Matt BirchlerModify

2025-12-11 22:00:00

Once something becomes easy for anyone to do, it stops being interesting.

2025-12-11 08:15:11

Based on the best data I can find, last year Spotify had 602 million active users as of early 2025, with about 42% of those users being paid subscribers (less than half!). Additionally, 2/3 of the people on premium are on it with some sort of incentive that gets them access for free or at a discounted rate (usually something like bundled in with their cell service).

And according to this data, only about 12% of their revenue comes from advertising. Put another way, 58% of Spotify's users account for 12% of the revenue. Put still another way (and if my ballpark math is right), if a Spotify subscription is $10 per month:

• A third of the premium subscribers are paying $10
• Two-thirds of premium subscribers are generating some amount less than $10
• Free users are generating about $1

Now, I'm sure these metrics are somehow off a bit, but you get the idea. If a free user especially contributes about $12 to Spotify over a year and listens to thousands of songs by hundreds of artists, how exactly would you split that $12 up in a way that's fair to all those artists?

2025-12-10 22:00:10

Richard Stallman in Reasons not to use ChatGPT

I call it a "bullshit generator" because it generates output "with indifference to the truth".

We are three years into the ChatGPT era, and I feel as confident as I have at any point in those last three years that, while Large Language Models (LLMs) are a serious and notable technology advancement, they are more of a normal technology than many give them credit for.

On one end, you have people who think LLMs are truly intelligent and we're just 6 months away from becoming God. On the other end, you have people who think it's absolute fluff that nobody actually wants. I don't know the author of the post I was referencing, but it certainly sounds like they are more on the latter side of this dichotomy.

I quoted the specific line about "indifference to the truth" because it's one that I constantly see from the anti-LLM crowd: the idea that these models "don't actually know anything," and I cannot express to you enough how little I care about that critique.

Yes, I will agree with you that neither ChatGPT, nor Claude, nor Gemini, nor anything currently available knows anything in a conscious sense, but that doesn't mean I don't find them useful. Does a spreadsheet "know" anything? No. Does HTTP "know" things? Absolutely not. That doesn't mean those technologies are useless either.

As ever, I feel like the people on either end of me are looking at LLMs as if they're magic, and some think that magic is good and others think it's bad. It's just normal technology, people. Computers haven't had to understand what they were doing before and they don't have to now.

2025-12-10 07:29:02

Earlier today I wrote about why I think the pay-per-stream metric is a bad singular reference point, and doubly so when it's used as a cudgel in the fanboy wars to show why your brand is better than someone else's brand. Jason Dettbarn, who is closer to the music industry than me, wrote up a reply at his Crucial Tracks blog:

I get that bands currently make more money on Spotify in total, but if bands/fans/etc. keep advocating and the listening behavior switches to better paying services (or forces Spotify to pay more), then that's a good thing.

This is a fair retort. Putting pressure on Spotify to increase the payout pool and reduce their profits is worth doing. My intention was more to point out that when people pay in so little for access to all the music in the world, and when many millions more pay zero for access to that music, there's simply not enough money to pay all the artists all they deserve.

What I especially liked in their post was a link to this from Los Campesinos! (a band I love) where they shared their streaming music revenue as well.

It being Streaming Stat Season, I thought now would be a good time to offer a detailed breakdown of how much money we make from our music being streamed.

Hell yeah, transparency like this helps demystify the world and lets people set more realistic expectations for how much money is being made out there. I was doubly happy when I saw they shared raw totals from each platform as well as the per-stream rates. Here's how their revenue broke down for streams of their newest album:

As I suspected from my last post, Spotify may have had the lowest per-stream rate, but they contributed 75% of the total listens and 64% of the total revenue. So yes, Spotify had more people listening to Los Campesinos! music and it paid them the most, but the per-stream rate was lower. Again, I think the much lower revenue Spotify makes from their free users is a notable detail here, as Apple, Tidal, and Amazon don't have these users in the mix, and I maintain that if they did, their per-stream payouts would drop closer to Spotify and YouTube's numbers.

This data also brings up something important that I didn't really touch on in the first piece: Spotify doesn't have a set per-stream payout, it fluctuates. Doing some quick math on their overall revenue numbers, you can see there's a 20% swing from month to month as all sorts of variables shift.

I think some people think that when you stream a song on Spotify, that increments a counter that adds $0.004 to the artist's payout, but that's not the case. Based largely on the company's overall income, they have a "pot" of money (for lack of a better word) set aside to pay out everyone on the platform every month.

For simplicity's sake, let's say that pot is $100 and there are 2 artists on the service, you and another band. Last month, you got 20 streams and they got 30 streams. That meant you accounted for 40% of the streams on the platform, and therefore you got $40, or $2/stream.

But then the next month, the other band's music goes viral and while you got the same 20 streams you did last month, the other artist got 100 streams. Now you account for 16.7% of the streams and those same 20 streams only got you $16.67, or $0.83%/stream.

These numbers are extreme examples, but they should illustrate the point that artists in this sort of system are fundamentally competing with each other for a fixed amount of money. Ideally, the pot that gets paid out will scale with subscriber revenue, and my understanding is that it does for these music streamers (it doesn’t always, though…looking at you, TikTok). The reasonable push back is that they should add a bit more to the pot so that a higher share of their revenue is going to the artists.

