- cross-posted to:
- technology@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- technology@hexbear.net
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Kind of weird, considering they’re a major competitor, but so what? Why is this something they need to “admit”?
Stuff like this will be used in the anti monopoly cases going on world wide.
I’m all for reigning in monopolies, but I actually don’t see how this is anticompetitive.
A business paying zero fees is not anticompetitive. One specific business paying zero fees when everyone else has to and doesn’t know about it is.
This old saying feels more relevant than ever in this context:
Mind your own business.
As I see it, there can be various good reasons for striking a “better” deal with some than others, depending on who benefits from who etc. Just like how a retailer wouldn’t just pay all the suppliers the same, since they’re supplying different amounts of different products that don’t all have the same value to the retailer nor customer.
Let’s ignore who are the parts in this specific case, but rather discuss the broader principles of free trade. Why would a business have any right to know what their competitors are paying/earning? They can definitely ask as a part of a negotiation process, but in no way can they expect to get an answer. Instead, they can decide not to do business with one who won’t share this information with them. This is a good thing.
They’ve rigged the system so that nobody can compete with them. YouTube music and Spotify pay nothing and everyone else has to pay, meaning smaller business attempting to compete is starting with a severe disadvantage.
This is not your uncle selling an old TV to your neighbour, this impacts lots of consumers and other businesses.
As a consumer I’m a part of the business , so you are actually advocating people to be involved, even though you are contradicting your self because I don’t think you understand the implications of “minding your own business”.
bro would be catching up on FTX news and their takeaway would be “damn rats snitched on SBF!”
If you want to start a competitor to Spotify or Google music, you will have to pay those fees making it almost impossible for you to compete.
A company giving special access to it’s competition on a platform they control is usually used as an indicator of not being anticompetitive.
I hadn’t considered it from a “collusion” angle.
it would be different if it was for all it’s competition.
Eh, when Microsoft was required to ask you which browser you wanted, they didn’t need to offer every browser, just theirs, firefox and Chrome.
This could definitely be collusion, but I don’t think that not extending it to all competitiors is what makes it that.
Microsoft didn’t make the other browsers pay for the privilege of being a browser though.
How? Special back door secret deals for one and only one company is the definition of anticompetitive.
Competition is defined as more than one lol
Edit: I’m special, I am first place! But if you knew it was 1st place of one… I sure hope you think me as noncompetitive…🤣 It’s strange to me to think I’m competitive if I have no competitors.
Two of the largest music services in the world colluding to stay ahead of everybody else?
The thing is that any other competitor music app (or other app in general) faces the monetary barrier that Spotify secretly doesn’t face in order to process subscription payments through Google Play is anticompetitive.
In this way, Google is also acting more like a market-maker than merely a competitive player or partner in a free market, where they can decide who the dominant music streamer could be.
Netflix makes heavy use of Amazon Web Services, specifically S3 Buckets. I’m sure there’s a special deal worked out with them as an anchor client.
Malls do the same thing. While they’re not in direct competition in the same sense as Google/Spotify or Amazon/Netflix, some stores don’t even pay rent in a mall because it’s expected that they’ll drive traffic to the rest of the stores. 90% sure Victoria’s Secret, Macy’s, etc are some of these anchor stores that very often pay little or negative rent due to the sheer revenue generated by other avenues.
And Spotify pass these savings onto the artists, right?
In effect, yes. Given that ~70% of revenue goes to rights holders, making the amount of revenue bigger by not paying 30% of subscriptions to Google, the savings are passed on to rights holders.
So, not exactly to the artists. I get the impression you seem to know quite a lot about the deal, can you try to analyze how this 70% gets divided?
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/
It’s net revenue split to rights holders according to the share of streams. If you have 1% of all streams on Spotify in a given time period, you get 0.7% of net revenue for that period.
How the rights holders distribute the money onward to the artists is not exactly transparent though.
I suspected that much, it must be a complicated matter with many different cases, considering how music is produced. Thank you for your insight.
Any time.
To be clear, I don’t think this should be taken as a defense of Spotify. I just think that these misconceptions distract from more valid criticisms.
70% of revenue goes to rights holders.
Thus could mean that 69% of revenues go to rights holders A and B and 1% of revenues are spread between holders C - Z.
Nah the savings are probably being mostly passed on to stock buybacks and executive salaries
…I mean, 30% of the savings go to Spotify, so some part of it will indeed go to stock buybacks and executive salaries. Some of it will go to regular employee salaries, and some of it will go to pay for technical infrastructure, and some of it will go to pay for offices. Some of it will be spent on marketing, even.
