And the enshitification begins.
Remember that you as users are next.
Find a sustainable alternative now.
I personally recommend bandcamp + youtube combo. Yt to explore and find new music, Bc to buy the music I enjoy and __own__ it.
Probably some dark pattern where they hide the actual price for just youtube music and show you the subscription for a bundle of services you don't want...
It is not exactly the new kid on the block, but I find tons of interesting music on the music blog aggregator Hype Machine. YMMV depending on your preferred genre.
What works well for me is a metal discord community (run by writers of a review blog [0]). Tons of interesting recommendations, including sometimes non-metal stuff, my favorite album of the year so far is chamber folk / Americana [1].
For new music, I tend to at least give a few seconds to every new release that is of an even slightly interesting sub-genre, older stuff sometimes shows up in what people post they are listening to, but there are also listening pods (me and two others are currently doing a one album a day discography run of Necrophobic), and adopted months: March was Screamarch, where two people curated a list of Screamo and adjacent albums/eps for every day, now it’s Finlapril where a Finn curated 1-2 albums a day moving through the history of Finnish metal.
Since joining, my monthly bandcamp purchases went pretty far up, though. And I’m only buying digital albums, there are quite a few who do vinyl purchases for even higher bills.
I hardly ever listen to metal any more but I still often check Angry Metal Guy just because it's such a well run independent music review and community site.
Unfortunately such sites are increasingly rare these days.
If they have issues with people abusing the revenue model by publishing white noise and generating fake plays - go after that.
However the 1K streams per track thing is going to negatively impact small artists who might have relatively large collections, but few over 1K annual streams.
If it's a processing cost issue then make it so that payouts need to meet some reasonable minimum threshold.
> between $1 and $2 will be added to monthly bills for customers in several territories, including the UK, Australia, and Pakistan, Bloomburg reports. This is said to cover the cost of audiobooks, added to the platform late-2023. More recently, video learning content was introduced to further diversify the offering.
I don't want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app.
They mention that there will be another tier added which doesn't have these -- great, so long as it keeps the audio quality for music at the same level, and doesn't have ads.
> I don't want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app.
Regarding Spotify, which I use daily, I also dislike their updates. I remember some months back I could disable/hide "Recommendations". Now in all my (personal & private) playlists I get a list of Recommendations. It's an annoyance because when I scroll fast to reach the bottom "to listen to that one song" it end up surfing the Recommendations (did I mention I dislike them?).
So, it makes me want to go to apkpure, find an apk from 2020 and use THAT (slim chance it'll work) because most updates are "to increase engagement" (pester you/me/all) with 'new and exciting content!!!' (bleh)
Sidenote: for podcasts I am using a 2021 version of the Podcast Addict (the one displaying the full screen ad)(which you can block with NoRoot Firewall)
My Spotify app almost daily shows me a full screen advertisement for some new album when I open the app. It is clearly labeled sponsored content.
I can then click a tiny 3 dots menu, click “stop showing me this” and “I don’t want to see sponsored content” and it will say “sure thing! We will no longer show you these” and the next day it will show me a new advertisement and I repeat the process.
So annoying. The whole premise of premium is that there are no ads! But now I’m constantly getting visual ads in the app. Every artists page has ads for their merch. Spotify notifies me about exclusive merch for artists I listen to. And is constantly trying to get me to go to concerts of artists I listen to.
"NoRoot Firewall" and I have allowed IPs and URLs that I've trialed-and-errored to Allow. Then . to block everything else. Fun fact: most of the garbage/ads/albums/pushes/etc, as well as your Annual Wrap-Up (or whatever it is called) it is provided by a tracker (I can't remember/see because I haven't individually blocked it - it's blocked under the . rule)(first 10-15 IPs & URLs are allowed, all else is blocked).
I believe that using an Android phone without a Firewall must be a horrible experience/it increases the positive experience by A LOT.
It also helps to see which apps are sneaky and run on their own - even if you disable the 'background run' (e.g. TuneIn Radio starts itself bypassing battery/power settings)
I got no prob paying for apps (I buy/subscribe to all of them). I simply hate it when I pay them, and they merely 'hide the add' but still 'talk' to adjust, googletagmanager, and so many other advertisers/trackers.
"Recommendations" never seem even close to what I want, on any platform.
The worst is Facebook (I have friends and family who don't use any other mode for regular contact), where it often behaves as if the ideal way to engage me is, in order of appearance on the timeline:
• "People you may know" (usually devoid of people I've ever even met, and when I do know them they're not people I'm going to add)
• One real post
• A suggestion of a corporation or group to follow
• An advert for something I'm not even capable of getting ("Are you an American living in the UK who wants to renounce their citizenship for tax purposes?" — no on all counts)
• Three more suggestions of a corporation or group to follow
• More ads for things even less relevant than the email spam I got in 1998
--
Even YouTube, where I can recognise the value by comparing what I see when I'm logged in to not logged in, the recommendations are still only 50% useful and 50% dross. (Not logged in it's 98% dross, and yes I did just count 50 items before finding one video I might watch in order to not be a statistic made up on the spot).
This is an issue I've seen with every platform that primarily exists online. They buy every digital service and increase prices with or without the customer's consent. Aside from being annoying and largely pointless, it's anti-competitive because if you subscribe to Spotify you are discouraged from subscribing to some other, better podcast service you actually want because you're already paying for one. It gets even worse as more services get bundled together.
Edit: Actually I see now, you're replying to where I said they bought services and raised prices without the customer consent. If we're using a restaurant comparison, it'd be like your local burger shop raising prices because your meal comes bundled with discounted carwashes. Consumers generally don't want bundles, they want to buy the thing they're interested in.
I mean bundling unrelated services. A subscription to just access all the music is pretty useful if you want to listen to music, but then they decide it should also be attached to a subscription of cloud gaming, shopping, podcasts, it becomes anti-consumer. Eventually you won't be able to just subscribe to the thing you want, but you'll also have to rent the kitchen sink.
Those seem to be arbitrary lines to draw. What if someone only wants to stream heavy metal, rap, classical, electronic, English, Spanish, Hindi, 1950s to 1980s, etc.
Building podcasts or audiobooks or even other services is just a business decision. It’s like cable/satellite TV used to be. The market will figure out where to settle.
Thank you. I don't understand why Spotify licenses all this rock and rap music when I'm only interested in pop music. So ridiculous. Why can't they just exclude all the stuff I don't care about?
I assume you're sarcastic, but Spotify is spending hundreds of millions on Rogan alone (and many other podcasts on top of that), and I have yet to listen to a single podcast on Spotify. They're making you pay for branching out to other content than music. If I want podcasts I go to my podcast app(s).
If only Tidal (or Qobuz, or...) would implement a Connect feature that allows me to control my PC desktop from mobile, then I would, but it's been on the "promised features" list for years now. It's a deal-breaker for me.
Subscribed to Tidal for about a year until my patience ran out. It has to be one of the buggiest pieces of long living software ever. Pressing the next button would skip two songs ahead for playback and one song ahead UI wise, making the UI tell you the wrong song was playing. That's just one of a wall of bugs I struggled with while I stayed on that service.
All that is listed are what reasonable customer and people would have assumed. However, things in corporate world seems to have the mind of it's own. It is normally in the interest of centralisation in the name of efficiency, and sadly at cost of human productivity and buyer and seller interests.
"Additionally, Spotify now requires a minimum number of unique listeners for royalties to apply. This attempt to stop "further manipulation by bad actors""
What a load of manure. The only reason manipulation of royalties even works is that they pool the streams such that the consumer wont pay the artist he listens too.
Just tie the royalties to what each user listens to and what they pay. Solved. No abuse possible.
But no. Have to have an opaque algorithm and do hacks upon hacks to obscure its funamental flaws.
Wait, what. Are you saying that the costs of using the service should be tied to how much listening one does? Because if you're not, then what you are saying should have no bearing at all on how much royalties anyone gets.
Assuming a fixed fee, it's a tradeoff. Do you let the people with more plays steer everyone else's money, or do you let plays from different people be worth different amounts?
I think the first option is worse.
Neither option pays a fixed amount per play, so that factor doesn't favor either choice.
I read this as splitting each user's monthly payment only across the artists they themselves listened to (like how YouTube premium works) instead of pooling everything together. So artists with more paying listeners would get more, while artists who only get listened to by free bot accounts wouldn't get anything.
Do you mean, how do you handle $0.001 monthly payouts? Spotify could set a payout threshold. If the threshold is not passed in a given month, the balance carries over to the next month.
One way it could work is if Spotify divided say $8 per user across all the streams that user listened to that month. So if a user only listens to Justin Bieber this month, he'd get the full $8 in stream royalties, while someone listening to more artists would redistribute their $8 across all of them.
No I'd like my subscription (which I canceled due to the new UI and new ToS) should go only to the artists I listen to, proportionally to the amount of minutes played.
I've recently learned how extraction of funds from gift cards and hacked accounts works.
What I've come to understand that obfuscation of monetization model, with simple info for the creators "beyond this many discoveries, we'll pay you some portion of general activity" is actually a good way to avoid abuse and allow for easier management of apps funds in general.
If that's all they wanted to achieve, then maybe they can pool that "demonetized" money and raffle it to the smaller musicians. If the outcome is only that Spotify stops paying out on something they used to pay for, by unilaterally changing the terms for the users without any bargaining power, then it feels like any effect other than increasing net profit is just the cherry on top.
