Free market… always look for more ethical options that still fit your music. An ideal platform would be Audius. It’s built on blockchain technology but is limited with music content. It would be the perfect way to allow artists to make a living and get rid of the record label kingpins and Spotify pimps forever!
Tidal has some pseudo quality (MQA) which they claim to better than lossless but isn’t at all and just costs more. If you want a streaming service, maybe take a look at something like qubuz where you can buy the tracks to download drm free. Might also wanna take a look at Bandcamp.
Personally, I use deemix with Deezer Premium ARLs to download my Music in full 320kbps. Works like a dream. You can accomplish the same thing on Android with Murglar. This section of the Firehawk52 guide explains it pretty well.
Go see them to support them. That’s the only way most bands make their money anyway. I’m friends with a member of a successful bluegrass band and they get just about zip from streaming and just about all their money from merch and ticket sales.
I buy their albums on vinyl 😄 Often comes with a code to download the album digitally too if you wanna skip the pirating, but sometimes it’s just easier and less effort to pirate
Media corporations won’t solve that either. They will simply take your money and put it in their pockets while pretending that they care about artists.
It kinda does in a way. A Harvard study from 2004 showed that most artists actually get a profit from piracy (when they broke it down pretty much all but the 25% most popular artists sold more records and had more concert attendance).
Basically most legitimate music streaming services have ways of screwing over artists. Most services use a pro rata model that will screw over most artists.
As it stands for right now one of the biggest things hurting artists are the streaming services.
Things that help are services switching over to a fan centric model (SoundCloud is the only service I know of that has done this and I haven’t actually seen too much info on how it’s actually affected artists) and organizations like MAC and ARA that can affect policies and regulations in the music industry.
They’d rather pay 200 mil to people like Joe Rogan. It doesn’t matter how you look at that deal, he’s not worth that much, and there would be 0% chance of getting that money back (thats a lot of additional subscriptions)
Found a handy little Music Streaming Royalties Calculator thing in this article. It’s not 100% accurate because none of the services pay the same rate for every song, but it shows how huge the payout discrepancies are.
Success! I mean I just found the comment funny. You need at least one sarcastic comment in a thread where everyone is super serious, more might be a bit too much.
As a collectice we really have to pull together to solve things like this, but it’s often a problem of gaining traction, chicken-and-egg. I mean if everyone using Lemmy decides to switch over from Spotify to something else it will hardly make a dent, but it we could enable mass mobilization through offering free migration to a service undercutting Spotify we might make a dent, but even this is not ideal because it’s centralisation again.
We need an effective mechanism to give big organization’s flak. One (somewhat impractical) technical solution might be to build a wrapper around all these platforms and then choose to play music through whomever is more aligned with the right goal(s), such as customer satisfaction and fair artist payouts.
The idea of a DAO type organization comes to mind where our collective moral beliefs can be codified
I’m a small label owner and I guarantee you that it’s a red herring. they set the price of the service, and you can either upload your music on spotify, or not upload it.
compared to the market before digital platforms, where YOU set the price according to several factors, Spotify is the judge and the jury. they choose what the subscription cost is. they choose what your music is worth. they choose the amount of payout you’re gonna get. this is completely backwards! WE should be the ones, labels and artists, to tell spotify what our cost is, and THEY should be the ones setting their subscriptions on the according price for them to be able to cover all their running costs.
but they put themselves in the dominating position on the market, and contributed to the destruction of the physical market. we got left with no choice but to upload our music on their service and eat shit.
we passed from earning thousands of euro per year in physical and digital sales, to getting 100€ every three months for royalties on spotify. this is unsustainable whatever the way you look at it.
they’re the pirates, and ruined the market much more than what pirate bay ever did.
what do you recommend a listener do to support the artists they love? I assume buying the music directly instead of streaming is the best, but I want to do what I can as a consumer
of course a direct purchase from bandcamp, either an album or a shirt/merchandise is the best. avoid amazon at all costs. purchasing from itunes is decent. if you want to stream, pay for an account on tidal, it’s the one that pays best of all the streaming services. the very worst is spotify and right under spotify youtube/youtube music. it’s better if you just grab the album from piratebay at that point, since youtube is the only one making money.
I’m not sure if that changes anything. by logic I’d say if you pay more, more money will get redistributed but I can’t say for sure. what I can say is that I see my payouts, and Tidal is the one with the highest payout rate per streaming.
nope. majors have flooded the factories a couple years ago and cut off all the orders from small labels. we had a turnaround of 8 weeks, that from one month to another suddenly became 12 MONTHS. we tried looking for another factory but they were all booked. lots of labels died because of this. the majors played aggressively to kill ALL the competition, included small actors like me.
have you seen the hundred thousand unsold copies of Adele’s last album last year? just to name one
I’m curious if you know how this works for other streaming services?
Presumably there’s a market rate that users are currently willing to pay and as such an increase of pay from Spotify to artists would mean they need to increase the fee to their users. This would make them less competitive and possibly lose subscriptions.
I’ve already jumped ship from Spotify over to YouTube music for example because in my country it was a better deal.
of course it’s a better deal, Youtube Music barely pays anything. it’s even worse than Spotify, and most of their streamings come for free, which is enraging to say the least.
anyways they have two paths: they either suck the costs in and increase the subscriptions (and lose customers in the meanwhile, so they’ll earn less in order to give more money to the small artists) or they cut the share they’re giving to the majors, which is the biggest percentage of the pie. but majors will simply boycott spotify and create their own platform, just as it happened with netflix.
