Spotify pays 70% of their music revenue to publishers based on the total number of listens. All revenue is put together and split based on the global numbers. Which means that niche band I like will get next to nothing. Instead if they account for 50% of my listening time in one month, they should get 35% of what I paid to Spotify that month. Unfortunately big labels will never agree to that.
Artists get big cuts when people buy their music, and if people decide to cancel their paid subscription, they still have the bought media available with no predatory gating like spotify uses to try to coerce people to resubscribing.
35% of 1 is the same as 0.000000035 of 10.000.000
It doesn't calculate your amount of listening and determine the payout based on that. All listens are pooled together and all subscription money is pooled together. And the payout is determined based on that.
With OP proposal, they would get USD 7.
It also promotes botting, as spotify only counts listens, bot listening a ton to a fraudulent artist will siphon money away from essentially everyone.
"Money only goes to artists you listen" would be very good change
My $7/mo should be going to the artists I actually chose to listen to, not the stuff that droned passively for hours in background environments. Particularly when I'm actually a high margin customer for Spotify; the cost to them of my subscription is low since I spend so little time on the service. That makes it all the more galling that my subscription cost is mostly going to Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.
100 people subscribe to spotify and listen for 100 hours a month each, for $10 a month. You listen to your favourite artist for 50 hours and other stuff for 50 hours. No-one else listens to your favourite artist.
I assume that if this is band is treated as the "average" Total listening hours = 100 * 100 = 10,00. Total money: 100 * 10 = $1,000. They get: 50 / 10,000 * $1,000 = $5
That seems fair? Obviously some bands won't have negotiating power when they first start and might get less, or some get more, but that feels like how the industry always worked, and not something to do with spotify?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Digital music just becomes marketing for live performances.
On the other hand, I have no idea who runs Anna's Archive. I wouldn't be surprised if it were backdoor funded by AI companies who want the data available for scraping. Maybe that explains the Spotify debacle?
Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify:
> It pays roughly two-thirds of every dollar it generates from music, with nearly 80% allocated to recording royalties and about 20% to publishing, though how much artists and songwriters ultimately receive depends on their agreements with rights holders, which Spotify does not control. [0]
Spotify is frantically trying to escape the record label's death grip (hence podcasts), because they know they can squeeze it for just about anything with licensing deals. It's a terrible business model! Spotify keeps a third for their costs (& finally some profit in the past year or two), ie. about the same that Apple takes from App Store for basically nothing[1].
How the record labels convinced the world that Spotify is the bad guy here is beyond belief.
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[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofiachierchio/2026/01/28/spoti...
[1] Certainly app store costs are nothing when compared to the infrastructure that Spotify needs.
And the premise of your statement is that only pro musicians deserve to be compensated for their work. That’s a pretty messed up world view.
*not only Spotify
They had plenty of problems from people abusing their system to steal listens from actual artists.
Their system is basically "one big bucket of listens" - if your song gets listens, you get money. So if you pay your sub, and listen to say 5 niche musicians only, it still all goes mostly to the most popular songs.
Now you might already notice the flaw here - if you say, make a bunch of bots that just listen to songs to boost their revenue, not only your sub doesn't pay artists you listen, but also to fraudulent ones.
Then there was problems with using fake collaboration tags, AI music to hijack artist profiles, and few others.
That's basically how radio is accounted for in royalties, as well.
With Spotify knowing exactly who listened to what, it could be more precise (and arguably more susceptible to the fraud), but tbh what they do is standard (compulsory licensing) industry practice.
If either of those was true with spotify, the unfairness would go away.
But when different listeners are paying very different amounts per hour, any correlation between payment amount and preferred content causes problems.
These big platform payouts matter a lot.
When you read artists' blog posts you can see they get peanuts. Not due to Spotify - due to the recording deals.
If you want an exhaustive but eye-opening account of all of the details, I recommend "All you need to know about the music business" by Don Passman.
