Honestly, Spotify is only half bad compared to the real scumbags of this industry, and that’s the “rights holders”.
It’s not the artists who created the music I’m talking about. It’s the record companies taking the largest piece for themselves.
They are the ones earning on other people’s talent and success.
But…but…muh “discovery”
I’ll die on that hill. 90% of the artists I listen to, I found through spotify’s algorithms.
Ok, but why not find a human that curates the kind of music you like? They are called DJs.
I don’t understand why we need to get rid of human DJs that seems like the last job we need to replace.
edit why do y’all think I am talking about radio DJs? You…. know there are wayyyyyyy more DJs out there than just radio DJs right?..…right?
….like y’all know mixes exist right? Like mixcloud or whatever?
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Well, their CEO Daniel Ek’s investment company Prima Materia "invested €100 million ($114 million USD) in Helsing, an artificial intelligence company based out of Europe that assists in military technological ventures. "
So I’m happy to take my *streaming business elsewhere.
What does a record company even do? Why do they have rights?
Basically they fund artists to record and then handle things like promotion.
Yo. I can be a record label. Come hang out in my apartment while I pay the bills and BAM! I get all the royalties!
Sounds like stealing with extra steps. Actually it sounds like just being rewarded for having money to begin with.
Actually it sounds like just being rewarded for having money to begin with.
That’s most of the economy.
Man, a lot of people here don’t understand how the music industry works. From the perspective of someone who’s been loosely following the music industry, what I’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter if Spotify gave up 2/3rds of their revenue, or 100% of it, the artists would still make fuck all.
Why?
The labels love taking their cuts and as a result, artists make very little. Instead of taking the blame for giving artists a <10% cut of the label’s revenue from their music (my understanding is that it’s pretty common for musicians to get <10%, sometimes <5% if you’re on a particularly shitty label), the labels are blaming platforms like Spotify.
Now, I’m not saying that Spotify is blameless, however I think there’s a lot of misdirection from the labels going on. I don’t remember anyone complaining about pre-spotify services like Pandora Radio for not paying out enough when they were largely ad-supported, which is another reason I’m not totally buying the, “it’s cause it’s free” argument either.
Fuck, remember Pandora?
Labels are an outdated concept that needs to die. Now that you can find any music from just a quick search artists shouldn’t have to rely on them, at least not as heavily, for advertising.
There was a very, very brief moment from about 2005 to 2011 or so where there was money to be made directly by artists on iTunes or the other music stores where the tracks were like 99 cents each.
But people stopped buying as soon as Spotify became popular, and now any artist that wants to release on Spotify without a label still doesn’t make much money.
Relatively “large” truly independent bands like KNOWER are starting to give true home recording a base of proof of functionality.
Power to bandcamp.
Why isn’t there some kind of genre music search for all artists without a label, Foss of course. From what I understand, when you’re starting out in music, getting people to hear it is the hardest part.
Do you know how the merch shops works? Spotify seems to be a reseller of some kind. How many % of the money is going to the artist usually?
I still use pandora free daily!
Pandora didn’t replace buying music. They did not add the “on demand streaming” option until after Spotify was prevalent.
Indies are on sporify too. Spotify pays them shit too. Label or not.
They just changed the rules so that if smaller artists don’t get a certain number of plays they don’t even get a payout.
With less than 1000 streams per year.
This is solely to kick out the AI generated music, which is already taking a significant share of the payout from the musicians.
This change is not against smaller artists, but for them.
Ugh, yes poor poor spotify, fuck that. Artists can’t even make a living making music anymore thanks to spotify. Fuck off blaming artists for trying to get paid. Fuck this article. Oh no it only gets a third of the revenue?! Abhorrent, no it should get ALL the revenue, for doing what, having a server with music on it. Amazing. Fuck spotify.
Is Spotify the villain here or is the “big three”? Because it sounds like Spotify is delivering a service and deserves some profit from that.
But what are the big three doing? Seems like they are just skimming because they hold the IP rights. Are they providing any service?
