$2 Billion and Counting: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Speaks Out On Taylor Swift, 3 Big Myths & More
By Spotify CEO Daniel Ek.
Taylor Swift is absolutely right: music is art, art has real value, and artists deserve to be paid for it. We started Spotify because we love music and piracy was killing it. So all the talk swirling around lately about how Spotify is making money on the backs of artists upsets me big time. Our whole reason for existence is to help fans find music and help artists connect with fans through a platform that protects them from piracy and pays them for their amazing work.
Quincy Jones posted on Facebook that “Spotify is not the enemy; piracy is the enemy”. You know why? Two numbers: Zero and Two Billion. Piracy doesn’t pay artists a penny – nothing, zilch, zero. Spotify has paid more than two billion dollars to labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists. A billion dollars from the time we started Spotify in 2008 to last year and another billion dollars since then. And that’s two billion dollars’ worth of listening that would have happened with zero or little compensation to artists and songwriters through piracy or practically equivalent services if there was no Spotify – we’re working day and night to recover money for artists and the music business that piracy was stealing away.
When I hear stories about artists and songwriters who say they’ve seen little or no money from streaming and are naturally angry and frustrated, I’m really frustrated too. The music industry is changing – and we’re proud of our part in that change – but lots of problems that have plagued the industry since its inception continue to exist. As I said, we’ve already paid more than $2 billion in royalties to the music industry and if that money is not flowing to the creative community in a timely and transparent way, that’s a big problem. We will do anything we can to work with the industry to increase transparency, improve speed of payments, and give artists the opportunity to promote themselves and connect with fans – that’s our responsibility as a leader in this industry; and it’s the right thing to do.
"three big misconceptions out there about how we work, how much we pay,and what we mean for the future of music"
We’re trying to build a new music economy that works for artists in a way the music industry never has before. And it is working – Spotify is the single biggest driver of growth in the music industry, the number one source of increasing revenue, and the first or second biggest source of overall music revenue in many places. Those are facts. But there are at least three big misconceptions out there about how we work, how much we pay, and what we mean for the future of music and the artists who create it. Let’s take a look at them.
Myth number one: free music for fans means artists don’t get paid. On Spotify, nothing could be further from the truth. Not all free music is created equal – on Spotify, free music is supported by ads, and we pay for every play. Until we launched Spotify, there were two economic models for streaming services: all free or all paid, never together, and both models had a fatal flaw. The paid-only services never took off (despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing), because users were being asked to pay for something that they were already getting for free on piracy sites. The free services, which scaled massively, paid next to nothing back to artists and labels, and were often just a step away from piracy, implemented without regard to licensing, and they offered no path to convert all their free users into paying customers. Paid provided monetization without scale, free reached scale without monetization, and neither produced anywhere near enough money to replace the ongoing decline in music industry revenue.
We had a different idea. We believed that a blended option – or ‘freemium’ model – would build scale and monetization together, ultimately creating a new music economy that gives fans access to the music they love and pays artists fairly for their amazing work. Why link free and paid? Because the hardest thing about selling a music subscription is that most of our competition comes from the tons of free music available just about everywhere. Today, people listen to music in a wide variety of ways, but by far the three most popular ways are radio, YouTube, and piracy – all free. Here’s the overwhelming, undeniable, inescapable bottom line: the vast majority of music listening is unpaid. If we want to drive people to pay for music, we have to compete with free to get their attention in the first place.
So our theory was simple – offer a terrific free tier, supported by advertising, as a starting point to attract fans and get them in the door. And unlike other free music options – from piracy to YouTube to SoundCloud – we pay artists and rights holders every time a song is played on our free service. But it’s not as flexible or uninterrupted as Premium. If you’ve ever used Spotify’s free service on mobile, you know what I mean – just like radio, you can pick the kind of music you want to hear but can’t control the specific song that’s being played, or what gets played next, and you have to listen to ads. We believed that as fans invested in Spotify with time, listening to their favorite music, discovering new music and sharing it with their friends, they would eventually want the full freedom offered by our premium tier, and they’d be willing to pay for it.
We were right. Our free service drives our paid service. Today we have more than 50 million active users of whom 12.5 million are subscribers each paying $120 per year. That’s three times more than the average paying music consumer spent in the past. What’s more, the majority of these paying users are under the age of 27, fans who grew up with piracy and never expected to pay for music. But here’s the key fact: more than 80% of our subscribers started as free users. If you take away only one thing, it should be this: No free, no paid, no two billion dollars.
