This seems really cool. Its aim should not be to usurp Spotify (will never happen since major record labels are entrenched in Spotify now). Rather, I could see this as an alternative to Bandcamp or other similar indie music sites.
I actually like the pay-per-play model personally even though that might irk some people. I'm interested to see how the pricing shakes out for an audiophile type who consumes lots of music.
Platforms should make money off ad revenue and prime placements and be happy with that. Radio sustained itself, along with the major music industry for many many years without needing to charge listeners and musicians for the music, and so did TV. Back then, we found epic music a lot more than now...
Now we're duped into the false belief that somehow Spotify, while making record profit year after year paying artists $0.0000001 cent per stream is reasonable?
This economy will bankrupt everyone who is not in their engineered and very controlled food chain if we give them subscription money just to listen to sponsored playlists that we can find and listen to elsewhere for free if we look hard enough. Tons of great musicians are putting out music on YouTube for free, and many other places, but the lazy attitude of only paying attention to charts, and letting playlists dictate what succeeds is really killing music because the money pipeline is locked down by the big industry, and it only pushes sterile and engineered music, not real honest music by naturally talented musicians.
It's a sham now, and the wrong people who do nothing to create and deliver the music make the profit, while the real artists pay the worst price of working hard. Musicians are forced to beg people with GoFundMe and Patreon campaigns and
very often die broke in this weak new type of Internet music economy.
Plain and simple. Music needs a new reasonable delivery model, and we need to stop supporting monopolistic communities for content they don't make nor promote fairly while they totally rip the true OC creators off.
I have no relation to OP, nor the platform cited... I'm just a musician that has been through the storm.
> Our unique Stream2own model splits the cost of a digital download into 9 plays.
> Plays start off cheap when you're discovering and as you fall in love with a song, you come to pay the full price.
> There's no transition out of Resonate to buy a song or album. Purchase it directly, or just keep listening.
> Resonate pays artists directly and per-play. For listeners, the overall cost is similar to that of the average monthly streaming subscription.
I'd be interested in seeing how the 9 plays number was derived, or a deeper discussion or article more than what's on the linked page. This is an interesting model, I hope it works out the way the creators intended.
TBH I just liked the number 9. Subtle Beatles reference I guess. But the model also reflects the process of falling in love with an artist or an album, meaning the payout to the artist goes up the more I repeat listen.
The intent is great, but this isn't going to happen. I'm a big Spotify hater, frankly -- but one thing they understand is that the marginal cost of streaming OR downloading a song is effectively zero. It's weird to pretend that it isn't -- and it's REALLY weird to promise that you're going to automatically lose more money the more you listen to a song.
I think there's legs in the idea of "hey, you've listened to this a bunch, would you like to pay more (and perhaps get something else)?" But this ain't it.
"marginal cost of streaming OR downloading a song is effectively zero" - only if you don't consider royalties to be part of the marginal cost? What's weird to me is the seemingly pervasive idea that the cost of everything should be 100% directly related to its marginal cost + some small fixed percent. Things are priced based on what consumers will pay, which is related to how much value they derive from it.
Personally I'd be happy to pay $2 a month when I don't listen to much music and up to $30-40/month when I'm obsessed with album(s) and listening to them every day - how much that costs Spotify is somewhat irrelevant to me
No, royalties are objectively not part of the marginal cost, by definition. Marginal cost refers to things that must be paid for before the thing is made. This isn't a "should," it's essentially a principle of "the science of economics" (which isn't always much of a science, but this one holds up pretty well over time.)
The one that doesn't is the bit about "how much value they derive from it." All sorts of real-life experimentation/psychology, etc shows that people don't much know or understand or generally follow this thing of "a person develops a sense of how much something is worth to them and makes purchases accordingly," I mean, a moment's thought reveals that if this were true, advertising (and perhaps, google and facebook et als entire business models) wouldn't exist.
I have idiosyncratic music preferences like you, but we much don't matter.
I listen to music for at least 3 hours per day. Assuming two minute songs, that’s 2700 songs per month. Since my spotify subscription is $10/month, that’s about 0.3 cents per song. I’m curious if I listen to much more music than average or what. I often hear that spotify is underpaying artists with complaints like “less than a penny for stream” (google says the average is 0.4 cents), but it doesn’t seem like spotify could be taking a huge cut off the top
The problem is your $10 isn't split among artists you listen to. Your $10 is tossed into a pool with all the other $10s and split depending on deals made with Spotify, not based on listening. That means the vast majority goes to the most popular artists' labels, many (maybe most) you never listened to. Most artists make pennies at best because already successful artists have labels that negotiate better per-stream rates. And they still see very little of it once everyone after Spotify and before the artist takes their cut.
I think GPs point is, given their streaming habits and what Spotify charges, it’s not possible to pay 1cent per stream on average.
