this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 103 points 11 months ago (4 children)

And Spotify pass these savings onto the artists, right?

[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago (3 children)

In effect, yes. Given that ~70% of revenue goes to rights holders, making the amount of revenue bigger by not paying 30% of subscriptions to Google, the savings are passed on to rights holders.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

So, not exactly to the artists. I get the impression you seem to know quite a lot about the deal, can you try to analyze how this 70% gets divided?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/

It's net revenue split to rights holders according to the share of streams. If you have 1% of all streams on Spotify in a given time period, you get 0.7% of net revenue for that period.

How the rights holders distribute the money onward to the artists is not exactly transparent though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I suspected that much, it must be a complicated matter with many different cases, considering how music is produced. Thank you for your insight.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Any time.

To be clear, I don't think this should be taken as a defense of Spotify. I just think that these misconceptions distract from more valid criticisms.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Nah the savings are probably being mostly passed on to stock buybacks and executive salaries

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

...I mean, 30% of the savings go to Spotify, so some part of it will indeed go to stock buybacks and executive salaries. Some of it will go to regular employee salaries, and some of it will go to pay for technical infrastructure, and some of it will go to pay for offices. Some of it will be spent on marketing, even.

70% of it will go to rights holders, though.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Spotify announced stock buybacks in 2021 that were greater in total that they most likely will pay artists in that same timeframe. Doing so artificially depresses the the amount of their revenue that's counted as profit, which is what they use to calculate artist royalties.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/20/spotify-to-spend-1b-buying-its-own-stock/

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago

Again, not true - the royalty payments are based on revenue, not profit.

To understand how absurd the claim that royalty payments are based on profits is, consider that Spotify has had a grand total of two profitable quarters throughout its whole existence - are you seriously claiming that no artist ever got paid outside those two quarters?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

70% of revenue goes to rights holders.

Thus could mean that 69% of revenues go to rights holders A and B and 1% of revenues are spread between holders C - Z.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

According to this random site with no sources the ranking is: Napster, Tidal, Apple, YouTube Music, Deezer, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wonder where SoundCloud fits in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Pretty sure no one uses that for exclusives only because it will get so few plays

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Better be, but don't be optimistic as they are called capitalist. You know what they love and hate.