Major Record Labels Keep 73% of Spotify Payouts 157
journovampire sends this report:
New record company figures out of France suggest that artists are being paid just 68 cents from every €9.99 monthly music streaming subscription – as major labels keep hold of 73% of payouts from the likes of Spotify. They’re followed by writers/publishers with a 16% share, and then artists – mostly paid by their labels – who get 11%.
First grab (Score:3, Funny)
mine, mine! ;)
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Lot of obfuscation in the article... For every 10 euro monthly subscription:
Spotify gets ?
Label gets ?
Aritst gets ?
Writer/publisher gets ?
What are the pre-tax amounts in each of these cases (don't care about the post-tax numbers)?
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Reading comprehension is important (Score:3)
"Major labels keep hold of 73% of payouts from the likes of Spotify."
The 73/16/11 split is of what Spotify pays the label, not what Spotify charges the user.
Re:Reading comprehension is important (Score:4)
Sure, but the artist keeps 100% of the label's payout to the artist.
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The label has to do all the hard accounting work. It takes real effort to rip off everyone they know.
And don't forget, the major labels also own a significant share of Spotify, so they get a cut of what Spotify keeps as well.
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"Keep anything" of what?
This is the split of what Spotify pays out, not what users and advertisers pay in to Spotify.
Re:First grab (Score:5, Informative)
It's written plain as day in the article, on the SNEP chart.
For every 9.99€ monthly subscription:
Spotify or other streaming platforms ("Plateformes") get 2.08€
Labels ("Producteurs") get 4.56€
Performers (or artists) ("Artistes interprètes") get 0.68€
Composers and writers ("Auteurs compositeurs éditeurs") get 1€
And VAT is 1.67€
Profit, pre-tax, is as follows:
Composers and writers ("Auteurs compositeurs éditeurs"): 0.6€
Performer (or artists) ("Artistes interprètes"): 0.68€
Labels ("Producteurs"): 0.26€*
Platforms: 0.1€*
*Net profit margin estimated at 5% of revenue.
But if you read the rest of the study, you'll see streaming represents 55% of digital music revenue in France in 2014 (16% total revenue for the industry).
The music industry market is tanking a bit says the study, but the royalty payouts are stable.
You'll find the full study here [snepmusique.com].
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I don't understand this analysis. Why are you showing "profit" as being equal to gross for some stakeholders (Composers, writers, performers), but as only 5% of gross for others (labels and platforms)? And, furthermore, what's up with "estimating" the profit margin at a single number, and then applying that same number to two very different operations (labels vs. platforms)? That looks quite strange.
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I don't understand this analysis. Why are you showing "profit" as being equal to gross for some stakeholders (Composers, writers, performers), but as only 5% of gross for others (labels and platforms)? And, furthermore, what's up with "estimating" the profit margin at a single number, and then applying that same number to two very different operations (labels vs. platforms)? That looks quite strange.
The whole focus on "share of profit" in this scenario is one big misdirection. It is of no interest what profit record labels have if their cost level is out of control vs their income and value. The record labels need to seriously adapt their cost levels to a new reality. They've had an extreme golden age in the decades of the CD, but now reality is different, as it was before.
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If they're worried about their gravy train drying up, tough shit. No one should be obligated to keep paying them money for services that aren't ne
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They're not my numbers! I just happen to speak French, I translated the graphs as they were created by SNEP.
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So the govt, which did not write a single note, nor sing a tune, makes the same amount as the hard working artists on just the pseudo sales tax. It's ridiculous that the people responsible for the actual work are getting paid peanuts, while the "platform providers and distributors" (govt, labels, web radio companies) make the lion's share of a
Services provided by governments (Score:2)
The government provided several services for the composers and recording artists. Examples of such services include protecting them from foreign invasion, maintaining the roads on which their supplies arrive, subsidizing their health care, operating courts of law to enforce their copyrights, operating space exploration programs to provide raw material for space metaphors in the lyrics, and more.
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so? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the 'artist' that signed a contract with the company, so he/she knows what he/she gets or doesn't get..
An artist working for a record company is nothing more than a regular employee..
