Is .00029 cents really money?

Date: December 9, 2011

Views: 2377

There is an interesting rant here on giving music away for free.

I'm not sure where it plays into our long-term brooding about music publishing and copyright, but it certainly relates to the discussion:

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) . . .

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. But from the blue-collar artist’s perspective, they’re not receiving any meaningful payment (there’s little discernible difference between $0.00029 and $0.00) and they are learning nothing about their fans, not to mention that music readily available on Spotify for little to no payment completely poaches the record sales upon which middle-class musicians are depending for survival (which is why I will withhold any new releases from Spotify in the future).

A hat tip to former student Peter Haley who pointed me to the page.

David Topping on December 9, 2011 7:04am

No, .00029 cents most certainly isn't "money" and this is perhaps one of the reasons that many artists and labels are not as thrilled with Spotify as are the people who use the service to avoid purchasing music (disclaimer: I downloaded Spotify and have used it a little, mostly researching what's available on it). Here's a story from Digital Music News about this issue:

Study: Spotify Is Detrimental to Music Purchasing

and a link to study announcement:

NARM and The NPD Group Unveil Results of Research Report on Consumers and Music Discovery

and a related story about labels withdrawing from Spotify:

200+ Labels Withdraw Their Music From Spotify: Are Its Fortunes Unravelling?

Chandos, the major classical label that features the Phoenix Chorale (I sing in PhoCho), withdrew its content from Spotify a long time ago due to problems with Spotify's business model (I think--I'm not finding details at the moment). I think that services like Spotify are being treated much like a radio station, in terms of the level royalty payments, but there's a major difference between being able to pull up a song "on demand" (which you can do in Spotify) and streaming random songs from a particular genre, in the true sense of the way radio stations have traditionally worked, makes Spotify a place where people can more easily grab songs instead of purchasing them, something that wasn't done as frequently from radio stations, so Spotify should be paying artists (and their labels) much more, IMO.

In my brief use of Spotify (the free version), I've found the advertising to be extremely annoying, specifically the loud audio "upsell" ads for the paying version. YMMV.