Ethical streaming service?

Artists are not paid by subscriptions. They are paid by royalties.

It’s entirely academic, as the market won’t stand for it, but I cannot see that increasing subscriptions by orders of magnitudes 10x or even 20x or 30x helps them out very much because under the present streaming royalty model they still need a threshold of millions of plays for any meaningful recompense. Most of them, just don’t get anywhere close

What does help them out is if streaming services and/or roon drives physical album/download sales as that leaves the old mechanical royalty model intact. For example, In a link further up minimum wage requires 380,000 plays in Spotify. But In the old days a rule of thumb was that artists got about 1 $/£/EUR for each album regardless of whether any individual song was never played or even if the entire album was never played in private collections. Under that model, total plays in private collections could only ever have been orders of magnitude 10’s of thousands and maybe none at all when they couldn’t be found in messed up filling systems (the reason after all why many of us probably got into computer audio in the first place).

But a combination of a singles/play-list streaming culture (where 2 or 3 popular songs on every album now have to do all the royalty heavy lifting) and a substitution of a model requiring 1 album sale with a model requiring 1,500 x 15 x 5 (approx) “streams” per 1 $/£/USD is not sustainable. So, I would prefer roon to support an “ethical” streaming service by integrating physical/download sales as has been commented by several on this thread. I don’t know how representative roonys are though or if for a younger generation physical sales or even downloads is a dying model. There are only 12,878 users on this forum (is that the roon subscription base?) , and only 200 or so ever comment at all and maybe only a few dozen regulars.

For any of you who are concerned about the ethics of streaming services a little question out of curiousity. How many of you shop at Wall Mart, Amazon, Ali Express, Primark, and above all the by many so much beloved Apple compagny? Just to name a few companies of where the founders/owners have become billionaires but the makers of all the stuff they sell get less then 1/10th of your average salary and are working under terrible circumstances.

Back to the opening post wich states that $20 dollar is not enough. Well I think it is. If anyone was willing to pay $20 for a subscription it would but unfortunaly a large percentage of the subscribers use either a free account and don’t mind the commercials or they use a family account to share amongst friends or, and the percentage is getting smaller each step, they pay $10 for a single account and then there are few that pay twice as much for flac streaming. So what’s the average? $2,50 tot max $5,- per account maybe?

Tidal pays the highest percentage on royalties at the moment, that’s one of the reasons I’m happy with my account. One of the most wanted Roon features however is implementation of other streaming services. So how ethical is the average Roon user? They keep shopping at Apple and Wall Mart I’m afraid.

1 Like

I agree with many here that asking about specific or higher subscription fees in streaming services does not help to resolve the problem regarding the adequacy of royalties and reimbursement models from rights managers to artists. In my opinion streaming services should be regarded like modern radio stations, internet content, physical record stores, online stores etc. They are the market place where artists, composers … can offer their art to an audience. The reimbursement mechanisms are manyfold today. As consumer you pay for the empty media (HD, SSD, empty DVDs, … for fair copy usage), on subscription portals, probably on cloud storage as well, and on streaming services, for more or less the same content again and again. I subscribe 3 streaming services and have a divers listening habit. Can well be that I hear only 5 tracks in a month on Napster and pay 10 bucks for it. Then I download 5 albums from Qobuz in hires with sublime contract and pay therefore on MP3 prize. Two of these albums I already purchased as CD and one as MP3, and CD. Tidal and Qobuz streaming, lossless and hires I stream depending on the endpoint, i.e. Roon enabled and local or non-roon and mobile. To think that one further call it “ethical” subscription could replace my listening and storage habits is not realistic.

An interesting read on how the royalties could be more fair.

Totally agree. I also don’t want my money to go to Taylor Swift or any other popular artists I have never listened to and not going to either. I listen mostly to Indie (pop/rock/electro), Jazz, World, Dub, Leftfield Rap and obscurities and never to artists like Adele, Bruno Mars, Drake, and a bunch of other highly popular artists but they get most of my subscription fee because others play them a lot. That’s not fair. I don’t even like them.

3 Likes

Yes. An interesting proposal. The most difficult thing is the legal/commercial changes needed to re engineer what looks like a fundamentally broken royalty system. That is going to be very hard. But there is also a more mundane practical consideration. Once you scale up to 10’s or 100’s of millions of subscribers and billions of plays, long value chains like this will require big investments in much more sophisticated billing and revenue share systems. The telcos discovered this 25 years ago in the switch from voice to data so there is a mature vendor eco-system out there that could probably be re-purposed. I would like to think it was not wishful thinking but maybe the next round of IPO’s will make those sorts of investments possible.

@joel I posted this the other day but it completey went unnoticed or commented on.

I guess thats answers your question :slight_smile:

Looks like it has almost no music in its library. How are they supposed to license the 100s of millions of tracks? Of course that was true of Spotify and Tidal initially too. Choon will need lots of lawyers to renegotiate with all the major labels.

It looks more like a bandcamp idea, licensing independent bands and small labels.

Supply and Demand.

It’s the artists own job to make music that people want to listen to.

