The post's actual title is "Giving it Away: How Free Music Makes More Than Sense" and is far more interesting than the part about preferring illegal downloading. The author, Derek Webb, gave (gives?) away albums in exchange for your ZIP Code and email address because the chance of getting you out to a live show was worth more than what he made on a digital sale or stream.
But for context, the full quote about preferring illegal downloading is: "I’ll go even further to say that I actually prefer illegal downloading over Spotify because when you get music illegally it’s at least implicit in the transaction that what you’re doing is potentially harmful to the artist. But with Spotify, your conscience is clear because you’re either enduring ads or paying to use the service and access the music."
I saw in a YouTube video once, and I'll paraphrase because I forgot, something that resonated well with me about piracy.
They said piracy is never about cost, but almost always about a service issue. Basically people flocked to Napster (and the likes) at the time because it let them browse an infinitude of music which was, back then, incredible.
That was just market demand validation, a latent problem waiting for a solution to address it. Piracy just did it first. Once someone solved it, a little bit better, like Spotify did with realtime (instead of p2p waiting), and with indexing/filtering/curation/etc. It automatically won over piracy.
Then, the one fun argument it brought after, is that the same tools that ended piracy are likely the ones making it rise again. Netflix made everyone happy, but now we have a subscription circus. There's N streaming services, and keeping up with subscribing/cancelling/finding the one that has your content created a ... service problem!
So we're bound to see piracy rise again, not because folks don't want to pay $20/mo for streaming, but because they don't want to deal with the hassle of jumping across N subscriptions and keeping track of that.
I think some of the big media is trying to solve for that, which is why you see all of them now becoming "channels" inside each other, but I'm curious to see how this will evolve.
In 2001, OG Business of Tech blogger Joel Spolsky famously said about Napster:
Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.
He was right. It was a service issue, and when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, the mainstream happily ponied up 99 cents a song because they could type the name of that song and then listen to it on their phone, Mac, or Windows computer right away.
Two times now that I've recently signed up for a streaming service to watch a show I'm interested in, I find out after signing up that I can only get 720p since I'm streaming to a browser. Money is part of it, but when it's easier to torrent 1080p than to pay money to get it, it's a service issue.
It's never just one thing either. People will try to narrow it down to one thing, and say cost or service fatigue is the dominant factor, but it doesn't work like that. The cost is an issue. Having to have 4 different streaming services for the shows you want is an issue. The quality of the apps are an issue. How much easier is the service compared to just torrenting is an issue.
At some point spending some time finding a seeded torrent sounds more pleasant than dealing with all of that. I can usually find a torrent, start a download, and begin watching a show faster than it takes me to figure out which streaming service it's on, decide if it's worth the price at that moment, and actually make an account with them and pay for it.
> which is why you see all of them now becoming "channels" inside each other
But you have to pay for those 'channels' separately, so subscription hell is still there. That explains why it's not a solution! Ideally, service providers should share revenue, and then it could be called a unified or frictionless experience.
Doesn’t really explain why piracy rates are much lower in Japan compared to other countries. It is mostly a cultural issue, and a lot of people will go above and beyond to justify their actions.
Just to note, I’m not even that anti-piracy, but if something is not being sold, or conveniently provided, you can just… not get it?
I pay for Youtube premium, which gives me unlimited Youtube Music usage with no ads.
Yet I've built myself a yt-dlp-based system to pipe audio into my multiroom audio system (built on Snapcast). It will cache things locally so they play instantly, and I can mix my own music library with stuff from Youtube Music seamlessly, which is impossible with non-piratical means.
I can teach pretty much any film I want for £3 through Apple tv. That’s the same price I paid at the video store in the 90s, Except inflation means it’s half the price in real terms and the quality is far higher.
Hell I rent films I own on blueray as diving through the cd wallets while the pizza goes good isn’t worth the saving.
This is an argument that, for an independent "middle-class" musician, giving recordings away in return for direct fan contact can be economically superior to selling individual downloads. Fully agree. I started to do so more than twenty years ago: https://rochus-keller.ch/?cat=3. I went even a step further in that I'm not even associated with a collecting-society (SUISA here in Switzerland), but permit everyone including radio stations or vloggers to play my music for free; the very little copyright royalties is much less than the publicity effect.
Does this argument change now that Spotify does offer meaningful connection to fans?*
Spotify tells me when any of the artists I listen to are coming to town - I’ve found and bought tickets this way and I don’t go to a lot of live shows in general.
Spotify is trying to sell me merch and artists can have both a merch and an events tab in app.
Edit: I see an artist with only 400k subscribers selling merch (compared to Lady Gaga’s 99 million), so it must be at least somewhat accessible.
