, this is never how it was, at least in the radio era. The entire distribution model was based on relentlessly promoting 30-40 artists and marginalizing everything else.
The best argument the Lowery article makes is that under the 'old' model, the recording industry assumed (some of) the risk of creating new music. But they also assumed a much larger share of the reward reaped by a 'mid-tier' artist than the artist can potentially retain today, and also much more creative control.
There is a market for music right now; it's working fine, and taylor swift choosing to withdraw from spotify in favor of other distribution is evidence that it's working.
Yes and no. Swift, along with a mere handful of others, are an exceptional case.
I see this attitude pop up over and over, and it utterly baffles me. It really comes across as "we're devaluing your labor, but it's for the good of society!"
And then you wonder why musicians don't trust you.
Edit: And as the nice folks at Cracked pointed out, the Great Library was less about knowledge, and more about cultural dominance. It was policy in Alexandria to seize any new books that came into the city, without reimbursement.
On second thought, maybe that metaphor does work. Though not the way you thought.
Well, I mean I do see it as an enrichment of culture to have access to all those works. I don't think you can look at a Star-Trek-esque "computer, play <thing>" that just works and say "man, that sucks."
But yeah, I don't see any fair way to both ensure artists a decent and fair wage while also not compromising the output aside from a market. I'm all for shortening terms and such (in fact I think it needs to happen), but if Swift wants her work to be purchased rather than rented or streamed (on-demand) free, that should be her choice. We have no particular right to that.
It comes back to my point about creating an equitable deal between stakeholders. It's easy to assert that things are good for everyone if you only consider the needs of one group of stakeholders important.
As I've said before, the reason copyright became dominant was because it balances the various issues and needs of various stakeholders best.
Information Is Beautiful has a wonderful infographic on how bad the Spotify model is for artists.
The problem with that infographic is that plays vs purchases is comparing apples to oranges. I would love to see more figures from Spotify, specially regarding average plays or payouts.
How is it comparing apples and oranges? They're comparing the payout rate for each method by the method's base unit.
One method is an event that will be repeated multiple times by an individual consumer while one will be a one and done for any given consumer.
Which fundamentally misunderstands what that graphic is illustrating. What that graphic shows is how many units any one sales channel has to generate to give a specified level of revenue (specifically, minimum wage.)
So say that streaming cannibalizes one album sale. In order to replace that one album sale, the artist would have to get enough plays to recover that lost revenue. Which numbers in the thousands.
177.
What's an order of magnitude, eh?
That's how many free streams are needed to earn the same revenue as a record sale.
I'm not sure how we get to lump in record companies being evil as spotify's fault.
Spotify's rate as listed is $.00029/play. To recover $1.00 (the listed performer share for a retail album), you would need 3449 plays.
As a gigantic caveat, the low end royalty retail album and Spotify both have 15% to the artists, whereas the high end royalty retail album has a 50% royalty, so you're comparing apples to apple trees.
This particular issue did remind me why I hate, in general, the commenter community at sites like Ars. I can tell you that.
I've made this point elsewhere, but what she's really objecting to, seems to me, is what I've kinda dubbed the "Netflixification" of content. Everybody loves Netflix. But Netflix is cheap. Too cheap. It's why they get into fights with ISPs, and why when I go to look for a specific film half time time it's not on there, and why their shows aren't as good as HBO's and won't be anytime soon. Netflix is about paying a small amount of money to choose from some limited selection and just watch some stuff when you don't necessarily much care what stuff you watch. But what it also does is create the perception that "all the movies" cost eight bucks a month. And creates a reluctance in the customer to ever pay more.
I see this every time my girlfriend balks at paying $3 or $4 for an online rental of a movie that isn't on Netflix/Prime yet/anymore.
Swift's position is even more reasonable than that. She's willing to be on the "Netflix tier" of Spotify's library, or at least that's her claim. She just refuses to be on the (non-plus) "Hulu tier," and they won't give her the choice. She feels that by forcing her to accept an ad-supported model, they're reinforcing the idea that her music doesn't cost money. And she's right, IMO. That's poor for your business, long-term, if part of your business is selling music.
This is a good thing for consumers. The marginal cost of everything digital is about $0, so it's all marginal profit. Now, artists still need to eat, as they always have, but the savings of digital distribution have far exceeded cost of living increases by magnitudes of order.
Hell, look at the infographic. Out of the $10 cd sale, the music people got $2 in the past, and now they are up to $6.28. Over 3x, and the mp3 store is making a mint at the same time, despite the drastically lowered percentage.
But really, rather than worrying about millionaires not making enough millions, we should be asking ourselves if the way we treat music (and other arts) makes sense anymore. When almost everyone in the world can have access to a digital Library of Alexandria for nothing, the idea of using shitty monopoly pricing to hope people can make cash on music seems outdated, to rather understate it.
Why?
I see this attitude pop up over and over, and it utterly baffles me. It really comes across as "we're devaluing your labor, but it's for the good of society!"
And then you wonder why musicians don't trust you.
Most of the cost of music was eaten up by practical considerations like shipping, warehousing, retail costs, etc. that no longer exist. Music that costs half as much as it did 20 years ago is overpriced, because costs have gone down by more than that on a per unit basis.
