There have definitely been fluctuations in the perceived value of the medium between fans and industry. However, I feel it's a bit unfair to say an artist is ripping off their fans by asking them to pay $12 for a CD in 2014.
Agreed, it's only a rip-off if the CD sucks!
I'm not going to claim that I'm familiar with the financial nuances of the music industry. However, it seems unlikely that musicians could be making the same (see next comment).
With industry revenue down from the peak, and with piracy probably having some role in that, *someone* must be making less money (btw how did that anomalous peak become the standard anyway?!) But a lot of those "someones" are surely truck-drivers, plastic-manufacturers, CD-store-workers, property-taxing agencies, etc. Under the new methods, a far greater percentage of revenue goes to the music rights-holders than under the CD-regime. So it's entirely possible that labels and artists can be collectively making just as much as they did in the past, despite the lower total revenue.
I don't think this is true at all. Have you been on a Torrent site lately?
I admit that I have not (I'm the perfect example of "with Spotify, why bother?"), but your data points don't tell me anything about the time-varying change.
Here is an actual data-based analysis stating that file-sharing in 2014 is down to "only about 8% of daily Internet traffic in North America". It was nearly 33% in 2008, and 22% in 2011.
From what I can quickly Google, Spotify has 3 million U.S. customers. To suggest that if Spotify could grow itself 5,000% it would set the industry on par with what it once was, is a bit over the top (unless I missed something).
No, I wasn't suggesting anything about Spotify's actual growth. I was merely trying to illustrate that the revenue-per-user that Spotify generates for the music industry is quite reasonable. If Spotify *does* grow 5000%, then the music industry should be happy, because they're getting tons of revenue. If Spotify stays where its at, the music industry should be happy, because the small number of people using Spotify are providing reasonable per-user revenue, and everyone else is getting their music through other channels. For artists who are not happy with the money that they get from Spotify, it's not because Spotify pays poorly, it's because hardly anyone uses it, and thus, it cannot be a threat.
Personally, I'd prefer to see a Bandcamp model succeed that reduces the corporate tax as much as possible.
Even with iTunes, the "corporate tax" of 30% is much lower than under the label system, but yeah, Bandcamp's 15% is even lower.
If this model were to prevail, I wonder if it would influence songwriting. Might songs become shorter? Does SX's "The Odyssey" show up as one song or many?
Spotify is still fairly opaque about their payout formulas; it's really just "we have $X to pay out this month, so we'll divide it up proportionally based on listening" rather than a set rate of "we pay $0.00xxx per track-listen". So it's entirely possible that they factor time-spent-listening into their equations rather than (just) number-of-tracks-listened-to. That at least seems like it would be the ultimate in equitability, and easily determinable for them too.
But it seems like iTunes downloads would have already exerted any influence on songwriting here, since they've been around a lot longer, and, unlike Spotify, don't even have the potential to do time-based tracking. Generally, all tracks on an album get the same price regardless of length; they attempt to smooth this distortion (in a pretty arbitrary rough-justice kind of way) by making tracks over 10 minutes "album-only" tracks, and charging a standard price for a full album regardless of the number of tracks.
For the record, "The Odyssey" is a single 24 minute track on Spotify.
That said, my measurement for the success of a new model will always be largely based on how it compensates the artist.
Same here, I guess I'm just more skeptical than you are about artists' own opinions about how poorly-compensated they are. Most artists are pretty bad at math, and if they're younger, don't have a history to compare to, and if they're older, still don't have an "aging artist in the 1980s" to compare to an "aging artist in the 2010s".
So the only thing I can really trust is what I see around me, and what I see, and have seen for the decade-and-a-half that this Internet-related artist whining has been going on, is that there are just as many artists, songs, and concerts as there ever were before, if not more. When the deluge of new music starts slowing down, then I'll start considering that artists are getting insufficient compensation.
It also seems like a large percentage of Spotify's value lies in finding a way to get people to pay for old music. To follow your restaurant analogy, Spotify has discovered a way to get diners to pay a second time for a meal they ate twenty years ago.
Yeah, that's certainly a part of Spotify's value at the moment, but depending on the age of the user, and, as time goes on, the user is less likely to have even paid for the meal twenty years ago. In a Spotify-only world, there's no double-dipping, and any listening to old music just shifts money from new songs to old songs. That said, Spotify shows just as big of a "fuck you" to The Long Tail theory as everything else has: the top lists are still dominated by just-released pop songs.