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The point of articles like this is to raise awareness so that artists are more aware of what they're getting into before they sign, so that they negotiate better and might refuse offers if that's in their best interest. It's tragic, but too many musicians fall into the trap unaware what it will cost them.
Re:so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that it informs the citizens who the labels have repeatedly told that they are charging these fees and getting tough on infringement for the benefit of the artists.
Re:so? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that's similar to raising awareness among burger flippers so that they negotiate better and refuse offers if necessary. If you want to get your first record deal, then you will have to accept pretty much anything. There are thousands of equally eager and talented musicians round the corner who don't ask such nasty questions. Guess who will get signed in the end?
Also, note that the reported sums are averages. This means that a handful of top artists actually get a decent cut, while the huge majority of artists actually gets nothing because they first have to pay back the label for recording costs, marketing, any advances the artists have received, etc.
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Before an artist signs they're usually a nobody who is looking at a future of singing in shitty bars and clubs for a living. It's the major studio that turns them into a star, and, as such, they get a BIG cut of the $ for it. Seems fair to me.
"You can sign with us and we'll do your PR, get you professional studio time, get you played on every venue, get you on talk shows, etc. And for that we take 90% of the money, but the 10% you get will still make you into a multimillionaire. OR, alternatively, you can k
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It's not that artists are unaware, but that they have poor bargaining positions. When they have attained some fame, their bargaining position improves somewhat, but the labels will be pushing for the best new thing.
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mcd employee does only what the company says.
however, finding interesting successful artists is pretty hard actually.
though, if the artist is bringing nothing to the table then perhaps he should just get 1%. if all the music is label arranged and the label arranges the producers, composers etc then why wouldn't the label be the one getting the profits..
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My brother has partnership with an indie label they provide advertising magazine and radio, a radio campaign [plays that are counted for charting], digital sales [50/50 split], help them find sponsors and get interviews with magazines and on the radio [some booking not included]. The band handles all artistic aspects, composition, production, recording, booking, tour, video production, physical media, merchandising, associated cost. The band holds copyright of all their music and art work, they only give t
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The point of articles like this is to raise awareness so that artists are more aware of what they're getting into before they sign, so that they negotiate better and might refuse offers if that's in their best interest.
Or the record company just tells them to take a hike and select the next artist in the line. You can't go for a walk without stumbling over wannabe artists, it's a surprise they get paid at all. Filling the position of an artist is easier than filling a position at McDonalds. You can't really expect to be paid more during those circumstances.
The average McEmployee does not have the potential to generate millions in revenue.
McDonald's CEO barely has that potential, so no, not really like an artist when it comes to monetary expectations. If I'm a good artist, I'm providing a hell of a lot more than asking if you want fries with that.
The only way your mcpopstar can make a millions in revenue is with millions in advertising. What would you guess is the percentage of artists that generate millions+ to the overall pool of 'artists' signed or unsigned? Not very high at all I'd wager and the ones which can do it don't need the labels. More than ever in these internet self publication days.
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Nice troll (mostly correct, but omit an important fact to come up with an incorrect conclusion).
In this case, you forgot that the *labels* don't know who will become a big hit, and there's no requirement that there be any big hitters at all. Indeed, promotion and marketing are necessary, but they are not sufficient.
This means that once artists have reached a certain level, the negotiation power is rather more equal. Sure, the label can stop promoting them, but there's no guarantee that the label can repla
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Of course, for low mid-list and below, you are quite correct. Given the labels inability to determine who has earning potential, artists are effectively interchangeable.
I was going to disput this, but it seems quite easy to "make" a star nowadays. Just consider some of the pop artists that are popular nowadays. Taylor Swift and Katy Perry have incredibly narrow vocal ranges [huffingtonpost.com], and without makeup they look like like completely average schlubs. And yet they have been promoted and marketed to the point where that doesn't matter at all. Hire the top songwriters and lyricists, add a bit of autotune, add makeup with a garden trowel, and you have yourself a star. I think the b
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I can assure you that if the labels could "manufacture" success, they would do it a lot more. There's no quota system, and it's only slightly zero sum. (If it was zero sum, the music industry would be doing *much* better right now.)