A quick search suggests a very steep drop off from the top earners.
‘At 100 million streams, artists can earn approximately $300,000-$500,000 in gross royalties. However, the actual amount reaching the artist varies dramatically based on their contracts. Major label artists receive $90,000-$150,000 after the label’s cut, while independent artists could keep $255,000-$425,000 after distributor fees.’ https://rebelmusicz.com/how-much-do-artists-make-on-spotify/
This has historically been unclear. Lots of artists make more money from touring and merchandise than from record sales, and piracy is likely to boost those.
Reminder of the recent "The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'":
Most small-medium time artists can't afford to front all the expenses. If no one buys the records, no record company will give the band an advance. Even if most records don't really generate any direct profit for the band, getting the production bankrolled is a pretty big benefit.
I'm not sure about that. A related situation is software piracy. There was a long time period when it was easy for people to get "free" copies of software titles such as a major word processing program, by copying them at work and bringing them home. This might not really have hurt the vendor of the software, because they still sold lots of copies to businesses. But it effectively kept anybody from bringing a less feature rich but lower priced alternative to the market. Some of the companies whose works were copied became effective monopolies.
Another way of putting it was that the software had two price tiers: A paid tier for businesses and a free tier that kept competitors out of the market. Had anybody done this deliberately, it might have been considered "dumping."
Music piracy may have a similar effect of creating a moat for the big labels and players who can diversify their income streams, while preventing small-scale acts from offering an acceptable but lower priced alternative.
though the determination of damages is usually completely all over the map (and usually skews high to serve a punitive purpose, though I doubt it has any real deterrent effect).
I just brought Light Years on cassette by Nas.
I’m an hobbyist musician and I’m going to sell actual cassettes and donate the profits. I’m never going to get the 500 million streams you need to make money off Spotify
Global distribution. For $40/year. That was fucking unheard of 20 years ago. Spotify is the best thing that ever happened to artists. Don't let the mediocre one's who blame their lack of success on Spotify fool you. They don't make money because they likely suck and can't book dates because no one wants to see them.
>But if there are cheap services and cheap avenues (that still underpay artists), why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all?
Spotify cancelled my package, and keeps sending me offers to rejoin at twice the price (actually more than that, it was a joint account with my wife, so its like 2.5 times if we were both to start paying again). Every time I listen to spotify without the package I get 3 ads to 1 song. Sometimes 2 ads when its generous.
I would have probably paid my spotify tax on time every month without thinking about it. But now I hate them to pieces.
It seems like my options are:
1. Sign up for a service without the all of music I want to listen to.
2. Sign up for a service thats as scummy as spotify but hasnt quite enshittified yet.
3. Download all the mp3s from my spotify playlists and listen to them locally without the weird payment/advertising apparatus in between.
So far 3 makes the most sense to me.
I don't like this perspective because it puts the onus on the individual consumer. Many people who listen to music struggle to make ends meet. They do not have the extra money to afford buying albums off of bandcamp, yet they are contributing members of society and they deserve to be able to listen to music.
Meanwhile there are billions of dollars floating around in the music industry. Spotify absolutely has the spare cash to pay their artists more; they just choose not to.
As much as I love the idea of Gabe's "piracy is a service issue" philosophy, I think the real truth is likely that piracy is an issue of capitalism and wealth inequality.
I guess you could fund it with taxes?
By the same token, artists are contributing members of society and they deserve a host of things, including enough to make a living.
You can't demand one group's output as a right for everyone else unless you also grant them rights in return.
So there’s a heavy supply/demand imbalance, and distribution/discovery thrives there.
> While Spotify puts real price pressure on artists,
You know that Spotify doesn't pay artists, right? That Spotify pays 70% of its revenue to rights holders before it sees a single cent itself? And that it's rights holders who pay artists?
I wish the angry pitchfork mob for once managed to attack the actual culprits: the Big Four. Nope, that day will never come.