Spotify Is Eating the Entire Music Business?

[VitaminD]

Doesn't that just further prove there is little money in online music? From what I gather, the top 50 highest paid creators on the platform aren't music artists. It seems only about 14% of the members are even audio themed.

[ghettosynth]

I saw a story about the guy that started Patreon. He spent $10k of his own money building these fantastic looking robots to do his music video. It was a great video and it got millions of views on Youtube, and he ended up getting paid $156.00 for his millions of views (while no telling how much YT made off ad revenues from him), and he thought there has to be a better way artists can make money and earn an actual living. So he started Patreon.

The problem with the Patreon model though is that it is a subscription model. I get it, that's probably a good idea for a business like patreon.com. Let's imagine I set aside an equivalent budget to Spotify for Patreon. Let's even bump it up just a bit under the assumption that it intrinsically has more value in terms of any metric that you wish to apply to justify that. So, a nice even $20/month is my budget now for Patreon. Do I give up Spotify? Well, I can't really, because, even though I'm made a mental justification for Patreon, there's still a need to listen to random and obscure things that I don't want to own, or want to listen to a few times, or even just once.

Just the other day I was watching a youtube video about the Stones album "Between the Buttons." The video prompted my interest and I listened to the full album once. Honestly, that is probably the last time I'll ever listen to that album in full. I like some of the hits on the album, but, the album itself is, well, quaint. I'm really appreciative that I can listen to that via streaming, it was given a chance, it didn't pass the test. I have more than a few albums that were purchased back in the day based on a similar curiosity that led to a similar conclusion. That got very old quickly enough and I was really appreciative of finding trusted sources that helped me avoid such purchases.

So, no, streaming will stay on my menu until the model collapses. At that point, there's no interest on my part in evening listening to those albums, let alone buying them. Moreover, knowing that I can't just listen to an album once, I won't bother watching the youtube video that has the potential to generate interest in your channel, or your Patreon.

So, back to that $20, now it's in addition to my $12, or whatever, streaming costs. How should I divide that up? How many artists can I support? Which artists should I support? What am I getting, in actual value to me, for my $20/month? A fuzzy feeling, that's just regressive tax, no thanks. Access to exclusive content? Well, what content? Your albums? Those can be had for about $10, if I'm being generous, on BandCamp, maybe $20 as a CD. I will likely buy, at most, one per year per artist, so why am I giving you more than say $1/month? Keep in mind that my one per year per artist is an outlier. If you aren't someone already on the national radar, that's likely not you. There are exceptions, I bought multiple records from Donacha Costello, about three years ago, none since.

Consider my perspective as the canary in the coalmine. I care, I care about copyright, I don't pirate anything, but I'm not willing to pay anyone based on how fuzzy a feeling I get from it. The vast majority of people, no matter what they say out loud, are less generous in that they are willing to violate one of those principles. I think that a big part of this is that the economic gap is widening around the world and the people who used to care about music a lot, young people, often with limited income, just don't have extra cash.

So, who's making enough off of Patreon? Maybe people like loopop, who does great reviews, but, in general, the entire free product schtick for reviews comes with a shallow "I got this shit for free but no money changed hands" as if that in some way mitigates the fact that the reviewer was paid for the review in some material way. I'm not throwing shade on loopop, I don't doubt his integrity, but I do doubt that his approach is as cleanly used across the board. Bottom line on this though is that I'm not going to pay for paid reviews.

Moreover, I think that the loopops of the ecosystem are the Taylor Swifts of Patreon. It's just a different sized pool with different players on the preferential attachment curve. By forcing consumers to choose which artists they subscribe to you are just dividing that $20 up into small chunks of money, or time in terms of moving it around. It doesn't materially change the model. I suspect that the friction of this impacts people at the lower end of the economic scale from even bothering with Patreon.

tl;dr: Patreon is just a different flavor of the same subscription model, it scales with popularity in the same way that the national charts do, just in a smaller pond with different players.