If Pandora paid that, his royalty would have been $582.55...

So it looks like the industry from a streaming point of view assumes about 20,000 radio listeners per play on the radio.

This might even average correctly across the US market.

you get to hear the song you want, and a few similar ones, in a guise that it worked like radio and you didnt select any song, so they can keep the royalties down.

...that said, i'd be very curious what's YouTube excuse. if they need any and are not just shoving their weight around. for tv series and cartoons they are using the "but thats our users streaming content live! we will punish them, after suggesting their live stream to everyone and collect ads revenue" excuse

In the end what we are seeing is that that golden era of creators making a living (and much much more) was an anomaly. Control of new types of distribution created scarcity and new forms of expression and shifting norms jacked up demand. But now distribution is free, instant and global. Demand has flatlined and production has exploded.

The hard question a creator needs to ask themselves now is not "how do I get paid for what my art is worth?", but instead "was my art ever worth much to begin with?"

Just because some of us are eking out a sort of existence in the new era doesn't make it a functional system.

I would be perfectly happy to see it become 'this is the Star Trek future, your entire compensation is the satisfaction of a job well done and being personally liked for what you've created', if our world operated on some sort of UBI and we didn't have to have our performance linked to survival at all.

Under those circumstances, things naturally shift down the Maslow hierarchy of needs, and people take for granted that they'll live, and get desperate for validation and popularity, that being what they lack. I have NO problem with a world that completely unlinks money from performance, because I'm not a free-market capitalist type demanding that financial reward behave like a 'meritocracy'.

Self-evidently it doesn't anyway, so literally nothing of value is lost.

BUT, we have that completely decoupled world and yet demand that people pay for even the most frugal living with money they got somebody to give them, in a world where people simply can't and don't do that anymore.

Silicon Valley clever-boffins: come up with some disruptive alternative really fast. We don't have time to mess around, and what these songwriters face is the same fate waiting for all of us, in turn, including you. How about abolishing money and replacing it entirely with 'likes'?

Someone who produces and uploads their own video that reaches a stupidly huge number of people will make bank guaranteed, just like someone who is reaching their audience directly through Patreon.

On average you should be able to get $5-$10 per 1000 YouTube video views if it is on your own monetized channel. So that 35 million views probably generated around $245,000 dollars for someone.

Probably most of it ended up in the hands of the record label that owns the YouTube account, and by the time they finished taking their cut the final $200 made it back to the song writer.

My point is that new methods of distribution flattens the distribution and gives you the potential to make much more money if you spend the time to build your own thing rather than going with a record label.

Not disputing your numbers but just putting it out there that Hank Green estimated $2-per-1000.[1] That calculates 35m views to be ~$70k.

Google also recently changed its engagement algorithms and everybody's views and monetization went way down. I'm not sure what the latest 2017 cpm estimates would be. That Hank Green estimate was from 2015.

[1] https://medium.com/@hankgreen/the-1-000-cpm-f92717506a4b

Either way, my point is that a 35 million view YouTube video generates a lot more than $200 dollars for someone. Even if you take the minimum of $1 per 1000 you are still looking at $35,000 of ad revenue. That ad money must be going somewhere, even if creators don't get it. So YouTube isn't to blame, its the people who are skimming off so much money that only $200 is left for the writer

The hit things are a mechanism OF the distribution channel, which is how the 'hit' scales to those levels. If you go 'new methods' it only guarantees that you will never, ever have a hit thing. You might well have a culturally important or creatively valuable thing: they say the Velvet Underground spawned a thousand bands. But you simply don't reach the stupidly huge number of people unless you're part of the mechanism that's taking all the percentage out of that profit.

There's no such thing as that flattening of distribution, truly there isn't. There's no such potential. It's just tighter control of the channels by the record labels, media companies etc. and it's all middlemen, running the show. New media didn't make that better, it's substantially worse than it was.

But the video will have more 'creators' than a song. I.e. song writer should not be getting 20% royalties of the video spin.

Only competion can alter that very much.

They may listen to what you've produced and enjoy it. But are they paying to listen? Did they buy the track or sign up for a subscription? Are advertisers paying to be featured alongside the song, or to use it in their commercials?

If not, maybe your song isn't so valuable. If those listeners could easily listen to some other song for free, then maybe your song isn't so valuable.

