• adhocfungus
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    2 days ago

    Is it 0.3 cents or 0.003 cents per play? I thought it was the latter, but the image above seems to show the former.

    • LwL@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      If it’s 0.3 cents (and google seems to agree it is) then it’s really not spotify’s fault, other than they could increase their prices or you could consider their business model bad.

      I’d estimate I listen to around 80 songs a day on average (through youtube music in my case), which comes out to 2400 songs a month. 0.3 cents per song would then be around 7 bucks total. Dunno how much it is in the US but a spotify premium subscription is 11€/month here. If I’m around average (which I would guess I am) that would leave around 4,50€/month for spotify to pay for everything else that the users existence costs.

      They seem to currently be making around 10% of their revenue in profits (after being in the red for years afaik). So i guess around 3,40€ of those pay for costs, 1,10€ is profit. If we throw all of that back to the artists, we’re not even rounding to the next fraction of a cent.

      And even though the ceo makes obscene amounts of money, giving all of that to the artists also won’t make a dent.

      Voluntary support of creators, through bandcamp or patreon or kofi or whatever (or more classically merch), seems to work for many (and i spend more on that than my yt music subscription). And honestly it will have to be the future (though afaik small artists never made a lot from record sales anyway bc the publisher took most of it). If music streaming gets much more expensive, people will probably just go back to pirating.

      Spotify has its issues but paying the artists more is simply not feasible as it stands. Unless it’s actually 0.003 cents in which case thats a joke.