I have around 48k streams on spotify and I’ve earned a whopping $172. Their new payment model would bring that down to essentially $0.
The justification for this is demonetizing white-noise tracks or other work without creative effort that supposedly costs spotify too much. I’m not a fan of the direction this is going because one of the best things about the platform was it’s selection of underground music. This just buries it deeper and doesn’t help artists that are trying to break through. It just shovels the profits to the top earners who are already doing quite well. There aren’t many alternatives and bancamp has been passed down from epic games to songtradr and isn’t anywhere near a real alternative yet.
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.
Also no fair competition from Apple and google
How is that going to help artists getting paid?
I usually use them to discover music. Then I make donations or buy merch/disks of the artists I really like.
Small stuff and when I can afford it, but I try to make my part
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I don’t even like using Spotify or Pandora, it’s full of ads and I can’t play what I want to play. I just go to YouTube or download what I want. Their structure sucks.
Spotify doesn’t really have ads. Only the horrible free plan does and you are obviously not supposed to use it. It’s designed to be as bad as possible to make people switch.
While YouTube is alright for music it’s very inconvenient compared to Spotify. The same multiplied by 100x applies to downloading all your music.
YouTube music is actually very good.
But you need a subscription… And unless you also use a lot of YouTube and would benefit from a lack of ads it’s not very good value.
I’m not into too much music, but whenever I do want to listen to some, I open a YouTube music client which is more than enough for my needs. they don’t require subscription, or are ads-riddled.
like, at the moment, I’m using vimusic
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?
And it’s likely a good bit less than 3
Which really illuminates how fucked it is that they aren’t paying those people.
These tiny artists earning barely anything are evidently a major enough cost sector that it’s worth Spotify just telling them to get fucked. Playing their content is evidently significantly important to Spotify, but not enough to justify an annual check that isn’t even enough to buy a beer.
With hits that low, youre basically just advocating for UBI at that point, you cant expect pay for every little amateur hobby folks have.
People want to listen to it tough, don’t they? Don’t these amateur musicians provide a service that people value?
Thats just it, number of hits is the metric for that, if its low then folks dont want to listen to it.
Lol thats a lunatics take. You absolutely can be expected to pay every person who gives you content to farm users off of.
Imagine applying your take to any other business. “Sorry john, I loved the soap, but you only have 4 people a week asking about you, so Im going to be keeping it for free.”
“Love the scarf, really, but you only sold what, 25 this year? 50? Nah, Im just going to keep this. Let me now when you shift real sales, maybe then you will deserve being paid.”
Nah dude thats lunacy
the product isnt being taken and needing replacing, this is like people coming to look at the soap you made. And if enough people come and look at it, an advertiser might give you some money to put an ad by the soap.
Now, there’s nothing stopping you from selling the soap instead. There are avenues to sell your music instead of having it on a freely accessable platform.
Except thats incorrect. Spotify is a store, asking musicians to give them the rights to sell their songs as a package deal in exchange for a cut based on popularity. All music gets ads. There is no “low popularity ad free” section.
And now you, and spotify, are saying “yeah I know we agreed to pay you based on how many customers came in here for your stuff, but I think what you rightfully and legally earned is chump change, so I wont be giving it to you.”
You are advocating scamming people because you, personally, think the money owed is a pittance. Thats an evil, black hearted mentality.
It’s sort of a sliding scale between: making content that is popular enough for a platform to make considerable revenue from it and wants to pay you a portion to keep you there, because your content is competitive and could be making other platforms money. Or, it’s a free hosting site for data you’re uploading that’s funded with ads. Every other platform I know with this model, like Youtube or Twitch, have a cutoff between the two, it’s a hosting site for users until they’re popular enough to become business partners with a monetary agreement. It’s two way freedom between each party, spotify doesnt have to pay anyone anything, and no one has to host their content on spotify.
This isnt a retroactive change of terms, it’s new terms starting next year. Everyone’s getting what was agreed to this year. If they dont support the new terms, they can leave the platform. They wont, because they’re using it as a free hosting platform and not a money maker, maybe with hopes they’ll be popular enough someday.