The physical market was long gone before Spotify happened, don’t make your legitimate complaints look silly by blaming Spotify for it. The music industry simply had no good answer to deal with digital media.
Spotify did seem to force their hand and some artists improved and adapted. And it’s never had a true monopoly with many different services coexesting and competing with it.
sure thing, I’m not saying it’s not true. but we had two models to choose from: the bandcamp model, which is a marketplace where the artist can set their own price, the spotify model, where the distributor sets the price, and an in-between that was itunes, where the artist would suggest the price and the distributor could modify it.
for some reason we went to the nuclear solution, and chose the terrible spotify business model, where three companies make money while killing everybody else.
All of these complaints are nearly identical to the complaints about major labels prior to streaming. It’s almost like the core issue is still the same, but the scapegoat is changing.
ah, you got to the main issue of the question. the problem is not different from before, and Spotify has just been used as a tool from the majors. if you read a comment below, I wrote that it’s true that Spotify pays their 70% to the artists… but they don’t tell how that money is redistributed. what we earn as independent is absolutely not the same of what a Warner or Sony artist earn. Spotify made under-the-table agreements with the majors in order to grab their catalogue and avoid getting shut off.
the majors saw spotify as a great tool to get themselves out of the hole they dug themselves into during the post 2000s, and kept doing their same shady kind of business.
I work for a label and need to press that no artist would get actually big without their label. Nit because the artist isn’t good, but because if you can’t get deals with radio stations, deals with streaming services to get on curated playlists, interviews with Graham Norton/other shows, nomination/performances at award shows, promotions on tick tok, commercial/movie soundtrack deals, world tours, tradional advertising. Etc etc. Then you’re never going to be making good money in the industry.
And music is infamously not very lucrative in terms of entertainment. Film, TV and video games companies are actually ordered of magnitude more profitable.
It’s clear that labels are acting as gatekeepers, but are they productive gatekeepers? Or just skimming off of the top — that is, rent seeking, profiting even when they provide little value themselves. It seems like there’s a lot of the latter going on.
In a letter sent to Uruguay's Minister of Education Pablo Da Silveira, a spokesperson for Spotify said: "If the proposed reform became law in its current form, Spotify's business in Uruguay could become unfeasible, to the detriment of Uruguayan music and its fans," claiming that the amendment would force it to "pay twice" the amount of royalties.
Spotify currently pays out at 70%. Doubling royalties would cause them to pay out more than they make in subscription and ad revenue. This is why they're shutting down.
If that’s subscription revenue in Uruguay then the business model is just not feasible, unless they up the subscription fees to adequately cover costs.
This is the risk when the revenue model doesn’t scale with th cost model.
Depends doesn’t it? If I make a song that is listened to zero times, I wouldn’t expect to get a payout that equals Spotify subscriber income split by amount of songs. Disregarding the popularity.
The entertainment business, is a one-to-many business and money follows whomever sits at the top of the pyramid. And it was the exactly the same before the streaming era.
If you make a great song, and Dua Lipa makes a crap song, which one would be featured and added into playlists by Spotify’s algorithms? It’s not a level playing field. It doesn’t promote content that isn’t already popular.
I’m sure that songs that tend to become popular are probably promoted first. And I think we agree that you can always do more work to showcase lesser known artists.
But with that said, it has never been easier to get your music published. And any idiot can make their music globally available. Which is a win for smaller artists.
And the songs that Spotify put in my Discover Weekly list, often has less than 10.000 plays. So in that regard their algorithm work in the unknown artists favour.
You mention your discover weekly. Do you know how that algorithm works? It suggests songs that you have not played, that other people who played songs that you played. It’s the same positive feedback loop. It’s songs already popular that it promotes to be played more. Which makes them more popular so it recommends them more. And thus you end up with the most steamed artists only making 15% of the content.
Does it work? Passably. For the majority, mostly generic listeners. Is it a fair way to structure a platform and to dispense payments? No. A great business model however.
Ease of publishing - ignoring the fact that it’s been easy to record and publish since well before Spotify came along - just means more volume of content to sift through for audiences, meaning that lesser known artists end up having a hard time just like they did before, it’s just that now it’s for different reasons. Regardless the result is the same: bigger artists get an advantage on being discovered. At best it’s still the same playing field it was before.
Spotify did not democratize the ability for working musicians to earn money any more than broadcast radio did. Another medium that favored and continues to favor already established artists.
Which is mostly due to Spotify’s playlist and algorithms. Which fall victim to the positive feedback loop issue. Those popular artists are suggested, promoted, and played more frequently so more people hear them and thus play them more. It’s not a level playing ground. It’s a self generating walled garden of artists.
Doubling means rising the price and not shutting down or giving less to some and more to others. The new price may be too expensive for the customer. In this case, the service or the business model is the issue.
An other regulation may be to pay egally all artists per listen with this point regulated as well.
Spotify didn’t turn a profit yet. I would be pessimistic on the business model knowing the Majors take the majority of the 70%. Spotify is de facto a monopoly and so the Majors. With a fair price, the issue is to see the Majors quit the service and launch their own service. Spotify would be useless with only the indep (this is sad). They are protecting their money and the Majors. They don’t care about the smaller artists.
Spotify is hardly a monopoly by any standards. I agree that they have a large market share and in some countries Spotify is synonymous with music. But there’s plenty of options
they don’t. spotify says they’re paying 70%, but they don’t tell how they redistribute that revenue. they have under-the-table deals with the 3 majors who grabs most of that money, and leave the crumbs to everybody else.
Add comment