* I don’t know if Spotify is charging money for these services or if they are ultimately fair, but at least for some artists it is generating ticket sales
Until we are honest about the Spotify payment model, how can we ever possibly come to a consensus of what is fair and what is not? These comment sections are full of misinformation, and posters are very rarely held accountable for spreading that misinformation.
There absolutely is a conversation to be had here, but it is not the one that has taken place for years and years. To be fair to OP, the information wasn't quite as ubiquitous in 2011 as it is today.. but for the last 5 years at least Spotify has published yearly reports giving information to how the payment system works.
The model is a pro-rata model. There is no per-stream rate. The amount of money paid out each month is stream-share based from a shared pool of money which contains roughly 2/3 of every dollar spotify makes. These payments are paid to rights holders (not artists.. labels, distributors) and then rights holders pay a percentage of that to not just artists, but also publishers and song writers. The rate they pay their artists is their business, Spotify isn't dictating that. In fact, this payment model is industry standard (most major streamers pay the same 2/3) and heavily favors the rights holders, which have always dominated the cash flow of the music industry. They just have Spotify to take the heat now.
So, like I said, there is a conversation out there to be had. That conversation is more is 2/3 of music revenue fair? Should Spotify charge users per stream instead of a monthly subscription? Should the subscription be something more like $20/month? $50?
This is a good clarification but I think the core issue is that Spotify (and Apple Music and Amazon Music and probably others) have chosen a business model in which consumers can listen to basically everything and yet artists do not get paid. The rightsholders suffer too yet they are complicit.
This business model ALWAYS outcompetes any other, and can't be "fixed" imo, because no one will pay per-stream or pay $50 a month.
Sure, the subscription model and free tier model were chosen by Spotify, but the payout model was and is a negotiation between DSPs and record labels and the big 3 record labels (universal, sony, warner) hold most of the leverage. Any changes to this model require sign off from those three and they aren't likely to want to change the model since it profits them so much. And I'm not really sure they suffer.. their argument re: why they still take so much from the artist portion of the revenue without actually physically manufacturing anything is because they attribute that cost to maintaining a database and such, which seems a bit disingenuous. At least when it comes to the big 3 I don't really care if they suffer, they've made screwing artists and consumers their business.
I guess you can imagine a world where the music industry saved itself somehow, but I don't see how that happens without the subscription based model. It's a fucked up industry and I'd love to have artists supported more but where is the money coming from? Fortunately, there are distributors like DistroKid.. DK charges a flat rate and passes on 100% of royalties earned to musicians.
There's no reason as an independent artist to put your music on Spotify or any other streamer if you're not making the money you think you deserve. There's no reason to complain if you did it anyway.
as a guitarer * with a realy cheap phone running butchered android and "side loaded" everything, and zero accounts for anything other than web space, the whole web looks like it's part of my file system as a default, some of it works, most does not , and some tiny fraction of all that is now local.
people send me links and files all the time, again most does not work, and I have to specify, I can open old school pdf's, jpegs, and whatnot, but spotify!, ha!, nope, just tried,it just goes into a fit trying and failing to load who knows what, I could probably spend a day or two, three and build a hinky work around, but then it would fail, so I will stick to what works
* edit: I called myself a musician, but thats not quite true.
Without Spotify and (to a lesser extent) piracy before it, I wouldn’t be listening to 1/10th of the artists I listen to. Maybe it’s just moral cope but I can’t see how it can be made any better for niche or up and coming independent artists.
One issue with Spotify that's currently happening is that a lot of their curated playlists are quietly replacing real songs, often written by smaller/up and coming artists, with AI music.
You see something like "chill lo-fi" or "pool party beats" and you might put that on and not even realize that the artists aren't real.
And what good does that do those artists precisely?
From the article: “For example, I am paid $0.00029 per stream of a song on Spotify, and even this amount depends on whether the song is being streamed by a paid user or someone using the service for free. This means it will take upwards of 3,500 streams of a single song on Spotify to earn $1.00 versus that same revenue for one iTunes song purchase (not to mention the fact that Spotify refuses to pay the same amount to independent artists as they pay major labels, unlike iTunes). ”
If you consider that paying for Spotify premium is basically the equivalent of buying one album per month, and the top 12 artists I might be listening to are getting nowhere near 3,500 streams per month from me, it would be better for the artists if I used free Spotify for discovery (like the radio) and then used the money to purchase those favorite albums/songs (that I could then own).
I wonder how artist pay would change if each artist got a proportional cut of every listeners fee instead of listened bring pooled and paid out that way.
