I just want to mention that what I like about Spotify is I dont have to bother figuring this kind of thing out, because it provides music I want to listen to at a price that is completely reasonable.
But it's for the 13 y/o me that was figuring out how to use alcohol 120% to burn the latest games or fix my computer from all the viruses I got downloading movies and music at that time from p2p.
And if it wasn't for that pursuit that led to many other skills and opportunities, I know a lot of us wouldn't be in the financial situations we are in right now.
Did you ever try to boot it from a floppy, just to see what would happen?
Until it doesn't
I use Spotify a lot. Maybe too much. And disappearing music is a real plague. Now it's there, now it's not. Why? Licensing perhaps, who knows.
A good example is that I cancelled Amazon prime this year because with add-on items and ineligible items it stopped providing any value over just meeting the minimum order $ for free shipping.
This is about labels and sometimes artist not wanting to have their songs on spotify anymore.
This is about Tidal or whathername wanting more money from a dying market.
I used to tell myself I couldn't afford all the music I listen to but looking at all the money I have given spotify over the last decade im thinking maybe I could have bought a good chuck of my favourite music by now. so that is what I'm going to do at some point, and maybe just keep spotify for discovering new music every now and again
So once again, greedy business practices makes it more inconvenient for paying users than for pirates.
The licensing agreements that spotify negotiates are between them and the artists, and if artists are unhappy they can take it up with Spotify. But hopefully artists realize that for recorded performances, there is a sweet spot where the convenience of a subscription has a higher value than trivially accessing pirated recordings.
But to your point. Pre-Spotify I think the overall music market sales volumes and profits, offset by piracy and copyright infringement, ended up around the same overall total market value that Spotify based their subscription and payments off of (that and economics of scale).
I’ve been a Spotify subscriber for a long time so I get it. I just wish Spotify would do more to support artists, not labels, or help fix the system for indies to self-distribute.
It’s obviously way more complicated. I dream of a utopia where a platform exists not for profits sake but for the art’s sake.
We're long past the 1990s, where only a very select number of major label artists made it big and sold millions of copies. We need to stop using these numbers as a benchmark for todays music landscape -- so much has changed and most of it for the better.
Music creation and distribution has been heavily democratized. Where you needed connections and thousands of dollars to even get something released (outside of niche DIY tape style releases) you can now basically do it for free from your room or band practice space. The amount of money per working musician has gone down significantly but there are more of them in 2020 than has ever before.
We can certainly argue about what kind of value art should have in society. Should there be more money going around? What industries should this money be taken out of? Suffice to say independent artists are better off than they have been, creating music and making money has never been easier and Spotify/digital music distribution in general have been great enablers.
Which is a point: Quantity != Quality. This argument makes it seem like anyone can go and earn a living from music and that simply isn’t true. Anyone can make money with music with a little investment in a copyright and BMI id... To make it a career, to live off of, as your sole income source has a lot of musicians having to diversify how, where, they release music.
Artists with indie labels are fighting for air time with other artists with indie labels for $3/1000 plays.
I’m not blaming Spotify outside of the fact that my $9.99/mo subscription (minus 10%) should be allocated based on play time to the artists I listen to. This doesn’t seem to be the case.
Granted, it’s been over 15 years since I released music. I never “made it” in the traditional pre-diy era. Punk Rock is dead based on listenership. I went into tech.
I'm not sure if this is still the case.
There's composers and producers with quite high production values, very complex and intricate music, the kind you want to pay attention to, in order to get the most out of it.
But I don't listen to that music all day. I got other music for background.
In my view the latter is not more valuable because I listen to it for more minutes.
When it was CDs I'd pay roughly the same for my Autechre as my Kruder & Dorfmeister.
When my subscription ends, my library disappears. Not a very attractive deal.