As one data point, I’d gladly pay an extra $5-15/month for a “tier” of Spotify that passed along, say, 90% of that extra money to artists. Spotify being mostly private makes it hard to get good digital bling from a higher-tier option, but maybe artists could offer extra rewards to people in that tier?
Much more simply, I’d love to have a “tip the artist” option next to any song, so that when I was especially appreciating something, I could tip the artist a dollar. I’d probably use that option 100-200 times/year.
This seems like it should be a win for Spotify — I see few people angry about Spotify making/keeping too much money, lots of people angry about artists being underpaid. And I think it should be possible to design a tier/tip option that sends the message “you’re funding artists” without “we’re not”.
From some brief research, Spotify paid out over $5 billion to “rights holders”* in 2020 and grossed about $9 billion (they claim to pay out 70% of all revenue). And they have 6500 employees. All of these seem like reasonable numbers, and even boosting artist revenue by 20% would probably feel tiny to critics — now it’s half a cent per stream instead of 0.4 cents, hooray — while being a pretty sharp cut for their staff/technical infrastructure.
*Note that this includes record labels; for many artists, Spotify’s rate isn’t nearly as problematic as the % their record labels take.
As one data point, I’d gladly pay an extra $5-15/month for a “tier” of Spotify that passed along, say, 90% of that extra money to artists. Spotify being mostly private makes it hard to get good digital bling from a higher-tier option, but maybe artists could offer extra rewards to people in that tier?
Much more simply, I’d love to have a “tip the artist” option next to any song, so that when I was especially appreciating something, I could tip the artist a dollar. I’d probably use that option 100-200 times/year.
This seems like it should be a win for Spotify — I see few people angry about Spotify making/keeping too much money, lots of people angry about artists being underpaid. And I think it should be possible to design a tier/tip option that sends the message “you’re funding artists” without “we’re not”.
From some brief research, Spotify paid out over $5 billion to “rights holders”* in 2020 and grossed about $9 billion (they claim to pay out 70% of all revenue). And they have 6500 employees. All of these seem like reasonable numbers, and even boosting artist revenue by 20% would probably feel tiny to critics — now it’s half a cent per stream instead of 0.4 cents, hooray — while being a pretty sharp cut for their staff/technical infrastructure.
*Note that this includes record labels; for many artists, Spotify’s rate isn’t nearly as problematic as the % their record labels take.