And this is talking about the whole song. If you're just the writer, it's even more stark. How good of a writer do you need to be to write a hit Justin Bieber song? If you didn't exist, how easy would it be to find another writer who could write a hit for Justin or some other star?

I would guess that what's really bringing money to the table is Justin's star power, not the uniquely amazing abilities of a single writer. So 20% seems generous.

So there is a hierarchy among songwriters even for pop stars, it's definitely not a vast ZMP pool.

Communes have been tried, voluntary ones and forcible ones, over and over. They never work out. People just aren't wired up that way.

> Star Trek

is an imaginary utopia. You can always make things work when writing a script.

Monastic orders for example can be stable over hundreds of years, but to pull that off they need a focus on new membership. They fail not when the last member dies, but when nobody signed on 20 years before then.

PS: There are ideological reasons that people oppose communes, and many had significant issues. However, the jump from 6 young people sharing rent, to 20 young people living together is not that difficult. And at 20 people economy of scale kicks in where buying in bulk saves money but meticulous record keeping is not worth the effort.

The larger point is, in America, anyone can form a commune or choose to live in one. There's no law against it. What you don't get to do is force people to join and prevent them from leaving.

There seem to be orders of magnitude more people advocating communes than are willing to live in them.

PS: I am not personally interested in living on one. However, I do know people who have for ~30 years and see a host of upsides and downsides.

Of course. People who believe they will be better off leave the commune. Those tend to be the highest producers. What's left are the low producers, and that can't sustain the commune, so it collapses.

The next obvious step is to prevent the high producers from leaving, and history shows how that plays out.

It's often the low producers without significant retirement savings who have larger incentives. ~100k can be a lot of money or almost meaningless very easily.

Abolishing money does not need to exist only in a commune format; currency is a mode of exchange that exists because there is a natural scarcity of resources. Currency allows us all a medium to acquire what we want; usually as a result of personal investment of some source.

Star Trek, while imaginary, is a technological utopia and I would argue that we are not that far off from the beginning of that type of society. Since we're on HN i'll assume you're familiar with Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns and the consistent and predictable exponential tech growth. As we make advances in energy, nanotech, robotics, and genetics the problems that plague society today won't be relevant to the people of tomorrow. If we aren't working towards Utopian society as a collective then the fault is ours, because working towards anything else is just a failure of imagination.

Of course this assumes the political will and foresight to address the challenges and growing pains that come along with the transition.

Consider the state of the poor in the US today. It is far, far better by any measure than the state of the poor in medieval times, Roman times, etc. Yet the conventional opinion is it is not remotely good enough.

By today's standards, the Star Trek universe is a utopia. But by the standards of the inhabitants of that universe, they may regard the state of their poor in crisis terms.

Communes from the 60's still exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hog_Farm

https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-a-2001-08-07-25-hog/395182.ht...

Seems like a weird detail to fixate on. Plenty more money has been spent on office space (whole buildings, even) by music industry and music industry adjacent companies that acted as gatekeepers and ensured only a hand-selected few ever made a living off their songs.

> I have NO problem with a world that completely unlinks money from performance, because I'm not a free-market capitalist type demanding that financial reward behave like a 'meritocracy'.

I also have no problem with this, but I think creative people won't be sharing our opinion anytime soon.

(unless you believe marketing & distribution is all of the value)

Historically, musicians and actors were very poorly paid. For a brief period in the 20th century, some of them made a lot of money. That's over.

There were, at peak, several million Myspace bands. Some of which didn't suck. Supply of musicians far exceeds demand.

Now most of the power lies with the consumer who will typically consume whatever artists choose to offer their creations for close to free. There are some artists like Garth Brooks and formerly Taylor Swift, who wield enough power through enormous demand for their songs to limit supply and charge higher amounts, but these are the exceptions.

What's ironic about this article to me is that Justin Bieber would likely not have ever become famous in the first place if not for YouTube because that's where he was discovered. The same goes for a large percentage of today's most successful artists. So previously the record labels wielded all the power and only the chosen few who they deemed worthy made large sums of money. Now pretty much anybody can put their stuff out there but the consequence is that they can't control the supply.

But... this is obviously not how the world works. In the records and CDs era revenue was proportional to disks shuffled around. It is absolutely not the case that a typical web business has revenue proportional to the number of servers they employ.