“Its a sliding scale, we want your content but we dont want to pay you for it, so if we think youre not popular enough to take us to court over this we are sliding the scale of how much we pay you for the content to zero”
You sound like an evil cartoon robin hood villain, do you get that? Are you floating about in chains and a nightgown, in preperation for scaring jeff bezos this christmas eve?
“Nah its like youtube bro, the other super evil and morally bankrupt company!” Thats not a defense, why are you saying that like its a defense
What they’re actually advocating for is dividing each user’s pot by their listens.
If a user primarily listens to a handful of small bands, why shouldn’t their cut go to those bands, rather than being thrown into a big pool to be diluted? At first glance they’d be similar, but they’re arguing that if you do the math out they aren’t.
To be clear, what I said is Spotify should be sending them their annual several dollar checks. They shouldn’t be allowed to just trim away that cost entirely because the artists are small and Spotify wants more profits.
And what you’re saying is that they shouldn’t get anything because it’s “just a hobby”.
Fuck you, seriously.
Like, i dont think i deserve any money for getting some thousands of views of my art. I think im getting paid about how much money im making the platforms its on, which is nothing. Im not yet good enough to get a job making art, or to sell my art instead of making it freely viewable.
Well thank god you arent in charge of any company worth a damn, you little scammer
Your math assumes those people only have one track on Spotify. I currently have 25 tracks on Spotify. Without advertising or promotion of any kind, I earned about $12 this year. The big problems are:
- New rules apply per song, so if ALL my songs got 999 streams, that would be $75 they wouldn’t pay me–if ONE song hit the magic 1000 streams they would pay me $3 and I still wouldn’t get the other $72
- They are still making money off my streams, they are just coming up with ways not to pay me for it while still claiming to be “artist focused”
- They claim the “small payments” usually don’t get claimed anyway so they don’t see the need to make them–this is ideologically “paying with exposure”
- By your logic, since $33,975 annual income is the federal poverty level, anyone making less than that should not complain about not getting paid at all–you can obviously insert any arbitrary amount here to support the “logic” of “that’s not much so nothing at all is just as good”
I have no delusions about ever making a living off Spotify (or my extremely niche music in general), but the idea that a corporation should be able to monetize my work and not have to pay me anything for it is sort of distasteful
you dont have to let them monetize anything. host it yourself, or sell your music on other sites.
Any track, not any artist. You could have a hundred tracks getting hundreds of streams a piece. Maximum before cutoff would be about $3/track. Not a ton but could be hundreds of dollars. And combining that from dozens to thousands of artists potentially in that boat.
Yeah I cancelled my Spotify and I’m not sure I’ll be releasing any new music on streaming services. I’m over it
Someone mentioned Faircamp recently. I haven’t had a chance to look into it properly but it looks great!
This is one of the reasons I use soundcloud when listening to music.
Why are you not moving to a different distribution model where you’ll get what you’re worth? I’ll go where the music is. If you keep putting it on Spotify then I’ll play it on Spotify.
Spotify has the market pretty much cornered, though.
There are plenty of better ways to obtain music, such as actually buying the music instead of streaming it. And, hey, that’s like saying you’d stay on Reddit because that’s where the content is. Ethics should come before easy entertainment.
So, where do I buy the music? I’m not seeing an alternative being offered here.
Just so I’m clear here - are you doubting the existence of websites where you can buy and download music? I have a feeling that is not what you mean but I also can’t really figure out another way to interpret this.
I checked a couple of songs on my playlist and didn’t find places that were obviously better than Spotify. Is Bandcamp better? How about Beatport? Being able to buy and download music is not a guarantee that the artist is getting paid fairly.
As a side note I’m growing weary of having to keep track as a consumer of the revenue streams and ethics of every brand out there. There’s a lot on my plate already. I wish that if musicians didn’t want me to buy things for a certain price or at a certain place, that they just wouldn’t offer it to me in that way. Or, if they were being coerced into it, that they would push for regulation to prevent that. But I have a suspicion that the principle of supply and demand dictates that selling music online just won’t be as profitable as they (naively) expect it to be. Too many musicians, too few ears.
