Kris Gildenlöw said it's €0.004 per stream - he got a royalty payment of €.16 recently, and apparently Daniel has a breakdown somewhere of all the miniscule payments that Pain of Salvation has received from Spotify. All I can find on an offhand search was this: http://www.painofsalvation.com/2011/back-on-spotify/ -- but I can ask Kris for more details when it's not 5am and I'm 10 minutes away from walking out the door!
Century Media suing BitTorrent users... Opinions???
- Thread starter TwizstedJesus
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Kris Gildenlöw said it's €0.004 per stream - he got a royalty payment of €.16 recently, and apparently Daniel has a breakdown somewhere of all the miniscule payments that Pain of Salvation has received from Spotify. All I can find on an offhand search was this: http://www.painofsalvation.com/2011/back-on-spotify/ -- but I can ask Kris for more details when it's not 5am and I'm 10 minutes away from walking out the door!
nailz
Member
No. It's a streaming service. You play the tracks over the internet. If you have a premium account, you can play them in "offline" mode, so you do download the songs, but you don't get the files to use whenever you want, or distribute.
And if a band sells 50,000 copies of a CD, they haven't recouped in almost every case, so they get no money from that either.
AeonicSlumber
srs
- Aug 14, 2008
- 4,893
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In this day and age, 50,000 CDs sold is profitable. The days of $500,000- $1 m records are long over. So actually, the artist would see money from that.
General Zod
Ruler of Australia
I gave up illeglly downloading music some time ago. For one, it is wrong and no justification changes that fact. Neither do I need the legal hassles associated with anti-piracy actions.
That said, Spotify is not the end all answer for people. With four phones to fund each month, I have no smartphone and cannot stream music with me wherever I go. Nor do I listen to music for enjoyment on the PC. I store music on the computer and ITunes Music Match but I rarely listen to music played over the computer. The vast majority of music I spin is off a first generation IPOD my son gave to me after he replaced it with an ITouch. No WiFi much less streaming internet.
I suspect there are many more people like me out there than there are people carting aorund smart phones and contracted with Spotify, Pandora, etc.
When I get in the mood to explore music (rather than enjoy it), I typically turn to Youtube but again, that does not really help me in terms of my daily activity with music.
One possible solution is to do what Valve does for games through its Steam distribution system. Periodically Steam offers insane discounts on games that encourage people to take chances, build name recognition, and keep people returning to browse (and sometimes pick up stuff at full price). ITunes could do that particularly well but there is no reason distributers and labels could not work wonders with such an approach. And yes, I know, Steam has its issues and drawacks but it promotes availability and actual purchasing.
That said, Spotify is not the end all answer for people. With four phones to fund each month, I have no smartphone and cannot stream music with me wherever I go. Nor do I listen to music for enjoyment on the PC. I store music on the computer and ITunes Music Match but I rarely listen to music played over the computer. The vast majority of music I spin is off a first generation IPOD my son gave to me after he replaced it with an ITouch. No WiFi much less streaming internet.
I suspect there are many more people like me out there than there are people carting aorund smart phones and contracted with Spotify, Pandora, etc.
When I get in the mood to explore music (rather than enjoy it), I typically turn to Youtube but again, that does not really help me in terms of my daily activity with music.
One possible solution is to do what Valve does for games through its Steam distribution system. Periodically Steam offers insane discounts on games that encourage people to take chances, build name recognition, and keep people returning to browse (and sometimes pick up stuff at full price). ITunes could do that particularly well but there is no reason distributers and labels could not work wonders with such an approach. And yes, I know, Steam has its issues and drawacks but it promotes availability and actual purchasing.
Urban breed
Member
About, umm, let's actually check... Litte over 5000 times what I get from Spotify. (Actual revenue and not rates.)
...Urban
Urban breed
Member
I shall try to be nice and decide that you simply chose to ignore this:
This means that I... Oh, wait... it already says it all. Whatever else I have to say in this matter can be deducted from that.
...Urban
AngraRULES
Member
Makes sense now, considering you didn't say much to begin with. But hey, if that's your choice on how to act about things, and your beliefs on the business as a whole, I respect it. At the end of the day, you don't know what tomorrow holds. Do I think CD sales will pick up again? Not really. But you just don't know the future. Just like some people thought Spotify was an innovative idea and "at least something," something else may come up tomorrow.
Now I have to ask, are you saying that just in regards to Spotify and album sales, or have you lost hope in the music business/metal scene? 'Cause you sure come across that way. I'm just being curious, mind you.
_Wes
StrangeBass
As an IT pro - I can assure you - they can find out. Point in case - I was in Germany, and a woman I worked with was telling the new guys (in country) to be sure to NOT download anything illegally. Her son dowloaded a single song - and the German Gov't sent her a letter detailing the offense (illegally downloading a copywrite protected item), the word "guilty" - and the fine, which, at the time (this was a couple years ago) was around 60.
Your IP address is unique - as is the MAC (Machine Acc... Ok, your computer's "Name" for lack of a better term). While an IP can be forged - it's not easy to do - and everything that comes over the internet can be logged. Yes, everything.
