Payola
Streamed over and over.
An unknown Bulgarian has become the talk of the music industry after a sophisticated and apparently successful attempt to game Spotify. Thanks to a fascinating exposé by Tim Ingham at Music Business Worldwide we learn that the perpetrator may actually have been playing by the rules, bringing to light a little-noticed …
Yes. My understanding is that the existing model is (in rough outline):
(1) Put all the money from all subscribers in a big skip every month
(2) Spotify takes 30% of the money in the skip
(3) The remaining 70% of the money in the skip is given to each artist (well, rights holder actually, not the same at all necessarily) in proportion to the number of plays that artist got from the platform total.
Bad points of this way of doing things include:
(a) Every month a large amount of my hard earned subscription cash goes to top 50 artists some of whom I never listen to and whose music I loathe with deep and abiding intensity.
(b) This model is susceptible to being gamed by the method described in the story.
Actually, another way of looking at this is that the major record companies are currently pulling a similar scam, but on a much larger scale, by mind-controlling impressionable young people with too much free time on the their hands to listen over and over again to a small number of artists almost all of whom are on major labels.
An alternative, which is often suggested when this comes up is:
(1) Put the money from my subscription in a little pot every month
(2) Spotify takes 30% of the money in the pot
(3) The remaining 70% of the money in the pot is given to each artist in proportion to the total number of tracks *I* play from those artists this month
(4) Repeat the above for each subscribing user
Then, if the only tracks I play this month are by The Delve (a hypothetical skint band of which I may hypothetically be a fan) then only The Delve gets my sub money this month – and no one else gets any of it.
I am led to believe that the major record companies are not keen on this model.
I'm sure there's no technical reason why they couldn't do this...as they can track exactly what you listen to through your account...
..out of interest, what would you have them do if for whatever reason you didn't play anything for that month of subscription? Would Spotify get the whole 100%?
..out of interest, what would you have them do if for whatever reason you didn't play anything for that month of subscription? Would Spotify get the whole 100%?
Well - if I didn't play anything then I don't think I'd have any objection if they just applied the existing model (so 70% divvied up to artists in proportion to total plays on the platform). I'd rather my cash was thrown to the vagaries of aggregate public taste so that artists would get something, rather than Spotify taking 100%. Ideally I suppose I'd like them to hold it back for next month, or not charge me at all, but either introduces too much complication I think.
Lots of people are not keen on the model you propose, including Google, the collecting societies, and the UK Intellectual Property Office.
What you've just described as the current state of play is Collective Licensing. This is/was justified when the cost and bother of figuring out who should get paid for what exceeded the pay available. It's a relic of the analogue era. Nowadays its possible, via metadata, to log exactly what got played to whom, when, and for rightsholders to be paid accurately.
How curious, then, that the trend in copyright is towards more collective licensing - throwing everything in the pot and only really paying the biggest players - and away from what digital actually makes possible: paying people accurately.
As always: cui bono? Follow the money. It mostly ends up in Mountain View.
It's worse than that. The more plays an artist gets per month, the more the artist is paid per play. It's not a flat rate per play for all, like you would assume would be fair.
He was probably getting 0.0004 p per play since he was in the top 50. Others get much less. If you generate 10s of millions of plays a month, sure you can get a decent return, everyone else is stuffed.
I understand tht some popular artists use the multiple short track trick too, as a way of having a larger percentage of their album listened to, this then makes the album more popular, jumps it up the charts and they then get a bigger cut of the overall revenue.
What is surprising is that a small timer has found a way to get in on the act and benefit and self fund the future income stream
Apparently the two fake playlists appeared in Spotify's album chart at No.11 and No.22 if I correctly remember from the story. Charts were invented by the music industry to increase sales - the chart is a form of advertisement (don't tell the BBC, they're not allowed advertisements) - so logically some other people were intrigued enough to play at least some of the tracks. I wonder if the BBC were... I don't listen to "The Chart Show" any more.
"Apparently the two fake playlists appeared in Spotify's album chart at No.11 and No.22 if I correctly remember from the story...
- so logically some other people were intrigued enough to play at least some of the tracks."
Or alternatively, 72 Million plays from some fake accounts is enough to get you a fair way up in the charts....