70% of it will go to rights holders, though.
Spotify announced stock buybacks in 2021 that were greater in total that they most likely will pay artists in that same timeframe. Doing so artificially depresses the the amount of their revenue that’s counted as profit, which is what they use to calculate artist royalties.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/20/spotify-to-spend-1b-buying-its-own-stock/
Again, not true - the royalty payments are based on revenue, not profit.
To understand how absurd the claim that royalty payments are based on profits is, consider that Spotify has had a grand total of two profitable quarters throughout its whole existence - are you seriously claiming that no artist ever got paid outside those two quarters?
According to this random site with no sources the ranking is: Napster, Tidal, Apple, YouTube Music, Deezer, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora.
Wonder where SoundCloud fits in.
Pretty sure no one uses that for exclusives only because it will get so few plays
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The real problem with the way Spotify distributes the money, is that they distribute it per play. This seems reasonable on the surface, but I think it’s pretty shit. I want my subscription fee to go to the artists I listen to. Right now they’re going to what most people listen to. This effect is worsened by the per-label deals: imagine if Beyonce wasn’t on Spotify, that would be bad for Spotify right? This gives her label (and by extension all major labels) massive leverage over how this works. It massively favors big artists.
The per-play model also enables playfarming as an economically viable scam.
Huh? If you listen to obscure music, they are paid for that, if you don’t they don’t. They base it of what people listen to, in the exact same way it would work if it was watermarked like you want it to be
My understanding is that they don’t split your subscription fee up to the people you listen to. They base it on who all of their subscribers are listening to. So even if you listened to your favorite obscure artists 24/7, they might not get a dime if nobody else is listening. However, a sizeable chunk of your subscription will go to whoever is most popular on the platform even if you didn’t listen to them at all.
No it wouldn’t. Imagine a hyper-small version of Spotify with two artists and two subscribers. The fee is 10$ per user, distributed fully to the artists (to make the math easy).
User A only listens to artist A, user B only listens to artist B. BUT: user A listens to artist A 30 times a month, while user b only listens to artist B 10 times a month. Artist A gets paid 15 of the 20 total dollars - user B is paying for some of artist A’s fee, even though they’ve never listened to them.
My Spotify subscription is paying for the artists most put on large playlists, the ones most played by fitness centers and cafes, and for botfarms. I want it to pay the artists I listen to.
I like how in a thread discussing how Spotify had been lying about their cost structures you’re continuing to take their word for how fairly they compensate artists.
They’re a public company, they’re required by law to share financial info.
Do you perhaps have better data though?
From what I understand that 70% they’re paying artists is from “profit.”
And from another comment in this thread:
Their last quarterly financial statements shows $65 million profit on $3.36 billion in revenue.
And then you have stuff like this:
https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/20/spotify-to-spend-1b-buying-its-own-stock/
So lets assume they make $65 million in profit every quarter between when that article came out and April 21 2026 (the period the article states they were doing buybacks). I count 18 quarters in that period. So if my math is correct that is $1.17 billion in “profit” in the same period of time they plan to do $1 billion in stock buybacks. But artists are only getting 70% of said profits. So that’s about $819 million to artists in the same period of time Spotify is doing $1 billion in stock buybacks.
So we have a mega corporation playing creative accounting and doing stock buybacks instead of paying artists more. Classic.
lets assume they make $65 million in profit every quarter
Where do you get this number from?
Hasn’t Spotify been operating at a loss for most of its existence? Wouldn’t that mean they paid 0€ to its creators most quaters (if it was actually calculated off profit)?
What alternatives do you guys use besides Bandcamp? I am open to paying a sub as long as the artist is getting a decent cut.
Pirate and buy official merch, they make more of that anyway. Also live shows
LiveNation has fixed the issue that artists got paid for playing live, not the companies can take that cut as well.
Are you sure “fixed” is the correct word?
buy the cd and rip them into your phone
Just because you liked that in 2000 doesn’t mean that two decades later, it’s still ideal.
It’s pretty much one of the only ways to make sure the artist gets a half decent cut though.
Unless you want to use bandcamp, which is much easier.
the first CD i ripped was like 2 years ago
Not ideal but artists get paid proper. Just don’t share then you’re mostly fine.
P.S.: Subject to your local law which may prohibits ripping a CD. This is NOT a legal advise.
Edit: I don’t know if my statement is right or not given the downvotes. Can someone explain?
