Way 1 is to say that x% of what you pay goes to the artists and that the streaming service takes the rest, no matter how many songs you play.
This makes no sense; this would cause a Taylor Swift fan that listens to her for hours on end, but also listens to other music sometimes, to pay less to Swift than somebody who just plays one Swift song per month and nothing else.
Way 2 is to pay a set amount per play, but make sure that the amount is low enough that if you play music for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the payouts are still less than what you paid for the service.
Most people don't listen to music for that long, so this makes artist payouts unrealistically low.
Way 3, which is what services actually do, is to have a much higher per-play rate and assume that users listen to n songs a month on average.
There will be some users who listen to a lot more, and you will take the loss on them, but by the law of large numbers, you will make an overall profit.
This is predicated on the fact that nobody "cheats" the service and misrepresents how much music they've been listening to. If you fraudulently tell Spotify that you've listened to your own songs 10m times this month, you make a lot of money.
> Way 3, which is what services actually do, is to have a much higher per-play rate and assume that users listen to n songs a month on average.
What's your source of this? I thought that all money is pooled, and then divided by total play statistics - i.e. actually numbers, not assumed values based on some guessing in advance as you suggest. That would make their business super risky. Imagine there's a holiday season and everyone listens double the usual amount. That could bankrupt a streaming company. Also, their incentives would be to discourage users of playing music, and we don't see any evidence of it.
> Way 1 is to say that x% of what you pay goes to the artists and that the streaming service takes the rest, no matter how many songs you play.
> This makes no sense; this would cause a Taylor Swift fan that listens to her for hours on end, but also listens to other music sometimes, to pay less to Swift than somebody who just plays one Swift song per month and nothing else.
This makes total sense for me as a consumer - I want my money to go exactly to the artists I'm listening to. I don't want any of my money to go to Taylor Swift or any other artist I don't care about. There are several benefits to this model:
- it would benefit small niche artists who have couple hundreds devoted fans. Maybe it would make it possible for some of them to live off the streaming, instead of getting pennies. It would reduce payouts to super starts, but I don't care about that since I'm the one who's paying and I vastly prefer that my money goes to who I want
- it would be inherently more fair than the existing model
- it would absolutely eliminate any kind of fraud as described here. You won't be able to invest $100 and receive $200 by manipulating numbers, you could only receive $100 - streaming fees
> Way 1 is to say that x% of what you pay goes to the artists and that the streaming service takes the rest, no matter how many songs you play.
> This makes no sense; this would cause a Taylor Swift fan that listens to her for hours on end, but also listens to other music sometimes, to pay less to Swift than somebody who just plays one Swift song per month and nothing else.
If I'm understanding the first quoted paragraph correctly, the second is not necessarily the result.
Say I'm paying $10/month to the streaming service and they pay $7/month to the artists no matter how much or how little I play.
Whether or not the second paragraph holds depends on how they distribute that $7/month among artists. They could for example take that $7, divide it by the number of songs I listened to that month, and pay each artist I listened to that amount times the number of their songs I listened to. In that case the result would be that your described.
Another way they could decide the value of a song is by taking the total amount they have to distribute, $7 x the number of subscribers, divided by the total number of songs listened to, and pay each artist that times the number of plays of their songs. Let's call that amount per play a share. In that case a person who only listens to one song a month and that song is a Swift song causes Swift to get one more share than She would have if they had not played any Swift songs. A person who listens to many Swift songs in a month causes here to get many more shares than she would have if they had listened to no Swift songs. The results is not what is described in your second paragraph.
afaik Spotify does none of those ways. They take the total amount of money earned per time period and divide it to artists based on the total_artist_playcount / total_playcount in that time period, after taking their own percentage cut. It's closest to Way 1, with the difference that you can listen to whatever - if Taylor Swift is the most popular artist right now and gets, say, 1% of all plays then 1% of your subscription will go to Swift.
> The fraudulent behaviour is on the part of the streamers.
He was also coordinating the botnet streamers. From the first sentence of the first paragraph of TFA:
> a scheme to create hundreds of thousands of songs with artificial intelligence and use automated programs called “bots” to stream the AI-generated songs billions of times.
On a completely unrelated note, I call for the repeal of the HN rule that forbids me from calling out commenters for having not read the first sentence of the first paragraph of the fine article.
rightbyte, your laziness contributes nothing to this forum and it would be better if you deleted your account. Your comment was bad and you should feel bad.
The fraudulent behaviour is on the part of the streamers. There should be no cross user account royalty dependecy.