The Grossness of Spotify's Payment System

Something I think about a fair bit...

Perhaps the impression of having some strong, well defined opinion makes me feel distinguished or above the issue I describe?

In actual fact: I'm just as rampant a consumer (abuser...?) of this model as millions of people who stream music.

It's mindblowing. The entire history of recorded music, in your pocket.

Think of that in CDs, in Cassettes or in Vinyl Records.

walkman Images generated with OpenAI Dalle

Spotify (streaming) is a better alternative to the early 2000s era of digital piracy.

But...is the basic payment model flawed?

spotify This article is all work of opinion

Does Spotify (music streaming providers in general) need to place more value on the content they are serving? Shouldn't consumers be made more aware of what they're consuming?

(e.g. imagine a 'meta-stream-counter' that shows how much revenue the user has garnered per streaming session, or an estimate value of royalties earnt if you streamed an album start to finish?)


A subtle change to the way payouts are handled could shift revenue spread to favour smaller artists and take the bias away from the mass-market, high earning, stream volume-dependant singles.

Instead of pooling revenue and splitting that gross sum (a 'radio model'-esque payout value per stream) between all artists on the platform. Why doesn't Spotify redirect its users susbscription fees to the musicians, content creators, artists that they are primarily consuming?

  Spotify Total Revenue/Month: £1.02B
{----------------------------------|----------}
 split/all artists                  Spotify

Tom's (single premium subscriber)

subscription/Month: £11.99
{----------------------------------|----------}
Just the artists Tom listens to      Spotify

'Premium' streaming service Tidal implemented a version of this for a brief period (though, only as an opt-in).


Quotes that I like about streaming :

I realised that you can never legislate away from piracy. Laws can definitely help, but it doesn't take away the problem. The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry - that gave us Spotify - Daniel Ek

If Whole Foods came out with a 10$ a month subscription to food, it would be a popular product -- Steve Jordan

~The era of physical music formats has come and gone. Theo Katzman

Using the term a single "Pity" when describing a new form of currency low enough to evaluate Spotifys payout per play, Jack Stratton (100 pity's in a penny)


Articles, Posts, Interviews that I like about streaming/spotify/music business