Let's replace the phrase that streaming services are "raping" artists, and put some figures in place so people can have a more informed opinion. My friend's band released an album on both iTunes and Spotify, and I did a little research to see if I was providing them with less income by listening on my paid Spotify account than had I purchased through iTunes.

iTunes model is that the artist get 70% of anything paid to purchase an album. From their 5 song EP for $5, they would have received $3.50. If some of that goes to your record company, well hopefully they've done enough to make up for it, but that's not germane to this math.

Spotify has a similar model; any revenues they receive through paid accounts and ads gets divided among the artists whose music is on the site. The distribution is of course weighted by the amount of plays of the artists songs and is presumably weighted by some other things like song length, etc.. Their documentation says that at the end of the day, this works out to about 0.6 cents for every play for the artist. At 0.6 cents per stream, it would take the play of 583 songs for them to get the same money as they would have gotten via iTunes (for a 5 song album), or about 116 listens through the album. The same would hold true for your average 10 song for $10 full length album.

116 listens is a lot for sure. I don't have any figures on how much the average person listens to an album, but for my part, I listen to my favorites maybe 30 times in the first year of ownership, and then maybe 5-10 times per year after that, when it catches my fancy. Given 10 years or more, the artist may get the full value of their album or more, but it takes some patience, and an album that really catches me.

For disappointing albums, perhaps you listen to them just a few times before giving up. In that scenario, yes the artist would have taken your money and ran via iTunes, and not have earned it on Spotify. It ties the income from the music with the quality more strongly. I'm ok with that.

And to its credit, Spotify introduces me to music I would have never otherwise discovered. One particular artist, TPR, does piano covers of old video games for which I would have never paid upfront, but find myself listening to about 30 songs of his most days. That means he gets something like $4 a month just from my patronship.

And you can do the math yourself. Go to any artist's page, look at their most popular songs and how many plays they have received. Ok, this local band has made $8k from their music, this indie band has made $200k from their music, this one pop song has made $1MM for that annoying artist. Then think about how this is just one channel of revenue, also allowing for other music distribution services and concerts. It seems pretty ok to me, and not so rapey.

And as for my friend's band, by my count they've made about double what they would have had I directly purchased the album. I must confess though that I tend to turn it on when I am headed out for lunch or headed home for the day to inflate the play count.

Remember when Microsoft Songsmith put Sound Engineers out of work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... This is really troubling that the same could happen to us programmers.

I had a coworker here in the states for a few years, who then had to go back to living in China at his wife's insistence. The difference in work from him was quite stark between the two locations. In our office, in-person, he was the guy I trusted most to handle the complexity of our core business and was toward the top of the team in output. He was a younger guy, and his coding style was a bit odd, but he was coachable and a hard worker.

Once he went back to China, he tried to switch up his working hours to be online at least part of the day when we were, but I could never tell when he was working. There were also some general issues with having internet access to some of the communication tools we used; he only ever made it onto Google Hangouts a couple times and so he would just not be involved in our morning scrums. We'd assign him tickets, and he'd do them, but being out of the office and out of the loop, he'd implement them in ways which were less extensible, or didn't make sense given some initiatives with our product. I also got the feeling that if he wasn't assigned any work, he just wouldn't work, instead of looking for ways to be useful or do traditional slacktime activities. And then the was the whole issue that if anything was a fire, even when it was related to his code, we just didn't have the time to wait for him to be online to fix it.

I'm not clear on any of the salary details; if he was paid the same for remote work that he was here in the office. He did get cut in the next round of layoffs (a year or so later), because he had become expendable. I like the guy, but I agreed with the company's thinking on that one.