So why is the US not doing this? They are on the way. . . I think it has something to do with the right to privacy, I don't recall exactly.
skyrefuge
Member
It was reasonably accurate at the time it was created (almost 3 years ago), but in the intervening time, Spotify's payout amount has almost tripled.
If you're really curious about all this Spotify stuff, do a search on this forum for posts under my username containing 'Spotify'. I've done all the math and analysis and shown that Spotify is not nearly the threat that many math-challenged musicians think it is, and even has the potential to be a savior for the music industry. Here are a couple of informative posts:
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/progpower-usa/697525-spotify-launch-us-week.html#post9946731
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/progpower-usa/697525-spotify-launch-us-week.html#post9947184
In summary, I calculated a year ago that if someone listens to an album more than about 100 times on Spotify, the rights-holder will make *more* money than if that person had bought the CD. That was using the old figure of $0.0016 per stream in that chart. With the current figure of $0.005 per stream, it takes only 40 listens to an album for it to be more lucrative if streamed on Spotify rather than purchased on CD.
If artists feel like they aren't getting sufficient revenue from Spotify, the problem is not Spotify itself, it's that no one is listening to their music.
DuchessOfDork
Member
- Feb 9, 2009
- 2,235
- 1
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Well the IP address will tell you who downloads, sure, but can you also find out if that person also bought the album on a CD? Probably not. That's what I meant. There are some well-meaning people out there who download a version of an album they already own because maybe their CD broke, but you can't really tell that just by knowing they downloaded it.
AngraRULES
Member
I think, especially the last sentence, about sums up the issue with some of the arguments I was having earlier in this thread.
If people are INTERESTED in the music, if people LIKE the music, I'm sure they'll listen to it plenty on Spotify. It doesn't just take the music being ON the service.
nailz
Member
Your IP address can be spoofed quite easily, and private trackers are everywhere. Not only that, but nearly every home in America is using NAT over WiFi Routers. And while most of them are locked down, it's not exactly difficult to spoof a mac address or sniff packets for encryption codes.
edit: Beyond that, there's free/cheap VPN services that will also mask your IPs, and keep you anonymous. Simply put, if you don't want people to know who you are easily, there are ways to make yourself entirely too much of a hassle to track down.
Yes, your ISP IP address might be implicated in an upload of a torrent file containing copyrighted material, but lol good luck making that charge stick in court.
Most people who download don't know this, sure, but enough do. Also, many people don't realize that these companies aren't going after people who DOWNLOAD the stuff, just the people who're seeding the torrents.
nailz
Member
THANK YOU.
I mean, realisitically, we're basing the entire argument against Spotify in this thread on a genre that has a very niche market that doesn't do well in ANY form, and yet, all of these people are vilifying Spotify for not making them rich. This has struck me as incredibly odd the entire time.
Urban breed
Member
It's going to be OK for me. I just don't see why anyone that can so easily make money by convincing musicians their hard work is of almost no value should have any reason to stop doing so.
AngraRULES
Member
Glad to hear, as more and more you see bands disbanding and more and more musicians stop making music because of sales.
Urban breed
Member
I don't see it as a threat. Not at all. I see it as yet another statement to the effect of "You love music, you should play for free. Here, let me take that money for you."
What I strongly dislike is that I find my music, my hard work, being used--in many cases without even having the rights to do so. Most likely thinking that they do. Someone else is to blame here--and I really don't have the money to spend to stop this to make someone else money. It is funny how some things in a contract can be so conveniently overlooked when the other party has no means to do anything about it.
I would be fine with getting paid just the odd dollar if not for the fact that someone else is making actual money by using my music. If I had the money to enforce certain clauses in certain contracts I would make sure I didn't have to worry about it.
General Zod
Ruler of Australia
Thanks. Going to read them now.
Just to be clear, we're talking $0.005 per streamed song? So someone would need to listen to the entire album 40x? Assuming that's how the math works out, than the whole thing is somewhat ironic. Someone who has access to all the music Spotify offers, is far less likely to listen to a CD 40x, than a person who listens to their music via purchased CDs.
Well, they're certainly not listening the way they once did. For instance, I know my favorite discs of 2012, will not get played anywhere near as much as my favorite discs of 2002, and certainly no where near as much as my favorite discs of 1985.
skyrefuge
Member
Ah, so to be clear then, you're talking about your record label(s) making your music available on Spotify, and you don't really have an issue with Spotify itself?
When I do my calculations, I always use the payout figure that Spotify pays to the rights-holder of the music, whether that's a label or an independent artist. How the label decides to share that payout with an artist is opaque to me, is different in every case, and really has nothing to do with the is-Spotify-bad-for-music issue. That's just the age-old label-vs.-artist issue, which exists in similar form regardless of the medium.
For the record, Spotify has lost money every year of their existence, and over 70% of their revenue has gone straight to licensing fees to labels/artists, so *they* certainly aren't making money off your music (yet).
Finally, while music as a whole is quite valuable to society, simple economic laws involving supply and demand, combined with the 76,785 albums released in the US in 2011 (equivalent to 211 new albums every day), reveal that any single artist's work *is* of almost no value. In my mind, the smart and talented guys are the ones who have been able to convince us of the opposite and get us to pay as much as we have for the last 30 years.
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