There’s a lot on my plate already. I wish that if musicians didn’t want me to buy things for a certain price or at a certain place, that they just wouldn’t offer it to me in that way.
This is the Amazon / Valve / [Insert dominant company] problem. It’s not musicians’ fault. A ton of small companies hate Amazon but if they don’t have a presence on Amazon, 90% easily are missing out on too much marketshare to survive. Same with Valve - if you are PC game and you choose not to publish on Steam, you are cutting yourself off from a massive revenue stream as Valve controls ~75% - which is absolutely staggering - of the market.
So this goes for Spotify now as well. If you aren’t on spotify, your ability to gain an audience plummets. You hobble yourself like crazy.
Yes Bandcamp and Beatport are viable. CD’s which you can rip are also readily available still. Ditching Spotify means ditching some convenience, that’s the cost ultimately (outside of the dollars and cents). You either care enough to do it or you don’t. It’s your call and no judgment here. But those are the answers ultimately.
I recently swapped to Proton Mail/Drive/Calendar from Gmail et al. I pay some extra money annually and sacrificed a few QoL things because decoupling from google was more important to me. I don’t expect everyone to follow suit and again no judgment, but I had to accept I wasn’t going to get those google QoL elements to the same degree when I made the swap. That’s just how it is.
What’s your method of determining that Beatport and Bandcamp are good options?
I’m not sure I understand the question. Go on the sites and look for yourself I guess?
Same as with most artists, go to their website and you’ll find the bandcamp/faircamp/etc page, in this case:
Fuck em…
Just buy music directly from the artist whenever possible…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
I hate the company but I haven’t found another streaming service with a similar amount of music, sound quality and algorithm. I have a jellyfin instance, but it lacks the choice and algorithm.
Tried tidal and didn’t work well for me with Android auto. You can actually use something like tune my music to copy your playlists to every main service for testing.
I used apple music. I don’t like Apple in particular, but they pay artists, and don’t pay Joe rogan
I actually found the music suggestions were way better than Spotify which mostly just repeated stuff I heard
[Weird little guy in the back of the room.] Hey guys! I still like Qobuz. They pay rights holders better than Apple Music, aren’t nearly as far behind in catalog size as they used to be, and almost the entire catalog is CD quality or higher. No fancy algorithms or podcasts. Just hi-res music. Just saying. It’s an option.
What’s the pay rate for artists?
Last I checked .04 per play.
Bandcamp and Tidal. Please everyone, we need to kill Spotify, they hate artists.
Bandcamp was sold off without the unionized employees. If you’re doing this to be pro-labour, you can’t really support Bandcamp right now.
As a fellow Bandcamp enjoyer I am quite sad about its enshittification. Someone made Faircamp as an alternative. I hope that Funkwhale will fill the soundcloud/bandcamp niche.
One important thing the centralized sites like Bandcamp enable, is discovery of new music and artists. I’m afraid that this is such a big deal that Faircamp won’t be able to take off until that problem is addressed and solved somehow.
Install some software on your server […]
I’m afraid that this is a big no-go for most artists, which just want to make music and don’t want to be server administrators.
This is why you can have local or label instance. People have email and website without being server administrators.
I know, but so far, it’s still the best way to give money to the creators. It’s basically 9:1 in favor of the artists when you buy an album… Hopefully a fair alternative will come up in a near future. Funkwhale is slowly getting better . Anyway, anything is better than Spotify.
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It’s unfortunate that this has to be a bad thing.
You know what, this makes me feel a lot better about using an ad-blocker when using their site. Although, I would prefer if the artists I listen to didn’t exclusively use Spotify for some reason.
I’m all for ad blockers. But this doesn’t solve the creators’ issue with not getting paid. The internet is a severely underutilized resource. Creators should be able to sell their content directly to us without middlemen like these.
I agree with that and some of the artists I listen to actually do use platforms where you can purchase their music directly but unfortunately buying the music directly just really isn’t viable for me. Platforms that use ads for monetization are really the only way that’s viable but the artists I listen to only use Spotify, or if they do use other platforms, they just use them for demos and other promotional stuff.
Creators should be able to sell their content directly to us without middlemen like these.
They can and do. Most are just lazy/uneducated/choose not to.