The important point here is what economists call "trapping the value" and "pricing power": a CD full of music has lots of value, but the person selling the physical item was at one point the person controlling scarcity, and thus had pricing power, so they trapped most of the value.

Nowadays web business models allow developers to trap the value of their software more effectively. That doesn't mean they are piggybacking on the markup on web servers.

Yes, availability of substitutes can diminish bargaining power of music rights holders, but I'm not convinced that's at all how we should interpret these numbers. I think this is more about market power and network effects of the middlemen (google, pandora, the labels, etc...)

I would be interested in the revenue split between rights holders and YouTube.

in a sense yes, but it depends on what you refer to by 'cheap'. other factors like convenience, availability, quality, storage, etc. were often quite different.

it's one thing to wait around for your song and then tape if off an FM radio broadcast, another to just download some 'lossless'-encoded bits off the web at will.

"Cheap" is relative. It is relatively "cheap" to copy tape or Vinyl. Now, we have digital files. Copying them is perfect and free. "Cheap" is infinitely more expensive than free.

That is laughable. Middle-men like YouTube (Google), record companies and other channels take most of your money. I wouldn't call that free.

(Discoverability is part of distribution)

The point is--- if the cost is nearly free, why not do it yourself? You're right that youtube/google/spotify are going to take a cut for distribution, but you really don't need the record companies. And if your music is good, and you already have a following, you can just sell it on Bandcamp.

Nowadays everyones music is hosted and streamed legally on youtube/spotify/play music/any generic music service. The days of people paying $20 for an album cd just to listen to the one hit they like are long gone.

If artists trust their popularity then they can pull their music from streaming services, indirectly forcing fans to purchase their albums (like taylor swift did a while ago). But even this isnt an option for smaller artists, who would just disappear into obscurity because of how over saturated the industry is.

anecdata, but I see a lot of people (myself included) buying $10 CD's and $20 vinyl with a download code at shows in small venues.

Going out on the street to sell your music is hardly meaningful distribution at all compared to putting up a Bandcamp with your music for sale. One has the upside of maybe a few hundred people in a day, the other has billions of Internet-connected consumers.

In the past, the distribution channels were owned by radio conglomerates and retail conglomerates and distributors/publishers/marketing/etc. Basically the music industrial complex. And it was very hard to penetrate that complex with your art and have anyone consume it, much less pay for it. And they picked winners and losers capriciously.

Now you can put your music on YouTube, Spotify, Bandcamp, iTunes, etc. If one of those won't take you, there are others that will. And you can promote a song on Reddit and it can go to the front page and you can have millions of people listening to your music tomorrow. That's what I mean by distribution.

Music business can be rough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3zesMAuJrM

Whenever I see people complain about this, I just feel sorry for them. The world changes, and there are winners and losers because of the change.

It's so strange to me how people think the world owes them something. The value of objectively looking at the market is so underrated.

I'm glad to be in a growing field that pays really well. But I'm also working to save a ton and invest wisely so that if my skills are suddenly not in demand anymore, I won't have to worry about being out on the street. I'm definitely lucky that a confluence of factors came into play that allow me to do this, but anyone and everyone should be thinking about how to hedge against employment issues down the line. That's just basic financial responsibility.

If you want to be a musician, you are already putting yourself into a difficult spot financially. If you're ok with that, more power to you... but you'd better figure out how to take care of your basic needs, at least, and you'd better have a plan for downturns since you're already living on thin margins.

And yet if Spotify were to pay its engineers scraps, I doubt the voices here would be as supportive.

The only reason the engineers are paid as much is because the companies can't get away with paying less. And just because they can get away with paying musicians less, doesn't mean the musicians should "get with the times". I am not saying every musician should be a millionaire, but there are plenty who collectively carry the multi-billion dollar industry on their backs, but get scraps in return.

On a more general note, when a vulnerable part of the population gets shafted, they shouldn't "get with the times" either. It's a sign of our failure as a society.

