When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
Gotta fund Barcelona’s €240 million sponsor deal somehow
Never heard of it.
Although it’s far from the best, Deezer has a much fairer royalties compensation method, which is more closely based on a per-user basis, rather than total amount of minutes listened (that Spotify currently employs).
This isn’t super related to OPs post but I thought it might be worth mentioning aswell.
I’ve been using Deezer for a while now. Not only is the streaming quality (FLAC) much better but also the artist compensation much fairer. Plus, they at least act as if they actually cared for the customer…
I’ve ditched Spotify last year when their app has suddenly started draining battery on my phone (and also because of them being so eager to give Rogan a platform). I’ve switched to Deezer, but I’ve ran into the same issue I’ve had with Spotify for a while - even if I download a playlist for offline usage, it’ll still try to connect to the internet, so if I was somewhere with poor reception, it’d get stuck on a spinning circle for a minute before giving up and showing me the songs I’ve wanted to play. I ended my Deezer subscription, rebuilt the library on my laptop, and just manually transfer files to my phone. I get instant access to my music with no delays, with music players that offer much better experience and handle shuffle and queues the way I want to, and aren’t a glorified Chrome tab on desktop. and if I really like an album, I’ll just straight up buy one. I listen to music a fucking lot (two years ago i was in top 0.2% of my country’s Spotify users), and according to some screenshots of my Spotify Wrapped, I’ve played my artists songs for 1200 minutes, which translates to 300-400 plays at best (probably less than that, given that many of their songs are around 6 to 8 minutes long). given that, from what I’ve found online, 1000 plays gives artists 4 bucks, I could just buy two of their songs on Bandcamp and pirate the rest of their music, and they’ll still get more money in a year from me.
I do miss seamless playback switching between devices, though. it was a really nice Spotify feature… when it worked, that is.
ve ran into the same issue I’ve had with Spotify for a while - even if I download a playlist for offline usage, it’ll still try to connect to the internet, so if I was somewhere with poor reception, it’d get stuck on a spinning circle for a minute before giving up and showing me the songs I’ve wanted to play.
That’s by design and all streaming apps would do it like that to enforce abuse prevention.
Edit: added word at the endthing is, it didn’t do that in the past, or at least it wouldn’t be that noticeable to me. but some time ago Spotify introduced a feature that would automatically add “smart” suggestions to the playlist, and it makes sense it requires network access for that. what doesn’t make sense is that it still wants the connection even when I kept that feature disabled.
Probably it wasn’t noticeable. Imagine this scenario: somebody would pay a monthly fee, would download “entire” Spotify and then forever listen to it in offline mode. And since it’s offline, artists won’t get payed as well.
then I dunno, maybe require periodic (e.g. monthly) checks to verify that I’ve been paying for a subscription, instead of punishing me for having the nerve to try viewing my library while I’m on an elevator?
They suck ass. Stop paying them money.
Thank God for a certain manager. Haven’t paid for Spotify in years. Fuck em.
I love how no one mentions that the great success business Spotify got all their starting music from the mp3 warez scene.
Early Spotify songs still had the meta data from those files, including misspelled song names and years of issue.
I already commented somewhere else in this thread, but I’ve been just buying music via bandcamp and I feel pretty good about it. If I buy about one new album a month for $8, it’s cheaper than spotify and after a couple years I have a large library of music I own outright.
This works with my listening habits, which are something like “I have like one new (-to me) album on heavy rotation every couple of weeks”. Someone who’s more of a “i never listen to the same song twice” extreme wouldn’t have as good a time.
More money for the executives and less for everyone else. People need to start standing up to this shit.
No matter what you think about Apple, Apple Music pays multiple times more than Spotify
And Tidal pays multiples more than Apple.
It’s up to you if you want to support artists or not.
Napster exists but people just ignore it
Spotify seems to be trying to transition to podcasts anyway - it’s harder to get it to recommend music. My guess is that eventually the Spotify and the record labels will have more disagreements about royalties, and that Spotify will pivot more towards podcasting - independent folks who have far less power in negotiations.
The very great and very funny singer Neko Case made a playlist on Spotify and entitled it “PAY FOR IT YOU CHEAP PRICKS!!!” I howled.
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😂😂😂
In seriousness, what is the payment to artists like nowadays on TIDAL? Dare I even ask?
As far as I know, it’s $0.025 per stream. Spotify’s rate is $0.003. Pretty substantial difference. TIDAL has the highest rate in the streaming industry.
EDIT: If you really want to support artists, go to Qobuz and buy albums. I’m planning to get a Sublime subscription so I can own my music and support artists even more (while not missing out on freedom to play what I want on demand).
Also, fixed the decimals and changed TIDAL to a more accurate average.
that’s a lot more evin more than deezer at 0.0064$
I think that you are off by about an order of magnitude. Spotify pays $0.003 per stream, and title apparently pays $0.01 -0.05.
I think this is correct. In cents, this is 0.3¢ and 1-5¢ respectively. Zeroes are too hard for my mushy brain…
And this is why I refuse to listen to ads or pay for spotify.