You can't just say "in order to improve your experience we've decided to stop paying you" and expect people to trust your motives.
Yes, but it would generate less than the current system. Today you can generate more revenue for your friend than your account costs, ie a pure financial arbitrage opportunity. This has been successfully exploited already, and I assume they anti-abuse systems in place today.
Put a dollar value on the free accounts then? You could even base it off the amount of ads played per account. This is such an easy problem to solve. The pooling of streams is the main main incentive problem, like parent says.
Something like 15% of spotify's revenue is from ads, and so even if you do that you have to address the ad-fraud problem.
You also aren't even addressing one of the issues here, which is functionally "listen-time" related fraud on Spotify, but simple solutions don't really work, since yt has the same issue in reverse.
As a general rule, if you think something like "No abuse possible.", you are unfamiliar with the problem space.
The gains from a lot of the abuse vectors they've mention are either ad-fraud related (your suggestions don't help), or are ways you steal from other creators by taking a larger than intended share. That is true whether the pool is $N,000,000 dollars statically, or a larger fraction than intended of 10000 $2 pools per user.
The other alternative is a pay-per-listen business model, but this kills the company.
I am not concerned with ad fraud, since it is more or less futile to prevent fraud in pay per impression setups.
My suggestion would however work, if ad money were distributed for plays proportional to how paying users listen, as long as Spotify's fee is larger than the ads share of revenue. I.e. each paying user don't "decide" more than a dollar of royalties per dollar paid.
How much of an issue is this? Does it work like ad revenue on youtube? If something has under 1k streams I have to assume that was only a few dollars hobbyists get occasionally, if even that.
As a side-gig musician and composer - my wife and I as a matter of fact - this is a non-issue. It's a few bucks a year, maybe $5 to $15, depending if we release some new album. It's symbolic, not even a tip, and we can't cash it until it reaches I think $60 or more iirc. Spotify is not (or barely) making money out of our work, but we otoh are "making money" by using its platform and visibility as means to reaching to our small fan base that will finance our work through concerts.
For Spotify otoh, these few bucks add up to a long-tail loss of an increasing and disturbing magnitude. Additionally, bad actors are in fact exploiting it, ruining the experience for me as a musician and as a user. The issue, if any, is that in all fairness we should all be making money, proportionally, from the platform. But under 1000 streams, as an artist, you are probably getting more value from having your work uploaded and streamable.
>> we can't cash it until it reaches I think $60 or more iirc
This is highly dependent on your distributor. It can be as little as $10.
>> Spotify is not (or barely) making money out of our work, but we otoh are "making money" by using its platform and visibility as means to reaching to our small fan base that will finance our work through concerts.
This is an odd way to look at it. Without music, Spotify doesn’t exist. People subscribe to Spotify and listen to their ads in exchange for unlimited music access. So Spotify is making money from your music.
> This is an odd way to look at it. Without music, Spotify doesn’t exist. People subscribe to Spotify and listen to their ads in exchange for unlimited music access. So Spotify is making money from your music.
Spotify has expenses too and is hosting and streaming our music, distributing and maintaining an app and api for access, all basically for free for the musician. So "making money from your music" from my 800 streams a year is a very optimistic view of how the whole thing works out, I'd say we are cooperating fairly.
For an individual artist it’s not much. For Spotify it’s huge, all of those nickels and dimes add up quickly.
It also doesn’t matter if their current plan is to redistribute 100% of the gains to other artists, since this becomes profit they didn’t need to sacrifice to appease big acts. I.e. small artists pay so Spotify doesn’t have to.
Most importantly the artists didn’t sign up for this arrangement when they first joined Spotify, but now due to Spotify’s size they may feel compelled to give away their work for free for the chance at being successful or keeping fans happy.
I don’t know much about how music licensing works. But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify?
I listen to a lot of music on Spotify. And some of it is from smaller indie artists. Not a huge amount, but I’ve definitely listened to songs that are in that <1000 plays category, and for some undiscovered artists that’s a good amount of their library.
It surprises me how much of my Spotify library is no longer available. There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out. A lot of good songs too.
As much as I love Spotify and music streaming, it seems like the economics of it fundamentally doesn’t work and can’t work.
Where do you get those numbers from?
I'm a self published artist. I had 150k streams on Spotify last year. I only earned roughly $450. There's no label or other middleman here taking a cut. Spotify is just cheap.
It's somewhere around $3.5/1k streams - you're not exactly super far off their estimate either, though. It varies a bit based on (listener, or artist?) regions too, I believe.
Ah. Music income numbers, where the details are not actually details. He did say that[1], but the statement is misleading (and has little to do with Spotify).
A very rough global average per-stream payout is often estimated at around $0.003 to $0.005. That brings the payout for 1 billion streams between $3,000,000 and $5,000,000. Let's go with the lower end. This is actual money paid out by Spotify for 1 billion streams, as in, a bank transfer of $3,000,000.
How do you get from there to $45,000?
- As with any legacy artist, the record label gets most (maybe 70%). Why that is, oh well. It's less shocking if you think of the label as an employer and how little an average employee gets compared to what they produce. Do you need an employer? Absolutely not. Do you need a record label? Absolutely not. Anyway, a 70% cut would leave the artist with $900,000.
- Expenses: There are various costs associated with producing, distributing, and promoting music, hotel costs. Let your imagination run wild. Safe to say: This is a black hole, depending on how you want the process to look. If Snoop wants to sit in a big studio for months, he pays prices, for month, but that's not required to make music. Renting a high end studio on end is lifestyle. Sure, it's an expense, but it's like complaining about your profit while driving a Porsche. Awkward. Let's assume a 20% deduction here, reducing the revenue to $720,000.
- Focus on Publishing Royalties: Publishing royalties are just one part of the total royalties an artist earns. So there's quite a bit of double accounting going on if you want to pretend that the above costs are all deducted from your Spotify income.
If we assume publishing royalties make up only 10% of the total, that brings the figure down to $72,000.
- tldr: Snoop is living the big life, confused about money, and then proceeds to confuse others about money.
If the ownership is with the publishing studio then AFAIK they pay the producing, distribution and promotion. It is an investment into the artist, so they shouldn't have these costs.
A record label is probably much more of a VC than it is an employer.
The business has changed since streaming and self publishing but the labels took bets on artists and gave them expensive recording studios and marketing dollars, gave them some basic money, and in return took the majority of rights to the first few albums.
They also knew that if the artist truly made it big they would likely go to a different label where they could get better terms or start their own where they’d keep all the money after the initial contract which drove their side higher.
The record label model clearly doesn’t work as well in modern days but it was successful for good reasons at the time it really flourished.
> It surprises me how much of my Spotify library is no longer available. There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out. A lot of good songs too.
This probably has more to do with publishers and licensing contracts than artists pulling their music off from platforms. Sometimes even bigger artists' albums disappear when publisher is sold or goes out from the business. Or the licensing contract's period runs out. As sad it is, many artists don't own the rights to their music, and if the rights owner is defunct, then there are missing albums or even discographies.
Spotify for instance had some Spotify exclusive “DJ mixes” that were all an hour of well-mixed playlists. Spotify got artists to curate them and would have “XYZ’s DJ Mix”. They were perfect for seamless music listening at the gym. No breaks between songs. Non stop music. I listened to them all the time.
But one day a few months ago they all just vanished. Every one. I had added several to my Spotify library. For a bit they were playlists of grayed out songs. And then the playlists themselves vanished too. This content was all Spotify exclusive- the music is just gone now. It’s not available elsewhere.
It was all “mixed” versions of songs with smooth transitions in an out. Luckily I had added most of the original songs to other Spotify playlists that I had. But still, the mixes themselves are gone.
You should know: Apple Music filled that niche to perfection. Hands down, better than it ever was on Spotify. More choices, easier discovery, more collaboration with external brands, etc.
It's the reason I use both. Spotify's recommendations and social features are much better than Apple's - but the exclusive DJ sets and recordings of concerts etc are a great value add.
Frankly, this is why I always ignored Spotify and other streaming services and keep a jolly roger above my head.
If you had pirated or ripped those mixes off Spotify, you'd still have them. And you probably paid enough months of subscription to feel okay with that.
Not sure what genre you listen to, but soundcloud and mixcloud are the place to go for high quality mixes imo. That's where the DJs post. It's not immune to takedowns and tracks disappearing. But I have a playlists of hundreds of mixes curated over years and they're all still there. Many even with an option to download if you so wish
A lot of that is also bad meta data. I have a few playlists for around 10 years or so. Every so often I have to go in and hunt down greyed out tracks that are no longer there but are available in identical versions elsewhere. Publishers apparently regularly update what they have on the platform and there's a lot of duplication as well between best off albums, remastered albums, etc. And some artists, like Neil Young, actually pulled most of their content. Spotify seems very happy to just break everybody's playlists continuously.
> Spotify seems very happy to just break everybody's playlists continuously.
definitely possible to avoid this, but given it would be a follow-up cost from the failing core business, it probably could not be done. hell, they didn't even get around to making basic meta-data reliably present.
>Spotify seems very happy to just break everybody's playlists continuously.
This is an artefact of the industry and not something they have much control over. Labels for larger artists just don't just sell global streaming rights in perpetuity. They will carve it up by region and time in order to try and maximize profit.