I guess it is not surprising that people in a capitalistic society think that the value of an activity lies in how much profit it can generate to the performer of that activity. I guess it's beyond reasonable to expect people to think of externalities and understand them. I guess it's not at all surprising that a bunch of people who claim to be in STEM have a collective amnesia when it comes to understanding that M in STEM is an art akin to music, but with laughable ROI and a far more limited audience (and the number of corporations that hire mathematicians to do mathematics in the entire world is probably... 5? Go on ArXiV and see how many math papers there are by people outside academia, i.e. are the product of the "free" market system).

None of that is surprising. But that doesn't make victim-blaming any less tiring to see.

Society hasn't failed either. Society is made up of individuals. If the individual wants to stream music instead of buying a CD, and if that means less money for the musician, then the only choice is to adapt as a musician or "get a job".

I say all of this as a musician myself. I realized all of this the hard way. Just about everything in the world that can be bought or sold is valued based on perception, which means anything can be worth millions tomorrow or squat. Nothing is permanent. We're all gamblers in a huge game of perceived value, and technology only makes it more crazy.

I don't see the creator's job as worthless, but I do think I see it as more of a commodity than many creators would like. The biggest hits in music today aren't there because they're somehow objectively the best at their craft. Don't get me wrong, they do have talent, but their success is largely driven by promotion and marketing. There are a ton of largely-unknown artists who could see just as much success if only they'd been able to get their material in front of someone with influence and reach in a better way than the current incumbent successes have done.

> On a more general note, when a vulnerable part of the population gets shafted, they shouldn't "get with the times" either. It's a sign of our failure as a society.

I'm very sympathetic toward people who are actually in vulnerable places. People who can't kick drug addictions, people who are homeless, people who just made one bad decision or just had enough bad luck to end up in a bad place. Creative types are not that. They've chosen to follow their passions to the place they are now. Even older artists simply can't remember a time when their craft was a "gold mine", because that's never been the case.

> I guess it is not surprising that people in a capitalistic society think that the value of an activity lies in how much profit it can generate to the performer of that activity.

I think you give people too little credit. I think people understand that an activity can be very valuable to society but not be lucrative at all. Grade-school teachers are the prototype example of this that pretty much everyone has heard before.

I don't think many people would argue that music and art have low value to society. They're certainly not essentials like housing, clothing, and food. They're not going to push the sum of human understanding further like scientific research. But they're certainly more valuable than some bullshit apps that we talk about here, things like "Yo" that attracted an obscene amount of investment for what I'd consider very little value.

But I feel like you contradict yourself with this point you've made. If you do manage to separate the value of an activity from the profit generated for the performers, you can easily make the argument that no one "deserves" to get paid for creative output. Just because something has non-monetary value, it doesn't mean people will want to pay a lot for it.

The same way performing artists don't make money off their albums, they make money by touring and increasing their brand reach as an artist.

Music industry is not about creating IP, the same way the tech industry is not about creating IP. Making things and making money are two separate, yet intertwined tasks.

I wish more people would come to terms with that. Protecting "IP" should not be the focus, but for many it is, so we have Copyright, DRM, etc.

What I find intriguing are the genres where producers are arguably MORE important than the artist (think trap music). Some producers in that space are circumventing this problem by starting their own labels and signing artists under them. This is essentially what Mike Will Made It has done with Rae Sremmurd. As the music industry evolves, people participating in it have to continually think outside the box and innovate to maintain revenue streams.

Or maybe Fabian or Frankie Avalon?

I love this kind of challenge.

Edit: helped write - per wgj there were 5 authors on that song - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15419567

I make a good hourly rate, but at the end of each hour, my earning from that hour is done, and none of my hours have every billed at $149k.

It's all in what you value, and who has the most leverage to get more money for whatever value they may provide. You may not think it's fair that the record company made some large multiplier of what the artist made, but that's just how the business works. If you want to change it by cutting out the record company, it's a lot easier to do that than it was 20 years ago, so I'd say the situation for artists in that regard is better, not worse.

In the end it absolutely does not matter what anyone thinks is "fair". Absent some form of regulation, people are going to extract as much wealth as they can out of a series of transactions, and some people are going to be more advantaged at doing so than others, whether because of talent or for structural reasons.

So it's like comparing what founder have earned per hour in some unicorn startup. Yes it's not bad, but when you think about EV of the work it doesn't look all that great.

But of course that's just my value system at work: other people might value creative work of that sort much more highly; if a creator can get that person to pay them, great. There's no intrinsic worth or value in a particular instance of creative output; it's just up to how much demand you can create based on how well you can promote/market it.