On top of that, it's a really difficult case to make that we should neither allow the free market to work, nor use government regulation for the benefit of the 99+% of people who aren't some musicians or fat cat Big Media types.
Edit: And as the nice folks at Cracked pointed out, the Great Library was less about knowledge, and more about cultural dominance. It was policy in Alexandria to seize any new books that came into the city, without reimbursement.
On second thought, maybe that metaphor does work. Though not the way you thought.
Eh, it's the best available English language metaphor for "a shitload of books." While we need everyone to chip in to maintain arts funding, it's reasonable that "every work of art created by mankind" should be covered in the spending of a middle class westerner's budget. There is almost no more scarcity of digital goods, and we should change policy to reflect that.
I see this attitude pop up over and over, and it utterly baffles me. It really comes across as "we're devaluing your labor, but it's for the good of society!"
And then you wonder why musicians don't trust you.
Edit: And as the nice folks at Cracked pointed out, the Great Library was less about knowledge, and more about cultural dominance. It was policy in Alexandria to seize any new books that came into the city, without reimbursement.
On second thought, maybe that metaphor does work. Though not the way you thought.
Well, I mean I do see it as an enrichment of culture to have access to all those works. I don't think you can look at a Star-Trek-esque "computer, play <thing>" that just works and say "man, that sucks."
But yeah, I don't see any fair way to both ensure artists a decent and fair wage while also not compromising the output aside from a market. I'm all for shortening terms and such (in fact I think it needs to happen), but if Swift wants her work to be purchased rather than rented or streamed (on-demand) free, that should be her choice. We have no particular right to that.
It comes back to my point about creating an equitable deal between stakeholders. It's easy to assert that things are good for everyone if you only consider the needs of one group of stakeholders important.
As I've said before, the reason copyright became dominant was because it balances the various issues and needs of various stakeholders best.
Copyright does exactly the opposite. A few giant rent seeking corporations have successfully bribed Congress multiple times to pass absurd laws (DMCA, Sonny Bonno, etc) because it makes them millions but no one is harmed enough to merit anything but a "Please don't, Senatory XYZ" response. It's a classic case of hyper importance to an unrepresentative minority vs. minor importance to the majority.
The music industry loves to suggest that if everyone doesn't give them more money that people will somehow decide to stop making music, because reasons. But people are making plenty of music under the current model and show no actual sign of stopping. Can you explain how we would get from A (Spotify/Netflix/Steam having massive libraries) to B (nobody making games/art/music)? Can you show me data that suggests we are progressing towards this dark fate?
Uh, it's really obvious. If I can't get paid for my music, then I need stop doing music and get a different job. Case closed.Furthermore, Steam is nothing like a streaming music service and has no business in this discussion.
The music industry loves to suggest that if everyone doesn't give them more money that people will somehow decide to stop making music, because reasons. But people are making plenty of music under the current model and show no actual sign of stopping. Can you explain how we would get from A (Spotify/Netflix/Steam having massive libraries) to B (nobody making games/art/music)? Can you show me data that suggests we are progressing towards this dark fate?
Uh, it's really obvious. If I can't get paid for my music, then I need stop doing music and get a different job. Case closed.Furthermore, Steam is nothing like a streaming music service and has no business in this discussion.
people play music because they love playing music, not because there's money in it. there isn't any money in it at all for anyone but the topmost acts, like U2 and Springsteen and their ilk. if a musician can't make a living being a musician, he'll pick up a day job and continue to play music in his spare time.
thanks to the possibility of making professional-quality recordings without having to spend thousands of dollars on equipment and software, there's no better time in history to be a musician. the industry still has a purpose in distribution, but they're not required for pretty much any of the creative or technical stuff anymore
The music industry loves to suggest that if everyone doesn't give them more money that people will somehow decide to stop making music, because reasons. But people are making plenty of music under the current model and show no actual sign of stopping. Can you explain how we would get from A (Spotify/Netflix/Steam having massive libraries) to B (nobody making games/art/music)? Can you show me data that suggests we are progressing towards this dark fate?
Uh, it's really obvious. If I can't get paid for my music, then I need stop doing music and get a different job. Case closed.Furthermore, Steam is nothing like a streaming music service and has no business in this discussion.
No offense, but streaming services have been around for a little while and we don't seem to be running out of good music.
If it's not working out for you, sorry to hear that. Like most forms of art, music is a tough gig!
But I see zero evidence for any kind of supply shortage in music right now. The problem seems to be completely the opposite of that - too many people making awesome music, and not enough demand to support them all.
haha no, this is never how it was, at least in the radio era. The entire distribution model was based on relentlessly promoting 30-40 artists and marginalizing everything else.
The best argument the Lowery article makes is that under the 'old' model, the recording industry assumed (some of) the risk of creating new music. But they also assumed a much larger share of the reward reaped by a 'mid-tier' artist than the artist can potentially retain today, and also much more creative control.
There is a market for music right now; it's working fine, and taylor swift choosing to withdraw from spotify in favor of other distribution is evidence that it's working.
