(One million Spotify listens - earning you the same income as selling 150 CDs - is a lofty enough target that Pink Floyd used it as a publicity stunt.)
For those catchy songs and the artists that made them it's good news. For the guys who made that concept album you only played four times but love deeply, it's the end of the line.
How does it only affect a few people on top? Suppose I'm in a garage band selling 150 copies of a 12-track album every month through iTunes, to people who've seen me play live. To make the same amount on Spotify I need to have 900,000 listens* per month. That's probably not going to happen.
*Spotify pays about 1/500 per play what iTunes does per purchase. Multiply the 500 plays you need, by 12 tracks, and by 150 copies.
That's exactly my point. iTunes rates are deplorable but a musician could count on making a few cents per person who liked their record enough to listen at home; now that listener has to be enthusiastic enough to listen to that track eight times a day for two months for the artist to make the same pittance. Revenues will go down for almost all artists, and the ones that aren't superstars - who don't have superfans listening to their single five hundred times - will get absolutely obliterated.
Most professional musicians do work all year round. Most of them aren't superstars, and losing all of their album income to streaming would be enough to force them into a desk job.
Interesting point. Radio ate into boy band sales more than it ate into indie or obscure records, levelling the playing field. Spotify cuts into both equally.
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.
(And to complete the thought, listening to an FM radio is so different that listening to the album that I will buy the album regardless. I might not, however, buy a CD if I can get it on demand from Spotify for free.)
Playing an album on the Spotify app, and playing an album off my MP3 library, are essentially identical from a user experience (moreso if I have Spotify Premium and have the album cached locally). Leaving the radio on all day and hoping the tracks I want to hear will be played is very different.
If Spotify was purely supplementary income that'd be accurate, but many people have stopped buying music in favour of buying streaming subscriptions, or simply putting up with adverts; if Spotify is replacing your album and singles income, then depending on how much your label is shafting you it could be quite a pay cut.
It was identified using data that was originally gathered in 2004-2009, but it was only found this year; it would appear that by convention the earliest data indicating its presence provides the discovery date, regardless of when the data was actually looked at.
The IAU uses "moon" and "natural satellite" synonymously, which in this context refers to any natural body in a bound orbit of Neptune. I'm not sure why you think a 20km rock would fail to meet that definition.
When your job is to protect universal human rights, being evil is inefficient. Never give a poltician the satisfaction of thinking "I'm evil, but I'm getting the job done".
Hey, at least you have some legal recourse under your constitution. If I'm reading US politicians' reassurances correctly, the NSA can do whatever the hell it likes with my data, and your local press will consider that perfectly fair.
(The third option is to get the US to respect the privacy of foreigners' internet traffic as it respects the traffic of its own citizens, but that's never going to happen.)
Let's face it, when the argument for leaving the US in charge was "they have stood up for internet freedom and neutrality", a failure like this was ultimately inevitable. I just don't think anyone expected it to be practically immediate. The choice now is whether to let nations establish their own internet authorities with their own goals, yielding the idea of the internet as a universal commons; or to create an ostensibly neutral overseer, something the UN is hideously inefficient at.
Slashdot Mirror
(One million Spotify listens - earning you the same income as selling 150 CDs - is a lofty enough target that Pink Floyd used it as a publicity stunt.)
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/121824-pink-floyd-catalogue-added-to-spotify-after-1-million-plays-of-wish-you-were-here
For those catchy songs and the artists that made them it's good news. For the guys who made that concept album you only played four times but love deeply, it's the end of the line.
From my perspective as a user they're interchangable. If one can replace the other as the way I listen to music, a comparison seems reasonable.
How does it only affect a few people on top? Suppose I'm in a garage band selling 150 copies of a 12-track album every month through iTunes, to people who've seen me play live. To make the same amount on Spotify I need to have 900,000 listens* per month. That's probably not going to happen.
*Spotify pays about 1/500 per play what iTunes does per purchase. Multiply the 500 plays you need, by 12 tracks, and by 150 copies.
That's exactly my point. iTunes rates are deplorable but a musician could count on making a few cents per person who liked their record enough to listen at home; now that listener has to be enthusiastic enough to listen to that track eight times a day for two months for the artist to make the same pittance. Revenues will go down for almost all artists, and the ones that aren't superstars - who don't have superfans listening to their single five hundred times - will get absolutely obliterated.
Most professional musicians do work all year round. Most of them aren't superstars, and losing all of their album income to streaming would be enough to force them into a desk job.
Interesting point. Radio ate into boy band sales more than it ate into indie or obscure records, levelling the playing field. Spotify cuts into both equally.
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.
Spotify limited you to 10 plays per track for a while back there. They rescinded that because it was unpopular with users.
(And to complete the thought, listening to an FM radio is so different that listening to the album that I will buy the album regardless. I might not, however, buy a CD if I can get it on demand from Spotify for free.)
Playing an album on the Spotify app, and playing an album off my MP3 library, are essentially identical from a user experience (moreso if I have Spotify Premium and have the album cached locally). Leaving the radio on all day and hoping the tracks I want to hear will be played is very different.
Which competitors? When it stepped onto the market the only equivalent I could see in the UK was Last.fm's premium service.
Unlike Spotify, radio didn't displace album sales; radio doesn't let me cue up whatever track I want, on demand.
If Spotify was purely supplementary income that'd be accurate, but many people have stopped buying music in favour of buying streaming subscriptions, or simply putting up with adverts; if Spotify is replacing your album and singles income, then depending on how much your label is shafting you it could be quite a pay cut.
I'm not sure what you mean by "vertically integrated" here. Can you elaborate on that?
That'd unlock the SIM card slot, I'm not sure what it would do for getting new software onto the device.
It was identified using data that was originally gathered in 2004-2009, but it was only found this year; it would appear that by convention the earliest data indicating its presence provides the discovery date, regardless of when the data was actually looked at.
The IAU uses "moon" and "natural satellite" synonymously, which in this context refers to any natural body in a bound orbit of Neptune. I'm not sure why you think a 20km rock would fail to meet that definition.
When your job is to protect universal human rights, being evil is inefficient. Never give a poltician the satisfaction of thinking "I'm evil, but I'm getting the job done".
Move as much of Yahoo out of the USA as possible so they can speak to their users freely. This is why the NSA's actions are a tragedy.
Hey, at least you have some legal recourse under your constitution. If I'm reading US politicians' reassurances correctly, the NSA can do whatever the hell it likes with my data, and your local press will consider that perfectly fair.
Oh, believe me, I appreciate Slashdot, I just like making that joke more.
"Below par"? What the hell version of Slashdot are you reading, and can I have some?
(The third option is to get the US to respect the privacy of foreigners' internet traffic as it respects the traffic of its own citizens, but that's never going to happen.)
Let's face it, when the argument for leaving the US in charge was "they have stood up for internet freedom and neutrality", a failure like this was ultimately inevitable. I just don't think anyone expected it to be practically immediate. The choice now is whether to let nations establish their own internet authorities with their own goals, yielding the idea of the internet as a universal commons; or to create an ostensibly neutral overseer, something the UN is hideously inefficient at.