Spotify is definitely not the villain here, they have created the best music streaming platform in the world. The big publishers also can’t be called the villains per say, but it wasn’t so nice of them to force a small startup (Spotify in it’s early days) to sign contracts that will permanently force it to payout about $0.66 out of every $1 it makes.
The most popular musoc streaming service. Definitely not the best. They still don’t offer lossless musoc streaming and their lossy files use an outdated encoder.
The “best music platform in the world” sure hates paying artists, tho. I know you are obsessed with labels, they pay indie artists fuck all too
Spotify picks it’s price point. It’s picked a price point (free) that meams artists can’t get paid. And it’s price point (free) means that artists can’t compete either.
So yeah fuck spotify, pay artists what they are worth and having servers to download mp3s on isn’t worth taking 1/3rd of the revenue. They should get less not more. Adjust their prices (maybe it shouldn’t be free so artists can fucking pay rent and spotify can pay employees)
Blaming artists for wanting to pay rent and eat food is some bootlicking bullshit.
Blaming artists? What are you smoking?
I was asking if it’s Spotify which is relatively new and, as pointed out in the article MUST get this contract or die, or if the problem might be the big three that hold all the power in this negotiation.
Speaking of which. Isn’t it the big three that actually pay the artists. So how would Spotify, if they were so inclined, manage that payout? (It’s an interest idea though. I wonder what would happen if they offered a tip-the-artist button).
Spotify is not new.
Spotify already manage their payout. To labels and indies. They screw over both massively.
Unfortunately, my understanding is that at least part of the blame lies with the labels. Most labels have contracts with their artists that mean the artists make very little, if anything, off studio recordings. That means they make very little from vinyl sales, CD sales, Spotify streams, etc. If you wanna actually support an artist, you buy merch and go to live shows. My understanding is that this is how it’s always been and people are barking up the wrong tree. People are bitching about Spotify when they should be bitching about labels taking a massive chunk of their money. They’ve only become aware of how much money they’re missing out on because Spotify supposedly makes so little that they get sticker shock when they get their royalty check, but it’s really not entirely Spotify’s fault.
That’s not saying Spotify is blameless; but if Spotify’s hands are covered in shit, then the labels’ hands are covered in diarrhea and vomit.
No, labels are shits. Spotify pays indie artists shit too though.
This is not a case of labels being greedy. This is a case of spotify being greedy and making a bad situation worse.
It’s not free. There are ads.
It’s free. You are the product.
Free is literally why they have the market they have. Completely silly point.
You can’t assume the price point changes and the market remains the same as well. It’s more complicated than that. We literally have talks of people leaving Netflix every other week from the constant changes being made this year.
Yes, and they don’t deserve a market if they can’t pay artists to make the content. They should not exist if they can’t do that.
That just leaves us nowhere to go though. We know artists aren’t paid enough, but if our only answer is the one that clearly takes them out of business, then it’s just sitting on a soapbox while another company comes in and does the same thing.
Either the solution has to be feasible or someone will eventually show up to ignore it.
To reemphasize, this is regarding “they have the market because they’re free”, it’s not regarding something else like just paying the artists more, or getting a better deal with labels.
You can buy music. You can use subscription services that are less shit to artists.
I do buy music.
I know most people don’t and won’t though.
You can’t make a solution that ignores evil and apathetic exists.
Have you ever looked into the operating costs of having a server with music on it which over 400M monthly active users use?
I actually work in cloud engineering and regularly price this kind of thing up.
Their costs are salaries not aws bills.
Not that high. Spotify uses some pretty tight compression (not good, just tight); most users get 96-128kbit/s AAC, premium can go a bit higher if opted in. That works out to about 16KB/s or 58MB/hour, assuming nothing’s cached.
Bandwidth pricing very much goes down with scale, not up. But even the non-committed AWS pricing at Spotify’s scale is 2 to 3 cents/GB. You end up paying way less than that with any kind of commitment and AWS isn’t the cheapest around to begin with.
Man, you weren’t alive before napster were you?
Yes, I was alive in the time when artists could barely scrape by. Now, I’m alive in the time when artists can’t even do that.
Wooh. 👀. This isn’t Spotify’s fault. They can’t pay artists if they don’t have money.