Myth number two: Spotify pays, but it pays so little per play nobody could ever earn a living from it. First of all, let’s be clear about what a single stream – or listen – is: it’s one person playing one song one time. So people throw around a lot of stream counts that seem big and then tell you they’re associated with payouts that sound small. But let’s look at what those counts really represent. If a song has been listened to 500 thousand times on Spotify, that’s the same as it having been played one time on a U.S. radio station with a moderate sized audience of 500 thousand people. Which would pay the recording artist precisely … nothing at all. But the equivalent of that one play and it’s 500 thousand listens on Spotify would pay out between three and four thousand dollars. The Spotify equivalent of ten plays on that radio station – once a day for a week and a half – would be worth thirty to forty thousand dollars.
Now, let’s look at a hit single, say Hozier’s ‘Take Me To Church’. In the months since that song was released, it’s been listened to enough times to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for his label and publisher. At our current size, payouts for a top artist like Taylor Swift (before she pulled her catalog) are on track to exceed $6 million a year, and that’s only growing – we expect that number to double again in a year. Any way you cut it, one thing is clear – we’re paying an enormous amount of money to labels and publishers for distribution to artists and songwriters, and significantly more than any other streaming service.
Myth number three: Spotify hurts sales, both download and physical. This is classic correlation without causation – people see that downloads are down and streaming is up, so they assume the latter is causing the former. Except the whole correlation falls apart when you realize a simple fact: downloads are dropping just as quickly in markets where Spotify doesn’t exist. Canada is a great example, because it has a mature music market very similar to the US. Spotify launched in Canada a few weeks ago. In the first half of 2014, downloads declined just as dramatically in Canada – without Spotify – as they did everywhere else. If Spotify is cannibalising downloads, who’s cannibalising Canada?
By the same token, we’ve got a great list of artists who promoted their new releases on Spotify and had terrific sales and lots of streaming too – like Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande, Lana Del Rey and alt-J. Artists from Daft Punk to Calvin Harris to Eminem had number ones and were on Spotify at the same time too.
Which brings us back to Taylor Swift. She sold more than 1.2 million copies of 1989 in the US in its first week, and that’s awesome. We hope she sells a lot more because she’s an exceptional artist producing great music. But she’s the only artist who has sold more than a million copies in an album’s first week since 2002. In the old days, multiple artists sold multiple millions every year. That just doesn’t happen any more; people’s listening habits have changed – and they’re not going to change back. You can’t look at Spotify in isolation – even though Taylor can pull her music off Spotify (where we license and pay for every song we’ve ever played), her songs are all over services and sites like YouTube and Soundcloud, where people can listen all they want for free. To say nothing of the fans who will just turn back to pirate services like Grooveshark. And sure enough, if you looked at the top spot on The Pirate Bay last week, there was 1989…
Here’s the thing I really want artists to understand: Our interests are totally aligned with yours. Even if you don’t believe that’s our goal, look at our business. Our whole business is to maximize the value of your music. We don’t use music to drive sales of hardware or software. We use music to get people to pay for music. The more we grow, the more we’ll pay you. We’re going to be transparent about it all the way through. And we have a big team of your fellow artists here because if you think we haven’t done well enough, we want to know, and we want to do better. None of that is ever going to change.
We’re getting fans to pay for music again. We’re connecting artists to fans they would never have otherwise found, and we’re paying them for every single listen. We’re not just streaming, we’re mainstreaming now, and that’s good for music makers and music lovers around the world.
1. No one (credible) is saying Spotify doesn’t pay anything. Straw man.
2. Streaming and radio are apples and oranges. I can’t tell the radio station to play the song I want to hear *right now*. I have to wait until the station decides to play it. Streaming is on demand and instantly fills my need to hear a given track. Since my need to skilled instantly, there’s no need to purchase the record.
Talking about pays per listen is also highly misleading: if I buy a record and only listen to it once, I’m paying $15 per listen.
The real problem with Spotifys royalty distribution (in my mind at least), is that all the subscription fees collected go into a pool this distributed based on the number of plays. This rewards music that is better suited for passive listening in the background. Challenging music that requires active listening can never hope to generate enough plays to earn much money Under this system. If I subscribe to Spotify, and only listen to my bloody Valentine, why is any other artist getting a share of my subscription money?