That's a lot of money - more than most people make in 2-3 years - for what probably amounted to a few weeks of work. And we're supposed to feel sorry for him because he couldn't retire on it? Seems to me if he got 1 of these per year he'd be pretty set.

You don't get paid for all the non-hit songs you wrote.

I.e., it might not be long before a comparable song with comparable popularity earns him $1000 instead of $150,000.

I don't think that music industry people are entitled to anything in particular. I do think there's probably something suboptimal going on with streaming payments. If I were watching payment for my work drop 100x, I would probably be both looking for ways to "correct" that if possible, and looking for other work to do...

https://soundcloud.com/reivalk/basic-rnn-joplin-example-over...

That's 8,000 people who care enough to come out and see you. So let's say at least 100,000 people need to like you enough that they would at least consider buying the ticket.

$4000 dollars gross in ticket sales per night, 30% to the promoter. $2800 left. If you get 50% of that with 25% to each support act then after commissions to booking agent and manager you're left with maybe $950. You need to pay travel and accommodation costs out of that, and possibly a tour manager. For a four piece band plus tour manager you probably need $30 a head per diem for incidentals of living in the road. Add in food - another $30 per head and you've got $650 left. Hotel rooms aren't cheap. travel isn't cheap.

Sure you can sell 25 t-shirts a night at $20 each and make $15 a shirt. And throw in some CDs - maybe 30 at $10 a pop... you maybe net another $600 a night.

$1250 a day for your hotels and travel for 5 people - maybe you have $600 left after these costs. Oh and you have to pay your tour manager...

Each of the people in the band makes... what - $100 per show?

Can artists really make that respectable a living from touring and merch?

Sure, scale this up, play bigger venues - 2,000 capacity. But then your costs increase - people want a more impressive show, not just spit and sawdust. You need a set, lighting design, all the rest of it.

I saw him perform for the first time in 40 years, and realized how much he lied to my mom. On stage, he was (as the kids these days say) lit. He clearly loved the music (he still writes and performs new material), but the light in his eyes showed that what he really loved was performing and sharing his music with the audience.

Most musicians can't count on a career lasting 50+ years. The era of singles is gone, and performances are where the next generation will have to make their living.

30 years ago, the supply chain for recorded music went something like this:

creator -> music label & radio -> retailers -> audience

Now it's something like this:

creator -> (label) -> digital platform -> audience

Huge power is concentrated in the platforms, which essentially combine curation, distribution, sales, and marketing. They control pricing. They control the playlists. They control the relationship with audiences and understand them far more than record retailers or radio ever did.

Labels now provide questionable value -- I would expect that some platforms may start to move into that area, in order to guarantee exclusivity, which is one of the few ways for labels to establish competitive differentiation. This is already happening in other media, such as books (ex: Amazon-owned book labels signing top authors or strong up-and-comers) as well as Amazon video and Netflix funding promising scripts and creative teams.

What can artists do? They have a few cards to play. One of them is exclusivity. Another is the ability to build their own connections with audiences (often using free or low-cost communications platforms). And dedicated audiences will do what is asked of them, within reason.

Some also perform, which is one of the few areas to make money these days. But platforms are also horning in on that pot. Ticketmaster is ruthless when it comes to manipulating pricing and forcing artists to play by its rules.

If I were an up-and-coming artist, I would concentrate not on becoming a "star" but rather making music that both you and your audiences can love, and building indestructible bonds with audiences that they will follow you no matter where you go, whether it's jumping platforms, going on tour, buying new march, or taking part in other activities that respect their love for the music while helping you make a living.

30 years ago the supply chain for recorded music went something like this:

Songwriter - publisher - recording artist - record label - wholesale distribution - retailer - audience.

Someone would write a song. Ideally they would have a publisher, whose job it is to help them maximise the commercial exploitation of that song. That song would be recorded by an artist, funded by a record label. The writer and performing artist may or may not be the same person or people.

A record label would sign a recording artist, and often pay them an advance against future recording royalty revenues. That advance - say $100,000 - was exactly that - an upfront payment, and until the artist's royalty payout hit $100,000 they did not make any more money and did not share in any profits the label might be making from the recording. At the point that they have paid back the $100,000 advance the artist has "recouped" and starts to get a share of profits.