> Spotify seems very happy to just break everybody's playlists continuously.
I remember this being particularly infuriating with movie soundtracks or other compilations, where individual tracks would often evaporate one day for bogus (licensing) reasons.
> And some artists, like Neil Young, actually pulled most of their content.
Yeah, I actually left Spotify with Neil. Apparently though he and other artists like Joni Mitchell that left at the time are now back on the service as of a few weeks ago.
I’m not sure how it can affect those artists given it’s like $0.5 for 1k streams. I mean, I guess if they have 100 songs all at like 999 streams, that’s about $50 loss/year if they never pass that threshold. It sucks obviously, but not enough to for artists to pull out.
My understanding is they’re playing a cat-and-mouse game with auto generated content, that syphons away some percentage of the royalties.
While it might not have a big impact on smaller artists financially, the idea of a multi billion dollar company deciding unilaterally to steal a few cents from you could be enough to drive you away.
Not to mention people can set up labels themselves, it's just a company like any other.
I'm sure we don't want big labels being gatekeepers. They have their own set of problems, and make streaming even more difficult for everyone but very large artists/groups (and sometimes even for those, as they eat a big chunk of royalties).
Spotify does not allow you to self publish. However, you can pay a distributer like DistroKid an annual fee in order to upload to the platform (and all other majors).
As a part-time indie artist, one can do a lot with $50 you get on the side from streams.
Also, what is Spotify going to do with these 50$? What if it happens twice, 100$... do they pay you back eventually? Perpetually free access to all their premium services?
it's not up to Spotify to decide what I do with that. What if I use it to pay a sub for some app I like and helps me create music? Then Spotify is taking value away from 2 Indies, not just one.
I'll take this bad faith argument, and give you even a worse one - $50 is about 5 drinks or less at a bar with tips nowadays. I genuinely doubt a serious person who makes music on the side will look at that number as a potential loss of income.
And if you have made 200 songs (so loss of $100), all streaming less than 1K each, maybe your current production is not marketable on Spotify, and yeah, maybe you should find another venue. Eventually there will be a marketplace for this type of production, and hopefully willing users to pay for it.
Seems silly. The reason they have that problem is that their logic for funneling subscription revenue to streams is broken. This won't fix that fundamental problem. You can still use Spotify to scam money out of the system.
You can, but the game isn’t to drive the abuse to 0. It’s about to bring it down, and hope abusers find an easier target to extract money from. It’s the same concept as “why would you steal a secured bike, when there’s an unsecured one right next to it”, and hope you’re the one who secured yours.
> The reason they have that problem is that their logic for funneling subscription revenue to streams is broken
Changing it to splitting out a users monthly payment to what they're actually listening to, would make the abuse they're trying to stop easier and not harder (as it would mean all the money they're trying to launder will go to the correct artist instead of just some of it)
Not saying that that's a good argument for the current system, but it wouldn't fix the issue they're trying to solve
Yea there are better ways to fix the problem but the problem is selling that fix to the big labels. The current system gets them a larger share of the revenue so why would they be interested in changing it?
I would much rather prefer that my subscription money gets split between niche artist I'm listening to instead of going to Taylor Swift. I assume it's harder to calculate royalties, you can't keep single counter per track, you have to agregate listens within a month for each user. But that doesn't seem insurmountable. Or maybe it is on Spotify scale?
I don't think any subscriber (i.e. people giving them money) would prefer current model over where your money goes directly to who you listen.
Laundering would be easier yes. But extracting money from the system would be impossible. I was talking about the latter where you pay for an account of 10 usd/month and extract > 10 usd/month in stream revenue.
I use YouTube Premium 90% of the time now for this reason. All the remixes and other indie mixes that I listen to are on YouTube and YouTube has so much more that I find it a hard value proposition to beat.
Even people who have Spotify end up buying stuff in Bandcamp, anyway. I never had merch but had CDs, and sometimes people would buy two physical copies, one to gift.
For me there was never any difference between Spotify and piracy.
Absolutely. I always buy music from artists to support them on Bandcamp. Spotify lets you discover bands that are little known, which is cool, but it's not a place that enables you to support those artists. Unfortunately, Bandcamp might also change since they are changing owners.
I use Spotify because my SO wants it for podcasts and stuff and family subscription is just tad more, and it's in my car and similar which is convenient.
I also buy the music I listen to a fair bit on Bandcamp or at concerts.
As an example, last fall a song from a band came up in the randomized post-album "radio" on Spotify as I was driving, and I added the band to my favorites. A month ago Spotify notified me the band was playing in town, so I went and ended up buying several CDs, including from the warmup band as well.
That said, I agree that Spotify should pay more to small artists. I really dislike that my money goes to Talor Swift and similar artists who have more than enough and that neither I nor my SO listen to.
I think I should have said that Spotify is the same as piracy from an artists POV.
It's definitely not illegal for users, and it definitely helps with "exposure", but it's not really a platform for making real money with your music, except when it's listened to in massive quantities.
For me, it's no different than putting a free album link in Instagram, or when Nine Inch Nails put it on PirateBay as a stunt...
Listening on Bandcamp right now - the song 'drop'. I like some pretty out there stuff, and this is right at the outer limits, and I mean that as a compliment.
I might not "enjoy" it as one would traditionally enjoy listening to music, but I enjoy that it exists and the uniqueness of the experience it provides.
If you can handle LAMC by Tool, you can handle this.
'kabelbrand' is giving me flashbacks to Providence by King Crimson, just a bit more raw and industrial. All build-up without the instruments actually synchronising together for the payoff as per Providence.
Would you/your band be interested in trying out a pay-what-you-want system? I started the work to add crowdfunding support to communick (described on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39399121) and I'm looking now for musicians/artists/FOSS developers for some beta testing.
Yeah, most artists let you listen to the whole album before you buy it. Sometimes there are songs that don't have previews, and I think there are sometimes hidden songs included with the album but not even listed, but in general you can stream a few times before buying, and then stream as much as you want afterwards.
> but in general you can stream a few times before buying, and then stream as much as you want afterwards.
Not exactly what I have in mind. I am working with the model where all songs are always available (like Spotify) and people simply choose how (a) how much they want to give per month and (b) how to split this amount among their preferred artists.
In effect, it's the same as a "pay as you want", but there is no overhead of thinking about which songs to "buy".
Your arguments veers close to the "for exposure" payment.
People don't go to indie concerts because of a spotify track. Nor to big name concerts. And 20 cents corresponds to around 50 to 100 plays according to the numbers mentioned here.
Same. I see a show advertised and I want to hear what the bands sound like, the easiest way (for me) is to search for them on Spotify and check out the top few tracks and the new release. If I like what I hear then I'll buy a ticket and go. I probably could have found the tracks other ways if I really tried, but this way just works, almost always.
If there's any fallacy here, it is comparing "for exposure" between a gig at your local dive bar (this is where you typically hear the phrase), and uploading your material to Spotify.
The first requires committing time and effort to get 50 people to see you, 20 of which are your personal friends. The second is making the music you have already produced available to millions of people around the world, with virtually no effort.
Surely Spotify should improve on compensating artists, but all-in-all it is still a better deal for the artist than the "for exposure" gig at the local bar.
I'm not sure what your basis is for this claim? I've most certainly discovered artists from Spotify and later on bought e.g. merch to support them. I would in a heartbeat also go on their concerts if I was given the opportunity with travel distance, vacation plans etc.
Spotify can't give you these experiences no matter how hard they try so this claim doesn't make much sense to me. A concert isn't exactly competing with streaming services or anything.
>Your arguments veers close to the "for exposure" payment
While it does, note that paying or doing stuff free "for exposure" is exactly how many artists got big and huge hits were made, from payola to DJs (starting way earlier than Alan Freed with radio DJs, and going all the way to EDM DJs being paid to break a track), all the way to paying for artist ads or record shop placement, buying fake streams, followers, and views to appear more popular and drive exposure, or doing for free (or, often, paying for) the support spot on a bigger band's concert.
I have no data on that, but my stochastic feeling (based on conversations I had with people visiting our concerts) does not imply that at all. Most came because (in that order of frequency):
1. They saw our sticker/poster and thought the name is interesting
2. They checked the venue/festival-site and thought it sounded interesting
3. They knew us from social media
Exactly zero times I had someone tell me the found us on spotify and came because of that. Of course that doesn't mean no such people exist, my sample size might be too small. There might also be people who find us on spotify and then buy on bandcamp, no way to check on that.
But my feeling right now is that our more traditional boots on the ground marketing does a lot more than the online stuff. That doesn't mean that dynamic can be totally different for other bands or other genres tho.
This is exactly the reason why my preferred method of music consumption is piracy + Bandcamp. Every Bandcamp Friday (when Bandcamp doesn't take a cut) I buy about 2 to 6 albums I've listened to in the past month or a few. If an artist is not on Bandcamp, I'm less likely to listen to them, but if I do, I eventually pirate their stuff.
All the music I buy and pirate is in FLAC and funneled into my local library, where I can enjoy it without any streaming service taking it away from me.
And I usually end up contributing more to my favorite artists financials than fans who use streaming service, so that's a bonus.