Though my math would be slightly different.
Assuming:
* 3 hours (180 minutes) per day
* 30 days in a month
* $10 subscription
* 3.5 minute average song length
180 * 30 / 3.5 = 1543 streams per month
$10 / 1543 = $0.0065 per stream
So for a listener listening on average 3 hours per day, if Spotify gave away 100% of what they charged the user, they’d still only be able to pay an average of little over 1/2 a cent per stream.
No matter how you distribute that money, unless you charge the user more, there isn’t a way to pass on an entire cent per stream to every artist from that users subscription.
Yeah, to achieve that you're looking at a minimum of $25+ per month, and probably more like $60 once you take in to account payment processing fees, the service overhead, label overhead, etc.
And despite all the virtue signalling, there is no way the majority of users would be happy to pay an average of $60+ a month to stream music.
Paying to become a co-op member is optional. Not required for listening.
The latter seems like an issue though. It would be great to be able to convert a listener account into an artist account, or to have both under one account entity.
We're about to launch an long-anticipated User API which is going to solve this double account type problem (listener + artist + etc). Supposed to drop in December.
And the other comment is correct... co-op membership is optional.
> It's also about resisting the urge to treat music as nothing more than audio wallpaper.
Having music on doesn’t require an active listening experience, nor should it. And if I really want to engage with an artist, I’m going to see them live or buy their work on a medium I own whose playback I control. Sorry, but for me this stream credit system would be more of a pain than a benefit.
> also your pricing page doesnt actually give a sense of cost at all? 9 plays per what? 5 euro? 10 dollars? .0000005 eth?
This is a huge oversight.
Resonate is a good idea in theory but the majority of people who really care about independent artists getting paid properly for digital music (which seems to be the main purpose behind Resonate) are supporting artists by buying from Bandcamp, rather than solely streaming.
Its kind of telling that Resonate has been around for 7 years yet the database is 13,000 songs. In my experience artists and labels will upload their music anywhere that will get them plays/pays. Not saying that Bandcamp is perfect but it really resonates (sorry) with artists and labels.
Hopefully Resonate can get it right because we need more people to become comfortable with paying for music again.
For comparison: my own library of songs [0] is 127, and I'm not particularly prolific. That's just short of 1% of their library. Bandcamp has at least 100 people more prolific than I am.
The pricing page gives prices in terms of "credits", their FAQ [1] includes the actual conversion rate: 1 credit ~= $1.49. That makes listening to a song the first time cost a bit less than 0.3 cents, and after 9 plays you will have paid the full cost of ~$1.50
Has anyone ever figured this out? It doesn't make it clear at all on the site. As someone who listens to spotify almost all day during working hours, I wonder how much this would cost me compared to the $5/month or whatever I pay now. I'm fine paying more if it goes to the artist, but for goodness sake you need to make it clear what this thing costs.
The idea seems sweet. I registered immediately, but the catalog seems to be pretty empty for now. For me the biggest feature is being able to write a new client. Oh, how I wish Spotify or Tidal had open APIs...
Once the User API is launched (expected in Dec 21) then we'll finally be able to automate profile and catalog creation for the many distributors standing by. Expecting 20-50X in catalog size then.
> Paying the lowest price you possibly can nearly always means someone along the way was exploited
No, I agree with that. But that's still engaging in charity, right? Voluntarily paying more for something that I could pay less for, so that artists will have a living wage, workers won't be exploited, etc etc.
Your "sustain something you want to see continue to exist" suggests something else, though. What it suggests is that I have a good practical reason, on the basis of wanting to see good music continue to be created, to personally pay more for music. I think this is incorrect.
If I was of the opinion that only a few artists made really great music, it might make sense to exclusively fund them so that they would continue doing so. But that's not the case: music is an extremely cheap commodity these days, because high quality production is so easy (can even be done with free or cheap software on an old laptop). There's enough good music put out there for free by people just doing it as a hobby to last a lifetime. You can't compete with that; a "fair share" of nothing is still nothing. Similar problem for Uber drivers: when there are too many drivers, the cost per ride gets driven through the floor. That's true regardless of whether Uber are exploiting their drivers (they probably are).
I was evasive in my original reply, so let me put my cards on the table. I do think that voluntarily paying more for something than it is worth (its fair market price) is charity. And I don't think it is practicable to fix the problems with artist remuneration by encouraging everyone to be charitable. And I think it's a bit ludicrous to try to commandeer the word "fair" to mean something other than the market price, if you're not going to reconsider the more fundamental assumptions behind having a market in the first place.
I would argue that if you want music to flourish, in something like its present democratized form, you need to do just that. Music should be understood as a human good - both creating and listening to it. All music is good, even bad music. All musicians should be supported, even those whose music wouldn't be popular enough to earn a living wage at the market price. Recall that even the Beatles were supposedly on the dole at one point.