Yes and no. Swift, along with a mere handful of others, are an exceptional case.
well of course; swift is obviously very popular. Artists with her popularity/sales potential obviously will not have her leverage to extract concessions from (say) spotify, but that doesn't mean the market isn't working.
the 'long tail' phenomenon has been written about forever, and we've seen it play out over the last decade. Music sales on a per-unit basis have steadily increased, while revenue has fallen. The public is buying more music, for less money, than it ever has since the dawn of mass media.
What's happened is that the 'traditional' music industry's leverage over distribution has eroded. They are able to extract less profit from the creation of content. This isn't only because of the reduced cost of media; it's because now I can buy the single I want for two bucks without having to buy a whole (frequently mediocre) album to get it, and I can choose between more artists being distributed in more ways.
media products are worth what the market will pay for them, and it turns out there's a lot of competition in music. I mean, am I supposed to apologize that it's now harder for the music industry to seek rents than it was previously?
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Information Is Beautiful has a wonderful infographic on how bad the Spotify model is for artists.
The problem with that infographic is that plays vs purchases is comparing apples to oranges. I would love to see more figures from Spotify, specially regarding average plays or payouts.
How is it comparing apples and oranges? They're comparing the payout rate for each method by the method's base unit.
One method is an event that will be repeated multiple times by an individual consumer while one will be a one and done for any given consumer.
Which fundamentally misunderstands what that graphic is illustrating. What that graphic shows is how many units any one sales channel has to generate to give a specified level of revenue (specifically, minimum wage.)
So say that streaming cannibalizes one album sale. In order to replace that one album sale, the artist would have to get enough plays to recover that lost revenue. Which numbers in the thousands.
177.
What's an order of magnitude, eh?
That's how many free streams are needed to earn the same revenue as a record sale.
I'm not sure how we get to lump in record companies being evil as spotify's fault.
Spotify's rate as listed is $.00029/play. To recover $1.00 (the listed performer share for a retail album), you would need 3449 plays.
While the larger point - you need a lot of plays to equal the revenue of an album sale - is true, that infographic is still using extremely shady techniques to make it's point.
You are meant to directly compare the size of those circles and go "wow, the streaming circle is so much bigger than the album sales circle!" And that requires that you equate one album sale to one play on streaming.
It's just a plain shitty and disingenuous way to present data, and the fact that their larger point is valid does not make it less shitty.
In the context of revenue generation, they are the same, though - the unit of revenue for a specific channel. The point is that it illustrates why certain sales channels are much more valuable than others, which in turn leads to why someone would turn their back on one channel to protect another.
I don't see how making that point is disingenuous at all. I think that it makes people uncomfortable, but that is something very different.
The unit of revenue at McDonald's is one burger. The unit of revenue at the local independent grass fed butcher is one cow's worth of beef. If you made an infographic comparing those things directly, it would also be shitty.
And yes, that picture makes me uncomfortable to the extent that dishonest presentations of data make me uncomfortable.
Look, I'm on your fucking side, so stow the You Can't Handle the Truth bullshit. The streaming data needs to be weighted based on the number of times the average listener could be expected to stream a particular song. If the average user listens to each of the ten songs on an album twenty times over the course of the year, AND it can be established that they would not have done so had they owned the album, then an argument could be made that the streaming numbers should be divided by 200, since that is how many times a musician is receiving their cut.
That said, you need to figure in how many times someone who owns the album might use the streaming service, how to calculate lifetime usage, and a bunch of other factors. It gets complicated.
The moral of the story us that data presentation is hard to do well, but that doesn't mean you get to barf up some pink circles on the internet and call it good.
I'm really not seeing what the issue is with the data as it's presented.
The infographic is dead simple. To make $X revenue from stream Y, you must move Z units.
This is extremely valuable as it tells us that if something like Spotify is to replace album sales, it must generate approximately 3500 listens for every sale that used to occur.
The the units you must move are different is the entire point. Because what you are trying to compare is the different quantities of those units you must move in order to generate the same income.
Streaming must move ALOT more units to generate the same income. Those units are easier to move, but that's not really the point. There's no easy way to compare the ease of moving one CD vs one Listen. That's up to you, the reader, to determine.
This particular issue did remind me why I hate, in general, the commenter community at sites like Ars. I can tell you that.
I've made this point elsewhere, but what she's really objecting to, seems to me, is what I've kinda dubbed the "Netflixification" of content. Everybody loves Netflix. But Netflix is cheap. Too cheap. It's why they get into fights with ISPs, and why when I go to look for a specific film half time time it's not on there, and why their shows aren't as good as HBO's and won't be anytime soon. Netflix is about paying a small amount of money to choose from some limited selection and just watch some stuff when you don't necessarily much care what stuff you watch. But what it also does is create the perception that "all the movies" cost eight bucks a month. And creates a reluctance in the customer to ever pay more.
I see this every time my girlfriend balks at paying $3 or $4 for an online rental of a movie that isn't on Netflix/Prime yet/anymore.