The label would pay for the recording of the song, and then pay for mixing, master, and production of the finished product. They would then ship this product to a distributor who would get it into shops. The distributor would pay the label a unit price considerably below the retail price. The publisher representing the songwriter would get a small fee per unit shipped based on the wholesale price. The artist would get a small recording royalty per unit against the wholesale distribution rate - maybe 10% or 20% or whatever deal they had struck with the label.

Retailers would mark up from what they paid. Sales would be driven by a marketing campaign paid for by the record label - sometimes the publisher would contribute to this marketing spend. Marketing would comprise interviews/features/reviews in a limited universe of music publications and newspapers, some advertising spend, a radio campaign (convincing radio stations to play the music) and perhaps some TV slots. It was fairly manageable, and labels had good connections into major media so were quite easily able to generate good hype for artists.

If the record didn't sell, then the label had sunk a lot of money into marketing and promotion, and the advance to the artist. And if the record didn't sell, the artist would not begin to recoup against their advance.

Now the model is something like -

Songwriter - publisher - recording artist - record label - music platform

Someone still needs to write a song. Someone still needs to pay for that song to be recorded. Recording is easier and cheaper than ever though, so labels don't have to invest so much here. However, because it's easier and cheaper to record than ever before, it also means that more people than ever are doing it. Distributing physical product was HARD. And expensive. And now that you can quite literally with a couple of clicks send a recording to Spotify or Apple Music, that barrier to entry has also dropped. So it's easier and cheaper to record, easier and cheaper to distribute - and the audience has far more choice than ever before. Marketing music effectively is harder than ever - there are more channels to reach consumers than ever before, and labels have far less influence over these channels than they did before. So marketing music effectively requires a real understanding of the potential fan base for an artist, and real understanding of how to structure and run a campaign, and reach the curators who power the platforms.

The role of a label has changed considerably in the last 30 years. Do labels provide questionable value? Against the old model, yes - you can record and distribute your music without a label. To reach an audience and really cut through against all the thousands of other people recording and distributing music - you need real expertise, and considerable experience of what works and what doesn't work.

Running a record label in the old days was very different to running a record label now. But labels make money by being experts.

If I were an up-and-coming artist I would make music that I and my audience could love - and I would hire the BEST POSSIBLE PEOPLE to ensure that I'm maximising my chances in every possible area of my career, and cut them in for a percentage of whatever increased success they could bring me.

Are those experts working for a "record label"? Maybe, or maybe not. But they will definitely be doing this day in, day out, for similar artists, and they will be learning every day what does and doesn't work.

A lot of people in technology seem to think that music is a "build it and they will come" sort of thing. Just because your song is on Apple Music or Spotify does not mean that people are going to discover you. Once they discover you, you have to hope that they will stick with you on your journey, but actually because they way a lot of platforms work the music comes first and the "artist brand" comes second. It's a pretty widely acknowledged fact in the music industry that if you play a bunch of relatively well known songs to a bunch of kids they will probably know the songs, and be able to sing along. They probably WON'T be able to tell you the artist behind those songs though. Great songs deserve great audiences - but all too often great songs suffer because they can't cut through and find those audiences, and even when they do get listened to, converting someone who hears your music into someone who remains a fan and follows along on your journey is something else entirely.

For example, if someone signs up for Spotify to listen to exclusively songs by one artist, that artist is not getting that user's monthly fee... they're probably getting a couple pennies tops, if that.

Comparing listening to different artists to funding multiple agencies with tax dollars isn't a valid comparison.

It's like saying that when I buy my favourite brand of ice cream at the store, that the other ice cream brands will get a cut simply for gracing the shelves.

If said artist is in such high demand, then he or she can go make their own streaming platform, charge $10/month, and keep 100%. Obviously that isn't the case, so they must get some utility out of using the Spotify platform.

Again, Repartee is free to pull their songs and sell them directly to you if they think that will bring them more fans and more money. It's kind of funny for two consenting parties who both use a platform to complain that the platform is treating them unfairly.

I think the argument, which is fair, is that it is very weird that if I pay Spotify $10 a month and listen exclusively to a single artist, that artist may get a penny from me and Justin Bieber may get $3 from me, despite me never listening to a single track from him.