On the other hand, we could decide that music is simply not all that valuable to us, that creating more music than anyone can reasonably consume does not promote any particular human good, and let the current proliferation of music die. That's also a valid outcome. What isn't valid, to my way of thinking, is valuing music and then thinking that charity ought to be our way of responding to that value.
What you are calling charity (which also lumps in patronage since patrons don't pay "fair market prices") is precisely how music has been funded for hundreds of years and how classical/orchestral music continues to survive today. No one funds opera houses or gets their name on one of the bricks because they think it's a smart business decision or a fair market transaction. It will hopefully continue to be a big part of the equation going forward, I think a whole community being able to see live orchestral music based on the generosity of a few is a good thing that should continue.
Your whole comment is somewhat baffling to me as you decry "charity" or anything not based in free-market economics as "not the way" but provide little in the way of specifics on what should be done, other than that we should "reconsider the more fundamental assumptions".
Here's the fundamental assumption being reconsidered: the idea that the only value the consumer derives from a product is the direct first-order utility or pleasure they get from using the product. Let me put it this way: there's a market for "free trade" coffee that is more expensive than regular coffee. Is that charity? I don't think so, instead I think it recognizes that there is actual economic value in the consumer's personal satisfaction or belief that they are purchasing something sustainable, that they can feel good about. Call it charity if you want, but it is a very real economic force.
> is precisely how music has been funded for hundreds of years and how classical/orchestral music continues to survive today
You're quite right about this. That's why it's important that I'm strongly of the view that the economic realities of music making have changed. The difference is that now a vastly larger number of people are making music, because technology has made this possible, and individual pieces of music are reaching vastly larger audiences, thanks to the "free-copy" effect of files.
If the goal were to preserve music (the cultural institution of music) exactly as it has existed for hundreds of years, your approach (patronage) would be sufficient. This is what I meant when I said that we could just conclude that making and consuming music aren't values as such. As long as there's enough music to go around, as much as anyone needs, then that's enough and we should not make any more. In other words, this is the view that concludes that the market is right, that it has accurately priced in the way we value (or don't value) music. Individual compositions and performances are intrinsically fungible.
My view is that we have larger possibilities. That the democratization and wide-scale production of music, even too much music, is itself an expression of a human good and that it makes sense for a society to support it for that reason, even though it is incapable of generating profits that would pay for itself. My point is that this huge over-production of music is something that cannot, like the music of the past, be paid for by individual acts of charity. That was something that only worked when there was only a certain amount of "good" music that needed to be sustained.
I believe that most people who listen to music instinctively embrace part of my view (that music is a human good as such), but are trapped into thinking that the only way in which "fair" and "unfair" can be assessed is in the commodity price of the work. I'm trying to show that this is incoherent: if whatever the market says is the value of music is the end of the story, then most music is simply not valuable and you get something like the present hierarchy of artists, with a handful of multimillionaires at the top and a majority making almost nothing at the bottom. You can't bypass that by trying to force the idea of a "fair share of value" into our current system for determining values, which is simply incompatible with that.
Edit: let me spell out something that may be unclear about my view. Part of what I'm getting at is that there is an enormous gap between "fair market value + charity" (as I would have it) or "fair market value, including the value of fair remuneration" (as you would have it) and meeting the actual material needs of most artists. Even the most expansive view of "fair trade music", or whatever, is not going to say that individual people should be paying more than $20 an album or so. The market value of a work of art cannot be taken to automatically contain the necessary remuneration to ensure that the creator earns a living wage through their work. To wish that it did is to wish that market prices ceased to function as prices.
So even on the most wishful version of "fair" payment under a market pricing scheme, the vast majority of artists won't be paid enough (where "enough" is read in the intuitive way I have in mind that reflects the real human value inherent in creating music). We can either be okay with that, and say that the current system (with a few adjustments, perhaps) is fine, or we can say that some human goods that cannot be priced into a free market are also worth achieving.
Vouched for your comment because I thought it was an interesting view. Not sure why it was downvoted.
Why can't it be both? Suppose I buy t-shirts from Walmart. At the checkout counter, the cashier asks me to donate $5 to feed hungry children in Malaysia. I take a quick look at the tag on my $3 t-shirt. Turns out it was made by hungry children in Malaysia.
In this case, giving the $5 would be both justice and charity. The way the workers who made the shirt are underpaid and hungry is unjust, so taking a step towards rectifying this probably counts as justice. On the other hand, it's undeniably a voluntary payment made to a poor person because they are poor. It's not something I have to do, nor is it something I can reasonably count on many other people doing. So it's charity.
I actually like the pay-per-play model personally even though that might irk some people. I'm interested to see how the pricing shakes out for an audiophile type who consumes lots of music.