I’m not a big fan of the high fees, but I’m even less of a fan of big developers being treated differently than the little guy.
Some banks do this *** too. The more money you deposit, the less fees you pay. Because ‘premium customer’ and all this.
Yep Chase for instance: over 75k on deposit, no ATM withdrawal fees anywhere! You know, helping the people who need it the least.
Sorry for the ignorance, but you have to pay to withdraw money from your bank in the US?
And charge you a monthly service fee unless you have a job (regular transaction into the account per billing cycle), which isn’t a thing in other places.
Ripping off poor and jobless people. Yes.
I mean I can’t believe I’m about to defend a bank, but it makes sense no?
Banks want people to deposit money, rich people have more money. So it tracks that you would offer better incentives to get those people to be your customers.
Some banks? No. All banks.
Even credit unions do this. They may not have as many or as expensive fees as regular commercial banks but they still have fees and certain features aren’t free. If you deposit $100,000 (or more) you’ll find that a lot of those fees get waived, your interest rates will be better, and they will generally treat you better than the peasants with like $5,000 in their savings.
It’s just another advantage that the rich have over every day people. Most of them take these things for granted or don’t think they matter in the slightest. It never occurs to them that regular $3 fees or occasional $25 fees can have a huge impact on the poor and the middle class.
Full Disclosure: I work for a bank.
Agreed, but at least that is an upfront rule that technically applies to anyone with X amount of money. This is some back room handshake shit.
I’d be better if Apple / Google lowered their fees based upon how many installs anyone hit. At least it would apply to everyone, not just a couple of billionaires scratching each other’s backs.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I think this is done to prevent anticompetitive issues. If Google were to profit off of both its own product (youtube / yt music) and also require its competitors to pay it a % of revenue, it would potentially open them up to more anticompetitive lawsuits.
They don’t do the same for ebooks with Kindle, which is why Amazon has removed the ability to buy them from the app. I’d be surprised if that was the reason for Spotify.
And Spotify pass these savings onto the artists, right?
In effect, yes. Given that ~70% of revenue goes to rights holders, making the amount of revenue bigger by not paying 30% of subscriptions to Google, the savings are passed on to rights holders.
So, not exactly to the artists. I get the impression you seem to know quite a lot about the deal, can you try to analyze how this 70% gets divided?
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/
It’s net revenue split to rights holders according to the share of streams. If you have 1% of all streams on Spotify in a given time period, you get 0.7% of net revenue for that period.
How the rights holders distribute the money onward to the artists is not exactly transparent though.
Nah the savings are probably being mostly passed on to stock buybacks and executive salaries
…I mean, 30% of the savings go to Spotify, so some part of it will indeed go to stock buybacks and executive salaries. Some of it will go to regular employee salaries, and some of it will go to pay for technical infrastructure, and some of it will go to pay for offices. Some of it will be spent on marketing, even.
70% of it will go to rights holders, though.
According to this random site with no sources the ranking is: Napster, Tidal, Apple, YouTube Music, Deezer, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora.
Spotify pays 70% of its profits to artists. Not revenue. Almost all your subscription money and ad revenue goes to spotify. They just at some point decide that’s enough to take to spend on spotify, then give a tiny tiny amount to artists.
Not strictly correct. Spotify pays out from its net revenues (revenues when billing costs and tax are removed) and it pays to the various industry rights holders who then distribute the money. There are lots of complex deals in place and big rights holders are likely to have better deals than ad hoc users, plus it’s different in different countries.
The 70% figure is a PR thing Spotify pushes about as part of its constant battles with rights holders on exactly how much it will pay them. It’s trying to claim most of the money goes to artists but it’s opaque how much goes where.
I like how in a thread discussing how Spotify had been lying about their cost structures you’re continuing to take their word for how fairly they compensate artists.
They’re a public company, they’re required by law to share financial info.
Do you perhaps have better data though?
The real problem with the way Spotify distributes the money, is that they distribute it per play. This seems reasonable on the surface, but I think it’s pretty shit. I want my subscription fee to go to the artists I listen to. Right now they’re going to what most people listen to. This effect is worsened by the per-label deals: imagine if Beyonce wasn’t on Spotify, that would be bad for Spotify right? This gives her label (and by extension all major labels) massive leverage over how this works. It massively favors big artists.
The per-play model also enables playfarming as an economically viable scam.
Huh? If you listen to obscure music, they are paid for that, if you don’t they don’t. They base it of what people listen to, in the exact same way it would work if it was watermarked like you want it to be
While sure, there is leverage, but it’s not like Spotify is being arbitrary about their content. I can listen to obscure stuff, and I do. Also don’t forget that big artists are often big for a reason and it’s usually not for a lack of talent, taste just varies but certainly there always is a market for ‘pop music’.
No fees when users choose to pay via Spotify (which had been the case and only option since the beginning, until User Choice Billing was implemented).
If users choose to pay with Google Play Billing, Google keeps 4%.
Even so, what I find hypocritical is that Spotify got this deal and seemingly agreed to keep it under wraps, without advocating for it to be extended to all other music streaming services in the platform.
Because… having a deal with the platform holder that gives it unfair advantage over the competition is exactly what they accuse Apple of doing with iOS.
Sauce: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23969690/google-spotify-android-billing-commission-secret-deal
The game is rigged
We’re totally screwing the artist, so we’ll give you a cut if we don’t pay any gees.