After all, the labels do *lose* money on probably 80-90% of those they pick up. If they could manufacture just the successes, they'd drop the rest. It would be like a book publisher trying to only publishing best-sellers. Remember, we don't notice the artists that the labels
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There was a reason that anti-monopoly and anti-oligopoly legislation was created. The idea is that if one participant in he market is stronger than everybody else and can impose conditions, the 'free' in 'free market' is gone, and the outcome is bad for everyone except the monopolist. This is especially true in markets where the monopoly isn't natural, but bestowed by a law, like the copyrights. The logic is also true for monopsonies, i.e. buyers' markets.
Too bad that the government doesn't sue large corpo
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Companies are allowed monopolies over their own products, and no one label actually dominates the music industry - plus the barrier to entry to releasing your own music is very very very low.
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Yes, yes there is. Unless you can prove collusion between those 5 companies, then the market is working. It might not be doing what *you* want it to do, but it is working.
IFPI (Score:2)
Unless you can prove collusion between those 5 companies
You can find evidence of collusion from just the fact that they belong to the record industry trade group IFPI and its national affiliates such as BPI and RIAA.
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I guess it all depends on whether RIAA has acted in restraint of trade. What's the best evidence either way for this?
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Ostensibly it has to support the creators
Well, actually it only has to support what passes for creators to the extent required to make their business model work. As long as there is a sufficient market for the products they're churning out, the status quo will remain.
Re:so? (Score:4, Interesting)
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A cartel implies collusion - got any evidence of that going on?
At the end of the day, music is rarely something you can replace 1:1 with another, similar product. You either like song A or song B (or both), but you cant replace song A with song B if you don't like song B. Same goes for artists, TV series, movies etc etc etc.
So competition in these areas is very very difficult - a label either has the artist, or they don't. And the label has the artist by virtue of the contract that artist willingly signe
Re:so? (Score:5, Insightful)
A cartel implies collusion - got any evidence of that going on?
Yup. They even named it themselves: The RIAA.
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That doesn't imply collusion, any more than unions do.
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Are you implying unions aren't a form of collusion? Just because the way the laws are written excludes their activities doesn't mean they aren't colluding.
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Haven't you ever noticed that despite the fact oligar
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With no market with just a few players there doesn't have to be collusion.
The supplier makes up the price, demand, and quantity. You have no say in it. This is why during the Great Recession a few years ago you saw software engineers happily taking $40,000 a year. With so many out of work software engineers and a wife ready to leave, repo men in the driveway waiting for you to leave, and the bank threatening to take your home you will do ANYTHING and work at ANY price.
Likewise in 1999 you commonly saw soft
Accidental infringement of copyright (Score:2)
Companies are allowed monopolies over their own products
So if I write a song, how can I tell whether my song is my own product or whether it's an accidental copy of a substantial portion of someone else's song (the "substantial similarity" test)?
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Imagine now there are only 3 major employers in your country (hypothetical situation here).
You have your skills. They all say you can't get paid or work for them unless you sign a contract. The contract stipulates $10/hr for your skilled labor, but performance may get you up to $30k a year.
You have a family to feed so you accept the meager salary as both other employers charge the same through agreements to keep the price low so the CEO and shareholders take your profits.
Now they say whoops that doesn't cou
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Except a mere performer isn't writing anything. Their contribution to the creative process is minimal.
They are not comparable to your average programmer.
They are more like someone that types in a program from a magazine.
The OP is rightly making an important distinction between actual artists and mere performers and you are trying to muddle it again with bad analogies.
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Your "typing in a program from a magazine" analogy is completely flawed since two people typing in a program from a magazine will produce identical code. Two singers singing the same song will obviously not produce identical performances.
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I see two recorded performances of a piece of music as closer to two implementations of the same RFC or the same ISO standard. The code will not be identical.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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personally I find it somewhat insulting calling many of them artists. yes without a doubt many have a gifted voice or work hard to produce excellent sounds, but they aren't artists. The artists are those that actually write the songs and the music (yes sometimes that is also the singer, but that seems to be a rarity nowadays). most singers are little more than performing puppets.
Re:Artists often get little (Score:5, Funny)
Note that the word "artist" usually refers to the autotune operator, not the singer.