A subscribers money should be distributed based on who the subscriber actually listens to. This would have a dramatic positive effect on small artists, and great artists who are more challenging to listen to.
3. I am a lifelong musician. I support the music industry with all my heart and passion. But once I subscribed to a streaming service, I stopped buying records. There was no point, anything I wanted to listen to was available on streaming format. Why spend hundreds of dollars a year when $10 a month can satisfy all my listening needs? How many records did *you* buy this year Daniel?
It doesn’t take much more than common sense to realize that streaming absolutely cannibalizes record sales. Arguing against this obvious fact makes you look duplicitous.
I am not advocating a return to how things were. Streaming is here to stay. But the method and manner in which royalties are calculated and distributed needs to change. One of the first things you can do, is stop giving money generated by small independent artists away to artists who get large numbers of plays making what is essentially background music. I am horrified that any of my subscription dollars can wind up in the pockets of artists I vehemently dislike.
#Sharky
Can you specify why a small-artists track objectively is more worth than a major mainstream artists track? I can’t…
Sharky:
1. No one (credible) is saying Spotify doesn’t pay anything. Straw man.
Swift herself said that “music should not be free,” and that if an artist consents to users having a free tier, they are “underestimating themselves” and “undervaluing their art.” And some people (e.g. the Music Ally blog) have noted that Swift pulled her music only from streaming sites that have a free tier, or “freemium” model (which, at present, is mainly Spotify). The ones that are subscription-only (like Beats) still have her music.
It’s not a straw man at all. You may not agree with him, but Ek’s response is right on point.
2. Streaming and radio are apples and oranges. I can’t tell the radio station to play the song I want to hear *right now*. I have to wait until the station decides to play it. Streaming is on demand and instantly fills my need to hear a given track.
This is not how Spotify’s free tier works. Their free tier is “non-interactive,” to use the legal term, and is closer to something like Pandora.
Ek himself even explained this in the article: “just like radio, you can pick the kind of music you want to hear but can’t control the specific song that’s being played, or what gets played next, and you have to listen to ads.”
You might have a point when talking about subscription services vs. radio, but not the free tier, and that’s the primary reason Swift pulled her music (it seems).
Talking about pays per listen is also highly misleading: if I buy a record and only listen to it once, I’m paying $15 per listen.
And you’d be getting ripped off. Ripping off your consumers is not an ethical business model, no matter how much it may (or may not) benefit artists. But in fact, almost nobody buys a record for $15 anymore, and if anyone does so, they sure as hell don’t listen to it only once. If they’re paying that much, they’re likely going to listen to it a lot.
As an aside, if you do believe this, then you should call people out on who compare songwriter payouts from Spotify or Pandora to payouts from terrestrial radio. Compared to internet radio, terrestrial radio pays out almost nothing to songwriters – yet it is the internet services who are getting all the negative press.
The real problem with Spotifys royalty distribution (in my mind at least), is that all the subscription fees collected go into a pool this distributed based on the number of plays. This rewards music that is better suited for passive listening in the background. Challenging music that requires active listening can never hope to generate enough plays to earn much money Under this system. If I subscribe to Spotify, and only listen to my bloody Valentine, why is any other artist getting a share of my subscription money?
Here’s the problem with that line of thinking. Nobody is going to subscribe to Spotify and only listen to My Bloody Valentine. People who use the service are doing so precisely because of its large catalog.
Let’s turn this argument around. Without the “passive listening” music, fewer people are going to sign up for the service – and hence won’t listen to the “challenging” music either. I’m going out on a limb here and figuring that popular music, like Swift’s, are what you would consider “passive listening” music. Without artists like her, nobody would listen to artists like My Bloody Valentine, so why should they get any of “her” subscription money?
That’s simply your argument turned around, it’s not one I actually endorse. In fact, I think Spotify’s system is eminently fair. People sign up for the service, and use it however they like; the payouts are based on their usage. I don’t see a problem with this, and in fact the Spotify system would seem to benefit smaller artists more than popular ones.
3. I am a lifelong musician. I support the music industry with all my heart and passion. But once I subscribed to a streaming service, I stopped buying records. There was no point, anything I wanted to listen to was available on streaming format. Why spend hundreds of dollars a year when $10 a month can satisfy all my listening needs?
Most people aren’t lifelong musicians, and will not – and have never – spent hundreds of dollars a year on music. Most people who are now paying $10/month for Spotify would pay something like $5/month on music otherwise.