Swift's position is even more reasonable than that. She's willing to be on the "Netflix tier" of Spotify's library, or at least that's her claim. She just refuses to be on the (non-plus) "Hulu tier," and they won't give her the choice. She feels that by forcing her to accept an ad-supported model, they're reinforcing the idea that her music doesn't cost money. And she's right, IMO. That's poor for your business, long-term, if part of your business is selling music.
I think you're correct that these kinds of services (Netflix, Steam, Spotify, ect) tend to lower prices dramatically.
You haven't explained why that's a bad thing. There is still a huge amount of content on those services, likely more than the average user can ever use. I literally can't play all the games I own on Steam. I can't watch all the movies and shows I'd like to watch on Netflix. I can't listen to all the music I'd like to listen to on Spotify. Despite the low prices, there is no shortage of supply. Quite the opposite - supply hugely outpaces demand, which is why the prices remain so low.
Uh, what? What are you basing this assumption on? Cause there is no way that this statement is true because prices are not low due to a high supply of content. That's not how the purchasing of content by Netflix works.
And secondly, the fact that there is a huge amount of content already on these services is irrelevant. If we literally stopped making music/movies/TV right now, there would still be a huge amount of content on these services. Exactly the same huge amount of content in fact. The exact thing you are talking about. Of course, pretty much everyone would consider this a bad thing though. Your framing here that "there's a huge amount of content already so it doesn't matter how more gets made" is utterly silly.
haha no, this is never how it was, at least in the radio era. The entire distribution model was based on relentlessly promoting 30-40 artists and marginalizing everything else.
The best argument the Lowery article makes is that under the 'old' model, the recording industry assumed (some of) the risk of creating new music. But they also assumed a much larger share of the reward reaped by a 'mid-tier' artist than the artist can potentially retain today, and also much more creative control.
There is a market for music right now; it's working fine, and taylor swift choosing to withdraw from spotify in favor of other distribution is evidence that it's working.
Yes and no. Swift, along with a mere handful of others, are an exceptional case.
well of course; swift is obviously very popular. Artists with her popularity/sales potential obviously will not have her leverage to extract concessions from (say) spotify, but that doesn't mean the market isn't working.
the 'long tail' phenomenon has been written about forever, and we've seen it play out over the last decade. Music sales on a per-unit basis have steadily increased, while revenue has fallen. The public is buying more music, for less money, than it ever has since the dawn of mass media.
What's happened is that the 'traditional' music industry's leverage over distribution has eroded. They are able to extract less profit from the creation of content. This isn't only because of the reduced cost of media; it's because now I can buy the single I want for two bucks without having to buy a whole (frequently mediocre) album to get it, and I can choose between more artists being distributed in more ways.
media products are worth what the market will pay for them, and it turns out there's a lot of competition in music. I mean, am I supposed to apologize that it's now harder for the music industry to seek rents than it was previously?
New entrants, in any field, are always willing to discount their services for a while in an attempt to establish a base from which they can build. But in media (games, music, film, youtube channels, whatever) many find that it's not sustainable and drop out, only to be replaced by next year's class of new entrants trying the same thing. A few achieve lasting success, and good for them, but given the permanence of media these days consumers can still derive benefit from that work years after the artist has moved on to other things - the "Long Tail" as it were, except since it was given away for practically nothing when it was created the artist still continues not to profit. They're no longer competing for revenue from their current cohort, but last year's cohort, last decade's cohort - hell, when was Trololo released? It's competing within an ever-growing library of content, for fewer and fewer dollars spent on the library as a whole.
When industry chews through labor and treats them like cannon fodder to be discarded for the next desperate intern, it's terrible. When media consumers chew through indie artists and treat their content like cannon fodder to be discarded for the next desperate artist giving content away for practically free trying to get their break, they're worth what the market will pay for them.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
edited November 2014
Taylor Swift was paid a pittance at a mere 2 million dollars?
If that is not buying into the language of upper class entitlement, then I don't know what is.
The problem with the info-graphic is that it's disingenuous and discounts quite a bit of nuance.
-Not everyone that buys a Tyler Swift album or song is going to listen to her on Spotify. Actually, I would think that would be a good thing if they do listen to her stuff on something like spotify, pandora or what have you, if they own a copy of the song because then she is getting revenue from them listening to something again, that they could listen to in a manner that would generate no additional income for her.
-Not everyone that listens to her songs there is or were ever going to by any of her songs because they have a finite amount of disposable income for entertainment purposes and determine that they would rather use it to support other creators.
-Some that do listen to her stuff on spotify decide that they do want to support her with their limited disposable income, but that wouldn't have happened if they didn't hear her songs first (there might be a very limited number, where if she wasn't on spotify, they would have never bought her music).
-She still gets some revenue; however small it may be, from each song heard on spotify, which is better than no revenue if the alternative for listeners was to either pirate it, borrow it from someone they knew or get a used copy.
So I'm in agreement with Jeffe. Comparing album sales and streams, just doesn't work the way they are doing it.
All that said, she owns the rights to her content. So if she wants to leave spotify, I feel that is well within her rights and I don't really care why she does it. If the market feels that her stuff is still worth buying for the asking price, then it will continue to do so.
