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Major Record Labels Keep 73% of Spotify Payouts
journovampire sends this report:
New record company figures out of France suggest that artists are being paid just 68 cents from every €9.99 monthly music streaming subscription – as major labels keep hold of 73% of payouts from the likes of Spotify. They’re followed by writers/publishers with a 16% share, and then artists – mostly paid by their labels – who get 11%.
mine, mine! ;)
It's the 'artist' that signed a contract with the company, so he/she knows what he/she gets or doesn't get..
An artist working for a record company is nothing more than a regular employee..
Cents is in USD.
Music artists have often received little from broadcasting. Historically, they've received the bulk of their money from live performances and merchandise. Most of that broadcast money goes to the studios, the producers, the managers, the studio, the songwriter, agents and lawyers. Singers (if they're not also songwriters) usually come dead last.
My understanding is that many new artists have come to realize this scam and are starting to avoid the major labels, using alternate channels of distribution instead. It may not sell as much music, but they get a much larger slice of the pie
Wouldn't the "they already got paid for their work" crowd be fine with this kind of arrangement? That's what pirates always say, right? Not that I would agree, of course.
You wouldn't steal an an artist's royalties.
You wouldn't dodge taxes
You wouldn't install a rootkit on a customer's computerl
But the Record industry would.
And just to get the joke out of the way, "You wouldn't shoot a policeman. And then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet. And then send it to the policeman's grieving widow. And then steal it again!"
Spotify explain their revenue-model and payout-model here.
"Major labels keep hold of 73% of payouts from the likes of Spotify."
The 73/16/11 split is of what Spotify pays the label, not what Spotify charges the user.
The 11% is out of the amount that Spotify pays the label, not the 9.99 that Spotify charges the user.
I thought this story was interesting, especially in light of the story a day or two ago about how there weren't any torrents for newly released music on TPB (with all the caveats that came with TFA). The barrier to entry for music production, or really, any kind of entertainment media, has been steadily dropping, to where the reproduction of the created content is almost effortless. Anyone can have a band in their garage and produce halfway decent sounding music, if they're willing to put the time and effort in to create something. A person can write and publish a novel electronically and do fairly well with it. The barrier to game production, in terms of financial outlays, is essentially gone. It's the same use of technology as a multiplier which enabled the information revolution in the first place, with the creation of the printing press. However, what all of those efforts don't have is a solid and pervasive marketing campaign behind them, and that's what a major artist for a major label is "buying" when they get a pittance out of their music being played someplace, or what a game studio or author gets when they are able to sign a deal with a publisher. Let's face it -- production costs are largely nil, but it's the ability to get the word out about something, and like them or hate them, this is what marketers do, and they don't work for cheap. I don't really see the situation going away -- they are a lot of people creating niche media, but there is still money to be made in mass market production. (yes, there are some things I haven't covered, such as the staggering cost of creating a movie or AAA game, and a need to make a profit on them, but I can paint with as broad a brush as I want on a comment board)
If they agreed a certain level of royalties from sales then that's what they'll get. If they sold the rights to the label outright, they'll get nothing at all. You can't make a contract then whine and bitch about it when you get exactly what you signed up to.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
And that's fine... for you.
Others make their living by abiding by licensing, or creating content under licence, and want things legitimately. I know this might be a shock to you, but people WILL pay for legitimate product.
Additionally, when the RIAA rock up to your house, see how far that explanation gets you in court. There's a reason most of the RIAA court cases resulted in settlements... people just decide the time and hassle costs too much to argue, let alone the costs of the music.
However, the same things were said back in my day - you can just record off the radio, you can just copy your friend's cassette, you can just do this or that. Music is still a multi-million dollar business.
Same with software. Same with lots of other things. But some people are honest and pay for things properly even if they're not FORCED to, and others are bright enough to not admit to copyright infringement on a website that will sell your details out in a second if a court asks them to.
Sure... "it'll never happen". And for the most part it won't. But every day some smartass who thought "it'll never happen" finds themselves in court.
P.S. in some IT industries, a personal civil case for copyright infringement would be enough to end a career on the spot for.