Nobody is arguing Spotify can take it's 20% or whatever, people are just arguing that the calculation Spotify uses to distribute the monthly royalties severely penalizes small artists. (because it looks in aggregate across all listeners instead of divvying per user)

That's why i usually buy t-shirts or something like that of the artist to support them. Fortunately for the type of music i prefer, soundcloud is enough for as of now.

>>> Amir Epstein - Money for big hits is in streaming on DSP’s. Spotify pays $7,000 per million streams. That may sound like nothing, but when artists like JB get 100,000,000 streams (that’s a conservative number) that’s $700,000. And then there’s apple itunes, which pays around the same, and google play which pays a little more. And if you are lucky and getting decent numbers on Tidal, it pays $23,000USD per million. Not too shabby

>>> Anonymous (response) - That Spotify money you just referenced $7,000 per 1 million streams goes to whoever owns the MASTER. Typically the record company, NOT the songwriters. Do your homework

There is a pot of money out there, but you're unlikely to see it unless you're the one writing the record contracts.

As a percentage of my cash, how much goes to Justin Bieber vs how much to the bands I've actually listened to who have many less total plays?

Or - do neither of them get anything?

Economically speaking, you can imagine if Spotify had 100 users paying 10 GBP each; 99 listened exclusively to Justin Bieber, and 1 to 'Band.' All users listen to music in equal frequency. Though 99% of the pooled money — and if divvied up equally, 99% of 'Band' fan's money — goes to Justin Bieber, 'Band' fan's listening weight results in ~10 GBP of the total pool being pulled towards 'Band.' So, in effect, all of 'Band' fan's money could be classified as going towards 'Band.'

Also, as a couple side notes in Spotify's revenue structure:

1. 70% goes to artists, 30% goes to Spotify.

2. Over 70% of Spotify users become paying subscribers iirc, so there's not much of a problem with listening weight being pulled by free users.

Well obviously not all users listen to music at the same frequency (which i know you are likely well aware). What is the reason that they don't just take each users $10 then dole that out only according to the songs that person listened to. So if the user listened to one artist the entire month, then that one artist get's the full portion of the $10 that is given to artists.

That will help with the situation where: 1. Someone else listens to bieber on repeat 24/7 (why should that affect where another's $10 goes) skewing the sample massively towards that artist.

2. In terms of free users, segment them off and pool the ad revenue again boxed on a per user basis.

A rights holder may or may not be an artist - quite often, the rights holder for the recording royalty is a record label, and the artist is getting a percentage of what the label takes. There is also the publishing (songwriter) royalty - and the songwriter may or may not be the recording artist.

Let's assume that Justin Bieber gets 100m streams this month, and that's 5% of all streams on Spotify. That means there are 2bn streams across all artists. If your 10 favourite bands between them get 2,000,000 streams, then they represent 0.1% of streaming activity. Out of your £10, spotify gets £8.33 (taking off the VAT). Spotify pays out 70% of revenues in royalties - so there's £5.83 going out the door. Bieber gets 5% of this - £0.29 - and your bands get £0.0058 - so about 0.6 pence. If there are ten bands, then they are each getting 0.06 pence of your £10. Assuming those bands are self releasing, and there are four people in a band, each band member is making 0.0015 pence out of your initial £10.

Whether that money actually goes to Bieber personally, and whether the 0.06p actually goes to the members of the band is another thing entirely, and is dictated the deal that they have (or don't have) with an intermediary such as a record label.

It's because Spotify pools all the subscription money earmarked for artists into one great pool then divvies it up based on number of plays or play-time or some weird proxy measurement.

Bieber also has songwriting credit. If the royalty was divided evenly, Bieber would also get 20%. However, it isn't required to divide evenly, and songwriter royalties can be negotiated myriad different ways.

It's interesting watching this comment section fill with bickering over what commenters think he deserves.

However if you want a salary and comfortable living, you take a salary and don't get a shot at wealth. You could refuse to work on such terms but your company could persumably hire someone else who won't refuse since the supply of risk averse individuals significantly exceeds those who take risk..