In fact, all you’re saying is that the casual listeners (who pay more) are subsidizing music aficionados like yourself. Personally, I wouldn’t complain.
One of the first things you can do, is stop giving money generated by small independent artists away to artists who get large numbers of plays making what is essentially background music. I am horrified that any of my subscription dollars can wind up in the pockets of artists I vehemently dislike.
Well, as I said, I completely disagree. Spotify pays out according to who is listened to on their service. If you listen to My Bloody Valentine, your streams are counted, and payouts go to My Bloody Valentine. If someone gets a subscription to Spotify so they can listen to (say) Maroon 5, but end up listening to My Bloody Valentine a couple of times, then the payouts from those streams also go to My Bloody Valentine. I just don’t see the issue here.
Incidentally, if you feel that way, then you probably hate the way PRO’s such as ASCAP pay out to their artists. They can’t do per-listen calculations, so they essentially pay only Top 40 artists, regardless of what you actually listen to on the radio (or play in a venue, etc).
@James
If I spend $10/month and listen exclusively to DumDum Girls why should *any* other artist get the benefit of my subscription fees?
I am not paying to listen to Justin Bieber, so why should he get a portion of my subscription fee simply because his army of listeners hit the repeat button?
From an operations standpoint doesn’t it make sense to reward artists with high revenue to bandwidth consumption?
The bottom line is the money should go to the artists generating the revenue. Artists generating large number of plays will still do very well. But smaller artists would finally stand a chance if they can deliver subscribers who are focused on their music. Genres that deliver dedicated subscribers but not necessarily large numbers of plays (jazz, indie, classical) would also benefit. What’s not to like about that?
$2 billion! wow, that’s about 4 times what Elk paid himself.
@tritonester
1. Taylor says they are giving it away for free. You acknowledge they are via the freemium model. Her point: why is *my* work being used to build your *business* and I am not getting paid? It’s a fair point. Ek’s response: we’ve paid out $2B. This is a strawman because no one with credibility is saying that Spotify hasn’t paid out any money at all.
2. I have many records I only listened to once or twice which I consider worth every penny. Challenging works cannot be valued strictly by the number of plays. Not all great music was designed for repeat listening. If you don’t agree then I would emphatically say you are missing out. I don’t put Meredith Monk on my daily playlist, but she’s in my top ten of influences.
3. *Nobody* is going to listen to MBV exclusively??? Or just nobody you know? Well now you know someone: me. For the three months after that last record came out that was exclusively all I listened to. I pay $10/month to hear exciting new music. I do not pay $10/month to hear Avicii. In fact I would consider paying $10/month to not hear Avicii. Yet under the current royalty system it is a near certainty that some of my subscription fee went to Avicii. How is that remotely fair? If I buy a Future Islands record should Justin Bieber get a cut because without Bieber the music industry would be smaller? Of course not! Yet that is precisely what Spotify does.
As for benefitting smaller artists you are clearly deeply disconnected from the reality small artists face. If I am a baby band and deliver 1000 subscribers who listen to my music exclusively 3x a day for 3 months, I have singlehandedly delivered $30k of revenue to Spotify, of which $21k will be paid out as royalties. But not to me, because under the current system I will only get around $700 in royalties. The remaining $20,300 of royalties payable will go to artists like Justin Bieber who have listeners that will listen to a track 100x a day. The result is that it’s a mathematical certainty that larger artists are being paid more in royalties than they actually generate in revenue. And the artists bearing the brunt of this are those that can least afford it.
3. You are incorrect on PRO payouts. Over a decade after my last commercial release I continue to get checks for performances of music I wrote. TV and digital media are itemized and quite granular (3 plays in Kuwait last quarter!). True, broadcast radio is sampled, but that’s an understandable solution: between fraud and error there is no better way to determine what radio stations actually play. That’s not an issue with Spotify: we know exactly what was played, and by whom.
Under the current system the $10 a Bieber listener pays could be worth $15-20 to him. The $10 a baby band generates is going to pay pennies if anything. There’s clearly something wrong here.
If a listener listens to a baby band AND Bieber they should split the subscription fee relative to the number of plays of each: 25 plays of the baby band and 45 plays of Bieber should translate to subscribers the being divvied up proportionately: $2.50 for the baby band and $5.50 for Bieber. This should scale up: if it’s a 100 artists they all split the $7 according to plays. Listeners who run music continuously in the background will be paying out less per play. Active listeners who only listen to a couple artists will see their subscription fees divided among fewer artists resulting in larger payouts per play.
