Who get paid the same as the ‘old’ ones 
Funny isn’t it, Justin Bieber gets 63 million monthly listeners. The Eple Trio get 2,632 and several of them are me.
no thanks
Pity - better sound quality and better overall experience than Spotify in every respect (apart from cost I concede) by quite some way!
I agree ‘H’ thro’ my Nova and B and W cm8 S2’s it can sound really very good, and for what it costs who could argue? They are preparing to commence a Hi-fi tear this year so it will compete with everyone else any way.
Ive no interest in paying a silly amount for Roon as well as a spotify sub if spotify will just upgrade their quality.
For me in terms of functionality, they are not that much different, Spotify has more organisation towards listening habits which I like when I am a bit tired of my own playlist so things like radio based on the style I like, can be found in tidal and Qobuz under playlist but those I’m not sure is personalized.
However I learned to discover music more from Spotify because of its huge collection. There’s even that I’m not aware of. Only thing about Spotify is filtering through, the internet age means any artist can have register with Spotify(my band is on Spotify but we are very underground most of our followings are from London), so on Spotify I find that I spend a lot of time filtering through albums I don’t like. In Qobuz for example, the ones I could find are generally more established artists, or signed under a certain record label. You could search for example under Bluenote or verve for famous jazz artists. Polydor for rock and pop etc, for me there’s a good reason these artists are signed with record deals.
I guess it’s probably marketing strategy for avoiding direct competition, it’s either that or the record labels favored certain servers for their own profit.
The thing is Spotify only lets me down when the internet is down, but tidal has let me down often because the glitches, it’s not a nice feeling when a song stops half way.
Ultimately I will keep Spotify because it’s got download option which I could listen off line. It helps me to explore music and I’m thinking of stopping tidal once free trial is over and go back to Qobuz, shame I tend to build up different playlist to avoid listening to the same thing so now I’m on tidal I miss my playlist on Qobuz, which I think has better sound quality.
Thanks for elaborating. One small thing, Tidal supposedly has a larger library than Spotify by now.
This recurring theme about Spotify not paying artists enough feels a bit silly. It’s a problem of the market first and foremost, not the end users. The artists can group together and address this with Spotify themselves if they want, or with the appropriate agencies or authorities who monitor these kinds of things.
I don’t assume many of us here complain that the food in the supermarket is too cheap, or that the farmer isn’t paid enough by supermarket X or Y. And who would actually go to a more expensive supermarket just because they pay the farmer more? Not many i would guess.
Where I live the government has fixed it by stepping in and setting the price of milk and bread (a lot higher than UK supermarkets) to help ensure sustainable local farming. I think it is a good idea, rather than being driven by the supermarkets as in UK.
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Yes that’s basically what i said, either the market itself or if that doesn’t work the appropriate authorities who monitor these kinds of things should fix it if there is a problem.
I think here plenty would. But by the nature of what binds us, we are of course a group that has some disposable income.
The many on a global scale, probably less so.
Although I feel this is slowly changing. Where smaller shops used to be closing in lieu of supermarkets, more and more small scale (artisan) brands, small, specialist shops etc. seem to be popping up. And I feel certifications like ‘fair trade’ are also becoming more prevalent.
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Perhaps we could compare this a bit more to radio. For instance, in the other thread about Spotify Hifi a calculation was shown for a classical artist receiving a $753 check from Spotify, as compensation for 206,011 streams. How much would they have earned for the same amount of listeners on a radio station?
If we take these stats:
Classic FM has around 5.7 million listeners tuning in each week, making it the biggest classical music radio station in the world
That is roughly 800.000 per day. Which probably means that if Classic FM played a single track from this artist on a decent time slot, it would likely get the same amount of listens/streams as on Spotify in a whole year.
For a rough indication of radio royalties, here are some from the BBC for prime time slots:
Radio 1: £13.63 per minute
Radio 2: £24.27 per minute
6 Music: £5.25 per minute
Radio 1 has a reach of about 10 million listeners, Radio 2 about 15 million.