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Oh, they weren't remotely the first. A really old example is the Comedian Harmonists, formed in 1928. It was assembled after a newspaper ad calling for auditions, and the plan was explicitly to create a German equivalent of a foreign group that had impressed the originator, namely The Revellers. That was exactly how Boyzone was formed too, only th
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Apple v. Apple (Score:2)
In fact, apple could probably buy the big labels outright out of pocket change.
Under such a strategy, Apple Inc. would probably first have to buy Apple Corps from Yoko, Paul, Olivia, and Ringo, in order to fulfill its contractual obligation to Apple Corps. Since February 2007 [wikipedia.org], Apple Inc. owns the name "Apple" in both fields but exclusively licenses it to Apple Corps for the fields in which Apple Corps was operating at that time.
Re:Artists often get little (Score:5, Insightful)
personally I find it somewhat insulting calling many of them artists. yes without a doubt many have a gifted voice or work hard to produce excellent sounds, but they aren't artists. The artists are those that actually write the songs and the music (yes sometimes that is also the singer, but that seems to be a rarity nowadays). most singers are little more than performing puppets.
Those that can do. Those that can't, teach. Those that can't do or teach, become critics. Performing is an art, no matter how bitter you are.
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It's more of a skill, and a little bit of art. Composing the melody and writing the lyrics is majority of the artiness of any song.
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In comedy, delivery is everything
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Tell that to any successful comedian.
In comedy, delivery is everything
I'd say the joke is important, too. A bad joke is a bad joke, regardless of delivery. Both are equally important.
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No. A bad joke delivered with the right "this joke is completely terrible and you and I both know it"-attitude is effective metahumor.
But the joke is still bad, and the humor in telling it is situational, depends heavily on the audience, and takes a masterful comedian to pull off.
A good joke, on the other hand, is funny in almost any situation, to almost any audience, and even a bad comedian can tell it well enough to get a laugh.
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Oh, the vast majority of music scores and poetry would benefit from the makers thinking of it more as skill, and less as art,
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personally I find it somewhat insulting calling many of them artists. yes without a doubt many have a gifted voice or work hard to produce excellent sounds, but they aren't artists. The artists are those that actually write the songs and the music (yes sometimes that is also the singer, but that seems to be a rarity nowadays). most singers are little more than performing puppets.
Performing puppets, eh?
So, I'm curious, do you feel Jim Henson is an artist, or is he just some hack who performs with puppets on stage?
The artist is what is represented in voice and on stage. Many artists have VERY unique voices, and they also have VERY unique tastes. It's not the song itself that makes art. It's the entire presentation.
If we can't call entertainment sprayed all over the stage in a visual orgasm art, then I don't know what the hell we're doing labeling people who slap paint on a canvas
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I agree with your point, but Jim Henson was also an writer, and if you ask me a highly original and talented one. The actual performance with the puppets was a small thing of what he made.
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The performer is just as important as the composer for a good music, I dont know from which planet you came to think such nonsense.
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This one.
Those that don't have enough talent to actually create are actually the ones that can be completely taken out of the equation. This is especially true for modern forms of music that aren't dependent on large backing bands full of relatively mediocre performers.
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The performer is just as important as the composer for a good music
The guy who cleans the blocked sewer pipe is also just as important. Doesn't mean he's an artist.
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"personally I find it somewhat insulting calling many of them artists. yes without a doubt many have a gifted voice or work hard to produce excellent sounds, but they aren't artists." The performer is just as important as the composer for a good music, I dont know from which planet you came to think such nonsense.
Where in that quoted section does he say the performer is not as important? He said they weren't the artist. Bit of a difference there.
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Most of that broadcast money goes to the studios, the producers, the managers, the studio, the songwriter, agents and lawyers. Singers (if they're not also songwriters) usually come dead last.
Looks like the studios are double-dipping.
Not True! (Score:2)
"The payment was already done" (Score:2)
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"they already got paid for their work" [..] That's what pirates always say, right?
More and more artist starting from 2004-2010 have produced their own content with little investment from music companies and might not have gotten paid at all by the record company. Many times they get an small advance that is paid of by the royalties, until that advance is paid off they receive no further money. That's going to take a long time if all artists on streaming services have to split 68 cents per month and user.
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More and more artist starting from 2004-2010 have produced their own content with little investment from music companies and might not have gotten paid at all by the record company.