To be fair- Spotify priced the service that doesn’t make enough profit to pay artists adequately.
Like the article explains, they can’t price their services too expensively, because of competition. If Spotify becomes $25/month, most users will move to Apple Music or YouTube Music, etc.
Is that your blog or whatever you keep posting?
Yes, it is. It’s entirely spotifies making. It’s the situation spotify has created. And the answer is absolutely not ‘starve artists even more than we do today’.
Okay, lets say I accept the thesis that Spotify is directly to blame for the demise of physical media and the rise of streaming. In the current moment, what is Spotify supposed to do that would satisfy you?
For every dollar I pay to Spotify for their music service, Spotify sees 33 cents of it. Much of that goes to running the service that people want access to. The label takes the other 67 cents. They pass about 2 cents of it on to the artists.
Let’s go full fantasyland, say Spotify cuts their own take entirely and somehow subsidizes the entire thing. The label is now making the full dollar, a full 150% of what they were making before. Well, is that better for artists? 150% of what they were making before is 3 cents on the dollar. Is that a solution? No, it’s barely a difference.
Let’s say Spotify triples sub prices so they can take only 10% for infrastructure. Most of their current subscribers won’t pay that, but let’s just pretend. Is 5.3 times what the artists were making before an acceptable amount? Six cents on the dollar? Weird Al would’ve made $60 off Spotify this year instead of $12. Is that satisfactory? Because that’s literally the most Spotify can do, even theoretically.
Spotify can’t solve the problem.
The problem is labels locking artists into contracts where the label gets to keep 90% or more of everything they make. Spotify has no say in that.
Conversely, if we go back to the current split, but have the labels share their cut with the artists 50/50, the artists are suddenly making 1650% what they were before. Snoop’d be taking almost a million dollars for his billion streams. These contracts made some shred of sense in the physical era, when you needed to own a studio and audio engineers and marketers and media factories to push and print a band, but even back then they were widely known to be exploitative. Nowadays, when any tiny town has a studio for rent and anyone can edit a killer track in their bedroom and go viral on social media? They’re a fucking joke.
The villain in this scenario is blindingly obvious, and anyone who believes otherwise is either a plant or a useful idiot.
Haha. Don’t be shocked by the reaction. We live in a world where a certain portion of ‘people’ Believe every thing should be free and corporations don’t need money at all and should just be willed in to existence and live off of the ether.
Etc. Etc. Rich people bad
Way to go mask off with the ‘people’ comment bud
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If you want to support an artist pirate their music and see them in concert.
Some artists that people like may never come to their city
Buy merch
This is outdated and bad information. Most small artists lose money touring. Bigger artists might break even.
If you can buy merch, do that, if you can buy physically do that. Spotify is gonna pay pennies for thousands of streams, so nothing you do on spotify is going to benefit an artist. But “pirate and see live” is probably gonna result in a negative bank balance for artists.
Nothing short of handing them cash in person is truly a guarantee. Really depressing how it’s turned out.
Unless it’s a ticketmaster concert because fuck them.
Nice try ticket Master!
“Support”
This is probably why you get a nearly endless stream of covers and remixes if you just let Amazon Music play random music.
This is why I thought some of their recent actions that hurt the lowest played artists was strange, you want to encourage artists to NOT use the big publishers to help break their triopoly.
I think the most recent changes are fine in practice, but the optics are not great which probably matters a lot.
Exactly, Spotify is stuck between pleasing artists and the big publishers.
Even the smallest artists are making more than 1000 streams yearly. The only ones they are hurting are AI generated songs.
FYI it’s 1000 per track per year, not per artist.
I agree though, I went through my instrumental playlist which has loads of indi stuff and the smallest I found had 10,000 plays
Edit - looks like I got a notification for this 4 days late…
How much money would they want to skim to distribute the music? 33-66 split doesn’t sound so bad considered that they don’t produce the music, sign artist, promote them, etc
They can always start their own label if they believe that vertical integration will be more profitable for them.