If you don’t see the inherent fairness in dividing up the revenue paid by a subscriber among the artist that subscriber actually listens I just don’t know what to say. Try talking to some real artists and asking how the current system is working for them. Hint: it’s not.
I guess pay per listen is the easiest way to calculate the royalties and without going to deep into it also the fairest.
However, it would be very interesting to see how the subscription money is divided compared to what each subscriptor actually listens to. In other words, the share of royalties compared to the share of subscription fees generated.
I would support the following assumptions:
Popular artists (such as Justin Bieber): share of royalties > share of subscirption fees generated
Indi artists: share of royalties < share of subscription fees generated The question now is: by which factor do the two shares differ? I believe, it is not just by 2 or 3 but a lot higher. And, to agree with Sharky on this point, that is pretty unfair and makes the "Our interests are totally aligned with yours" talk by EK ridiculous.
@JoJa
Royalty calculations should never be based on what’s “the easiest” but on whats fairest. With that being said, figuring out, subscriber by subscriber, what they listened to and dividing royalties accordingly is *not* remotely a difficult task. It is a simple database query combined with some very simple math.
The code to calculate this could be written, deployed, and executed in under an hour. Testing it to confirm accuracy might take a little longer, but compared to serving streams to millions of people simultaneously all over the world this is literally child’s play.
#Sharky
“easy” was more about selling the pay out system to the powerful and (to Spotify) important customers. Imagine, Ek and his team need to explain to the Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift management that they are getting less money per stream than the next door indie band. Rightfully so, but bargaining power does not lay on Spotifys side. Infact, it probably happens the other way around.
#JoJa Got it. I agree most of the bargaining power lies with the major labels. But I’m not sure I agree with the premise that Taylor would not do well under this system. I am of the opinion that artists like Taylor Swift would stand to make substantially more! She has legions of die-hard fans who listen to her music exclusively and are very emotional about her work. Maybe Justin Bieber is a poor example and he would do just fine. The primary losers would be artists with low engagement rates. Many people just pick a genre, put it on in the background and let it play. They don’t even know the names of the artists they are listening to. Dance and Lounge music comes to mind. Because they are playing constantly in the background they get lots of plays. I’m fairly certain that Avicii would not be doing so well.
Would the majors bite? I think it serves their interests too: instead of concentrating all the revenue in a small handful of artists who can then leverage that into higher royalty rates, spread it around. Now you got newer artists with presumably lower royalty rates getting higher payments which translates into more revenue for the major labels. The ecosystem becomes more vibrant with more artists doing interesting things because they can afford to take chances. Listeners are more engaged because they are voting with their ears who will get their subscription revenue. And the next generation of talent gets a leg to stand on. On balance I think the entire industry would benefit.
@Sharky
just to be clear, you propose a pay out system based the subscriptor´s preference:
Subsriptor A listens to say Taylor Swift a 1000 times a months comparing to subscriptor B who listen 100 times to an indie band (they listen to nothing else for the sake of simplicity). Each subsriptor pays 10 bucks a month of which Taylor Swift and the artist each receives 10 (minus the Spotify cut).
Correct?
There is a direct link between payment and usage. The money goes where it belongs.
@ Sharky Laguana:
1. Taylor says they are giving it away for free. You acknowledge they are via the freemium model. Her point: why is *my* work being used to build your *business* and I am not getting paid?
It looks like someone is claiming that “Spotify hasn’t paid out any money at all,” and that someone is you.
In fact, artists like Swift are getting paid for the streams on the free tier. And Swift herself never claimed otherwise. Her argument (it appears) is not that she’s not getting paid for those streams, it’s that the mere existence of a free tier “devalues” her work.
2. I have many records I only listened to once or twice which I consider worth every penny.
Well, good for you, but most people would consider that getting ripped off. Including me.
There’s nothing wrong with “challenging” music, but the entire idea of why it is worthwhile is that it requires more listens to “get.” If you only listen to the record once or twice, then you’re doing a disservice to yourself, and to the artists who created it. At least in my opinion.
Challenging works cannot be valued strictly by the number of plays.
If streams for those works should be paid more than works listened to regularly, then that would simply not be fair at all. And that is exactly what you are saying: that somehow the artists that are streamed less should be paid more, because they’re producing “difficult” music.