I can listen to only indie artists all month long and they get laid about 15 cents from my listening. Surely more of that from my monthly fee is going to artists, but it is going to artists I don't even listen to like Taylor Swift or whoever
It enables them to build small but dedicated global fan bases that support the artist directly.
The alternative is all music is paid only and they could potentially make more money, except for the fact that they’re completely unknown and there is zero demand for their music.
I think this is a false dichotomy. There's no reason "all music is paid only" is the only option besides the all-you-can-stream for one monthly fee popularized by Spotify.
For example, the other day I discovered a local artist on Instagram. I went to her Bandcamp page and was able to listen to some tracks for free with zero friction. I ended up purchasing the deluxe vinyl, and it was one of my favorite albums that came out last year.
I've done similar with the radio. I went from hearing a track on the radio to purchasing the album on Bandcamp in like ten minutes.
Spotify and the like CAN help with discovery, sure, but that doesn't have anything to do with their business model.
It enables them to build small and entirely undedicated global fan bases.
And no, that is not the only alternative. There is a fine article linked at the top of this very page that points out alternatives that an actual living and breathing artist prefers.
You've been sold a repackaging of “paid in exposure” lie.
Spotify popularity doesn’t bring in cash directly, but it leads to increased ticket sales for live shows. And Spotify will recommend you to new listeners in a way that piracy won’t.
I have a personal example: Spotify recommended a band to me that I’ve now seen live three times, and they’re so obscure that I never would have heard of them without it. None of my friends knew them either.
Is that actually feasible though? Could Spotify 5x the payout? That seems unlikely and even if they could that would nowhere near solve the problem anyway. It would still be meagre income for small artists. What do you suggest?
The current set up enables discovery. Small artists are able to gain global audiences that may support the artist directly, an artist they would almost certainly never have found without Spotify. This is happening all the time.
The post's actual title is "Giving it Away: How Free Music Makes More Than Sense" and is far more interesting than the part about preferring illegal downloading. The author, Derek Webb, gave (gives?) away albums in exchange for your ZIP Code and email address because the chance of getting you out to a live show was worth more than what he made on a digital sale or stream.
But for context, the full quote about preferring illegal downloading is: "I’ll go even further to say that I actually prefer illegal downloading over Spotify because when you get music illegally it’s at least implicit in the transaction that what you’re doing is potentially harmful to the artist. But with Spotify, your conscience is clear because you’re either enduring ads or paying to use the service and access the music."
I saw in a YouTube video once, and I'll paraphrase because I forgot, something that resonated well with me about piracy.
They said piracy is never about cost, but almost always about a service issue. Basically people flocked to Napster (and the likes) at the time because it let them browse an infinitude of music which was, back then, incredible.
That was just market demand validation, a latent problem waiting for a solution to address it. Piracy just did it first. Once someone solved it, a little bit better, like Spotify did with realtime (instead of p2p waiting), and with indexing/filtering/curation/etc. It automatically won over piracy.
Then, the one fun argument it brought after, is that the same tools that ended piracy are likely the ones making it rise again. Netflix made everyone happy, but now we have a subscription circus. There's N streaming services, and keeping up with subscribing/cancelling/finding the one that has your content created a ... service problem!
So we're bound to see piracy rise again, not because folks don't want to pay $20/mo for streaming, but because they don't want to deal with the hassle of jumping across N subscriptions and keeping track of that.
I think some of the big media is trying to solve for that, which is why you see all of them now becoming "channels" inside each other, but I'm curious to see how this will evolve.
This may have been the origin of the quote you are remembering, from Gabe Newell in the context of Steam.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem..."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11676496-we-think-there-is-...
In 2001, OG Business of Tech blogger Joel Spolsky famously said about Napster:
Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.
He was right. It was a service issue, and when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, the mainstream happily ponied up 99 cents a song because they could type the name of that song and then listen to it on their phone, Mac, or Windows computer right away.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...
Thank you!
Two times now that I've recently signed up for a streaming service to watch a show I'm interested in, I find out after signing up that I can only get 720p since I'm streaming to a browser. Money is part of it, but when it's easier to torrent 1080p than to pay money to get it, it's a service issue.
It's never just one thing either. People will try to narrow it down to one thing, and say cost or service fatigue is the dominant factor, but it doesn't work like that. The cost is an issue. Having to have 4 different streaming services for the shows you want is an issue. The quality of the apps are an issue. How much easier is the service compared to just torrenting is an issue.
At some point spending some time finding a seeded torrent sounds more pleasant than dealing with all of that. I can usually find a torrent, start a download, and begin watching a show faster than it takes me to figure out which streaming service it's on, decide if it's worth the price at that moment, and actually make an account with them and pay for it.
