I ditched Spotify and set up my own music stack

Without giving specific numbers, I think the following situation is inherently unfair:

I pay Spotify $20. They take their cut (say, 50%) and there's $10 left for the artists. I've only listened to one small artist throughout the entire month. The artist does not get $10 but much less despite Spotify knowing precisely which artists I listened to.

They on average pass approximately 70% on, but the record labels also eat heavily into that before the artists get their share.

I'm reminded of an effort a few years ago to legislate the creators getting 50% - which of course meant the "platforms" and the "labels" would collectively share only the other 50%. Which is presumably why the initiative failed.

> The three major labels - Sony, Universal and Warner Music - faced some of the toughest questioning of the inquiry, and were accused of a "lack of clarity" by MPs.

> They largely argued to maintain the status quo, saying any disruption could damage investment in new music, and resisted the idea that streaming was comparable to radio - where artists receive a 50/50 royalty split.

> "It is a narrow-margin business, so it wouldn't actually take that much to upset the so-called apple cart," said Apple Music's Elena Segal.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473

These days Spotify has hundreds of millions for Joe Rogan and podcast investments, and Apple reports a 75% profit margin on services, so I guess it is quite profitable for everyone except the actual artists.

shameless plug:

SoundCloud implements a "fan powered royalties" model, so that $10 in your example goes to those who artists who you stream

https://community.soundcloud.com/fanpoweredroyalties

There's just one problem with your model. There's no royalty difference between a Spotify subscriber playing one song vs 1000 songs if it's just % of subscriber's listening time. Someone who gets more plays by absolute numbers is going to be upset when they don't get a proportionate amount of money. The only way to make more money on Spotify is to get more fans and/or convince your existing fans to listen to fewer artists.

This is a popular HN suggestion for disbursement but it makes the math super weird.

I have often thought this method made more sense. It should not be total revenue / total streams, it should be what a single person pays going to exactly what they listen to.

It isn’t fair that someone who listens to a ton of things has a much greater say in how the money is distributed even though they pay the same as someone who only listens to one artist.

indeed - record company exec salaries don't come out of the ether, that's money that could otherwise go in the artists' pockets

By that logic the most fair would be pay per play for every song, with some fraction to the artist. But subscribers really like the single payment for unlimited plays model.

This isn't likely to happen or change, but what if subscribers were instead billed by usage? If you streamed 24 hours a day for the whole month, that could round out to $10 a month, but if less, then simply a proportional percentage.

Spotify would never forgo current profits from flat monthly plans, but then why shouldn't artists be granted the same advantages in royalties proportional to a subscriber's ratio of playtime if the subscribers are charged a flat rate any how?

Apple Music is a miniscule part of service revenue compared to App Store, payments from Google ($20 Billion a year), AppleCare, etc.

I just found out Spotify is $20? In my country it's less than $3. Why the huge pricing difference.

It usually comes down to cost of living in the county.

If I pay Spotify $20 and listen to one song one, surely they don't send that artist $14...

Speaking of Spotify, they apparently just updated their Terms of Use as of September 3, 2025, effective September 26, 2025. From the email I received:

> We have clarified that you may only access the version of the Spotify service available where you live at the applicable price set for that version of the service.

> We have clarified how we bill you for subscriptions and how subscriptions may be canceled.

> We have provided more information about different ways in which content may be posted or shared on the platform.

> We have also provided more information about our content policies and practices, and our personalized recommendations.

> We have included links to important user policies and guidelines for your ease of reference.

> We are making some updates to the arbitration agreement.

Found some more discussion of pricing issues:

https://old.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/comments/1n4x58f/spoti...

And this change was not called out in the email, but seems interesting to note:

https://musictechpolicy.com/2025/09/02/ai-implications-of-sp...

The record company representing that one artist also does not get $7 of the $10.

It would just mean your total fixed subscription cost is apportioned across all of the artists you play in the month in proportion. It’s not an extremely difficult calculation.

YouTube have done the same with the Premium subscription. From the email I received:

> We are updating the Terms of Service for YouTube Premium, YouTube Music Premium and YouTube Premium Lite subscriptions ('Terms'). These new Terms will be included in the YouTube Paid Service Terms of Service and will come into effect on September 26, 2025.

> We are making these changes to improve clarity and transparency regarding your subscription, including:

    Clarifying our plan types.
    Explaining our policies on promotional offers and accepted payment methods.
    Clarifying that your subscription access should be predominantly from the country where you signed up.
    Providing additional explanations and clarifications on our subscription policies.

I believe that the date may be the end of Q3 for the financial year, if I had to guess, which might explain the similar moves by both parties, though I'll admit that I'm speculating on that point. There's a lot of overlap in vested interests on Spotify and YouTube, when it comes to music especially.

They don’t. What happens is that your listen is pooled with all listens of all songs, and every payout the artist/label gets a check for the percentage of that total listening pool. For small artists that have relatively few listens, they don’t get almost any money.

So it doesn’t matter if Spotify passes on 70%, most artists aren’t going to see any substantial portion of that, label or not.

Yeah that would work, but then the more you listen the less each artist gets per stream. Which is less fair to the artists, especially for subscribers who listen to a wide range of artists.

Whether that is the most ‘fair’ method or not, a pay per play model wouldn’t be the best for either listeners, artists, or streaming company.

There is always this challenge for creating a business model around digital goods; there is a non-zero cost to create the good, but there is a near zero cost per unit of the good.

No one is going to want a pay per listen model. The heaviest users aren’t going to want to pay that much and will likely turn to piracy, and the lightest users don’t have that strong a desire to listen to music (as demonstrated by their light usage) to want to pay for each stream.

The advantage of a single price, all you can stream, model is that it generates revenue for artists AND it properly recognizes the fact that each stream has a near zero unit cost.

In my model, each listener generates a fixed revenue that is divided up amongst all the artists who create something that user listens to in the same proportion that they listen to it.

Why is it less fair? The artist gets less revenue per stream, but it doesn’t cost the artist more per stream, and they are earning the revenue per user.

For example, let’s imagine a subscription service with just two users, paying $10 a month and each only listens to a single artist. The first user listens to their favorite album once a day, while the second user listens to their favorite album 9 times a day.

Would it be fair for the artist the first person listens to to only earn $2 while the other artist earns $18? Why should the money spent by the fan of Artist A be used to subsidize the support of artist B, even though they never listen to their stream?

This quirk of “divide by total streams” instead of “divide each users subscription by their particular stream” has lead to a type of fraud where someone will submit a song to Spotify, then create thousands of accounts that just listen to that song 24/7. Those 24/7 listening accounts have unfair say in who gets paid, so much so that you can make more than the subscription price just by having that user stream your songs.

I guess it's time to cancel my youtube premium sub since it's US-based but I no longer live there and it's not available where I live now.

Right, and before you even get into password sharing you have stuff like this: Apple Family Plan: Costs $25.95 per month, includes Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 200GB of iCloud+ storage, and allows sharing with up to five other people

So $5.20/mo per head and you get TV, games and storage with it.

Or Spotify Family Plan - 6 Premium accounts for family members under one roof. $11.49/month

So family plans seem to discount unlimited music streaming down to $2/mo per head.

$24/year or what a single CD used to cost, before even doubling it for inflation..