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Radiohead's Thom Yorke Pulls Albums From Spotify In Protest of Low Royalties
First time accepted submitter rpopescu writes "Thom Yorke of Radiohead fame has pulled his solo album 'Eraser' (as well as music made as Atoms for Peace) from the music streaming service Spotify, as a protest at how much it pays the artists. Quote: '"Make no mistake. These are all the same old industry bods trying to get a stranglehold on the delivery system."'"
Reward the artist by going to see a show and buying some merch. Nothing else really gets back to them in any significant amounts.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Is this guy nuts? Who gets paid for their work? Just steal it from TPB or someplace else.
Pfft. Getting paid for their work. How quaint. Move into the 21st century!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I believe since the graphic was made, there has been extensive lobbying for royalties per play to be reduced from the figures shown in this picture. There's something to the original musician's case if it takes more than 4 million plays per month to get to one individual's *minimum wage* of $1160 per month (and that's with the *generous* current pay per play rate).
Technically I think that's pretty good, isn't it? Write some songs, receive residual income whilst you do nothing else for the rest of the delivery platforms life. Win win.
What none of these reports seem to show is any perspective on how much the delivery service (Pandora/Spotify) is making. (Raising IPO capital isn't exactly making a profit..)
If (without creative accounting) they're breaking even, then the artists are getting paid too much.
If they're running at a loss, then the artists are definitely getting paid too much.
If they're reaping in huge profits then the artists aren't getting paid enough.
That kind of transparency isn't available (or I haven't seen it).
Either way I'd quite like $5000 for work I did last year.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Spotify pays up. It's the labels that aren't sharing.
Internet streaming services shouldn't be expected to pay any more per head than any other form of "broadcast" out there. If you put all of this stuff out of business, you will have NO ONE to help promote the talent.
You'll be trapped in a vaccuum where no one can here you b*tch and moan and whine.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yes, but you must be forgetting the stringent editing process that all SlashDot articles have to go through.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Or listeners are paying too little. Or the CEO of ${MUSIC_STREAMING_SERVICE} is overpaid.
And no, if my paycheck for the last couple of weeks work were to be spread out over the remainder of my employer's lifetime as a few dollars a month, I wouldn't consider it a "good deal". People have to eat now.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Seems to me that the existing music business establishment is trying to devise an internet business models that will fuck over music creative types until the end of time.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Either way I'd quite like $5000 for work I did last year.
By "less than $5000" they don't mean "most make about $5000." A handful make $5000, a bunch make $500, the rest make $5 to $50. So enjoy the juicy hamburger you just bought with your earnings from last year.
http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/spotify-responds-to-thom-yorke-and-nigel-godrich-criticism/055383
Doesn't seem so bad. I think Thom Yorke is missing a step... spotify pays the LABELS. The LABELS obviously decided the royalties from spotify are enough... Perhaps the labels aren't paying artists enough...
Spotify's "basic" quality is Q5 Vorbis, which is roughly equivalent to VBR mp3 in the 192kbps range (only with better handling of edge cases than mp3). i.e. virtually transparent to most listeners on most equipment. Spotify's premium quality is Q9 vorbis, which is, well, complete overkill. Even more pointless than 320kbps cbr mp3.
Youtube's "basic" quality is shit. Youtube's premium quality is... is there even such a thing?
Don't misunderstand me, I find out about songs often though youtube, but then I go load the tune up on spotify to actually enjoy the music.
Unlike Spotify, radio didn't displace album sales; radio doesn't let me cue up whatever track I want, on demand.
radio also paid a lot to a small circle. a circle he was part of, but now nobody gives a shit so he is trying to be all "new artist"... it ends up being the natural progression that more artists are paid - but each is paid less and he is seemingly arguing this is unfair to new artists, while the only thing unfair to new artists in this new system is the labels and they were unfair to new artists before as well... if anything he should be promoting that you don't need a label. this only affects few people on the top though at all.. like 0.1% of performing artists are actually affected("ug" is _huge_ compared to top 40).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Spotify does not pay up. Labels an artists get about a 5:1 split of the payment from both iTunes and Spotify, but Spotify's payment per play is five hundred times smaller than iTunes payment per purchase. Unless each of your listeners hits that Spotify play button five hundred times, you don't make the same money by streaming.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
From memory Radiohead and NIN have both offered albums, available online where you can pay what you want for them, and both walked away with over $1million.
Unless there's some crazy contract shenanigans going on, I really don't see why some of the bigger artists don't pull a Valve and create their own content delivery platform that is fair for the artist, fair for the consumer and criticism free.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Technically I think that's pretty good, isn't it? Write some songs, receive residual income whilst you do nothing else for the rest of the delivery platforms life. Win win.
I think there are two issues with this kind of logic.
The first is counter to your argument - the residual income is essentially a big part of the total compensation. When I get paid at work to do a job, I get paid the full value of the job. I don't really have an expectation of residual income. Now imagine that I'm a software developer and I get paid a share of productivity savings over time - I get paid $10k up-front for six months of work, but then I get 30% of any efficiencies the company that bought the software realizes as a result of using my software. Then the company uses accounting games to undermeasure the savings. In a situation like this the residual income was promised as the major component of the total compensation.
On the other hand, I think that a statement that 90% of artists make less than $5000/yr is very misleading because of the way the payments tend to be distributed. With digital distribution there really is no barrier to getting your item listed. That means that I can probably play a few bars on a kazoo and put it up for sale, and maybe sell a few copies to relatives if I'm lucky. When the same service sells that alongside of a top-10 hit I don't think you can really talk about averages in any kind of meaningful way.
When you're trying to force your way as a supplier into an industry where supply already vastly exceeds demand, you should expect that to happen.
As a poster above indicated, if you could wipe all contemporary professional musicians and their music off the face of the earth, we'd still have more new music tomorrow. People make music because they love to make music, and that will always be the case. You actually don't have to have paid professionals to supply it. Much of the stuff produced by the paid professionals isn't even that good, and gets surpassed in quality by no-name indie bands a thousand times every week.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
You mean like Bandcamp? - Jasen.
According to the WSJ:
"In the United States...radio companies pay only songwriters and music publishers, not record companies. The system, dating back almost a century, is based on the idea that radio play has enough promotional value for performers that they do not also need to be paid royalties."
Yes, that's right - the actual performance of the song gets them NOTHING, NADA, ZILCH, not one thin dime. So if Clear Channel plays a Radiohead song on 200 radio stations 100 times in a month reaching (on average) 40,000 listeners per station, that's 800 Million listener-plays for absolutely $zero.
Remind me again why RadioHead is getting such a raw deal at $1000/4M plays, but $0 is just fine?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Like United Artists Corporation, now part of MGM.
By which I mean to say that endeavors that start like this wind up being "captured" over time by industry managers anyway. To keep that from happening you'd need some kind of clever artist-ownership arrangement, maybe a bit like the Vanguard Group or TIAA-CREF.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
> I'm so tired of reading "I help myself to all their stuff but I'll buy their merch". Quit being a freeloader.
"Stop listening to the radio you thieving scum!"
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sure, but in the case of the two mentioned, the members of Radiohead and Trent Reznor are all pretty adept at studio work, so there's a lot less spent hiring sound guys, producers, etc, when you can do it yourself. If you've got the money (which they do), then time/labor isn't really an issue either since you can rely on saved cash to get by while you do it your way. Not saying this will always be the case, but generally, if you can do it yourself at a fraction of the cost you would face going through an agency, you'd probably walk off in the black no problem (assuming too that your music is good and you can find a fanbase).