Technology

I remember when Joe Rogan was getting giant paycheck from Spotify promoting antivax stuff, and people talked about moving to Apple Music, but it feels like many just stuck with Spotify.

I came across a post on instagram that says that Al Yankovic's 80 million stream on playlist only netted him enough money to buy a sandwich.

Also, Spotify underpaying artists, making fake playlists with cover artists to undermine artists, are not new. It feels like the mainstream crowd just doesn't care, which pushes me further into depression.

If you want to do the maths, the maximum one can possibly earn in Spotify royalties is $0.003 a stream. It doesn’t add up to a living wage for most artists.

And now, to make matters far worse, starting in 2024 Spotify will stop paying anything at all for roughly two-thirds of tracks on the platform. That is any track receiving fewer than 1,000 streams over the period of a year.

So if my maths are right, this means people not getting paid...are people that would make less than 3 dollars in a whole year?

Some context is that this is Spotify's first profitable quarter in quite a while. Also, there are 11 million artists on Spotify. I won't pretend to have any data on listening distribution, but even naively and stupidly going with a uniform split, that's of course $5 per artist if you eliminated Spotify's profit entirely. In reality, most of those will have next to no listeners, and the vast majority of streams are going to the top several thousand.

The deeper question to ask is where all the streaming revenue is actually going, and the answer to that isn't to line Spotify's pockets; it's to the labels.

I feel like you’re doing everyone a disservice when you don’t tell us the most beneficial way for us to hear your music.

Why is anyone still using Spotify?

They have money to pay Joe Rogan an absolutely obscene amount of money which could have made hundreds of artists life awesome apparently (which feels more like a bribe). So it is clear, they have the cash to pay others too. They just choose not to

Bandcamp and Tidal. Please everyone, we need to kill Spotify, they hate artists.

How much of this is Spotify's fault and how much is the major record labels sitting between Spotify and the individual artists?

And is there a better place for us consumers to go and vote with our wallet? Ideally somewhere that isn't one of the 5 major tech giants that control everything

If you want to do the maths, the maximum one can possibly earn in Spotify royalties is $0.003 a stream. It doesn’t add up to a living wage for most artists.

And now, to make matters far worse, starting in 2024 Spotify will stop paying anything at all for roughly two-thirds of tracks on the platform. That is any track receiving fewer than 1,000 streams over the period of a year.

Honestly, does the 1k floor matter much? Based on the above text, the most that such a track can possibly make is $3/year. It's a safe bet that most aren't sitting right at 999 views and the maximum revenue per track; most are probably well below that. I have a hard time seeing someone caring much about that.

I'm not saying that there isn't possibly some kind of business model for which a track making $1/year or something this might make sense (massive numbers of cheap machine-generated tracks targeting very specific tastes, that all get a few views each). But for conventionally-produced music, I think that if you're making a song that's generating 50 cents or 10 cents a year or something, it's basically not on your radar financially.

Would love to know if this is better at Tidal than at Spotify. After all, that is the main reason I switched.

I haven't used Spotify in a while. I buy stuff on Bandcamp (Bandcamp Friday usually).

Fuck em..
Just buy music directly from the artist whenever possible....

Honestly, 56 million profit is really not much. How many artists are getting next to nothing? 100,000? Splitting that profit between them leaves each with 560 per year. There's even less when you include more.

And if Spotify raises the prices to pay more per play people will leave, leaving Spotify with less money to hand out. Having asshats like Rogan getting millions or the deals huge artists, who are already filthy rich like Taylor Swift, make with Spotify are what's hurting small artists. I think Spotify has the same issue as the rest of the world. There is enough for everyone, it's just not equally distributed.

I did, I cancelled Spotify and switched to Tidal because of this, and noted the reason in my exit survey.

After several of my favorite songs disappeared from Spotify, I've adopted a different approach to music.

If I see on on a band show merch stand, I buy a cassette. It's more of a novelty item and a way to slightly support the band. While I do have a portable tape player, I only rarely take it out. I switched from LPs to tapes because of the costs and huge effort associated with playing or storing them (that is, if you do it right are are not OK with fucking up your LPs), but tapes are cool and don't have that many storage or playing problems.

Other than that, I've stopped paying for any kind of streaming services, and save the 10$ per month to just buy one or two (new or old) albums from my favourite artists on Bandcamp, that I've spend the last month listening to the most. The albums I buy I add to my NAS library, which usually replaces stolen copies of said albums that I've previously got from Redacted.

This allows me to keep a pretty expansive library, by just stealing what I need, but with a promise that I'll eventually buy the album (using the money I saved on streaming services), if it's something that I've listened to extensively. I'm also not at mercy of streaming services, that can take away my music whenever they decide to.

So far I've been doing this for a few years, and even increased my budget for just buying albums if I can't immediately find them on Redacted.