In case of smaller artists we'd be better off pirating music instead of helping cement Spotify's brand as a central platform. The only person losing money in this case is the platform holder so we could argue the decentralised aspect of piracy helps fighting monopolisation of the industry.
But don't they give out a flat % of what they earn from the subscriptions? The low return would mean that either:
a) Spotify doesn't charge enough for a subscription
b) Spotify takes too big of a cut right now from the subscription revenue
c) The model doesn't work as a lot of people from low-income (and low subscription cost) countries are "sucking out" the money that goes mainly from rich ones. So 1 listen from USA = 1 listen from India even though the USA listener pays around 7-8x times more and the subscription income gets divided equally by listens.
What's better for music as a whole? Boosting Spotify's share price and Taylor Swift's private jet habit? Or putting that $11/month towards some gigs for an artist you really like?
I don't require a huge intake of new music: I obsess over those dozen albums I really love a month, always listening to them in full and appreciating them as art. Browsing Bandcamp tags, music review and catalogue sites, and music critics album reviews is really all I need to get that hit.
Not the poster you're replying to, but I acquire music the same ways as them.
a1) on my computer, in folders. I manage it using iTunes/Music, but could just as well use anything else, or do it manually. I also have Serato for DJing, which imports my iTunes/Music library xml to share the same collection.
a2) to be fair, in the past year, I've gotten lazy and started streaming from the band camp app for more recent purchases. I'm not DJing much these days.
b) I buy phones with a lot of storage and don't upgrade very often
I have both a Jellyfin and a Subsonic-compatible (Gonic) server on my local NAS. Those are used for streaming and work anywhere where there's internet thanks to Tailscale. If I need to go offline, for a flight or something, I pick a dozen albums to download full quality to my phone and listen to them with the Retro music player.
> Every Bandcamp Friday (when Bandcamp doesn't take a cut) I
It's great that BC still does BC Fridays... but if fans only buy music from BC on BC Fridays, BC will lose all revenue and will fold or resort to shitty tactics. BC are one of the few "good" businesses in this space, and have reached an impressive scale. I'd hate to see them fold. I reckon it's worth buying some music on normal days as well as BC Fridays.
BC was acquired recently, so that may come sooner rather than later. It's not due to BC Friday, bur rather that selling MP3s piecemeal is a hard business. Artists sometimes also remove their albums from BC if they sign with a label that wants exclusive distribution rights.
> All the music I buy and pirate is in FLAC and funneled into my local library, where I can enjoy it without any streaming service taking it away from me.
Where do you get these FLACs? Do you have a pipeline/automated system or it’s done manually? Asking for a friend.
It ain't piracy if the record I want is out of print and no longer commercially available. Most of the music I listen to is pre-2010, so there are a lot of records that fit that description.
Same goes for live recordings, remixes and radio sessions. P2P has had this for 20+ years, Spotify doesn't and never will.
Same here. A lot of artists and a good chunk of the recording crews from before the early 1980s are dead and have been for decades, and the only ones getting the money are the record companies. Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Jim Croce, Stevie Ray Vaughan, all of them have been gone for thirty years or more at this point. Not even their kids or some sort of charity managed by their estate get any of the money. Piracy of their albums is denying wealth from graverobbers, really.
Taylor Swift albums are not out of print and she owns her record label. I am talking about recordings that were never released commercially, or released by labels that are long gone. This is closer to the videogame emulation legality argument than it is Metallica v Napster.
Still copyright infringement (assuming it’s not so old to have left copyright). Doesn’t matter if it’s a song that was last printed on a 78 in 1945 and the artist decided to burn all copies, or the latest album from some k-pop band that you can get free with your cornflakes.
> There is no monetary reason to be on spotify, the only reason we are on there is because fans asked.
This isn't an excuse for Spotify not paying much for plays, but I bet having music on spotify helps the gig revenue though.
In some ways this is also true for Taylor Swift et al - they also make thousands times the amount from playing gigs than 'selling' albums, streaming, and radio plays but that drives ticket sales.
Of course that's a quite rare case of a small nation with many neighbors with interested listeners, trying to get an artist to play there exclusively in order to drive concert tourism.
The music industry is the most vicious example of inequality.
While some artists are so big that governments compete to have you come to their country (and NOT to your neighbours), the vast majority has trouble even getting to play free gigs.
This is literally their current business model. Large music distributors pay for streams, the songs rise up the charts, people see the songs. If that’s not advertising I don’t know what is.
Yeah, no cash in it but I figure it's mainly to gain exposure to hopefully later on get those into the "playing gigs" / merch audience, because reach is on the other hand massive on Spotify.
I wonder if is there a monetary reason to be on youtube (music)?
I listen to most music on yt music (although their client sucks) and buy stuff on bandcamp whenever i love some band and it's available there. I've never seen a value in spotify - limited library with no ability to fill the gaps with custom files (like you can do on YT music), client is meh, additional cost or ads are meh too.
lots of commercial endeavors rely on investment, capital or otherwise, to increase exposure and growth. sucks to be feeling like you're working or 'spending' for nothing in any context. but hopefully you guys ultimately see the return you deserve.
> There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out.
As infuriating as this is, it's the reason I still use Spotify. A music service that hides their catalog changes by subtly modifying my playlists is a no-go. Having the songs still appear lets me know, as it gives me the opportunity to find those songs elsewhere.
Yeah I have to admit, Spotify uses the least amount of cruddy dark patterns. Their model is very upfront about paying, so they have never nagged me for anything. Their interface isn't the best but it's consistent.
These days there's a lot of worth in that, the bars been set quite low.
I think royalties from <1k streams are basically nothing anyway. Giving up the ability to distribute your music for free and reach more people would be a terrible idea.
>I don’t know much about how music licensing works. But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify?
A lot of smaller artists don't have a say regarding licensing and distribution. They're usually managed by a local minor label, which in turn has specific agreements with bigger players (Columbia, UMG) once your music sells more than, let's say 50.000 copies and they need a partner to publish a release on more territories. A few artists also get their own label.
For example, Peggy Gou tracks are usually released trough Dudu Records (Her own label) -> Ninja Tune -> XL Recordings, which is basically the same label that nowadays publishes Adele and Radiohead. Adele went even a step further, and her music is handled by Columbia Records for the US market.
Until you reach this level of clout, you have very little direct control over your syncs and streaming rights in the "regular", Billboard-tracked, market.
The mechanism there is kind of "dontcareism": yes, indie musicians will go away, but Spotify doesn't care, because ultimately this won't stop listeners from using it, over time most of them will forget what they really wanted
I have a few thousand of streams per month and I make pennies from it. It's not like I care about being demonetized on spotify and losing a few pennies.
It’s not just about the money. It’s about the exposure! If you’re not a big band you’re making money from touring. More people listening and discovering you online = more people attending your tours and maybe reaching a threshold where you can make good money
It's the opposite. If you're not a big band, you usually cannot afford to go on tour. You have no manager, no contacts, you have to handle booking venues, lodging and transport yourself and hope that you can make some of it back in ticket sales.
Most bands can't do this. They're not full time musicians, many have a day job. The ones that can are likely to come from rich families where they get time and money to pursue their passions, insteas of going to college and getting a job.
Lana Del Ray, Grimes and Billy Eilish are some of the biggest artists of the 2010s, all of them grew up rich and connected.
They send me a monthly email detailing the number of plays I received as an artist, and it averages around 300.
So each track is getting around 10 plays per month.
So none of them come anywhere close to the minimum threshold.
I made around $10/year from Spotify plays, it's a pittance, but over all the streaming platforms I would get enough for a new plugin each year, this makes it "worthwhile".
I absolutely will not allow Spotify to have content on their platform without reimbursement.
The only people losing from this are the handful of fans who like my music.
If I understand correctly it's each and every track needs 1k plays. As an artist over all my tracks I'd meet the threshold of 1k plays, but I don't think that's how it works.
If they really cared about musicians they would have just left it at fining the aggregators for allowing crap on the platform. Just a tiny amount of KYC from the aggregators would solve the problem, but instead the aggregators were just as greedy as Spotify and were happy to allow any old shit in, so they could grab another slice of the pie.
This is the reason I have stuck with Apple Music so long (and previously Google Play Music). I have a fair number of sentimental tracks that I've carried with me in my collection for decades which aren't on streaming sites.
Spotify doesn't have an answer for this. Just don't listen to things outside the Spotify library. Apple Music (and GPM before it) lets me upload my own tracks and sync them between my devices.
Finally, someone else who feels the same pain as I do.
Believe me you, I keep subscriptions of both Apple Music and Spotify. Apple Music for the better in general catalog and better syncing, Spotify for better discovery.
I plan on creating a tool that would allow me to download all the songs in my library so that I don't lose on them when Spotify or AM decide to remove it from their catalog.
Apple Music, at least, shows the track details but greys it out. Spotify simply shows an empty entry, which frustrates me even more.
There’s an app called song shift that works 90% well. It’ll transfer the music over from one service to another. Also you can export Apple songs to CSV using desktop iTunes
That's solving a different problem. If you have a track that is not on any service, Apple Music will still accept the song file being added to your library and sync it for you. Spotify will not as it does not do cloud file sync.
And maybe it wasn't removed by their choice. Below is a video of someone who had all their Spotify music removed with no recourse, due to a claim the were buying streams. No recourse.
>I don’t know much about how music licensing works. But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify?