The market doesn't seem broken to me at all. I mean Tyler Swift is able to choose who distributes her music, I think that is leaps and bounds better than the shitty rent seeking model, that the music industry used to have. There are lots of artists that are now getting attention, that use to be ignored because the big record companies were picking the winners and losers. The downside, if anyone wants to call it a downside, is that there are so many choices.
The music industry loves to suggest that if everyone doesn't give them more money that people will somehow decide to stop making music, because reasons. But people are making plenty of music under the current model and show no actual sign of stopping. Can you explain how we would get from A (Spotify/Netflix/Steam having massive libraries) to B (nobody making games/art/music)? Can you show me data that suggests we are progressing towards this dark fate?
Uh, it's really obvious. If I can't get paid for my music, then I need stop doing music and get a different job. Case closed.Furthermore, Steam is nothing like a streaming music service and has no business in this discussion.
people play music because they love playing music, not because there's money in it. there isn't any money in it at all for anyone but the topmost acts, like U2 and Springsteen and their ilk. if a musician can't make a living being a musician, he'll pick up a day job and continue to play music in his spare time.
thanks to the possibility of making professional-quality recordings without having to spend thousands of dollars on equipment and software, there's no better time in history to be a musician. the industry still has a purpose in distribution, but they're not required for pretty much any of the creative or technical stuff anymore
Right. But he'll do less. This is true for every kind of content producer. It's literally why we have things like copyright. Because the purpose of securing the ability for people who make art to profit off that art is to let them spend less time doing some other random job for food and give them more time to make that art.
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Except that these aren't "unknown artists". They are mid-tier and niche artists who used to be able to build small, solid fanbases, and make a decent living on that. In fact, your phrasing illustrates the problem - it used to be that there were many different levels in the industry, and a working musician could do well on any of them. Now, you're either big, or you're nothing.
I've made this point elsewhere, but what she's really objecting to, seems to me, is what I've kinda dubbed the "Netflixification" of content. Everybody loves Netflix. But Netflix is cheap. Too cheap. It's why they get into fights with ISPs, and why when I go to look for a specific film half time time it's not on there, and why their shows aren't as good as HBO's and won't be anytime soon. Netflix is about paying a small amount of money to choose from some limited selection and just watch some stuff when you don't necessarily much care what stuff you watch. But what it also does is create the perception that "all the movies" cost eight bucks a month. And creates a reluctance in the customer to ever pay more.
I see this every time my girlfriend balks at paying $3 or $4 for an online rental of a movie that isn't on Netflix/Prime yet/anymore.
Swift's position is even more reasonable than that. She's willing to be on the "Netflix tier" of Spotify's library, or at least that's her claim. She just refuses to be on the (non-plus) "Hulu tier," and they won't give her the choice. She feels that by forcing her to accept an ad-supported model, they're reinforcing the idea that her music doesn't cost money. And she's right, IMO. That's poor for your business, long-term, if part of your business is selling music.
Can I get a tl:dr on that article? I got like 50 paragraphs in and so far the only actual points I have seen are that new technology has not made the price for recording albums cheaper since it's mostly labor costs which are untied to technology, and total revenue across the board is down since the advent of file sharing.
Haven't read your linked article, and I'm about to. But I will say that I used to spend $20 or $30 a month on CDs pre-Napster. Now I spend $10 a month on Spotify. And that's it. I tried getting off Spotify, and going back to albums, and just budgeting $10 or $15 a month to buy the songs and albums I really liked. But that didn't work out, it cost to much. So I'm back on Spotify.
So clearly Spotify, and their model (even the paid model) is exerting some serious downward pressure on revenues for recorded music. This is only exacerbated by the free tier.
We can say this is "better," and from the POV of the consumer sure it is. For smaller artists that don't want to depend on being on the road nine months out of every year, in perpetuity (or until the revenue dries up entirely), less so.
http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2014/6/3/5772796/nba-y2k-series-finale-the-death-of-basketball
the 2019-2020 section explains it
But she's still on Pandora's free service, indicating to me that if Spotify paid out at a higher rate, she'd be fine with them to.
And that's fine, that's business. I don't see why the Tech Village has decided that this has broad repercussions for the twenty-first century music industry or whatever. It's like deciding that Steam is destined for failure because Minecraft isn't there.
She's on Pandora's free service in part because it works differently, and most likely in part because she has no choice (yay for statutory licensing!)
The unit of revenue at McDonald's is one burger. The unit of revenue at the local independent grass fed butcher is one cow's worth of beef. If you made an infographic comparing those things directly, it would also be shitty.
And yes, that picture makes me uncomfortable to the extent that dishonest presentations of data make me uncomfortable.
Look, I'm on your fucking side, so stow the You Can't Handle the Truth bullshit. The streaming data needs to be weighted based on the number of times the average listener could be expected to stream a particular song. If the average user listens to each of the ten songs on an album twenty times over the course of the year, AND it can be established that they would not have done so had they owned the album, then an argument could be made that the streaming numbers should be divided by 200, since that is how many times a musician is receiving their cut.
That said, you need to figure in how many times someone who owns the album might use the streaming service, how to calculate lifetime usage, and a bunch of other factors. It gets complicated.
