Major labels get more profit, smaller indie labels and unsigned artists get less.
"A new threshold of minimum annual streams that a track must meet before it starts to generate royalties. The threshold, according to MBW, will de-monetize tracks that had previously received 0.5% of Spotify’s royalty pool."
@lashman Thanks! I’m considering not adding my future releases to Spotify either. Not that my little act of rebellion will make a difference, but it’s the principle of the thing.
@killyourfm I hear you. We all reach our breaking point with Spotify at some point.
Mine was a few years ago when they started putting free to access podcasts on their platform and adding their own ads for the non paying users....
While at the same time the CEO's salary was astronomical and he was quoted as saying artists who wanted to make more money on Spotify needed to make more content.
I wrote them about it and then cancelled. I'm sure my email went nowhere, but I felt good.
The only reason why Spotify succeeded in getting the contracts with the recording labels in the first place (back when they were still fighting against piracy, and afraid of "devaluing music" by monthly subscriptions) was by giving shares to the record labels.
This created an incentive where streaming contracts had record labels on both sides of the negotiating table for royalties -- with artists having no direct representation.
@killyourfm@EposVox I am not clear how they distinguish tracks that are “just white noise” versus classic noise artists like Merzbow, Massonna, Fe-Mail, or what have you. There are a lot of atmospheric black metal, sludge, old school industrial, and other genre pieces that consist predominantly in various kinds of white noise and distorted tonality too. Is there someone going through their catalog and evaluating whether something is “real” music?
I abandoned Spotify a while back. Doesn’t sound like they’re doing any better…
@NathanHarvey@killyourfm they don’t. It’s an automatic system that has already fucked up on our music, so a lot of music is about to be false flagged and demonetized
@killyourfm Fuck Spotify ... Might as well just pirate music (not that I'm condoning it) because the artist still gets nothing, but at least the Spotify owners/shareholders aren't getting rich on other people work.
This has more to do with the fact that major labels own most of Spotify, so shafting independent labels/artists allows gaining monies from those who didn't sell their business/music to labels directly.
It's a bit unfair to blame Spotify-the-company, which has historically (and probably still) doing actually quite badly, as it's just a pipe from consumers to labels, without enjoying from a strong position like Apple with Itunes.
I meant that Apple owns 100% of their streaming service, allowing them to set their rates so as to benefit Apple-the-company and Itunes-the-service (and consequentally not to prioritise big labels over indie-labels/artists).
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