It might, but then there's this:
(1) they're not making money already anyway (they'd be getting like $3 for 1000 streams before)
(2) that's were the listeners are (not the listeners they have, since they don't have many to begin with, but the ones they wish to attract)
(3) most of such a low number as 1000 streams are usually themselves, band members, friends, and family, plus whoever they sent a link to and gave it a short listen before moving on.
This change quite obviously can't negatively impact small artists in any meaningful way. When googling for how much Spotify pay artists per stream, ranges vary a bit. But it seems like a high number is $0.005 per stream, or 200 streams to the dollar.
Even if a very prolific artist has 200 songs, averaging 500 plays per year, this would only ever amount to $500 per year. It is not peanuts for a hobby musician, but it would represent an unusually productive artist who happens to be just under this limit with most (or all) their songs, and also who manages to somehow get paid in the upper parts of the span.
The change in isolation from Spotify may not impact individual bands. However if this is adopted across all the seven major streaming services, then artists can in theory have 7,006 streams per track without generating a penny of income, even though the streaming vendors have generated revenues.
If YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Deezer, Soundcloud, and Amazon all adopt this practice, taking your edge-case artist, they're out of pocket for $3,500 per year.
That makes a situation where the more highly concentrated Spotify's monopoly is, and the less productive an artist is, the fairer the outcome for that small artist. Meanwhile the $3,500 is distributed between the monopolist, and the very large artists on the service. That's a quite uniquely perverse set of economic outcomes.
When I read the headline, I assumed this was to disincentivise uploading thousands of cheap AI-generated songs. There's tons of this on the platform, and it looks like it was generated automatically in bulk.
But the article makes it sound like this was not a factor?
I'm inclined to believe that filling the service with an endless stream of generated garbage is their ultimate endgame - why bother with unreliable and costly human creators when you can just emulate them well enough for undiscerning listeners. No substance, just vibes.
No, that's the end game here. People already mostly have parasocial relationships with artists. There's already famous AI personality Instagrams and Vtubers. With the advent of Generative AI video like Sora and Generative AI music like Suno, people will find their perfect generative AI niche and follow an artist story/interaction that they can't even tell is real or not. Generative AI will create millions of niches, it will hit that spot.
I find it really hard to imagine people following famous AI personalities as much as real musicians if they know that the AI are AI. Humans are social creatures.
I guess at some point there will be a popular "musician" who is relieved to be an algorithm, and we'll see what happens.
We're already seeing an explosion of people doing AI chatbot therapy and AI relationships. "Human-ness" factoring into someone's enjoyment of music is already below well below both of those.
The 1k streams limit will probably only financially effect "artists" that spams the platform with new tracks. It is not like it will make any difference for real artists.
So by your definition a real artist should have more than 1000 plays. I listen to small artist from my country which will probably never reach a global audience and they definitely do not get 1.000 plays but are verified artists according to spotify. This policy basically drives more drivel music and leaves out alternative and indie bands. It's a bad policy that needs an investigation by the authorities to force Spotify not to discriminate smaller artists.
I suspect the truth around this is that it contributes to their eternal losses actually paying artists so they worked out another way of not doing it for their balance sheet.
I was at a gig for a moderately successful band recently and they said rather loudly they were bastards and buy one of their CDs instead even if you never play it because they need to eat.
This shouldn’t be legal. It’s a massive abuse of power. Small artists need to be on Spotify (pulling their music in protest is not viable and not going to lead to change anyway). What gives Spotify the right to arbitrarily decide “you make so little money it’s not worth our time paying you”? There’s no other business you could get away with this in. Scum.
>> Why deal with payment processors, billing disputes, etc for a customer only earning pennies?
Spotify doesn’t have to deal with these things. Artists work with distributors who then deal with Spotify on their behalf. The distributor pays the artist.
For me the issue here is they’ve changed the deal to the detriment of the littlest of the little guys. A company that just signed a non-exclusive $250m deal for Joe Rogans podcast, can’t afford to pay $10 a year to a whole bunch of independent artists. That’s outrageous. For me it’s the ethics of it rather than the amount.
Seriously, if you're a small artist with less than 1,000 streams per YEAR on your tracks, Spotify (or any streaming service for that matter) is already today not a relevant income stream at all.
I think they should basically turn it into Twitch, where I can "sub" to an artist and maybe get their tracks earlier than others or some other additional content that costs artist $0 to produce for the most part (podcast, making of, e.g. a la Patreon). In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash. It's a shame that these hacks (streamers) become multimillionaires while real talents make pennies off actual art.
> In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash.
There are donation buttons for some artist on Spotify. I guess the artist need to enable it? ("Signum Regis" is an artist that has a Donate button for example)
And/or something like Amazon Prime Video and how it aggregates its main subscription, ad-driven licensing, VOD and, that's what I'm getting at, hosted third party subscriptions into one UI.
I actually hate that in Prime, because discovery for shows and movies is never a positive experience but a setup chore separate from consumption, and advertising stuff that isn't already paid for always makes it worse. But for music I think it could actually be enjoyable, because you can consume and browse at the same time is actually a thing. Like diving into discogs.com while listening. I could easily see myself listening to some artist's main albums as part of some standard subscription (that pays as badly as spotify?) and then shell out a single digit payment on one hundred pay-per-listen tokens for obscure B-sides from the label that the artist is signed on, or something like that. Or reimplenent radio, by offering a licensing model where what would have been single releases in the olden days are part of the ad based subscription, but album content is only available through purchase or (various?) subscriptions.
Make it a marketplace of monetization models! Perhaps the right company to try this would be someone completely unexpected like cloudflare? Being a blank slate from both consumer and licensor perspective could almost be considered a prerequisite for a project like that...
I did some research on this recently and it's a bit tricky to pin down as some of the information is out of date or doesn't include certain services, but the three that appear to be the best on payouts are: Tidal, Quobuz and Napster.
Even if this doesn't really impact the small artists, Spotify is not even profitable for shareholders yet AND still doesn't pay a meaningful amount to most artists. It is only going to get worse from here.
I do not believe that their business model will ever do anything but fuck over the artists. It's also deeply disturbing to me that there are only a few options left for people to actually own their music and the rest is rent-seeking platforms.
How is Spotify not the loser here? Isn’t it more important to say “we have basically every song ever made” than save a few bucks over small fish streaming?
That’s not quite what the article linked says. If anything is done it could be years. It’s also unclear if they have any price per stream in mind and how they even think it should be calculated on an ongoing basis.
I spend £17 a month on Spotify. If all I do is listen to “Bob Bobson sings Bob Bob Bob”, then my £17, minus commission (1%, 5%, 30%, whatever), should go entirely to Bob Bobson
That’s not how Spotify works. Instead a lot of it goes to Taylor Swift, who I don’t listen to.
Even worse like 90% of the money comes from paid users, but most of the streams comes from free users with ads.
Some some barber shop is playing drake 24/7 having ads and 16£ of you 17£ are going to drake because you only listened to Bob bobson 20 minutes today instead of 23 hours:59 minutes like the barber shop.
The pay model is ridiculous, every update is terrible and there is no mechanism to let the company know they are running the product into the ground. It used to be heaven for power users,now if they simplify it any more the app will just pick what it thinks you should listen to, give the money to ed sheeran regardless of what you end up listening to and not even let you pause cause an extra button might be too complicated for you.
IMO the problem is that Spotify is fundamentally breaking the "spirit" of the deal that allowed them to get in the position they are right now.
Spotify's entire promise was "we solve the music inequality problem by just pooling all subscriber money together and then we do an equal(-ish, record labels iirc got slightly different deals) split depending on how many people listen to your music." It kinda sells the idea that if you're just popular enough, you can make it big on Spotify. Of course practically that's been a lie for ages (numbers showcased that only the top 0.1% could afford to live off of Spotify alone, and all those songs are owned by the established record companies anyway), so you could say this is just dispensing with the charade to avoid transaction costs.
I do wonder about the ripple effect this could cause for indie artists; Spotify just told them to go fuck themselves and there's pretty much no incentive to use Spotify anymore now that they pulled this stunt.
If you want to support artists directly, it's still always better to just buy the albums. Most of them have Bandcamp pages and for now, Bandcamp provides a good deal (and as a customer you can just download the FLAC files).
Did anyone really expect 10 dollars a month to be enough to be sustainable? That's the price we used to pay for a single album and it seems way too low for a sustainable flatrate music service.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 390 ms ] threadFind a sustainable alternative now. I personally recommend bandcamp + youtube combo. Yt to explore and find new music, Bc to buy the music I enjoy and __own__ it.
Unfortunately with YT I've had to cancel my Premium subscription on - they want $34/month, and I'm not paying that.
I'll move to using third party apps/adblockers, and paying some of the creators I watch directly.
Also, I got it wrong, it's $32.99/month.
> To continue delivering great service and features, we're increasing your price to A$32.99/month.
For new music, I tend to at least give a few seconds to every new release that is of an even slightly interesting sub-genre, older stuff sometimes shows up in what people post they are listening to, but there are also listening pods (me and two others are currently doing a one album a day discography run of Necrophobic), and adopted months: March was Screamarch, where two people curated a list of Screamo and adjacent albums/eps for every day, now it’s Finlapril where a Finn curated 1-2 albums a day moving through the history of Finnish metal.