For the 5.7 million Classic FM listeners this would likely mean a maximum of about £10 per minute, or £50 for a 5 minute track.
So this means that Spotify pays the artist about 15 times more per listen than radio does, with the difference being that on Spotify the listener can choose when to play the track.
Now i still think that Spotify could and should pay artists more, don’t get me wrong. But there’s still millions of people listening to traditional radio, and they have been ‘consuming’ these artists for years without paying them any more than Spotify does.
The numbers are likely similar for the internet radio stations (including Naim Classical and Jazz) that many on the forums here are tuning in to daily.
Yes, but the very nature of conventional radio is different. Radio has traditionally been accepted by artists in that it performs a sort of advertising role for them. It has traditionally been the main way of getting their music heard by significant numbers of people. If a listener likes a particular track or album then he/she is encouraged to purchase it since there is no guarantee when or if it will be played again.
This is not the case with a streaming service such as Spotify. Here, you have complete control of when you choose to listen to the track or album time and time again, and so there is no incentive to purchase that track or album.
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Some data i found back for the 2000’s:
Billboard magazine estimated that in 2002 the average number of copies sold of an album released by a major label was 11,253, while Nielsen SoundScan tallied an average of only 6,216 units sold per album. SoundScan theoretically counts only those albums that have really sold.
For independent labels Billboard’s number dropped to 1,712, while SoundScan counted only 500 copies sold per album.
In terms of cd revenue (2013):
About 13% goes to the artists, while 30% goes to the label, with a 17% cut going to the government in the form of VAT (applied at 20% and therefore 1/6 of purchase price). About 17% goes to the retailer, while the rest goes to manufacturers (9%), distributors (8%) and the spend on administering copyright (6%).
So if in the past a smaller artist sold 1000 cd’s, with 10 tracks, and each cd was played 20 times by it’s buyer, that would amount to 200.000 plays. This is equal to the amount of streams that the classical artist in my previous post had on Spotify.
With cd’s, the artist would have earned 1000 * £8 * 0.13 = 1040,-
Now this difference isn’t so big to the 750,- they earned on Spotify. However it would have provided the buyer real physical ownership of the album, which is not the case on Spotify. Albums can get retracted at any time, the listener only has a license to play it while it’s available.
After someone has physically bought an album, they will never pay for the music again. As opposed to Spotify where they can keep streaming and paying for the music for potentially decades.
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You might argue that you may still buy the CD after you hear the compressed music on Spotify, but now they are going CD quality, it becomes more of an issue. One would hope that the artists get more when they move to CD Quality. Time will tell
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You say the difference isn’t so big, but I disagree, it’s 40% more. That’s significant.
And even in the “CD days” people were complaining that too little was going to the artist, it’s not like everyone was okay with the distribution then.
It is significant, but the catch is:
This is the streaming revenue for a single year, the streaming artist will likely receive this amount each year, as long as people keep playing the music. With cd’s there is a peak at the beginning when the cd is released, and then sales will quickly drop (in most cases).
Over the course of a decade, the streaming revenue will likely be at least 5 to 10 fold the revenue of this single year. With cd’s this would most likely not be the case.
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I don’t have a vinyl replay system at present, but have several shedloads of records in storage.
Occasionally I’ll go through them and look up on Spotify. 9 times out of 10 it will pop up.
These are mostly obscure limited production independent label etc ambient,electronica,techno and house that I used to enjoy collecting.
Some that were originally of dubious quality and others of very high tech studio trickery. Spotify versions sound just as I remember and often better.
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What a coincidence:
“We would definitely be open to looking for alternative models and considering them,” said Spotify’s Horacio Gutierrez. Paul Firth of Amazon Music agreed, saying, “we should take a look at a number of these approaches” to see whether they really benefit the artist.