The moral of the story us that data presentation is hard to do well, but that doesn't mean you get to barf up some pink circles on the internet and call it good.
Again, Pandora's free service is not equivalent to Spotify's.
It may be true that her specific gripe is that she gets too few dollars from Spotify, and enough dollars from Pandora.
But I think she also has an ideological problem with Spotify's model, that Pandora's model does not have. Granted, that ideological problem may be rooted in business concerns as well, but it is a much longer term and broader in scope problem than "my check from Spotify is not large enough."
If you really still don't understand the difference between Spotify and Pandora (free tiers respectively), despite the fact that I've already explained it, I'll ask you again: go into Pandora, and create a new station based on "Love Story" by Taylor Swift. I will bet you my entire year's paycheck against a McRib sandwich that I can tell you what song will not be played first when you do so.
Mmmmmm.....McRib.
Hmmm...hadn't considered that Pandora might be doing statutory licensing. Not sure on that one. But a good point as well.
Those are some of the big ones. The biggest, though, is that the relationship between the musician and the label was fundamentally different from the one between the musician and the online services. The labels saw themselves as being in the music business, and as such had some investment in protecting and developing the industry. In comparison, the tech companies at best see themselves in content, and as such see content as fungible in their view. (At worst? They see themselves in advertising, and the content is solely a means to the end of producing their real product - viewer eyeballs.)
I think you're correct that these kinds of services (Netflix, Steam, Spotify, ect) tend to lower prices dramatically.
You haven't explained why that's a bad thing. There is still a huge amount of content on those services, likely more than the average user can ever use. I literally can't play all the games I own on Steam. I can't watch all the movies and shows I'd like to watch on Netflix. I can't listen to all the music I'd like to listen to on Spotify. Despite the low prices, there is no shortage of supply. Quite the opposite - supply hugely outpaces demand, which is why the prices remain so low.
The music industry loves to suggest that if everyone doesn't give them more money that people will somehow decide to stop making music, because reasons. But people are making plenty of music under the current model and show no actual sign of stopping. Can you explain how we would get from A (Spotify/Netflix/Steam having massive libraries) to B (nobody making games/art/music)? Can you show me data that suggests we are progressing towards this dark fate?
Because content services like Spotify (and Steam, and Netflix, and...) depend on content in order to draw in listeners, and that means broad, popular, blockbuster stuff. That's why Netflix has a rather poor streaming selection of, say, obscure 90s dramas but you can definitely watch The Avengers and World War Z. Blockbuster material draws in listeners who contribute revenue that the service uses in part to attract blockbuster material. If people like Swift hear her argument and decide it makes sense for them, too, then blockbuster artists flee Spotify in droves, Spotify attracts fewer listeners and becomes a worse proposition for blockbuster artists, and pretty soon they're locked into a downward spiral. The same logic applies to the industry as a whole. If people decide that internet radio isn't worth it, internet radio's future will not look good (whether that means slashing profits to raise payment rates or whatever).
I guess I never considered that to be an enormous difference, but if she does, then... good for her, I guess?
Some business models will work for some artists, and others will work for others.
If anything, the big story here is that she can actually do this at all, because she owns her own music, whereas in the traditional record label relationship, the label owned the music as a "work for hire", and if the artist didn't like how the label sold it then the artist could fuck off.
So like every radio station ever?
And unless you make a big fucking record and become a household name they're gonna do some pretty nasty things.
One, I want new content. I get that there's a huge pile of content we can all get access to, but I want the pile to grow, for a number of reasons. And taking away incentive to create means that the pile won't grow as fast, and more importantly that the new additions won't be as diverse.
Which leads into my second point, which is that B is not the only shitty scenario. Right now, we're heading to C - hollowed out industries where the only options are large scale blockbusters geared towards mass consumption, and small products built on shoestrings by semiprofessional creators. The vast middle ground of well designed and professionally created content geared to focused audiences, and which has challenging content (in many ways!) has become unsustainable, because you either have to go big, and get revenue from everywhere; or you budget small and get constrained.
If it wasn't an enormous difference, there'd be no story here. Pandora is still free. Swift is still on that. So who cares, right?
People do occasionally want to be able to listen to the song they want to listen to at the time of their choosing. That is a product distinct from a "radio" format that has value. That value used to be $15 or $20 for an album. That value was then $0.99 or $1.49 for a song. Now Spotify has placed that value somewhere between $9.99 a month for all the albums ever at your fingertips, to "free and listen to some ads."
Swift is probably not happy with the former, along with many other artists. The latter she was unwilling to accept.
I do agree that it is at least nice she has the choice, owning her own music. I do find it amusing how many of the "take it or leave it" defenders of Spotify's payouts suddenly cried foul when a major artist decides to actually exercise that choice.
Netflix makes the bulk of their business out of shows and movies that have already long since been monetized through other outlets into profitability (which is to say theaters, television, and disc sales). And at their super-cheap price point, they are still (controversial statement ahead!) kind of a shitty service. Their selection of things I haven't seen and want to see, for instance, is woeful. There's more content on Netflix than I could ever watch. But I canceled my subscription because on a given night half the time I couldn't find a single fucking thing that I wanted to watch. And their original content is middling at best (and at worst godawful). You get what you pay for.