Streaming upends that. I don't buy records anymore, I pay a streaming subscription. I get pretty much anything I want whenever I want on demand. I have access to a much larger catalog than I would if I bought everything individually and I'm probably spending on-par with what I did in the old days. (I use to get a lot a free CDs and such because I worked for a record store chain in the 90's, but even so, I have access to a larger catalog today). The fact that I can get the vast majority of what I want means that those few hold out artists that I would like to listen to, but can't because they refuse to play the game (with good reason), simply don't get listened to... I have other choices.

I can't comment on the other issues you raise.

When they offered this songwriter some % of song royalties, they knew ahead of time that it wasn't going to be a whole lot of money.

Solution? Songwriters need a new metric to charge by.

One problem, though, is that perhaps songwriting isn't actually worth that much. When you look at a performer like Justin Beiber, how much of his income depends on specific songs that he's putting out? I'm not sure, but I don't necessarily think it's a large amount.

Source: royalty statements

I would love to see that math worked out with someone who has written a popular program/website.

For example, in the UK, PRS takes 3% of box office, and that is then paid out to songwriters based on duration of performance. So for example, if someone sells 1000 tickets at 10 each, there is £300 to be paid to PRS. If there are three acts playing and they each play 30 minutes, songwriters get £3.34 per minute. So if two songwriters co-write a song and agree a 60/40 split and that song is 4 minutes 30 seconds one songwriter would get £9.02 from this show and the other would get £6.01.

Bieber played six dates at the O2 in London - capacity 20,000 - and tickets seem to have been around the £45 mark. Let's assume he pretty much sold out - so those six dates grossed £5.4m

Assuming he did a 20 song set (so maybe 75 minutes duration for songs, with two support acts each playing 30 minutes - total duration 135 minutes) then the songwriters (for both Bieber and support acts) are getting £1200 per minute of performance across that segment of the tour. So actually, if you are the support act and you are a singer-songwriter playing 30 minutes support to Bieber, you're going to walk away with your live appearance fees plus £36k in songwriter royalties.

Streaming revenue splits between labels and songwriters (or sound recording copyright royalties, and publishing mechanical royalties) are based on old record label models, where the label invested a large amount of money to record, manufacture and market product; because of this, they took the lion's share of revenues from record music sales. It's easy to argue that things have changed, but equally, generally speaking a songwriter needs an artist to perform and record the song - and the artist probably needs a label (or someone with some money) to market that song and help it generate the maximum revenues. Songwriters still benefit, because they get MORE revenues than they would have done otherwise. A great song is nothing unless someone records it and performs it.

So the problem is not necessarily with Pandora, Spotify, YouTube and all of these other companies - they are following models which by-and-large have been dictated to them by labels - you can't operate a music streaming platform without songs to play, and you can't play songs without obtaining permission to use the recording, and the recording copyright - and thus that permission - is controlled by record labels rather than songwriters.

The scale of the market is completely different. Bieber's 2016 world tour apparently grossed $250m in ticket sales - if we stick (for ease) with the UK model for compensating songwriters for live performance, this tour generated $7.5m in revenues for songwriters. Let's say that across the whole tour - including Bieber songs, numerous co-writes, and support acts - there were 250 songwriters involved. Assuming everyone's song was performed for roughly the same duration then each songwriter should have walked away with about $37,500. Not bad.

The problem is not streaming - it's people crafting flawed narrative that is based around "my song got streamed a billion times and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" but at the same time ignoring the completely different scales of revenue for live performance vs recording. Bieber has 32 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Assuming that they each listen to an average of 8 tracks a month (for a total of roughly 250m streams) then his label is generating maybe around $1.25m in recording revenues. The songwriters will be getting a fraction of that - and each individual songwriter will get a proportion of that fraction, based on how much their song is listened to. If his most popular song gets 50% of streaming activity, second most popular 25%, third most popular 10%... and his tenth most popular gets 1% then that track is only generating the label $12,500 a month - and maybe $2,500 for the song writer - but it's still getting 2.5m streams a month. If the writer has a 20% share of the song, then they are getting $500 - over a year (all things remaining equal) then maybe they get $6,000 for 30m streams.

If that song was played on every date of a Bieber tour as part of a 20 song, 75 minute set, on a tour where headliner is performing 60% of the total duration, then based on the UK model for songwriter performance royalties the writer of that song would be getting $225,000.

If someone has a 20% share of that song they are getting $45,000.