Demonstrating a Fair(er) Streaming Royalties System
A few months back i stumbled across this article by @cuepoint: How to Make Streaming Royalties Fair(er)
Click here to not have to read anything else, and just jump to the demonstration i built instead
As a Spotify premium user, it was an informative and eye-opening read which I’d suggest you take a moment to have a look at too. While reading it though, I surmised how this might look compared to my actual listening history.
Last.fm is a tool that you might be familiar with; It collects your listens (they call this ‘scrobbling’), and can give you stats on what you listen to and build a profile of your listening behaviour. I’ve used it on a few occasions to find new music, and just out of habit leave it scrobbling as i listen.
The thought didn’t really leave me — so I started to build up a page using the Spotify API and the Last.fm API to see how this would play out for me. Once done, I had reached a chart like this:
I’m highlighting in red artists who I’ve listened to who would get a reasonable share of my premium under the current system. You’ll notice a complete lack of red segments.
This basically sucks. So, I’ve put the page on github.io so you can play with it yourself.
If you have a last.fm account of your own, put the username in the box:
If not, use the one that is prefilled, mine `sweetl` or any others you might find on last.fm.
If you care about who gets your money when you pay to stream music, you’ll probably find this rather enlightening; Click below!