And Spotify, by comparison, wants Swifts album on release day. That's concerning.
As for data rather than anecdote, the data on music revenues is easy to find, and I think you can guess what it looks like. I feel like this has had a negative effect on the quality of music out there, but of course I'm also an old guy telling kids to get off my lawn. So that's harder to point to objective data on.
As a gigantic caveat, the low end royalty retail album and Spotify both have 15% to the artists, whereas the high end royalty retail album has a 50% royalty, so you're comparing apples to apple trees.
This is a good thing for consumers. The marginal cost of everything digital is about $0, so it's all marginal profit. Now, artists still need to eat, as they always have, but the savings of digital distribution have far exceeded cost of living increases by magnitudes of order.
Hell, look at the infographic. Out of the $10 cd sale, the music people got $2 in the past, and now they are up to $6.28. Over 3x, and the mp3 store is making a mint at the same time, despite the drastically lowered percentage.
But really, rather than worrying about millionaires not making enough millions, we should be asking ourselves if the way we treat music (and other arts) makes sense anymore. When almost everyone in the world can have access to a digital Library of Alexandria for nothing, the idea of using shitty monopoly pricing to hope people can make cash on music seems outdated, to rather understate it.
Sure, but the alternative is basically enforcing communism on a single sector. Are we going to have a department of the federal government who gets to decide how much Taylor Swift and the Black Keys need in order to live at the lifestyle we feel is fair for them? Do they need to keep producing music to receive their allowance? Or must they perform, in perpetuity, to get their check? Will we have something akin to the MGIB for artists?
I'm just skeptical that there's a better alternative than some sort of functioning market for music.
Why?
I see this attitude pop up over and over, and it utterly baffles me. It really comes across as "we're devaluing your labor, but it's for the good of society!"
And then you wonder why musicians don't trust you.
Edit: And as the nice folks at Cracked pointed out, the Great Library was less about knowledge, and more about cultural dominance. It was policy in Alexandria to seize any new books that came into the city, without reimbursement.
On second thought, maybe that metaphor does work. Though not the way you thought.
Well, I mean I do see it as an enrichment of culture to have access to all those works. I don't think you can look at a Star-Trek-esque "computer, play <thing>" that just works and say "man, that sucks."
But yeah, I don't see any fair way to both ensure artists a decent and fair wage while also not compromising the output aside from a market. I'm all for shortening terms and such (in fact I think it needs to happen), but if Swift wants her work to be purchased rather than rented or streamed (on-demand) free, that should be her choice. We have no particular right to that.
I mean yeah, fair enough. But you said the claim's been debunked, like there's empirical evidence that a band generally makes their money on shows and merch. If there is, I'm interested in seeing it
hitting hot metal with hammers
haha no, this is never how it was, at least in the radio era. The entire distribution model was based on relentlessly promoting 30-40 artists and marginalizing everything else.
The best argument the Lowery article makes is that under the 'old' model, the recording industry assumed (some of) the risk of creating new music. But they also assumed a much larger share of the reward reaped by a 'mid-tier' artist than the artist can potentially retain today, and also much more creative control.
There is a market for music right now; it's working fine, and taylor swift choosing to withdraw from spotify in favor of other distribution is evidence that it's working.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
seriously
there seems to be a large-ish segment of the music industry that really needs to get off its high horse about this kind of thing; you make a mass media product. The monetization of that product has included advertising and other secondary sales and always has (at least since mass media was a thing.)
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Yes and no. Swift, along with a mere handful of others, are an exceptional case.
It comes back to my point about creating an equitable deal between stakeholders. It's easy to assert that things are good for everyone if you only consider the needs of one group of stakeholders important.
As I've said before, the reason copyright became dominant was because it balances the various issues and needs of various stakeholders best.
Most of the cost of music was eaten up by practical considerations like shipping, warehousing, retail costs, etc. that no longer exist. Music that costs half as much as it did 20 years ago is overpriced, because costs have gone down by more than that on a per unit basis.
On top of that, it's a really difficult case to make that we should neither allow the free market to work, nor use government regulation for the benefit of the 99+% of people who aren't some musicians or fat cat Big Media types.
Eh, it's the best available English language metaphor for "a shitload of books." While we need everyone to chip in to maintain arts funding, it's reasonable that "every work of art created by mankind" should be covered in the spending of a middle class westerner's budget. There is almost no more scarcity of digital goods, and we should change policy to reflect that.
Copyright does exactly the opposite. A few giant rent seeking corporations have successfully bribed Congress multiple times to pass absurd laws (DMCA, Sonny Bonno, etc) because it makes them millions but no one is harmed enough to merit anything but a "Please don't, Senatory XYZ" response. It's a classic case of hyper importance to an unrepresentative minority vs. minor importance to the majority.
