this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
858 points (99.0% liked)

Technology

59666 readers
3401 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] nicetriangle@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

From what I understand that 70% they're paying artists is from "profit."

And from another comment in this thread:

Their last quarterly financial statements shows $65 million profit on $3.36 billion in revenue.

And then you have stuff like this:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/20/spotify-to-spend-1b-buying-its-own-stock/

So lets assume they make $65 million in profit every quarter between when that article came out and April 21 2026 (the period the article states they were doing buybacks). I count 18 quarters in that period. So if my math is correct that is $1.17 billion in "profit" in the same period of time they plan to do $1 billion in stock buybacks. But artists are only getting 70% of said profits. So that's about $819 million to artists in the same period of time Spotify is doing $1 billion in stock buybacks.

So we have a mega corporation playing creative accounting and doing stock buybacks instead of paying artists more. Classic.

[–] crystal@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

lets assume they make $65 million in profit every quarter

Where do you get this number from?

Hasn't Spotify been operating at a loss for most of its existence? Wouldn't that mean they paid 0€ to its creators most quaters (if it was actually calculated off profit)?