Since joining, my monthly bandcamp purchases went pretty far up, though. And I’m only buying digital albums, there are quite a few who do vinyl purchases for even higher bills.
[0] https://www.angrymetalguy.com/
[1] Vera Sola - Peacemaker https://verasola.bandcamp.com/album/peacemaker
Unfortunately such sites are increasingly rare these days.
If they have issues with people abusing the revenue model by publishing white noise and generating fake plays - go after that.
However the 1K streams per track thing is going to negatively impact small artists who might have relatively large collections, but few over 1K annual streams.
If it's a processing cost issue then make it so that payouts need to meet some reasonable minimum threshold.
> between $1 and $2 will be added to monthly bills for customers in several territories, including the UK, Australia, and Pakistan, Bloomburg reports. This is said to cover the cost of audiobooks, added to the platform late-2023. More recently, video learning content was introduced to further diversify the offering.
I don't want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app.
They mention that there will be another tier added which doesn't have these -- great, so long as it keeps the audio quality for music at the same level, and doesn't have ads.
Regarding Spotify, which I use daily, I also dislike their updates. I remember some months back I could disable/hide "Recommendations". Now in all my (personal & private) playlists I get a list of Recommendations. It's an annoyance because when I scroll fast to reach the bottom "to listen to that one song" it end up surfing the Recommendations (did I mention I dislike them?).
So, it makes me want to go to apkpure, find an apk from 2020 and use THAT (slim chance it'll work) because most updates are "to increase engagement" (pester you/me/all) with 'new and exciting content!!!' (bleh)
Sidenote: for podcasts I am using a 2021 version of the Podcast Addict (the one displaying the full screen ad)(which you can block with NoRoot Firewall)
I can then click a tiny 3 dots menu, click “stop showing me this” and “I don’t want to see sponsored content” and it will say “sure thing! We will no longer show you these” and the next day it will show me a new advertisement and I repeat the process.
So annoying. The whole premise of premium is that there are no ads! But now I’m constantly getting visual ads in the app. Every artists page has ads for their merch. Spotify notifies me about exclusive merch for artists I listen to. And is constantly trying to get me to go to concerts of artists I listen to.
I believe that using an Android phone without a Firewall must be a horrible experience/it increases the positive experience by A LOT.
It also helps to see which apps are sneaky and run on their own - even if you disable the 'background run' (e.g. TuneIn Radio starts itself bypassing battery/power settings)
The worst is Facebook (I have friends and family who don't use any other mode for regular contact), where it often behaves as if the ideal way to engage me is, in order of appearance on the timeline:
• "People you may know" (usually devoid of people I've ever even met, and when I do know them they're not people I'm going to add)
• One real post
• A suggestion of a corporation or group to follow
• An advert for something I'm not even capable of getting ("Are you an American living in the UK who wants to renounce their citizenship for tax purposes?" — no on all counts)
• Three more suggestions of a corporation or group to follow
• More ads for things even less relevant than the email spam I got in 1998
--
Even YouTube, where I can recognise the value by comparing what I see when I'm logged in to not logged in, the recommendations are still only 50% useful and 50% dross. (Not logged in it's 98% dross, and yes I did just count 50 items before finding one video I might watch in order to not be a statistic made up on the spot).
I’ve noticed this in restaurants too, they just change the price like a normal business in an inflationary environment.
I bet you get raises too, or ask for them and move on if you don’t get them.
Edit: Actually I see now, you're replying to where I said they bought services and raised prices without the customer consent. If we're using a restaurant comparison, it'd be like your local burger shop raising prices because your meal comes bundled with discounted carwashes. Consumers generally don't want bundles, they want to buy the thing they're interested in.
They have been able to buy the individual song for $1 to $2 for a long time.
Building podcasts or audiobooks or even other services is just a business decision. It’s like cable/satellite TV used to be. The market will figure out where to settle.
A company offering an entertainment service is hardly forcing anyone to do anything.
Ever gotten a car wash from a gas pump?
If you don’t like it there’s plenty of restaurants that don’t do combos. And plenty of gas stations that don’t have car washing.
I have a much better listening and discovery experience through Roon and artists get paid more with Tidal.
All the others don't have clients for my OS and I don't have DRM in my browser which they require.
That said you sound like a Meridian shill.
What a load of manure. The only reason manipulation of royalties even works is that they pool the streams such that the consumer wont pay the artist he listens too.
Just tie the royalties to what each user listens to and what they pay. Solved. No abuse possible.
But no. Have to have an opaque algorithm and do hacks upon hacks to obscure its funamental flaws.
I think the first option is worse.
Neither option pays a fixed amount per play, so that factor doesn't favor either choice.
How big share of users play white noise on repeat really. One in 100?
You can't just say "in order to improve your experience we've decided to stop paying you" and expect people to trust your motives.
You also aren't even addressing one of the issues here, which is functionally "listen-time" related fraud on Spotify, but simple solutions don't really work, since yt has the same issue in reverse.
As a general rule, if you think something like "No abuse possible.", you are unfamiliar with the problem space.
Ok. The gains for the abuse is capped at the subscription fee minus Spotifys fees, per account.
The gains from a lot of the abuse vectors they've mention are either ad-fraud related (your suggestions don't help), or are ways you steal from other creators by taking a larger than intended share. That is true whether the pool is $N,000,000 dollars statically, or a larger fraction than intended of 10000 $2 pools per user.
The other alternative is a pay-per-listen business model, but this kills the company.
My suggestion would however work, if ad money were distributed for plays proportional to how paying users listen, as long as Spotify's fee is larger than the ads share of revenue. I.e. each paying user don't "decide" more than a dollar of royalties per dollar paid.
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/great-big-spotify-sca...
They argue a guy in Bulgaria set up 1200 premium accounts. However, they don't have proof.
Yes, you still run into the issue where 30 second whale songs get a larger than intended share of the royalties from whale-song-listening users.
I'm not sure where the disconnect is here.
For Spotify otoh, these few bucks add up to a long-tail loss of an increasing and disturbing magnitude. Additionally, bad actors are in fact exploiting it, ruining the experience for me as a musician and as a user. The issue, if any, is that in all fairness we should all be making money, proportionally, from the platform. But under 1000 streams, as an artist, you are probably getting more value from having your work uploaded and streamable.
This is highly dependent on your distributor. It can be as little as $10.
>> Spotify is not (or barely) making money out of our work, but we otoh are "making money" by using its platform and visibility as means to reaching to our small fan base that will finance our work through concerts.
This is an odd way to look at it. Without music, Spotify doesn’t exist. People subscribe to Spotify and listen to their ads in exchange for unlimited music access. So Spotify is making money from your music.
Spotify has expenses too and is hosting and streaming our music, distributing and maintaining an app and api for access, all basically for free for the musician. So "making money from your music" from my 800 streams a year is a very optimistic view of how the whole thing works out, I'd say we are cooperating fairly.
not really: https://www.statista.com/chart/26773/profitability-developme...
> Since the beginning of 2017, the streaming service has generated a positive net balance in eight quarters, two of them in 2021.
For an individual artist it’s not much. For Spotify it’s huge, all of those nickels and dimes add up quickly.
It also doesn’t matter if their current plan is to redistribute 100% of the gains to other artists, since this becomes profit they didn’t need to sacrifice to appease big acts. I.e. small artists pay so Spotify doesn’t have to.
Most importantly the artists didn’t sign up for this arrangement when they first joined Spotify, but now due to Spotify’s size they may feel compelled to give away their work for free for the chance at being successful or keeping fans happy.
Next step would be explaining why artists with the same amount of streams (but different labels) have wildly different payouts.
I listen to a lot of music on Spotify. And some of it is from smaller indie artists. Not a huge amount, but I’ve definitely listened to songs that are in that <1000 plays category, and for some undiscovered artists that’s a good amount of their library.
It surprises me how much of my Spotify library is no longer available. There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out. A lot of good songs too.
As much as I love Spotify and music streaming, it seems like the economics of it fundamentally doesn’t work and can’t work.
ansc's number was $4 per thousand plays.
Your number is $3 per thousand plays.
It sounds like you basically agree with ansc. While Spotify might be cheap, that cheapness is not the problem Snoop is having.
You say: $450 / 150,000 = $0.003 per streamed track.
The two sets of numbers don't seem so far apart that the discrepancy cannot be explained by rounding errors.
A very rough global average per-stream payout is often estimated at around $0.003 to $0.005. That brings the payout for 1 billion streams between $3,000,000 and $5,000,000. Let's go with the lower end. This is actual money paid out by Spotify for 1 billion streams, as in, a bank transfer of $3,000,000.
How do you get from there to $45,000?
- As with any legacy artist, the record label gets most (maybe 70%). Why that is, oh well. It's less shocking if you think of the label as an employer and how little an average employee gets compared to what they produce. Do you need an employer? Absolutely not. Do you need a record label? Absolutely not. Anyway, a 70% cut would leave the artist with $900,000.
- Expenses: There are various costs associated with producing, distributing, and promoting music, hotel costs. Let your imagination run wild. Safe to say: This is a black hole, depending on how you want the process to look. If Snoop wants to sit in a big studio for months, he pays prices, for month, but that's not required to make music. Renting a high end studio on end is lifestyle. Sure, it's an expense, but it's like complaining about your profit while driving a Porsche. Awkward. Let's assume a 20% deduction here, reducing the revenue to $720,000.
