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How Much Is Music Really Worth
After more than a century of cultural flux, music is now priceless. Or is that worthless?
Source : Pitchfork(http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/9628-how-much-is-music-really-worth/?)
Click through and have a read - it is deep and an interesting article that is on the same theme as I was here … and here. A friend on reading these pieces wrote this in an email to me - expanding with knowledge on the Spotify model - and then in paragraph three - blowing my mind with ‘Blackhat Spotify SEO’.
If I recall correctly, the Spotify payment model is (( # of plays for artist / # total Spotify plays ) x total Spotify revenue allocated for artists). From the fraud perspective, that doesn’t differ much from a fixed price per stream, but - brief tangent from the fraud topic - it could result in a change in revenue per stream over time as usage patterns and demographics change. Someone suggested an alternative payment model: paying artists based on the percentage of a given subscriber’s plays x that subscriber’s artist-allocated revenue. The benefits there are twofold - payment model is less skewed away from obscure (or just less popular) artists, and - voila - no more opportunity for streaming fraud. Now… where this gets even wilder is the opportunity for ‘blackhat’ Spotify SEO. As in - artists or labels using many fake accounts with carefully designed play patterns in an attempt to game the Spotify recommendation model to, say, get themselves to show up on the ‘similar artists’ page for Taylor Swift or someone popular, as a means to get free exposure.
Enjoy !