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 love all my friends who are really into music who happily use Spotify and don’t give a shit it is a weapon of class warfare being used on musicians disguised as a music player!
I basically lost all my drive to make something of my love of creating music seeing how little anyone in my society actually values music or musicians in terms of material support and reward, it is honestly pretty scary how broken music has become.
Walk me through this.
Before Spotify, I’d buy a record (physical or digital) and listen to that. I pay the artist once. After Spotify, I buy a record and listen to it on Spotify. I pay the artist the normal record price and there’s a long tail from stream payouts (unless they don’t reach the payout threshold).
Before Spotify, if someone heard a song and didn’t buy the record, they didn’t pay the artist. After Spotify, if they still don’t buy a record, the artist now earns from stream payouts.
Finally, before Spotify, if someone bought a record but stopped buying after Spotify, the artist loses that record purchase. This is definitely bad. Was Spotify the real reason? Would something other than Spotify have pulled them away? What levels of fame are materially affected by this?
Do artists have to pay to be on Spotify? Is that the issue?
I really wish there was a better alternative to push my friends to. I do use Bandcamp, so at least I know more of my $$$ are going to the artists and I can take the music with me, but I’m not sure about the platform long-term.
As a musician and composer it really took the life out of my identity as a composer seeing an alternative to bandcamp never really form and then one day waking up to it bought by Epic.
I didn’t cry that day, but I might as well have, it made me extraordinarily sad to see that headline and I imagine there are actually countless talented musicians out there who will never actuate on their creative vision because the environment for music production is at this point, downright hostile towards artists and musicians considering the amount of work music production is.
It takes an obscene amount of work to take a song from something that has promise to being as polished as listeners demand nowadays, and listeners won’t even give your song a chance on actual speakers. You have to twist and warp your music so it sounds good on essentially monophonic phone speakers with shitty frequency coverage or otherwise nobody will give it a try on speakers for actually listening to music. Doesn’t matter though, nobody is going to actually support you for the art you make.
🙃
It seems like https://resonate.coop/ is still around tho which seems like a cool idea (a coop owned streaming service where listeners can stream-to-own a song).
It seems that ampwall.com may come sometime as an alternative to Bandcamp? Time will tell…
Spotify could charge ten times their current price - indeed, should have been, for nearly the entire catalogue of western music? even at $100/mo it would have been a steal - and even so, they wouldn’t be paying artists significantly more, or even at a reasonable rate.
The model is the problem. The middleman is the problem. The service itself is the problem. It can never work in a way that pays artists fairly as long as it requires human oversight, administration and intervention, let alone all the wasteful shit like advertising and legal overhead/payola for politicians.
Get an AI to do it right, though… puffpuff, pass
Pirate and go to live shows.
Companies love selling you digital stuff cause they are essentially giving you nothing (as in it doesn’t cost them anything).
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.
Thank you for the information. Not a fan of putting the blame on the consumer here though. Spotify is the asshole here, not the people who want to pay for the music.
I switched to Tidal after Spotify announced the price increase. The catalogue is basically identical, the apps are much more intuitive, and the audio quality is higher (they recently rolled their premium FLAC subscription into the basic one).
I had to retrain the algorithm for a bit, but that was not so difficult. There are services that can migrate/convert playlists which might actually work for favourites as well.
Also, it’s easy easier to download stuff from Tidal, which is very nice for listening to Audiobooks with a dedicated player.
It’s not really just Spotify. I’m a hobbyist music producer. I uploaded my entire catalog through Distrokid about two years ago. Distrokid serves just about every streaming service. It costs $20 a year for the most basic package. I’ve got ~8 million listens according to Distrokid, and that nets me about $40 US. So, I made my money back. Not bad for 20 years of work. Haha!
I don’t really care about the numbers, like I said, I’m a hobbyist. I make music because I enjoy making music. It would never be my career unless I dropped everything and struck out touring trying to make it in an industry that traditionally chews up and spits out hopefuls. I’m not exactly the age or attractiveness that most people expect in a touring musician, either.
