So with the current shameless “making the rich richer” mentality in the music industry, Spotify jumps on this horse with their new “less than 1000 plays per year (per track)” royalty policy.
I always thought the internet would have changed the music industry in the benefit of the (smaller) artists and that they learned from the past. Yoda would say “How naive I was” 
.
Spotify can go f*** themselves. wouldn’t touch em with a bargepole.
Eh. If you really want to support artists, then buy their records. This is nothing new.
Spotify streams for indie artists are just bot farming anyway.
Seriously, very few give an eff about artists outside of themselves
I’m not even sure I listened to 5% of the music that was on my iPod from back in the day.
Seriously, I had like 10 Merzbow albums on there, only for me to discover I don’t like noise as much as I thought I did
This stresses me out. I’m fine right now, but always in the back of my head I am thinking: what if I can’t make money doing this anymore.
I need to save up a nest egg so if music ever becomes totally unprofitable (which doesn’t seem like that much of a long shot) I will still be able to make it and not just end up working the window at McDonalds or whatever until I am so tired I come home and don’t even have any energy to go out to the studio.
Time to post this sh_t again
None of the streaming services make most artists any useful income.
If you love an artist but they don’t have merch, would you send them money directly?
That you should help them turn a profit by providing content and populating their catalogue, but they won’t acknowledge the benefit of having a diverse, content rich catalogue as such, speaks volumes about the disconnect between the focus of online music sharing and the reality of those who facilitate the sharing.
In reality, it costs them less to run the business than the profit margin they’re shooting for would indicate, so this recent push to further distance the artists from their own content is just further evidence of the art-share world being overrun by business tyrant opportunity seekers looking to re-establish the corporate music monopoly that dominated the latter portion of the 20th century.
This is interesting:
" Running costs – 8 in 10 say it costs less to run a retail business online (vs B&M). Three-quarters say the same about service businesses. Break even – 8 in 10 say online retail businesses break even sooner (vs B&M). Two-thirds say the same about online service businesses."
And that’s dealing with physical merchandise online, Spotify doesn’t even do physical merchandising so they’re twice as likely to turn a profit.
It now costs them less than ever before to run you into the ground and then reap the benefits of having done it.
but instead its the same two katy perry songs from 2010 on repeat, shouts out to kroger
Spotify is pro 2nd amendment?
Am I allowed to have duplicate accounts there?
I’ve taken all my music off all streaming after this was announced. Its a horrible business model and I can’t support it any more. Honestly thinking of going back to cd for my next release.
One year in the mid 2000s, back when everyone was stealing music and I was pretty broke, I did that for a selection of artists I’d been listening to a lot. Partly also as a reaction to the years spending tons of money on albums with one or two great tracks and a load of filler (I don’t miss that).
I mostly just put cash in an envelope and sent it to the small labels they were on. Most actually replied and were pretty happy
Yep. And this one:
Not to say this decision is cool, but does it make any difference at all? You always hear from artists with hundreds of thousands of streams that amount to nothing in money for them. So I assume less than a thousand streams would not have made anyone any money anyways? It’s still a shit move of course and a symbolical fuck you. But the bigger issue seems to be how streams are generally translated into money for artists on Spotify. Or maybe I’m missing something here?
I had to look it up. 1000 streams is somewhere in the ballpark of $2-$4. So fuck all really.
It’s funny isn’t it. What is it about being successful in the music industry that ends up with you ploughing money into new and interesting ways to blow up children?
I think I’ve talked about this before too, but back in like 2001 or whatever, Godspeed you! Black Emperor put this on the back of their album sleeve
I ended up using it as the basis for a presentation as part of an International Relations module at University, did pretty well…
Yes, it doesn’t make a difference to the individual user but it adds up to a massive amount of extra money for Spotify.
Yes.
They have a system which does/could track exactly how many plays any track gets. Thus they could pay the content producers fairly. If they did that, and talked about it publicly, the other streaming services would have to follow their lead.
They have built a system which connects music makers with music listeners, directly. They could use this system to support musicians better. They could connect with musicians to help improve their QoL; seek their opinions, represent them collectively, lobby for them, provide support for licensing etc etc. If they did that, the other streaming services would probably have to provide similar support.
Instead, they treat the musicians as “resource” and constantly find ways to cut the amount they have to pay out. They prioritise hoarding money to invest in arms over the livelihood of the people who make their platform worth visiting.
It’s pretty amazing to me that anyone getting less than 1000 plays a year would bother with the effort of uploading shit to Spotify.
There’s nothing about it as a platform that is of any use at all to underground or independent artists, unless it’s your dream to spend 20 years waiting to get on some bullshit playlist, then it’s fucking grand.
The time for anyone (that isn’t already Taylor Swift) still on it to get off it has surely long since passed.
Crab bucket syndrome.
