How can you quantify this, count the bottles of fine red wine maybe, a tad sweeping …
I started my journey into classical music as a student, some of my friends had been introduced to it at their (public) schools and it rubbed off the the grammar school plebs
I think if small players like Presto Music (the UK music vender that recently added a music streaming service) can do that then I would bet Roon with its Harmon backing could easily do likewise… in fact I’d vote for that as then the integration would be superb! 
I’d go lifetime the moment Roon gets a deal with Apple. Or better, when Harman would pass on Roon to Cupertino (I know. Hell will freeze over before this happens 
)
What? Of course they do. This who are streamed more get more money in the same way as those who sold more records. (In the great scheme of things).
Sure. But if nobody else streams the same album, the payout from these two streams is all the artist gets. Just do the math, it comes out much the same way overall for the artist, because there is a fixed pool size (the sum of all subscriptions minus overhead) that is distributed to the sum of all streams.
I don’t care at all for how fair it is for the individual customer. They are not forced to be a customer and can buy music any way that makes most sense to them. If they only listen to one album a month and the purchase price is cheaper than the subscription, then they are free to not subscribe.
All of this is true but wouldn’t be different if an individual customer’s money were only distributed to the artists they actually streamed, as such weightings could nevertheless be in place.
I was only commenting on the fairness of whether the fee of each individual customer is only given to artists they streamed vs. putting it all into one pool and then distributing the pool to all streams based on their frequency.
No, they do not, which is exactly why I contrasted it with how the money would be distributed if the people bought CDs.
Greatly different. Not sure if you did not understand that of if you simply disagree, but disagreeing with math is pretty ridiculous. If you disagree, please, feel free to actually demonstrate where you disagree:
In short:
Label A produces: “Classical album”
Label B produces: “Pop Album”
Both have their different audiences.
Case 1 CD sales:
Classical Guy pays $20.-
Loop Guy pays $20.-
Label A gets 50% of the money.
Label B gets 50% of the money
Case 2 Streaming:
Classical Guy pays $20.-
Loop Guy pays $20.-
Label A: Gets 2% of the money
Label B: Gets 98% of the money
In case 1, Label B would get more money if it sold more copies. So if there are more Loop Guys who buy “Pop Albums”, Label B gets more money. That’s how it used to work.
In case 2, that is no longer so. Label B gets almost all the money, regardless of classical guy ever listening to anything from Label B.
And it matters greatly from a consumer and from an artist’s point of view.
I may be too stupid but in case 2 the label B only gets 98% of the money if they they have about 98% of the streams. If the classical guys created as many streams as the loop guys, they would get the same money.
I also think it’s biased to state that pop guys mindlessly play in a loop and the classical guys are so discerning and always listen intently, when in fact classical is used as elevator music just as often and many pop listeners put a lot of interest and heart into it as well.
That is exactly what I was saying. And that is exactly why the streaming payout “per stream” is skewed. Because I was contrasting two different types of listeners, who also tend to listen to a different type of music.
That is obviously true, no question. It’s not supposed to imply that “all” pop listeners are this way, “all” classical music listeners that way, this was also not meant to evaluate any type of music or listener. I didn’t say anything about “mindless” either, I know lots of highly intelligent people who enjoy playing music all day long and often listen to the same songs several times a day. I was not judging any type of music or listener. And of course there are other things that factor in. My examples were purposely simplified and hyperbole (as I think was obvious) to illuminate how putting everything into one pot and then paying out per number of stream is skewed.
Even more skewed if, as in case of Spotify, you don’t even get paid as an artist unless you have a certain number of streams.
I was just juxtaposing in a simplified and hyperbolic way two types of listeners (and these two type of music listeners definitely exist, I know quite a few of either) to demonstrate the issue.
There are simply people who listen to A LOT of music, and people who listen to just a few albums a week, but very intently. (And yes, obviously, a lot of people who are in between, or sometimes listen to a lot, sometimes not, etc.)
And putting everything into one pot and then paying out by volume is skewing the payments to the type of music that gets played on playlists over and over again, and that tends to be pop music rather than Pierre Boulez, which is why I used that to contrast two different types of listeners, who both pay the same amount of lump sum each month, but for different things. The Lutosławski crowd is already way smaller than the Taylor Swift crowd, but the distribution of “pay per stream” reduces the share of money even more, because Taylor Swift fans tend to play her songs daily and often several times a day, whereas the Lutosławsk “crowd” (of maybe worldwide six people) listens to his music only once in a while. But both pay the money to have that particular music at hand.
It’s like two people buying Scotch for $100.- each. One person might buy one bottle of a 26 year old Single Malt for $100.-, the other buys 7 bottles of a decent blend for $100.-. Fine.