They tried that with podcasts and it didn’t go as planned
33% is a massive amount for effectively just being a download service. massive
For reference, the Steam store of the gaming distributor Valve charges 30% of each sale, however the Steam service provides quite a bit of incentive. Having community and discussions easily accessible, cloud storage that links to screenshots and saves, branches, I’m sure there’s more.
Meanwhile Spotify gives you, what, playlist creations?
Because servers and traffic are free. Totally forgot how you don’t have to pay the people keeping the service alive either. A steam game you download once? Maybe once a year? Music gets streamed (downloaded) every single time unless you decide to download it. Can we maybe not pretend like Spotify does fucking nothing?
I didn’t mention servers because that is their only cost next to employees.
If they aren’t paying artists well, well what’s the point of having servers.
Maybe can we not pretend like Spotify is some up and coming startup that barely breaks even because of their benevolence?
To determine if this company is actually a poor widdle guy or just trying to look like their hands are tied with respect to paying artists, look up how much Daniel Ek is worth, and then look up what he does with his money
You do know even without Spotify artists would be getting paid the same amount by their label?
Spotify splits 70/30, that 70% goes to the rights holder. So why aren’t the artists seeing it?
It used to be artists didn’t make money on albums annd only from merch at tours, nothing has really changed in the music industry.
Indies are on spotify, and spotify pays them badly, too.
And snoop dog complains after receiving a measley $45k from one billion streams.
My Spotify wrapped had a special message from Weird Al (I know, I have great taste!) with the following:
“It’s my understanding that I had over 80 million streams on Spotify this year. So if I’m doing the math right, that means I earned $12, so, you know, enough to get myself a nice sandwich at a restaurant. So from the bottom of my heart, thanks for your support. And, uh, thanks for the sandwich.”
I mostly listen to smaller bands and buy their stuff on Bandcamp. It sucks that Bandcamp was sold (twice now) and will probably go down the shitter, but that seemed like a more sustainable model. Also buying music is nicer than renting it for me.
Team Bandcamp as well. I’ll be sad if it degrades. My hope is it survives long enough to be discovered by everyone as they get sick of the shit music streams on Spotify, Pandora and their ilk
I believe Spotify is largely responsible for its own financial struggles. Knowing that 2/3 of their revenue goes to the greedy labels, they should consider scaling back on operational costs and excessive investments in advertising and celebrity podcast deals.
In a way, it serves them right. Spotify plays a significant role in transforming music into a product akin to fast food, prioritizing mass consumption over artistic value. This approach not only impacts their profitability but also contributes to a broader devaluation of music as an art form.
So fuck Spotify.
Spotify plays a significant role in transforming music into a product akin to fast food, prioritizing mass consumption over artistic value.
Have you never heard of Top 40 before?
ok. they should get a job then. pull themselves up by their bootstraps
Equity.
In total, at the close of last year, SEC documents show that exactly 65 percent of Spotify was owned by just six parties: the firm’s co- founders, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon (30.6 percent of ordinary shares between them); Tencent Holdings Ltd. (9.1 percent); and a run of three asset-management specialists: Baillie Gifford (11.8 percent), Morgan Stanley (7.3 percent), and T.Rowe Price Associates (6.2 percent). These three investment powerhouses owned more than 25 percent of Spotify between them — a fact worth remembering next time there’s an argument about whose interests Spotify is acting in when it makes controversial moves (for example, SPOT’s ongoing legal appeal against a royalty pay rise for songwriters in the United States).
Furthermore, according to MBW estimates, which my sources suggest are still solid, two major record companies — Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group — continue to jointly own between six percent and seven percent of Spotify (Sony around 2.35 percent and Universal around 3.5). With Sony and UMG added into the mix, then, the names mentioned here comfortably own more than 70 percent of Spotify.
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/who-really-owns-spotify-955388/>I call bullshit. Yeah I’m sure they spend 2/3 of their income on rights holders, mainly Joe Rogan, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift.
The average musician isn’t making shit, and yet the spotify execs are sipping champagne.
Average musician probably makes more than you think https://youtu.be/qjb-pJIfQXI?si=Zbi54GvD3NqomIrv
