alt Hacker News> many people believe their streaming use will only pay artists who they listen to, not realizing the streaming service actually pays artists based upon overall listener numbers
Those are the same thing
Replies
happymellon • today at 2:38 PM
No they aren't.
I pay $5 and listen exclusively to artist A.
10 other people pay their $5 but listen exclusively to artist B.
I would expect the artist cut of artist A to be the $5 (or their cut after Spotify), aka the artist I listen to.
However the 10 other platform users have more free time so each listen to twice as much music by artist B. So my 1 hour is dwarfed by their 20 hours, and my artist would only get $2.60 (or their cut after Spotify). Overall listener plays.
They're similar, but subtly different.
Say Bob pays a $5 subscription and listens exclusively to artist Foo, 100 song plays. Alice pays a $5 subscription and listens exclusively to artist Baz, but plays their songs a whopping 300 times.
If it was paid out per user, Foo and Baz would both get $5. But paying out based on overall listener numbers, Foo would get $2.50 and Baz would get $7.50.
Essentially, it's a zero sum game, and one artist getting a play takes away revenue from every other artist. Even if you exclusively listen to your favorite artists, the vast majority of your subscription money is going towards the top artists.
This is why Spotify is always pushing their own playlists, smart shuffle, and encouraging background listening with ambient / sleep playlists and such; the more they can shift listeners toward music they've produced themselves or have special license agreements with, the less they have to pay out to typical (i.e. smaller) artists using their platform.