And if you now pay out like in the “CD buying” case, distillery 1 gets $100.- and distillery 2 also gets $100.- Fine. But if you have a retailer who pools all that money into one pot and then pays out per milliliter (per stream… I guess the analogy is clear), distillery 1 gets just $25 and distillery 2 now gets $175. That’s just not fair, and obviously, distillery 1 will soon loose interest in that line of business, while distillery 2 thinks great.
So “special interest” recordings (lots of classical music, jazz, indie, whatever music with a “small but dedicated” audience) tend to “loose” in streaming, while mainstream pop not only makes more money because it has more fans, but additionally because it takes the lion’s share of money from a different type of listener, who listens to far less music.
I know people who listen to music every day for hours, and I know people who listen only Friday and Sunday in the evening for a few hours. Neither one is “right”, everybody can listen however they want, but if both pay the same amount for their music, it would be advantageous if royalties would reflect that.
No, that’s a wrong assumption. Due to the various weighing methods Spotify uses (there are ‘sub pools’ in the big royalty pool - genre, region and other things play a role), the same number of streams in the same time period can lead to a different amount of income for different artists.
Sure, but that’s a detail that can be adjusted and not a fundamental problem with streaming. In the old days there were also different schemes for Karajan and The Monkeys.
Thanks for all the detail. Now I understand better what you are getting at, and I just don’t see the problem with this particular thing. The music business was never communism with revenue distribution adjusted finely to be fair for everyone. The richest musicians were often (not always) those who made the worst music for the stupidest people while wonderful but difficult artists starved. Nothing new with streaming in this regard IMHO.
Edit: And I’m all for fair compensation, I just don’t think that the mode of distribution is the real problem. In my kinds of music, artists have been f****d over for 100 years, whether it was sheet music, vinyl, CD, or streaming. And with the internet, at least they are less dependent on labels than ever before, and there are options like Bandcamp.
Thanks for the deeper dive.
The whole system makes me sad. I thought the internet could do away with a lot of the fixed costs, but reading all this it seems to skew major anyway (I’m counting the successful indies as “major”, for context that’s where I find “content” to stream). And yet there is so much music out there with no filter. I am missing the simpler chain of “label promotes new release which leads to discovery”. Now I’m mostly retreating to catalog. Otherwise Roon would help, and that to me is so important.
I stream with TIDAL and qobuz, and that directly replaces what I could spend with, say, Bandcamp. It’s always some day in the future that I’ll turn off this practically free music and be intentional. Right now I just want to sit through 22 minutes of one artist at a time, without shuffle.
Has anyone seen a reaction in this topic from wayne_viala himself who did put a question in?
We are 3 days and 70 responses later, what’s the buzz?
No, I am still waiting for his feedback:
Torben
Let me just put my time traveller hat on. Ironically, you have to give me a few minutes for it to warm up
One of the reasons I love Roon is seeing detailed track information such as credits, lyrics, and composers. All of the data in one place. I prefer Qobuz but have Tidal as well so if something is out there, I can access it seamlessly.
I am a lifer, having signed up in the beginning.
All local here as well (at least when it comes to Roon; we do play a lot of free Pandora through HEOS/Sonos). I don’t know of any other solution that allows you to play your entire local (digitized) collection across many devices with such organization/information/options.
A lot less than half is probably better!
Talking of Pandora and live radio.
One feature Roon might be well positioned to implement - given their now fairly extensive list of live radio stations - would be the ability to ‘Shazam’ those live radio streams in real time or on-demand and then allow you to add those track to your library or ‘listen later’ queue, within Roon itself.
Effectively bridging the world of live radio / discovery to your more long term local music library.
You can obviously do this semi-directly with the Shazam app, but from there you can only (easily) add tracks to Spotify or Apple Music, which isn’t much use for Roon users. In fact its currently an argument for sticking with Spotify or Apple Music if that functionality is important to you.
I do not see how that is a listener’s concern. Just enjoy the music. As for Roon’s future I have seen nothing in the audio sites I participate in other than Roon-Ready being added to more new equipment and even at the lower end of the equipment cost spectrum.
If there were a concern it would be Harman losing interest and letting it wither, but this is not unique to other specialized products. I certainly could see Harman leveraging the brand to get licensing fees from manufacturers (this may have been the case prior to Harman) or passing it off to another company. I have no concern over the next 5 years though.
It’s not, most listeners don’t give a damn as far as I can tell.
However, long term it is clear that this will lead to some unfortunate developments. If you look at the market, it’s clear that this is unsustainable for many special interest music labels, which either fold or get sold to the bigger ones, where in all likelihood they will “loose” what made them “special interest” in the first place.