My contention, and what I tried to communicate in that last piece, although I may have implied it too subtly, is that even if Spotify bumped up the pot to the point where they were just breaking even as a business, there simply isn't enough money coming in from consumers to pay artists well in this system. I personally paid about $120 for streaming music last year and I listened to over 400 artists, 1,600 songs, and probably like 5,000 streams. How is that $120 going to pay out a fair amount to all those artists as well as pay to keep the music service itself running? I'm totally willing to bet there is more margin to be had, but I can't help but keep coming back to the fact I simply think streaming music is a business model at the prices we pay today that fundamentally does not value music.

I was feeling kind of down after writing these two posts today, so I took the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is and bought Los Campesinos! latest album direct from them. By my quick math, this one act did as much good as 8,205 streams would have done them.

I'll close this post with the same thing I said in that first one:

If you want to actually support your favorite artists, buy their music outright. Bandcamp is a good option here, and direct from the artist is even better

2025-12-10 05:00:24

Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Ghostty, wrote about this last week:

I believe infrastructure of this kind should be stewarded by a mission-driven, non-commercial entity that prioritizes public benefit over private profit. That structure increases trust, encourages adoption, and creates the conditions for Ghostty to grow into a widely used and impactful piece of open-source infrastructure.

You love to see it.

2025-12-10 02:00:00

Here's a question: let's say Music Service A pays me $0.01 per song streamed on their platform and Music Service B pays me $0.03 per song streamed. Which of these services is better for my income as an artist?

Wait, wait, there's more data you need to know. Music Service A paid me $10,000 last year and 100,000 people listened to my music. Music Service B paid me $3,000 and 10,000 people listened to my music there.

So I'll ask again, would you rather have had your music listened to by more people and you earned more money, or would you like to have had fewer people listen and make less money?

I'd imagine most people would prefer to have more people discovering their work and bring in more actual money than have fewer people hear them and make less money, right? Welcome to the Spotify vs Apple Music debate!

This was inspired by one of Brian Merchant's latest posts over on Blood in the Machine (a recent blog discovery for me, but it's pretty good), How to quit Spotify. I'm not going to disagree with the post's overall message…I don't like Spotify either and I would agree that the business model it pioneered has represented a massive reduction in direct value most artists get from the raw musical output they create. After all, I grew up in the 90s when a new CD routinely cost like $17 from the local music store, which is about $33 in today's money. But I find the "Apple Music pays more per stream" argument endlessly frustrating because it's horribly misleading. Yes, it's a single data point, but it's telling a sliver of the full story.

To put it simply, Apple Music and Spotify have basically the same deal with music labels, the difference is that Spotify has a free tier while Apple Music does not. As such, Spotify makes less money per user, but they have way more total users than Apple Music. If Spotify got rid of their ad-supported free tier today, then they would be paying artists basically the same as Apple Music. Of course, that would reduce the number of people using Spotify, streams would go down, and payouts to artists would go down as well. But the pay per stream would be higher, so all good, right? This very short article explains the pro-rata model if you want to get an idea for how it works.

By a similar token, if Apple Music added a free, ad-supported tier today, many people would start using that, and pay-per-stream would go down to Spotify levels. Or maybe you think that would be a terrible thing, and you think there should be no way for people to stream music without paying $10 or more per month, but let's talk about that then and not about how choosing Apple Music is the more "ethical" choice.

In that same post, Merchant links to this video by musician (and another YouTuber I like) Benn Jordan, in which he shares the exact pay per stream he got from music services in 2024. Unfortunately, he doesn't share any raw payout amount, he just shares the per-stream amounts. That resulted in this chart which I've seen a few people share.

I think this shows the absurdity of the whole "per-stream pay is all that matters" argument. For one, if this is the metric you care about, then you should only release your music on Peloton! Or maybe Qobuz, a French streaming service which, despite him saying he'd never even heard of until a few months ago (neither had I), has the highest per stream rate of the normal music services on this list. I'm guessing that because he'd never heard of it, it's not bringing in an actually significant sum of money. he also mentions that he's sure that if they get as big as Spotify, their per-stream rate will go down as well. That could be true, but really only if they add a free ad-supported tier.

In fact, here's an updated version of the chart with a line that I think clears up the difference.

Correction: Deezer does have a free tier, it's just hidden on their pricing page, so I didn't find it when I double checked for this original post. I'd love to see how their expenses differ. Maybe there's some hope for an ad tier in some cases?

I'm not here to say that Spotify is a faultless company or anything (I don't like them myself and I don't use them), but I think this obsession over pay-per-stream is a bad way to talk about these services. It's a data point worth considering, but it's not the end of the conversation.

I'll leave you with a couple assertions I feel pretty confident about.

1. If Spotify stopped offering a free tier, their pay-per-stream would match Apple Music/Deezer/etc.
2. If Apple Music/Deezer.etc. added a free tier, they would instantly drop to Spotify's pay-per-stream rate.
3. I strongly suspect Spotify paid him more in 2024 than any other service on this list.
4. Streaming music is a tough business to make meaningful profits for anyone unless you're huge. Yes, I would like to see Spotify and others increase the amount they pay to artists, but they can only do so much, this is simply not a great way to compensate artists.
5. Consumers don't want to reconcile the fact that they want to pay 10% of what they paid for music in the 90s, they want exponentially more of it, and somehow they also want artists to be paid the same as they used to.
6. If you want to actually support your favorite artists, buy their music outright. Bandcamp is a good option here, and direct from the artist is even better (Jamie xx, for example).