How Good is Spotify for Indie Musicians? (Not Good)

As someone that's done 'the band thing' and been involved with plenty of others who have and are doing 'the band thing' - if I was doing it now, as a smaller artist I would absolutely go to town with distribution by whatever means necessary. I'd get onto spotify, itunes, amazon, whatever. Hell, I'd probably even give the record away for free. For a smaller (indie/indie label) band, getting people through the door was always the biggest problem. Get them through the door, get the fanbase, you can sell them whatever you like.<p>When I had the numbers, I'd deal with the money. Long and short, I'd rather have 10 thousand people listen to my record and talk/blog/tweet about me / come to shows, than 100 people buy it and 10 people come to my show.

I'm a long-time Spotify user, and I have not bought a single piece of music (digital or CD) since I signed up, and I suspect I won't ever again.<p>Even if you offered me a free CD sent to my door, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I suspect the optical drive in my laptop is dead (I tried to burn a Linux install CD out of habit about a year ago, three in a row came out corrupted, then I discovered installing from USB-drives) and even if I'd get it ripped, I'd need to distribute it between my personal laptop, work desktop and phone (for living room listening). And dealing with backup.<p>Or, if you were on Spotify, I'd invest the time it takes to type in your name and give it a listen. If I enjoyed it, I'd probably buy a ticket to your show when your tour comes to London.<p>You're awfully concerned with getting your as-of-yet non-existent fans to cough up their cash rather than focusing on discoverability and betting on the long tail (I'm rudely making the assumption that Irish folk songs performed on accordion isn't going to displace Rihanna and Justin Beiber from the Top 40).

The vast majority of musicians can only support themselves via live performances. This was true before streaming services. It was true before the Internet. It's still true.<p>Radio stations pay (through a complicated scheme) royalties to songwriters. There are no performance royalties (whereas there are on Internet-streamed radio, which can be seen as a victory for radio broadcasting lobbying).<p>Major label artists typically earn nothing from music sales [1] due to RIAA accounting.<p>The parallel artists shouldn't be drawing isn't to the cost of purchasing a song or a CD but to radio royalties. If a radio station plays a song, how many people hear it? How much do they earn per listener? Unfortunately, that's really hard to answer.<p>Streaming services should be viewed as a means of discovery and curation. The bigger the audience you have the more you can make from live shows, which is your staple income unless you're the Rolling Stones, Sting, the Beatles, etc.<p>To focus on the &#60;1 cent per stream figure is shortsighted. You should be letting as many people as possible listen to your music. There's a reason tech companies typically start by giving away their services: build an audience and you can scale. This applies to musicians.<p>Think about it: charging $5/head for 50 people at the local bar to listen to you takes you exactly the same amount of time as charging $50/person for 10,000+ people to listen to you in a large concert venue.<p>Sure not everyone is going to get so famous but I guarantee you this: if you don't get relatively well-known, your income from music sales in any form won't sustain you or even be that significant.

Here's a freebie for Spotify and Rdio: Allow artists to sell their merch from your app/website. It would engender a ton of good will from artists. It might even help your margins (which I imagine can't be too huge) too.<p>If they don't do that, there's a startup idea for someone.

I haven't used this product so perhaps I am misunderstanding the article. It seems to confuse sales royalties and streaming fees. Streaming fees are 1 cent for big names and 2/10 cent for small names, is that it? And sales commissions for outright downloaded sales are not specified. But then $1 "per stream" is suddenly brought up in the last sentence without explanation. $1 per track download or sale is somewhat industry standard, with iTunes' 99 cent tracks. But $1 per stream or single listening is not normal at all. The two seem to be very different things, downloads and single plays. To me, the article seemed to confuse them.

When I hear a good indie band, I try to buy something from them. I don't care what it is... a tshirt, a cd (even though I never play it), a beer cuzy, whatever. Today I can only do that at a live show. I wish someone would make it easier for me to give my money to bands I like.

Ridiculously short sighted analysis. So you sell 143 CDs and make your thousand bucks. Good for you. End of the road. Then you sell another 155 CDs on CD Baby. Make another thousand bucks. Yep. End of the road.<p>In the time that it's taken to sell 298 CDs, and effectively reach 300 people, you're telling me you wouldn't (for free) make the music available to thousands of users and then just share the hell out of it? How much music gets streamed by Spotify users just looking to try a track out? That too counts as revenue.<p>If it were me, I'd distribute across as many channels as quickly as possible and hope that I catch on as opposed to "burning out" each channel one by one in the most painfully slow marketing campaign ever.

I don't want this sound like yet another anti-label rant but as I see it, this is mostly a chicken-egg problem caused by the big labels, that are unlikely to be charging Spotify the same fee per stream but rather a flat fee that is so high that Spotify is still at loss and can't afford paying more to smaller players. I'd imagine if more artists went independent, things could be better both for them and Spotify.

I think there was a graph here on HN a while back on the number of CDs/mp3/streams it would take for an artist to make a certain threshold of income.<p>If anyone could find that, it would be really helpful in conjunction with this article.

This is why we have things like Bandcamp and Tunecore