- Focus on Publishing Royalties: Publishing royalties are just one part of the total royalties an artist earns. So there's quite a bit of double accounting going on if you want to pretend that the above costs are all deducted from your Spotify income.
If we assume publishing royalties make up only 10% of the total, that brings the figure down to $72,000.
- tldr: Snoop is living the big life, confused about money, and then proceeds to confuse others about money.
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/s...
The business has changed since streaming and self publishing but the labels took bets on artists and gave them expensive recording studios and marketing dollars, gave them some basic money, and in return took the majority of rights to the first few albums.
They also knew that if the artist truly made it big they would likely go to a different label where they could get better terms or start their own where they’d keep all the money after the initial contract which drove their side higher.
The record label model clearly doesn’t work as well in modern days but it was successful for good reasons at the time it really flourished.
Or just buy it on bandcamp friday and give it all to the artists :)
This probably has more to do with publishers and licensing contracts than artists pulling their music off from platforms. Sometimes even bigger artists' albums disappear when publisher is sold or goes out from the business. Or the licensing contract's period runs out. As sad it is, many artists don't own the rights to their music, and if the rights owner is defunct, then there are missing albums or even discographies.
Spotify for instance had some Spotify exclusive “DJ mixes” that were all an hour of well-mixed playlists. Spotify got artists to curate them and would have “XYZ’s DJ Mix”. They were perfect for seamless music listening at the gym. No breaks between songs. Non stop music. I listened to them all the time.
But one day a few months ago they all just vanished. Every one. I had added several to my Spotify library. For a bit they were playlists of grayed out songs. And then the playlists themselves vanished too. This content was all Spotify exclusive- the music is just gone now. It’s not available elsewhere.
It was all “mixed” versions of songs with smooth transitions in an out. Luckily I had added most of the original songs to other Spotify playlists that I had. But still, the mixes themselves are gone.
https://music.apple.com/us/curator/apple-music-dj-mixes/1441...
If you had pirated or ripped those mixes off Spotify, you'd still have them. And you probably paid enough months of subscription to feel okay with that.
Because in the end https://xkcd.com/488/
Just looked into deleting my Spotify account through the app and appears that’s not an (obvious?) option. Ugh
definitely possible to avoid this, but given it would be a follow-up cost from the failing core business, it probably could not be done. hell, they didn't even get around to making basic meta-data reliably present.
This is an artefact of the industry and not something they have much control over. Labels for larger artists just don't just sell global streaming rights in perpetuity. They will carve it up by region and time in order to try and maximize profit.
I remember this being particularly infuriating with movie soundtracks or other compilations, where individual tracks would often evaporate one day for bogus (licensing) reasons.
> And some artists, like Neil Young, actually pulled most of their content.
Yeah, I actually left Spotify with Neil. Apparently though he and other artists like Joni Mitchell that left at the time are now back on the service as of a few weeks ago.
I do have YouTube Music for listening to stuff I don't own yet, but primarily I use Jellyfin these days for music.
My understanding is they’re playing a cat-and-mouse game with auto generated content, that syphons away some percentage of the royalties.
So, like all the rest of them?
Not to mention people can set up labels themselves, it's just a company like any other.
I'm sure we don't want big labels being gatekeepers. They have their own set of problems, and make streaming even more difficult for everyone but very large artists/groups (and sometimes even for those, as they eat a big chunk of royalties).
Also, what is Spotify going to do with these 50$? What if it happens twice, 100$... do they pay you back eventually? Perpetually free access to all their premium services?
And if you have made 200 songs (so loss of $100), all streaming less than 1K each, maybe your current production is not marketable on Spotify, and yeah, maybe you should find another venue. Eventually there will be a marketplace for this type of production, and hopefully willing users to pay for it.
Changing it to splitting out a users monthly payment to what they're actually listening to, would make the abuse they're trying to stop easier and not harder (as it would mean all the money they're trying to launder will go to the correct artist instead of just some of it)
Not saying that that's a good argument for the current system, but it wouldn't fix the issue they're trying to solve
I don't think any subscriber (i.e. people giving them money) would prefer current model over where your money goes directly to who you listen.
Even people who have Spotify end up buying stuff in Bandcamp, anyway. I never had merch but had CDs, and sometimes people would buy two physical copies, one to gift.
For me there was never any difference between Spotify and piracy.
I also buy the music I listen to a fair bit on Bandcamp or at concerts.
As an example, last fall a song from a band came up in the randomized post-album "radio" on Spotify as I was driving, and I added the band to my favorites. A month ago Spotify notified me the band was playing in town, so I went and ended up buying several CDs, including from the warmup band as well.
That said, I agree that Spotify should pay more to small artists. I really dislike that my money goes to Talor Swift and similar artists who have more than enough and that neither I nor my SO listen to.
I think I should have said that Spotify is the same as piracy from an artists POV.
It's definitely not illegal for users, and it definitely helps with "exposure", but it's not really a platform for making real money with your music, except when it's listened to in massive quantities.
For me, it's no different than putting a free album link in Instagram, or when Nine Inch Nails put it on PirateBay as a stunt...
I might not "enjoy" it as one would traditionally enjoy listening to music, but I enjoy that it exists and the uniqueness of the experience it provides.
If you can handle LAMC by Tool, you can handle this.
'kabelbrand' is giving me flashbacks to Providence by King Crimson, just a bit more raw and industrial. All build-up without the instruments actually synchronising together for the payoff as per Providence.
The band name is great; apt.
always good to have more options though!
Not exactly what I have in mind. I am working with the model where all songs are always available (like Spotify) and people simply choose how (a) how much they want to give per month and (b) how to split this amount among their preferred artists.
In effect, it's the same as a "pay as you want", but there is no overhead of thinking about which songs to "buy".
People don't go to indie concerts because of a spotify track. Nor to big name concerts. And 20 cents corresponds to around 50 to 100 plays according to the numbers mentioned here.
Do you have numbers behind this claim?
I definitely got aware of some unknown artists thanks to Spotify and YouTube, some of them had low hundreds views/listens.
Ended up supporting them, going to concerts and buying merch.
Unfortunately more like 5000+ plays. People tend go to concerts of music they listen to and for a lot of people that means hearing it on Spotify
> People don't go to indie concerts because of a spotify track.
Yes they do.
The first requires committing time and effort to get 50 people to see you, 20 of which are your personal friends. The second is making the music you have already produced available to millions of people around the world, with virtually no effort.
Surely Spotify should improve on compensating artists, but all-in-all it is still a better deal for the artist than the "for exposure" gig at the local bar.
Spotify can't give you these experiences no matter how hard they try so this claim doesn't make much sense to me. A concert isn't exactly competing with streaming services or anything.
Next?
Anecdotically I've attended multiple gigs for artists I discovered via Spotify.
While it does, note that paying or doing stuff free "for exposure" is exactly how many artists got big and huge hits were made, from payola to DJs (starting way earlier than Alan Freed with radio DJs, and going all the way to EDM DJs being paid to break a track), all the way to paying for artist ads or record shop placement, buying fake streams, followers, and views to appear more popular and drive exposure, or doing for free (or, often, paying for) the support spot on a bigger band's concert.
1. They saw our sticker/poster and thought the name is interesting
2. They checked the venue/festival-site and thought it sounded interesting
3. They knew us from social media
Exactly zero times I had someone tell me the found us on spotify and came because of that. Of course that doesn't mean no such people exist, my sample size might be too small. There might also be people who find us on spotify and then buy on bandcamp, no way to check on that.
But my feeling right now is that our more traditional boots on the ground marketing does a lot more than the online stuff. That doesn't mean that dynamic can be totally different for other bands or other genres tho.
All the music I buy and pirate is in FLAC and funneled into my local library, where I can enjoy it without any streaming service taking it away from me.
And I usually end up contributing more to my favorite artists financials than fans who use streaming service, so that's a bonus.
a) Spotify doesn't charge enough for a subscription
b) Spotify takes too big of a cut right now from the subscription revenue
c) The model doesn't work as a lot of people from low-income (and low subscription cost) countries are "sucking out" the money that goes mainly from rich ones. So 1 listen from USA = 1 listen from India even though the USA listener pays around 7-8x times more and the subscription income gets divided equally by listens.
What's better for music as a whole? Boosting Spotify's share price and Taylor Swift's private jet habit? Or putting that $11/month towards some gigs for an artist you really like?
Reminds me of allofmp3.com before the WTO asked Russia to kill it if they wanted to join.
Very shady at best.
I don’t know if YouTube is any better, but I have switched all of my music consumption to youtube music app with the premium subscription.
But it's not for everyone ig...
a1) on my computer, in folders. I manage it using iTunes/Music, but could just as well use anything else, or do it manually. I also have Serato for DJing, which imports my iTunes/Music library xml to share the same collection.
a2) to be fair, in the past year, I've gotten lazy and started streaming from the band camp app for more recent purchases. I'm not DJing much these days.
b) I buy phones with a lot of storage and don't upgrade very often
It's great that BC still does BC Fridays... but if fans only buy music from BC on BC Fridays, BC will lose all revenue and will fold or resort to shitty tactics. BC are one of the few "good" businesses in this space, and have reached an impressive scale. I'd hate to see them fold. I reckon it's worth buying some music on normal days as well as BC Fridays.
