Thought Flow

Tag: Spotify

  • Copying is not stealing, period

    A copy is just a copy
    A copy is just a copy by kioan

    Taylor Swift recently received a lot of media attention for pulling her music off Spotify. I am not going to comment specifically on Swift’s decision for pulling the music but I would like to take a look at the following quote from Swift in an interview with Yahoo:

    I felt like I was saying to my fans, ‘If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it’s theirs now and they don’t have to pay for it.’ Taylor Swift

    Comparing physical art with digital art in this way is like comparing apples and skyscrapers. Does Swift really think that vandalizing and stealing part of a painting is the same as streaming a song? I hope not. The painting is a physical object and it is unique. The bits and bytes of a song are not unique. If I rip off the corner of your painting, it is not the same painting anymore. If I stream your song on Spotify, the song is still the same. If your painting is stolen, you do not have it anymore. If I copy your song, we both have the same song.

    A digital copy is a perfect copy — identical to the original. Analogies like Swift’s convey the wrong message about streaming and it sounds very similar to the old music industry slogan that “copying is stealing”. But let’s be perfectly clear about something: Copying is not stealing.

    Copying, pirating, streaming or whatever might or might not be a bad thing but we can and should not use physical analogies to describe the act of copying or streaming. It is very disappointing that Taylor Swift is perpetuating the traditional discourse of the industry when talking about digital art.

  • Spotify royalties

    Spotify is a cool service but I do not agree with how they pay out royalties. In this post, I will propose a different way.

    The current royalty calculation is explained by Spotify like this: There is a big chunk of money (the revenue) and each artist is paid according to their global “market share”. The share is calculated by taking the number of artist streams and dividing it by the total number of streams on Spotify. 1

    On the surface this looks like a good thing because everyone is paying for everyone. But the problem is that the equation does not account for the usage of each user on Spotify. Sometimes I can go days without using Spotify and every second I am not using the servive, the market shares of the artists I listen to are going down, relative to users that use Spotify more than me. For example, if I stream two Radiohead tracks during one month and another user streams eight tracks from Justin Bieber, the market share for Justin Bieber will be four times higher than Radiohead, simply because Spotify is being used more by the other user.

    I think this is an unfair way of distributing royalties and I am not the first one to say this. 2 Instead of calculating a global market share for each artist, I propose to calculate the market share for each artist as the average market share value of that artist for each user.

    So instead of:

    for each artist:
  market_share = artist.streams / total_streams

    I propose:

    for each artist:
  market_share_sum = 0

  for each user:
    market_share_sum +=
      user.artist.streams / user.total_streams

  market_share = market_share_sum / number_of_users

    The calculation is probably more complicated than what is explained by Spotify but I do not think the proposed change is unreasonable. Let us see how it fixes the market share calculation bias from the example before.

    Old market share calculation:

    Radiohead.streams = 2
JustinBieber.streams = 8
total_streams = 10

Radiohead.market_share =
  Radiohead.streams / total_streams = 
  2 / 10 = 20%
JustinBieber.market_share =
  JustinBieber.streams / total_streams =
  8 / 10 = 80%

    New market share calculation:

    David.Radiohead.streams = 2
someone.JustinBieber.streams = 8
total_streams = 10

Radiohead.market_share =
  (David.Radiohead.streams / David.total_streams +
   someone.Radiohead.streams / someone.total_streams)
  / number_of_users = 
  (2/2 + 0/8) / 2 = 50%
JustinBieber.market_share =
  (David.JustinBieber.streams / David.total_streams +
   someone.JustinBieber.streams / someone.total_streams)
  / number_of_users = 
  (0/2 + 8/8) / 2 = 50%

    The two artist now have an equal market share. The reason that I think this is fair is that it values our listening preferences equally, not the time we spend listening.

    I love Spotify and have been a happy (paying) customer for almost two years. The 99 SEK per month price means that I have spent more money on music in the last two years than I did in the ten years before that and I am sure I am not alone. Spotify says that about 70% of their revenue is paid to artists and rights holders so to me, it seems like a win for the industry. But I hope they redo their royalty calculation. Until then, my limited usage does not warrant a premium account. I really don’t want to support Justin Bieber while I’m sleeping.