> which is why you see all of them now becoming "channels" inside each other
But you have to pay for those 'channels' separately, so subscription hell is still there. That explains why it's not a solution! Ideally, service providers should share revenue, and then it could be called a unified or frictionless experience.
Doesn’t really explain why piracy rates are much lower in Japan compared to other countries. It is mostly a cultural issue, and a lot of people will go above and beyond to justify their actions.
Just to note, I’m not even that anti-piracy, but if something is not being sold, or conveniently provided, you can just… not get it?
I cannot find any evidence to back this up that lies in the data of actual pirates.
I pay for Youtube premium, which gives me unlimited Youtube Music usage with no ads.
Yet I've built myself a yt-dlp-based system to pipe audio into my multiroom audio system (built on Snapcast). It will cache things locally so they play instantly, and I can mix my own music library with stuff from Youtube Music seamlessly, which is impossible with non-piratical means.
I can teach pretty much any film I want for £3 through Apple tv. That’s the same price I paid at the video store in the 90s, Except inflation means it’s half the price in real terms and the quality is far higher.
Hell I rent films I own on blueray as diving through the cd wallets while the pizza goes good isn’t worth the saving.
I’m sure there are people for whom the main problem is keeping track of N streaming services.
But I’d wager the combined cost of those N services is a much, much bigger factor for most.
This is an argument that, for an independent "middle-class" musician, giving recordings away in return for direct fan contact can be economically superior to selling individual downloads. Fully agree. I started to do so more than twenty years ago: https://rochus-keller.ch/?cat=3. I went even a step further in that I'm not even associated with a collecting-society (SUISA here in Switzerland), but permit everyone including radio stations or vloggers to play my music for free; the very little copyright royalties is much less than the publicity effect.
Does this argument change now that Spotify does offer meaningful connection to fans?*
Spotify tells me when any of the artists I listen to are coming to town - I’ve found and bought tickets this way and I don’t go to a lot of live shows in general.
Spotify is trying to sell me merch and artists can have both a merch and an events tab in app.
Edit: I see an artist with only 400k subscribers selling merch (compared to Lady Gaga’s 99 million), so it must be at least somewhat accessible.
* I don’t know if Spotify is charging money for these services or if they are ultimately fair, but at least for some artists it is generating ticket sales
The last concert I went to was Lord Huron in the Boston House of Blues, in 2018. Not much of a concert guy, clearly.
Just make the albums easily downloadable on Bandcamp is all I ask.
Can't get to the noisetrade website. 502 and appears to be using a private certificate.
This article is from 2011. Noisetrade was a very cool site for several years, but I don't think it's still operational.
Sadly it seems to be dead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoiseTrade
Until we are honest about the Spotify payment model, how can we ever possibly come to a consensus of what is fair and what is not? These comment sections are full of misinformation, and posters are very rarely held accountable for spreading that misinformation.
There absolutely is a conversation to be had here, but it is not the one that has taken place for years and years. To be fair to OP, the information wasn't quite as ubiquitous in 2011 as it is today.. but for the last 5 years at least Spotify has published yearly reports giving information to how the payment system works.
The model is a pro-rata model. There is no per-stream rate. The amount of money paid out each month is stream-share based from a shared pool of money which contains roughly 2/3 of every dollar spotify makes. These payments are paid to rights holders (not artists.. labels, distributors) and then rights holders pay a percentage of that to not just artists, but also publishers and song writers. The rate they pay their artists is their business, Spotify isn't dictating that. In fact, this payment model is industry standard (most major streamers pay the same 2/3) and heavily favors the rights holders, which have always dominated the cash flow of the music industry. They just have Spotify to take the heat now.
So, like I said, there is a conversation out there to be had. That conversation is more is 2/3 of music revenue fair? Should Spotify charge users per stream instead of a monthly subscription? Should the subscription be something more like $20/month? $50?
Just dunking on Spotify isn't helping artists. https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/
This is a good clarification but I think the core issue is that Spotify (and Apple Music and Amazon Music and probably others) have chosen a business model in which consumers can listen to basically everything and yet artists do not get paid. The rightsholders suffer too yet they are complicit.
This business model ALWAYS outcompetes any other, and can't be "fixed" imo, because no one will pay per-stream or pay $50 a month.
Sure, the subscription model and free tier model were chosen by Spotify, but the payout model was and is a negotiation between DSPs and record labels and the big 3 record labels (universal, sony, warner) hold most of the leverage. Any changes to this model require sign off from those three and they aren't likely to want to change the model since it profits them so much. And I'm not really sure they suffer.. their argument re: why they still take so much from the artist portion of the revenue without actually physically manufacturing anything is because they attribute that cost to maintaining a database and such, which seems a bit disingenuous. At least when it comes to the big 3 I don't really care if they suffer, they've made screwing artists and consumers their business.
