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I ditched Spotify and set up my own music stack

(leshicodes.github.io)
275 points starkparker | 4 comments | 04 Sep 25 22:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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cortesoft ◴[04 Sep 25 23:21 UTC] No.45133347[source]▶
So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song?

In the old days, artists would join a label and put out an album. The artist would earn about 10% of sales or so (varies of course, but on average). So a $15 CD would earn an artist $1.50.

The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. So it would take about 300 streams of a song to earn the same amount as selling a CD used to make.

I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? There are many albums I own that I have listened to way more than 30 times, which is what it would take for a 10 song album to get 300 song 'streams'

Is that a fair compensation? Why or why not?

I think artists should be able to earn money from creating music, but I don't know how we decide how much they actually deserve if we aren't just going based on the price the market sets.

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newsclues ◴[04 Sep 25 23:24 UTC] No.45133369[source]▶
Does the record company make more money than the artist? That’s unfair to me.

The people making the art, should be paid the most.

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nomel ◴[04 Sep 25 23:31 UTC] No.45133417[source]▶
> The people making the art, should be paid the most.

Why? There's a fair market value for the art. There's also a fair real world cost* for distributing and advertising, set by the market (the people working those positions need to eat too). It's trivially easy to go negative, if you try to market something that isn't popular.

If it weren't a net benefit for the artist, they wouldn't go under a label, or stream on a certain platform. They're not being forced to. They do it because it results in more money in their pocket.

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1. don_quiquong ◴[05 Sep 25 02:49 UTC] No.45134548[source]▶
>There's a fair market value for the art

Fair ain't got nothing to do with it. Markets don't give a shit about 'fair'.

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2. somat ◴[05 Sep 25 07:14 UTC] No.45135810[source]▶
Too true. For clarification, unhinged "free market" is how you end up with capitalism, try the the same with the "fair market" you get communism.
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3. emsign ◴[05 Sep 25 08:05 UTC] No.45136151[source]▶
With unhinged free market you get monopolists and no free market.
4. nomel ◴[05 Sep 25 21:05 UTC] No.45143603[source]▶
Fair from the perspective of the person doing the work. I'm using the dictionary definition of "fair" here: A fair exchange is an interaction or agreement where both parties feel they are receiving something of equal value for what they give, resulting in satisfaction and balance rather than resentment or guilt. I'm not using the "living wage" definition, which is a phrase that's not related to the definition of the individual words that it uses.

If they didn't find the compensation fair, for their effort, they wouldn't do the work, and would do something else instead. You want to see positions that that are at the boundary of "fair"? They have incredibly high turnover rates, because people think "this isn't worth it" and quit. Where I am, fast food is a great example of this, where the companies weren't paying wages people wanted to work for, leading to unsustainable turnover, labor shortages, then pay increases.