3. *Nobody* is going to listen to MBV exclusively??? Or just nobody you know? Well now you know someone: me.
You should really broaden your tastes, then. I like MBV as well as the next guy, but you could put on a Skullflower track once in a while, or something.
I do not pay $10/month to hear Avicii. In fact I would consider paying $10/month to not hear Avicii. Yet under the current royalty system it is a near certainty that some of my subscription fee went to Avicii. How is that remotely fair?
This is a really bizarre way of looking at the whole thing. You’re paying for a service, like everyone else. The payouts from that service are determined by how people actually use that service.
So, if you’re only listening to MBV, then you’re not generating a single ounce of revenue for Avicii. Only those people who listen to Avicii are generating revenue for Avicii.
I am completely in the dark about how you could even consider this unfair. It’s the way music should have worked (but didn’t) from the beginning.
If I am a baby band and deliver 1000 subscribers who listen to my music exclusively 3x a day for 3 months, I have singlehandedly delivered $30k of revenue to Spotify, of which $21k will be paid out as royalties. But not to me, because under the current system I will only get around $700 in royalties. The remaining $20,300 of royalties payable will go to artists like Justin Bieber who have listeners that will listen to a track 100x a day.
This is simply ridiculous. No “baby band” is going to deliver 1000 subscribers who subscribe for their music exclusively. That just doesn’t happen. If it happened like that for anyone, it would be for the Biebers of the world, not the “baby bands.”
But that doesn’t happen for anyone (neither Biebers nor “baby bands”). People subscribe because of the deep catalog, not because it has just the one artist that they like. If that artist isn’t on Spotify, they won’t un-subscribe from Spotify, and probably won’t avoid signing up in the first place. They’ll sign up for the smorgasbord, and if a particular artist isn’t in it, they’ll just listen to someone else. (This is why I think Taylor Swift’s attitude is a mistake, at least in the long run.)
And I simply don’t know why you’re thinking that the “baby band” listeners would listen only 3x per day (to nothing else), but Bieber fans would listen 100x per day (to nothing else). Frankly, I think it’s the opposite – people who listen to popular music tend to be more casual listeners, and stream less music overall than fans of the “baby bands” of the world.
But even if this were true, I fail to see how it’s unfair. If people are listening to Bieber more than the “baby band,” then Bieber is obviously giving more value to Spotify subscribers, and deserves to be paid accordingly.
Listeners who run music continuously in the background will be paying out less per play. Active listeners who only listen to a couple artists will see their subscription fees divided among fewer artists resulting in larger payouts per play.
I have no idea how you could think this sytem is more “fair” than the one they have now. There is no empirical difference between an “active listener” and “listeners who run music continuously in the background.” The only thing we can say is that one person listens to more music than another.
So you’re demanding that the people who listen to less music generate higher per-stream payouts than people who are music fans. That simply does not make any sense to me at all.
And I believe that it would absolutely benefit the Biebers of the world more than the “baby bands” of the world. The people who listen to popular music are more likely to be casual listeners. Under your system, the lion’s share of the revenue would be based on what those casual listeners are playing.
In addition, your system would totally leave out artists who are played on the free tier, since they don’t generate any subscription revenue at all. Artists which, again, are being paid under the current model.
3. You are incorrect on PRO payouts. Over a decade after my last commercial release I continue to get checks for performances of music I wrote.
Well, then, you’ve benefited by the ASCAP sampling model. My point was not that this model never worked (or that nobody made money from it). And it wasn’t to diss ASCAP specifically – the sampling model was created precisely because it’s a practical impossibility to have the kind of granularity that you can get from individual streams.
But it is impossible to deny that what you’re railing against – the popular songwriters getting the lion’s share of the collective revenue pie – absolutely happens with ASCAP (and BMI, etc). And the divide happens for precisely the same reason: ASCAP only pays the songwriters who write “what radio stations actually play.” So, if you think Spotify’s royalty system is unfair, then you are logically required to think the same thing about ASCAP, because they work the same way. That was my point.
For the curious, Sharky Laguna has posted an article on medium.com about this issue, and I have posted a rebuttal showing how his proposal will harm indie musicians.
https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-to-make-streaming-royalties-fair-er-8b38cd862f66
http://tritonester.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/sharky-laguna-and-fair-spotify-royalties/