Then it is an investment from their own pocket and they certainly want to recoup it with sales.
You wouldn't steal... (Score:5, Insightful)
You wouldn't dodge taxes [linkedin.com]
You wouldn't install a rootkit on a customer's computerl
But the Record industry would.
And just to get the joke out of the way, "You wouldn't shoot a policeman. And then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet. And then send it to the policeman's grieving widow. And then steal it again!"
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Well, of course not. What kind of sick fuck would steal a helmet full of shit?
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Busta Rhymes is still looking for his flow, which was apparently stolen shortly before his song "Woo Hah" came out.
See also "Spotify Artists" page (Score:4, Informative)
Spotify explain their revenue-model and payout-model here [spotifyartists.com].
Changing Dynamics of Entertainment (Score:3)
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The fact that it's marketing droids making the difference explains why 99% of modern "music" all sounds the same to me. There is no room for creativity and art in the corporate board rooms where the decisions to make or break a musician are made; no, what matters there is the statistics of market share.
That's not to say there weren't a lot of "sound alike" bands in my younger days, but there sure did seem to be more variety of style for those who broke out of the mold of their times.
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All about the contract. (Score:2)
Re:All about the contract. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, one can point out that the record companies have been pushing predatory contracts on artists for decades, and giving them little choice.
Seriously, if the *AAs are going to heavily run this "listening is theft" crap campaign and then keep all of the damned money .. then as much as it screws the artists even more, it's almost a moral imperative to rip off the record companies even more.
The theft is by major corporations who act like they've done something to earn this money and should be earning it in perpetuity.
And one of the problems with these contracts is at the time they were signed nobody had even THOUGHT of how the royalties for streaming would work -- or thought of streaming at all in many cases. The record companies defined that to be the one which gets the artists the least possible money.
Essentially the record companies have stacked the deck so badly that the game is unwinnable.
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I'm not at all saying that it is ethical, but it certainly has been proven to be a good business model. You may not like what the record industries do (who does?), but to say that they haven't done anything to earn the money is kind of naive. They function very similarly to a bank. If you don't like how they operate, go elsewhere. But the matter of fact is t
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This. The record companies are in the VC business - they make a lot of small bets on artists and hope for the 100x payoff, since they really don't know which of the flakes they've signed is going to hit big. That being said, nowadays it's really a pretty low-margin business for everyone involved. I sure as hell wouldn't invest in a record label.
I also wouldn't sign a deal other than a 360 with a label these days, because with a simple record deal you get close to nada and end up owing the company in most ca
Don't support them (Score:1)
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>Why are we paying 10-20% to the likes of Uber and elance/odesk with them providing little more than an app and/or site for us to communicate?
Because you're not going to look through a million sources with a million different interfaces to find what you want.
People want to go to one or two places (real or virtual) that they more or less trust (where "trust" means "have confidence that you can predict what you'll get").
A middle-man may do a bad job of protecting you from bad products and services, but it'
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The summary is wrong (Score:1)
Wait, what? (Score:2)
I don't think the entire 9.99EUR goes to the labels for distirbution. Spotify needs to keep some of that in order to run their operations, and I can't imagine that's cheap.
Wait, what? (Score:1)
According to the article, Spotify charges 2.08 Euro out of the 9.99.
Dinosaurs will die (Score:4, Insightful)
Slight error in summary (Score:2)
The writers are also artists for a given work.
Publishers and labels? Not so much.
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Reading comprehension (Score:3)
The 11% is out of the amount that Spotify pays the label, not the 9.99 that Spotify charges the user.
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And that's fine... for you.
Others make their living by abiding by licensing, or creating content under licence, and want things legitimately. I know this might be a shock to you, but people WILL pay for legitimate product.
Additionally, when the RIAA rock up to your house, see how far that explanation gets you in court. There's a reason most of the RIAA court cases resulted in settlements... people just decide the time and hassle costs too much to argue, let alone the costs of the music.
However, the same t
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> In the same way, are the musicians going to pay for that $10,000-a-day studio
According to the contract they will.
That's the kicker. Someone else said it. Label musicians are treated like employees when it comes to the masters but they are responsible for all of the production costs.
The label is little more than a specialty bank.