Oh, they weren't remotely the first. A really old example is the Comedian Harmonists, formed in 1928. It was assembled after a newspaper ad calling for auditions, and the plan was explicitly to create a German equivalent of a foreign group that had impressed the originator, namely The Revellers. That was exactly how Boyzone was formed too, only there the foreign group was Take That.
Village People was also formed after a newspaper ad and auditions. There, the purpose was maybe not so much to make a localized version, as a subculture-inspired twist on an established concept.
That's how Spice Girls were formed too, as an obvious twist on the well-established concept of a boy band. But they didn't succeed in the market they were formed to target, which was teenage boys! Luckily for them, they were surprised by the emerging market of pre-teenage girls.
All these bands were formed after ads and auditions, but some of them - perhaps the most deserving of being called "boy bands" - were formed by managers or other people who weren't themselves performers.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Why does any sensible person support these assholes? I sure as hell don't!
Except a mere performer isn't writing anything. Their contribution to the creative process is minimal.
They are not comparable to your average programmer.
They are more like someone that types in a program from a magazine.
The OP is rightly making an important distinction between actual artists and mere performers and you are trying to muddle it again with bad analogies.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I don't think the entire 9.99EUR goes to the labels for distirbution. Spotify needs to keep some of that in order to run their operations, and I can't imagine that's cheap.
Your "typing in a program from a magazine" analogy is completely flawed since two people typing in a program from a magazine will produce identical code. Two singers singing the same song will obviously not produce identical performances.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
> In the same way, are the musicians going to pay for that $10,000-a-day studio
According to the contract they will.
That's the kicker. Someone else said it. Label musicians are treated like employees when it comes to the masters but they are responsible for all of the production costs.
The label is little more than a specialty bank.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
According to the article, Spotify charges 2.08 Euro out of the 9.99.
They get as much penis as they want, in their choice of orifice as long as it's the ass! And they must like it like that, otherwise more of them would strike out on their own on the Internet and cut out the layers of parasitic middlemen between them and their listeners. Of course, then you don't have the vast marketing apparatus behind you and are relying on word of mouth to get around, but I'd be surprised if your garage band didn't get at least as much putting out an electronic tipjar on your youtube video as you would from a label, and way less penis. Well... you'd probably get takedown notices even if all your work was original, so there'd still be a fair amount of penis. Basically what I'm saying is you can't avoid penis in that industry.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
NoFX said it best live even
The government provided several services for the composers and recording artists. Examples of such services include protecting them from foreign invasion, maintaining the roads on which their supplies arrive, subsidizing their health care, operating courts of law to enforce their copyrights, operating space exploration programs to provide raw material for space metaphors in the lyrics, and more.
Unless you can prove collusion between those 5 companies
You can find evidence of collusion from just the fact that they belong to the record industry trade group IFPI and its national affiliates such as BPI and RIAA.
Companies are allowed monopolies over their own products
So if I write a song, how can I tell whether my song is my own product or whether it's an accidental copy of a substantial portion of someone else's song (the "substantial similarity" test)?
I see two recorded performances of a piece of music as closer to two implementations of the same RFC or the same ISO standard. The code will not be identical.
In fact, apple could probably buy the big labels outright out of pocket change.
Under such a strategy, Apple Inc. would probably first have to buy Apple Corps from Yoko, Paul, Olivia, and Ringo, in order to fulfill its contractual obligation to Apple Corps. Since February 2007, Apple Inc. owns the name "Apple" in both fields but exclusively licenses it to Apple Corps for the fields in which Apple Corps was operating at that time.
I've always thought it was interesting the way music worked out. It seems like the boy-band model works to attract female listeners, but most guys I know really don't care what the artist looks like. Sure Katy Perry may turn a few heads at the SuperBowl, but I don't know any guys who would go to her concerts or buy her music. In the same way, I know many women who would watch a movie just because a particular good looking actor was in it, regardless of the content. But most guys I know wouldn't go see a movie just because a certain actress is in it. Sure it's nice that there's good looking girls in Transformers, but we went to see the transformers and would have gone to see it even if there was no women in the entire movie. We wouldn't go see a romantic comedy with the same actress in it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The writers are also artists for a given work.
Publishers and labels? Not so much.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife