Time to put up or shut up about supporting the press.
$5 a week gets you the NYT and Spotify Premium for a year.
Wow, so Spotify really is going bust soon.
Is the NYT truly independant? Or just a liberal mouthpiece?
Who can even be objective in Trumps America?
Hah, I pay for both. Will continue to do so. Great deal for folks who have neither though.
This is not a terrible deal.
I’m a print subscriber… does this mean I get Spotify free as well?
No, they just mail you random song lyrics with the Sunday edition.
Also, Amazon Prime subscribers get a WaPo 6 month free trial of their online subscription. It is pretty great.
I’m surprised they can afford this.
My point exactly. It smacks of a desperation move to acquire customers, in the context of their financial situation.
Or maybe the cost-to-acquire and ARPU math works out, especially if NYT is kicking in any dollars.
I sure hope so. I subscribe to Spotify and I like it a lot better than the other services. But I’m not confident they’re going to be around in three years.
Well poop, I really like Spotify. I subscribed last year after getting tired of Pandora’s repetition.
If Play Music would just implement a workable “shuffle by albums,” it would be perfect for my needs.
I dunno if Spotify does that, but the fucking Spotify Connect service drained my phone’s batter like there was no tomorrow, so I had to drop it a couple of years ago.
The benefit to Spotify has always been playing exact songs as well as exact albums. No bullshit, no “just like” or “similar to,” just what you wanted to hear, unless the artist or record company had it removed.
I’ve been premium for a while now. If they actually fold, that will put a big hurt on my Echo and Home use as well.
What’s the deal with this weekly and monthly stuff?. I just want to pay for things a year at a time, like I do with magazines. Then I don’t want to hear from them again, about my subscription, until it’s almost up.
The downside being that the artists get fucked over on the deal. You could listen to someone’s entire album on Spotify 1000 times and they’d make less than you buying a couple tracks off iTrunes.
If you like someone’s music, just buy it. Streaming is fine for finding new stuff or maybe accessing stuff away from your library (though you could carry every song you’d ever want to listen to in your pocket nowadays).
Last I heard, the payout rate was around 1/2 cent per song streamed. So in that scenario, if the album had 10 tracks, the artist would make $50 off your streaming.
But yeah, the broader point stands that when you’re paying the price of an album for an entire month’s worth of unlimited listening, not a whole lot is going to make it back to any individual artist.
Not even close.
$0.006 and $0.0084 are the averages admitted by Spotify.
So in your example with 10 tracks they’d get $6-8.
But that’s literally 1000 playings of an entire fucking album. I’ve never listened to any song that much in my life that I’m aware of, much less a whole album and they’re still getting shorted. I was exaggerating… but not by a whole lot and I purposely took an example that was unrealisitically insane.
1 million+ streams for less than $5k.
“Average per-stream payout: $0.004891”
There’s a reason people like Taylor Swift left Spotify: it actually costs you money.
So actually… my number was probably low.
I’m… pretty sure all of those numbers support my point. $0.004891 IS ‘around half a cent’. $0.006 and $0.0084 are higher.
So if you stream a 10-track album 1000 times, that’s 10,000 individual song streams, which multiplies out to $50-84 depending on which number you want to go by.
And
Again, note that this is talking about streaming individual tracks, not the whole album. So it would be 119 streams of the whole album front-to-back. Though to make the comparison fairer, you’d want to base it not on the $10 purchase price, but the $6 that actually makes it back to the artist after the retailer’s cut, so more like 70 full-album streams.
So yes, the payout is much lower than it would be for buying an album, and if your goal is to directly support an artist, you should buy albums, concert tickets, or merchandise. But there’s no need to exaggerate the comparison beyond what the numbers show.
Assuming that everyone who streams an album a few times is a lost sale is the same sort of specious math that game companies love to use to exaggerate their losses to piracy. Yes there will be some number of people who would have bought an album but didn’t because they were content to stream it instead. But there’s some other number of people who never would have bought it anyway, so even a small amount from them checking it out is better than nothing (plus the benefits of reaching new listeners and growing a fan base).