If the artist goes with a label to promote them (make people want to listen to them) then it’s the artists job to negotiate what proportion of resultant monies go to the artist and to the label.

Artist boycotts of streaming has worked for some, but not for less popular artists is reqards of higher royalties.

Perhaps I should get to pay a variable amount per month, based on how much content I consume, letting the artist/label set the price of the streaming cost. (More popular music charging more to stream than less known music)

From what I understand about music, most of the money comes from the tours, as the labels take most of the physical media profit.

I continue to subscribe to a Tidal because it works with a Roon so well. I typically use it to try out new stuff. I am typically dismayed at what’s is displayed on the screen when I log on. While I listen to jazz, bluegrass, and similar, I typically see a screen of rap music images, which are quite discordant. Not a lot of stuff I care for in the HiFi section.

I enjoy looking through Bandcamp, and do purchase music there. Is there going to be hew and cry because I only paid once for the download, and listen to it many times?

I’m not aware that it’s the consumer’s job to ensure quality pay for any artist. If that were true, I’d quit my day job, grab a guitar and head out the door, knowing that I would make it big. I likewise feel that actress, and actor pay depends on reputable, skill, work ethic, ability to draw an audience, AND the negotiating skill of the artist and agent. Let the actor/actress boycott, and see how fast a replace the is found from the horde of similar people who would love to get noticed, and on film.

Personally I’m fine with my 20 USD/month hi-fi Tidal subscription since their royalties are much higher than most of their competitors, even though there are a lot of albums missing. I’d be okay paying more for a much more comprehensive lossless catalog, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

3 Likes

$20/month would buy one or two new CDs a month. I like owning music but having instant access to literally millions of songs in lossless quality…yeah, I would give up buying a couple of CDs a month for that. Would I pay more? Absolutely! I find it pathetic how little people value music these days. To say that $20/month is too much is an absolute joke.

4 Likes

I absolutely agree with you, @Stephen_Graham. But people who mainly use streaming services to discover new music and then buy and download the albums they really like often spend ten times as much (or even more) on music anyway. That’s what I do, too. I have Tidal and Qobuz Sublime. I (almost) only use them to decide if an album I’m interested in is worth purchasing or not.

3 Likes

The people on forums are very different to the general public. I know a lot of people who might buy only a few albums a year (and some who wouldn’t buy any). Spotify is more than they would normally pay in a year, but the are happy to do so as they think they have access to everything. I am not sure how many CDs the “average Joe” buys, but I would be surprised if it was more than a couple a month.

That’s very probably true. But I‘m not sure how many Roon users are “average consumers“ in the sense you outlined.

1 Like

I suspect the average joe buys no CDs. And no average joes use Roon. I have lots of friends that love music. And they love the way my setup works. And their eyes glaze over when I start explaining it to them. They pull out their phone, click on Spotify and say, “why go to all the trouble when you have this…”

I myself buy and average of 20-25 CDs per month. And I’m a sucker for Box Sets (Dylan bootleg series, etc.). And I buy the CDs (while I can) because I don’t trust that the particular albums will be there when I want them on a streaming service. The service may go away, and even more likely, albums get dropped from the service. I’ve seen this a lot over the years.

edit: I attend a lot of live shows in smaller venues. I always buy a CD from the act. I view this as supporting the musician (and the arts). They often tell me they make more from selling CDs and T-shirts than from the gig itself.

1 Like

Well done that man… when we host music the Artists get a guaranteed fee and sell merch on top to make some extra. We often accommodate as well as feed them as this saves even more monies.
The great touring artists today rely on this support and I urge people to buy what they can when they can. It’s use it or lose it time folks. It really is.
Chris

1 Like

“I would much prefer it if Roon would focus on metadata, user interface, and sound quality versus asking about what streaming services should charge. You should be an advocate for your subscribers, not the music industry.”

I agree. This is an argument that is out of your control. The millions of people who buy Taylor Swift, etc., are a much bigger voice in this. And, even they have little impact compared to the record companies.

I prefer that Roon stick to improving its product. There is still a lot of work to be done.

1 Like

Tidal is as close as it gets at the moment.

The meat of this post:

1 Million Streams on YouTube = $690
1 Million Streams on Spotify = $4,370
1 Million Streams on Apple Music = $7,350
1 Million Streams on @Tidal = $12,500
1 Million Streams on Amazon Music = $4,020

Whether this is sustainable (for Tidal or artists) is another matter entirely.

2 Likes

Here are some other compelling numbers that don’t lie either:

YouTube = 1 billion unique users
Amazon Music = 66 million (est.)
Spotify = 40 million
Apple Music = 27 million
TIDAL = 3 million

I can’t tell you which is better for what stakeholder, but I’m pretty sure which is least likely to last. :slight_smile:

But don’t you think it’s a shame that doing the right thing with regard to payments for artists end with this?

It’s not the result of some football match where the top team wins and all the fans are ecstatic, “my team are untouchable”.

This could mean the biggest win and the artists lose. In the end, we all lose as, believe it or not, artists have to be paid properly or they just won’t be there.

Sure mainstream pap will always survive but is that really the world we want to live in?

3 Likes

So why not support them instead of leaving the ship early?

4 Likes