I too fear the recent change of ownership will bring on changes in business model. But I live in hope that it wont, because it doesn’t need to.
And if they removed BCFs or took a small cut I wouldn't stop buying from them either.
Where do you get these FLACs? Do you have a pipeline/automated system or it’s done manually? Asking for a friend.
Same goes for live recordings, remixes and radio sessions. P2P has had this for 20+ years, Spotify doesn't and never will.
Being in print or not makes no difference
This isn't an excuse for Spotify not paying much for plays, but I bet having music on spotify helps the gig revenue though.
In some ways this is also true for Taylor Swift et al - they also make thousands times the amount from playing gigs than 'selling' albums, streaming, and radio plays but that drives ticket sales.
Popular: Gigs pay you.
Taylor Swift: Governments pay you millions of dollars for regional exclusivity. (essentially, play 2 - 3 concerts instead of 10+)
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/mar/05/taylor-swift-s...
While some artists are so big that governments compete to have you come to their country (and NOT to your neighbours), the vast majority has trouble even getting to play free gigs.
Bandcamp isn't perfect, but it fits well with my listening habits and I'm glad it earns _some_ money for you in the grand scheme of things.
https://damiancowell.bandcamp.com/album/only-the-shit-you-lo...
you can get the "free" synced multi episode animated web comic from youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkRxIMJ3GpPH_NurdvJLL...
Talking of Aussie bands: https://drunkmums.bandcamp.com/album/beer-baby and https://3pod.bandcamp.com/album/middleborough-rd
I listen to most music on yt music (although their client sucks) and buy stuff on bandcamp whenever i love some band and it's available there. I've never seen a value in spotify - limited library with no ability to fill the gaps with custom files (like you can do on YT music), client is meh, additional cost or ads are meh too.
It's already happening. Even some artists which are above the limit pull out to show their support for smaller artists.
As infuriating as this is, it's the reason I still use Spotify. A music service that hides their catalog changes by subtly modifying my playlists is a no-go. Having the songs still appear lets me know, as it gives me the opportunity to find those songs elsewhere.
These days there's a lot of worth in that, the bars been set quite low.
1k is a relatively low number to hit at least they didn't set the demonizations level the same as other platforms.
A lot of smaller artists don't have a say regarding licensing and distribution. They're usually managed by a local minor label, which in turn has specific agreements with bigger players (Columbia, UMG) once your music sells more than, let's say 50.000 copies and they need a partner to publish a release on more territories. A few artists also get their own label.
For example, Peggy Gou tracks are usually released trough Dudu Records (Her own label) -> Ninja Tune -> XL Recordings, which is basically the same label that nowadays publishes Adele and Radiohead. Adele went even a step further, and her music is handled by Columbia Records for the US market.
Until you reach this level of clout, you have very little direct control over your syncs and streaming rights in the "regular", Billboard-tracked, market.
It's the same dynamic companies use against ununionized labor.
Most bands can't do this. They're not full time musicians, many have a day job. The ones that can are likely to come from rich families where they get time and money to pursue their passions, insteas of going to college and getting a job.
Lana Del Ray, Grimes and Billy Eilish are some of the biggest artists of the 2010s, all of them grew up rich and connected.
They send me a monthly email detailing the number of plays I received as an artist, and it averages around 300.
So each track is getting around 10 plays per month.
So none of them come anywhere close to the minimum threshold.
I made around $10/year from Spotify plays, it's a pittance, but over all the streaming platforms I would get enough for a new plugin each year, this makes it "worthwhile".
I absolutely will not allow Spotify to have content on their platform without reimbursement.
The only people losing from this are the handful of fans who like my music.
Sounds like you're well over that, at around 3-4K plays per year.
On the other hand, that would make it pretty trivial for garbage/AI content distributors to circumvent.
Spotify doesn't have an answer for this. Just don't listen to things outside the Spotify library. Apple Music (and GPM before it) lets me upload my own tracks and sync them between my devices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVY7-Ti77UQ
It might, but then there's this:
(1) they're not making money already anyway (they'd be getting like $3 for 1000 streams before)
(2) that's were the listeners are (not the listeners they have, since they don't have many to begin with, but the ones they wish to attract)
(3) most of such a low number as 1000 streams are usually themselves, band members, friends, and family, plus whoever they sent a link to and gave it a short listen before moving on.
Even if a very prolific artist has 200 songs, averaging 500 plays per year, this would only ever amount to $500 per year. It is not peanuts for a hobby musician, but it would represent an unusually productive artist who happens to be just under this limit with most (or all) their songs, and also who manages to somehow get paid in the upper parts of the span.
If YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Deezer, Soundcloud, and Amazon all adopt this practice, taking your edge-case artist, they're out of pocket for $3,500 per year.
That makes a situation where the more highly concentrated Spotify's monopoly is, and the less productive an artist is, the fairer the outcome for that small artist. Meanwhile the $3,500 is distributed between the monopolist, and the very large artists on the service. That's a quite uniquely perverse set of economic outcomes.
But the article makes it sound like this was not a factor?
Some generative stuff will be more discernible than others.
The ones that don't even try to emulate the full experience of having a real artist involved will have a lot less friction.
And it's not like you're going to have a small niche audience that settles for artificial music, no there will be a niche that prefers it.
The size of that niche right now has nowhere to go but up.
I guess at some point there will be a popular "musician" who is relieved to be an algorithm, and we'll see what happens.
I was at a gig for a moderately successful band recently and they said rather loudly they were bastards and buy one of their CDs instead even if you never play it because they need to eat.
They could try making music people actually want to listen to. If they can‘t, that career may not be for them.
Lots of companies today only pay you out once you reach $X, usually some nominal amount. It sounds like that could be the case here.
Why deal with payment processors, billing disputes, etc for a customer only earning pennies?
Spotify doesn’t have to deal with these things. Artists work with distributors who then deal with Spotify on their behalf. The distributor pays the artist.
For me the issue here is they’ve changed the deal to the detriment of the littlest of the little guys. A company that just signed a non-exclusive $250m deal for Joe Rogans podcast, can’t afford to pay $10 a year to a whole bunch of independent artists. That’s outrageous. For me it’s the ethics of it rather than the amount.
This seems to already be the case, in practice. Spotify claims that there's about 40 million in unpaid royalties for people who can't withdrawal yet.
https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-...
There are donation buttons for some artist on Spotify. I guess the artist need to enable it? ("Signum Regis" is an artist that has a Donate button for example)
I actually hate that in Prime, because discovery for shows and movies is never a positive experience but a setup chore separate from consumption, and advertising stuff that isn't already paid for always makes it worse. But for music I think it could actually be enjoyable, because you can consume and browse at the same time is actually a thing. Like diving into discogs.com while listening. I could easily see myself listening to some artist's main albums as part of some standard subscription (that pays as badly as spotify?) and then shell out a single digit payment on one hundred pay-per-listen tokens for obscure B-sides from the label that the artist is signed on, or something like that. Or reimplenent radio, by offering a licensing model where what would have been single releases in the olden days are part of the ad based subscription, but album content is only available through purchase or (various?) subscriptions.
Make it a marketplace of monetization models! Perhaps the right company to try this would be someone completely unexpected like cloudflare? Being a blank slate from both consumer and licensor perspective could almost be considered a prerequisite for a project like that...
I do not believe that their business model will ever do anything but fuck over the artists. It's also deeply disturbing to me that there are only a few options left for people to actually own their music and the rest is rent-seeking platforms.
* I self-host this internally, for my family and me, since 2019. One of the best designed interfaces / UX you can find.
[1]: https://www.funkwhale.audio/
believing is without you
you won't believe
anymore~
https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/17/24041343/eu-music-streami...
EDIT: as it’s been pointed out, the article doesn’t mention a time, which is a speculation on my part
Sounds pretty early stage
To misquote Bezos: Your silly policy is my buisness oppertunity.
That’s not how Spotify works. Instead a lot of it goes to Taylor Swift, who I don’t listen to.
Some some barber shop is playing drake 24/7 having ads and 16£ of you 17£ are going to drake because you only listened to Bob bobson 20 minutes today instead of 23 hours:59 minutes like the barber shop.
The pay model is ridiculous, every update is terrible and there is no mechanism to let the company know they are running the product into the ground. It used to be heaven for power users,now if they simplify it any more the app will just pick what it thinks you should listen to, give the money to ed sheeran regardless of what you end up listening to and not even let you pause cause an extra button might be too complicated for you.
Spotify's entire promise was "we solve the music inequality problem by just pooling all subscriber money together and then we do an equal(-ish, record labels iirc got slightly different deals) split depending on how many people listen to your music." It kinda sells the idea that if you're just popular enough, you can make it big on Spotify. Of course practically that's been a lie for ages (numbers showcased that only the top 0.1% could afford to live off of Spotify alone, and all those songs are owned by the established record companies anyway), so you could say this is just dispensing with the charade to avoid transaction costs.
I do wonder about the ripple effect this could cause for indie artists; Spotify just told them to go fuck themselves and there's pretty much no incentive to use Spotify anymore now that they pulled this stunt.
If you want to support artists directly, it's still always better to just buy the albums. Most of them have Bandcamp pages and for now, Bandcamp provides a good deal (and as a customer you can just download the FLAC files).
Looks a lot like abuse of market position.