Comment by j4nek
2 months ago
>I think we all know that Spotify doesn’t pay artists appropriately and we want to help sustain the music we love.
not a big fan of all music streaming services, but they only keep about 30% of their revenue. the rest goes to the labels, and this is where most of the problem is. before the 2000s, very small artists hardly earned any income from the sale of (physical) media. I don't like the new platforms such as Spotify, Tidal, etc. either – but this kind of discussion often just distracts from the mafia-like structure of the major labels.
This is part of the problem for sure, but it's also how the revenue is split between back catalog vs new music.
In the physical media era, when you bought a record/CD you owned it forever and your marginal cost of listening to a song approached zero over time. Most dollars went to new music.
Now, it's close to a 75/25 split of dollars going to back catalog vs new music on streaming services.
If you're a new musician, you're not competing against new music, you're competing against the entire history of recorded music. You're fighting for a piece of a pie that the Beatles are still taking a chunk of.
And the labels are a part of the problem there, they made the deals with the streaming services that allows back catalog to dominate.
This is a problem with all of copyright, not just music.
You need to let things become public domain so people can make new. You need it to be unprofitable to just keep selling the exact same bits in perpetuity.
This redistribution of revenues from new to old has also taken place in games: ~90% of time in games on PC is spent in games older than a year, ~50% in games 5+ years old like Fortnite, CoD, Roblox etc. Around half of revenues are 'free to play' [1]
This is why making a new game is probably a terrible idea... but hey, world is casino!
[1] https://newzoo.com/resources/trend-reports/the-pc-console-ga... and widely reported e.g. [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1je98mm/pc_gamers...
It’s labels plus the limited revenue available due to competition.
15$ or so just doesn’t reflect the work that goes into a month’s worth of music listening.