Buying the music and selfhosting a streaming server is an option, though obviously not for everyone
It’s actually really easy if you just invest in a Synology NAS. You can install the music server package with a few clicks and copy music to the folder, then open a port on your firewall and the Synology music app streams it. Pretty nifty
Doesn’t even need to be Synology. Plenty of solutions that can be installed on your own “open” hardware (old PC, mini PC or just a more powerful server)
For sure. The Synology is just dead simple because it already has the package to install and there’s a mobile app it pairs with.
As a Spotify user, I’m not really ok with how much they pay artists… But I don’t use Spotify for “streaming” even though I stream a lot from them, I use it to discover new music, find obscure bands, their algorithm is amazing at that.
I could easily selfhost as you suggested, but then it would be my own music bubble.
I go to concerts and buy merchandise as much as possible when I want to support an artist.
Tidal seems nice
Can confirm. Tidal has “lossless” audio, but app is horrendous, albeit better than Spotify’s.
Also tech support is absolutely useless, still would prefer over Spotify every time.
Honestly love its Daily Recommendations
7digital has a reasonable selection, but it’s not all available lossless, which would be almost incomprehensible in 2023 if it wasn’t for the fact that we’re talking about the music industry.
Im not really sure what cut 7digital gives to artists either
Apple Music pays more than Spotify. It’s probably still not “decent”, but it’s more.
NetEase Music. It’s a spotify clone from China, and the VIP version costs like $1.20 a month.
It doesn’t spy on your phone and requires zero permissions (I’ve tested this extensively), but you will need a VPN set to China, Hong Kong or Taiwan for it to work (assuming you don’t live in either place).
China and doesn’t spy on your phone, I’ll take things that don’t go together for 200 Alex
I’m in China and work as head of IT security for a European company. As such I monitor my phone religiously for any transgressions. Netease Music works with zero permissions (unless you want to use the downloader) and doesn’t try to exfiltrate any data whatsoever.
Install PCAPdroid and see for yourself, you can monitor all traffic on system level on a per app basis.
at the very least, I expect it to make requests for every song you’re streaming which are associated with your account and payment information.
they also get your music consuming habits, because they know the times you listen to music and to which music at each time.
that’s a hell lot of data to analyze and sell.
As if Spotify and other services don’t lmao.
Spotify even dug your bluetooth device name.
definitely. You’re absolutely right, Spotify is a privacy nightmare and I didn’t say otherwise.
The post I was replying to was arguing that the service they were using was private, I just told them that even if the app doesn’t need any permissions they still have the ability to spy on their users and most probably do so.
And how, prey tell, should a music streaming service that delivers suggestions based on your preferences deliver content if not by analyzing your listening behavior?
If you’re afraid of that, then there’s no music service whatsoever you can use.
Yea no shit, idk if it’s just for my region or what, but Spotify does not manage their subscription through the play store. Makes it more annoying to cancel it too, which the execs at Spotify probably see as a plus.
The game is rigged
And we’re the pawns
Pawns? I don’t know if we worth that much.
Bold of you to consider yourself a pawn in this game.
As someone who have distributed on all platforms, Spotify is still the best. Sure it doesn’t pay that well, but it does enable your songs to get discovered and played
This is incredibly off topic here considering the fact we’re mostly talking about Google and the company giving a market advantage to companies that could cut them some “deals”
Idk if Bandcamp is better, but there I buy my beloved albums with a big tip. The only thing I dislike is many artists default to PayPal for their merch. Ah, and they got owned by someone like Tencent or Epic?
Were owned by Epic then sold to Songtradr last month
Thanks. Did you hear how it affects users like us?
They are removing lots of the nice things they did like days when an the revenue goes to artists
As far as we know it’s business as usual but I would make sure to have a copy of everything I’ve bought if I were you, when a business gets passed around like that (and sold at a loss) it doesn’t bode well…
I’m doing great with xManager so I don’t give a flying fuck about this haha
So they don’t pay fees, they dont pay artist and they never made a Profit. But for some fucking reason are allowed to dictate the music industry.
For anyone reading this, that still uses Spotify, a big fuck you from the heart of an artist!!! You’re the reason that abominations like Spotify are able to continue…
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This will continue, as long as people dont stop using the products of this shitty companies. So yes, everybody who uses Spotify made the choice to give them their money, so that they can continue with this bs.
You can blame the Management or whoever as much as you want, but as long as you dont change your behaviour and stop using their products, they dont have a reason to stop.
So yes, its your fault too!
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