I guess you can imagine a world where the music industry saved itself somehow, but I don't see how that happens without the subscription based model. It's a fucked up industry and I'd love to have artists supported more but where is the money coming from? Fortunately, there are distributors like DistroKid.. DK charges a flat rate and passes on 100% of royalties earned to musicians.
Spotify is increasingly a very objectionable company. I wouldn't ever want to give them my money.
There's no reason as an independent artist to put your music on Spotify or any other streamer if you're not making the money you think you deserve. There's no reason to complain if you did it anyway.
as a guitarer * with a realy cheap phone running butchered android and "side loaded" everything, and zero accounts for anything other than web space, the whole web looks like it's part of my file system as a default, some of it works, most does not , and some tiny fraction of all that is now local. people send me links and files all the time, again most does not work, and I have to specify, I can open old school pdf's, jpegs, and whatnot, but spotify!, ha!, nope, just tried,it just goes into a fit trying and failing to load who knows what, I could probably spend a day or two, three and build a hinky work around, but then it would fail, so I will stick to what works
* edit: I called myself a musician, but thats not quite true.
Without Spotify and (to a lesser extent) piracy before it, I wouldn’t be listening to 1/10th of the artists I listen to. Maybe it’s just moral cope but I can’t see how it can be made any better for niche or up and coming independent artists.
One issue with Spotify that's currently happening is that a lot of their curated playlists are quietly replacing real songs, often written by smaller/up and coming artists, with AI music.
You see something like "chill lo-fi" or "pool party beats" and you might put that on and not even realize that the artists aren't real.
And what good does that do those artists precisely?
From the article: “For example, I am paid $0.00029 per stream of a song on Spotify, and even this amount depends on whether the song is being streamed by a paid user or someone using the service for free. This means it will take upwards of 3,500 streams of a single song on Spotify to earn $1.00 versus that same revenue for one iTunes song purchase (not to mention the fact that Spotify refuses to pay the same amount to independent artists as they pay major labels, unlike iTunes). ”
Wow, those numbers are quite telling.
If you consider that paying for Spotify premium is basically the equivalent of buying one album per month, and the top 12 artists I might be listening to are getting nowhere near 3,500 streams per month from me, it would be better for the artists if I used free Spotify for discovery (like the radio) and then used the money to purchase those favorite albums/songs (that I could then own).
Great food for thought.
I wonder how artist pay would change if each artist got a proportional cut of every listeners fee instead of listened bring pooled and paid out that way.
I can listen to only indie artists all month long and they get laid about 15 cents from my listening. Surely more of that from my monthly fee is going to artists, but it is going to artists I don't even listen to like Taylor Swift or whoever
It enables them to build small but dedicated global fan bases that support the artist directly.
The alternative is all music is paid only and they could potentially make more money, except for the fact that they’re completely unknown and there is zero demand for their music.
I think this is a false dichotomy. There's no reason "all music is paid only" is the only option besides the all-you-can-stream for one monthly fee popularized by Spotify.
For example, the other day I discovered a local artist on Instagram. I went to her Bandcamp page and was able to listen to some tracks for free with zero friction. I ended up purchasing the deluxe vinyl, and it was one of my favorite albums that came out last year.
I've done similar with the radio. I went from hearing a track on the radio to purchasing the album on Bandcamp in like ten minutes.
Spotify and the like CAN help with discovery, sure, but that doesn't have anything to do with their business model.
It enables them to build small and entirely undedicated global fan bases.
And no, that is not the only alternative. There is a fine article linked at the top of this very page that points out alternatives that an actual living and breathing artist prefers.
You've been sold a repackaging of “paid in exposure” lie.
Spotify popularity doesn’t bring in cash directly, but it leads to increased ticket sales for live shows. And Spotify will recommend you to new listeners in a way that piracy won’t.
I have a personal example: Spotify recommended a band to me that I’ve now seen live three times, and they’re so obscure that I never would have heard of them without it. None of my friends knew them either.
It could be made better if they were paid more for the enjoyment you get.
Is that actually feasible though? Could Spotify 5x the payout? That seems unlikely and even if they could that would nowhere near solve the problem anyway. It would still be meagre income for small artists. What do you suggest?
The current set up enables discovery. Small artists are able to gain global audiences that may support the artist directly, an artist they would almost certainly never have found without Spotify. This is happening all the time.