Uh, it's really obvious. If I can't get paid for my music, then I need stop doing music and get a different job. Case closed.Furthermore, Steam is nothing like a streaming music service and has no business in this discussion.
people play music because they love playing music, not because there's money in it. there isn't any money in it at all for anyone but the topmost acts, like U2 and Springsteen and their ilk. if a musician can't make a living being a musician, he'll pick up a day job and continue to play music in his spare time.
thanks to the possibility of making professional-quality recordings without having to spend thousands of dollars on equipment and software, there's no better time in history to be a musician. the industry still has a purpose in distribution, but they're not required for pretty much any of the creative or technical stuff anymore
hitting hot metal with hammers
No offense, but streaming services have been around for a little while and we don't seem to be running out of good music.
If it's not working out for you, sorry to hear that. Like most forms of art, music is a tough gig!
But I see zero evidence for any kind of supply shortage in music right now. The problem seems to be completely the opposite of that - too many people making awesome music, and not enough demand to support them all.
well of course; swift is obviously very popular. Artists with her popularity/sales potential obviously will not have her leverage to extract concessions from (say) spotify, but that doesn't mean the market isn't working.
the 'long tail' phenomenon has been written about forever, and we've seen it play out over the last decade. Music sales on a per-unit basis have steadily increased, while revenue has fallen. The public is buying more music, for less money, than it ever has since the dawn of mass media.
What's happened is that the 'traditional' music industry's leverage over distribution has eroded. They are able to extract less profit from the creation of content. This isn't only because of the reduced cost of media; it's because now I can buy the single I want for two bucks without having to buy a whole (frequently mediocre) album to get it, and I can choose between more artists being distributed in more ways.
media products are worth what the market will pay for them, and it turns out there's a lot of competition in music. I mean, am I supposed to apologize that it's now harder for the music industry to seek rents than it was previously?
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
When I was young, citrus fruit was expensive in the UK. Now it is cheap due to radical changes in delivery and logistics (I'm old).
Does this mean I suddenly look down on satsumas, limes, and the people who produce them? No, of course not. That's moronic.
I'm really not seeing what the issue is with the data as it's presented.
The infographic is dead simple. To make $X revenue from stream Y, you must move Z units.
This is extremely valuable as it tells us that if something like Spotify is to replace album sales, it must generate approximately 3500 listens for every sale that used to occur.
The the units you must move are different is the entire point. Because what you are trying to compare is the different quantities of those units you must move in order to generate the same income.
Streaming must move ALOT more units to generate the same income. Those units are easier to move, but that's not really the point. There's no easy way to compare the ease of moving one CD vs one Listen. That's up to you, the reader, to determine.
Uh, what? What are you basing this assumption on? Cause there is no way that this statement is true because prices are not low due to a high supply of content. That's not how the purchasing of content by Netflix works.
And secondly, the fact that there is a huge amount of content already on these services is irrelevant. If we literally stopped making music/movies/TV right now, there would still be a huge amount of content on these services. Exactly the same huge amount of content in fact. The exact thing you are talking about. Of course, pretty much everyone would consider this a bad thing though. Your framing here that "there's a huge amount of content already so it doesn't matter how more gets made" is utterly silly.
When industry chews through labor and treats them like cannon fodder to be discarded for the next desperate intern, it's terrible. When media consumers chew through indie artists and treat their content like cannon fodder to be discarded for the next desperate artist giving content away for practically free trying to get their break, they're worth what the market will pay for them.
If that is not buying into the language of upper class entitlement, then I don't know what is.
No it's not. Not in the context anyone in this thread is using it anyway.
People are talking about the way the "proper price" of a product or service effects how much people are willing to pay for it.
-Not everyone that buys a Tyler Swift album or song is going to listen to her on Spotify. Actually, I would think that would be a good thing if they do listen to her stuff on something like spotify, pandora or what have you, if they own a copy of the song because then she is getting revenue from them listening to something again, that they could listen to in a manner that would generate no additional income for her.
-Not everyone that listens to her songs there is or were ever going to by any of her songs because they have a finite amount of disposable income for entertainment purposes and determine that they would rather use it to support other creators.
-Some that do listen to her stuff on spotify decide that they do want to support her with their limited disposable income, but that wouldn't have happened if they didn't hear her songs first (there might be a very limited number, where if she wasn't on spotify, they would have never bought her music).
-She still gets some revenue; however small it may be, from each song heard on spotify, which is better than no revenue if the alternative for listeners was to either pirate it, borrow it from someone they knew or get a used copy.
So I'm in agreement with Jeffe. Comparing album sales and streams, just doesn't work the way they are doing it.
All that said, she owns the rights to her content. So if she wants to leave spotify, I feel that is well within her rights and I don't really care why she does it. If the market feels that her stuff is still worth buying for the asking price, then it will continue to do so.
The market doesn't seem broken to me at all. I mean Tyler Swift is able to choose who distributes her music, I think that is leaps and bounds better than the shitty rent seeking model, that the music industry used to have. There are lots of artists that are now getting attention, that use to be ignored because the big record companies were picking the winners and losers. The downside, if anyone wants to call it a downside, is that there are so many choices.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Right. But he'll do less. This is true for every kind of content producer. It's literally why we have things like copyright. Because the purpose of securing the ability for people who make art to profit off that art is to let them spend less time doing some other random job for food and give them more time to make that art.