Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams | Hacker News Reader

Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

djmag.com

357 pointsburo9408 comments

Paying a nominal amount for each stream is one matter; however, compensating nothing for smaller quantities while you pay for larger amounts presents a fundamentally different issue. This scenario is akin to an author not receiving royalties for the first 1,000 books sold in a bookstore, or a manufacturer not being paid for the first 1,000 candy bars sold at a grocery store. Such practices can be equated with theft. It's perplexing how current legislation permits this.

The way this should work is that there can be some minimum earning threshold the seller has to achieve to be paid out by the platform. But! once the seller achieves it, they should be paid in full for all the units sold/streamed before achieving the threshold as well.

E.g. App Store requires you to earn $100 equivalent to pay out earnings in Colombia. In many countries the threshold is currently $0.02, but it used to be much higher.

https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/reference...

Why is this desirable?

Wouldn’t it be more desirable to pay artists for everything? The implied comparison is with the status quo, and both Spotify’s and your proposals frankly kinda suck

Well, because at some point the processing fees are so high it makes no sense to distribute the earnings.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect to get "peanuts" paid out. Google AdSense is the same; you have to earn at least $100 to get it paid out, until then the earnings just accumulate in your account. Same goes for YouTube. I don't see it as unreasonable.

To be honest, I wouldn't care as a creator/a seller, unless the threshold is set high.

What processing fees? This is a digital platform. It's not like there are dozens of bureaucrats stamping tonnes of papers here.

Moving money around is way more expensive than you think it is, even digitally.

Instead of being incredulous, assume good faith the other person is speaking with best intent. Try to understand first.

There are no free payment transfer mechanisms. Whatever is free is a loss leader.

If you don’t know anything about payments, start by reading stripe.com’s documentation to understand how complex this is.

Pymnts.com is the industry blog if you want to go deep.

Going back to the App Store Minimum Payment Threshold Table[1], it shows how highly effective Apple became at dealing with money transfers in a large part of the world.

Of course, they don't need to base their threshold on worries about spam/fraud/etc, because they have another hammer for that -> the $99/yr. developer programme.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/reference...

Isn’t that just part of the cost of doing business? Not all transactions need to be lucrative. The only reason Shopify thinks they can get away with it is because they’ve grown enough that small artists don’t have a choice but to suck it up.

There is nothing to get away with. Hosting small/shitty bands is not a money making proposition for Spotify. Most bands will never make money on Spotify, in spite of Spotify enabling them to do so. They just suck. And I think it is so cool that anyone can suck and still have their music be ubiquitously accessible on the premiere music platform, without real hurdles and at no cost, in (roughly) the same way that any big artist can.

the Beatles sold their first thousand records, at one short time in history.. and there will never be another Beatles due to "long tail" modern distributions.. casual ill-will and indifference to new projects must not be confused with reasonable, or even legal contractual behaviors

Well I'd say that if Spotify were forced to, they'd instead just remove small bands from Spotify entirely.

Honest question: have you ever run a business? You're talking about setting up millions of accounts to pay them $.02 or $.20 or even $2.00. ACH payments cost an average of $.29/each https://gocardless.com/en-us/guides/ach/ach-fees-how-much-do...

You're dealing with a bunch of people who will try to rip you off, so you need to have anti-fraud protections. Then you need to be able to override the anti-fraud protections because Alex, Alex and Bob, Alex, Bob, and Curt, etc. are all legit performers who want the payments to go to one common bank account even though you'd like one act == one bank account. Etc.

SEPA seems to have no problem moving sub-euro amounts. I am not an entrepreneur, but I did send single euro amounts to my friends. Is it more difficult in USA?

My impression from Germany is that while private accounts often have no transaction fees (and are either completely free, or charge a flat monthly fee), with business accounts it's not that unusual to have transaction fees of up to ten or even twenty cent per transaction.

It's the cost of doing business for the seller on the platform.

I'm not sure what's the problem here, to be honest. Alternativelly the platform could also charge withdrawal fees, making small withdrawals pointless.

Afaik this minimum withdrawal concept has been the standard way of doing business when reselling digital goods. See e.g. the aforementioned AdSense which has been set up this way for 20 years now. The same goes for Steam, once again you have to sell $100 worth of stuff to get paid.

That's not quite right. If they do reach 1000 plays they will be compensated for the first 1000 plays (which is like $4 dollars), and all streams thereafter.

What would you change about contract legislation to prevent this?

I'm not a scholar in law, but I would want the law to prevent someone to take someone elses property/ product and distribute it without compensation in their commercial services. 1000 streams is 1000 uses of a song. If you do not reach 1001 you get zero compensation, and that is in principle stealing in my opinion, and should also be that under the law.

But Spotify isn't taking anyone's property. Spotify is saying "here's how our payment system works" and then bands can decide whether to put their songs on Spotify.

True enough, the law should consider market control/ dominance as a factor. A market dominated by a few, should maybe be treated different than a highly competitive marked

It does in some circumstances. See apple's app store lawsuit in the EU. However this seems fundamentally different. It's more like youtube (which actually pays far less per stream $.1 - $1 per 1000 streams)

yes, as I said in my original comment, paying little is one thing, paying nothing is something different. Streaming music has ruined the "product" market for music as it was. That will not change. YT, Spotify, doesn't matter, you do not get much paid for music anymore, unless you are among the top dominant streaming artists in the long tail model. But something is still more than nothing...

I actually think this is helping the product market. This will set a minimal standard of quality for something to get paid. Otherwise the near future will involve the use of AI to automate the creation of thousands of garbage songs that each get streamed a few times.

If they would be smaller, e.g. a new startup on the marked, I would agree. But currently its the defacto place for your music to put if you want an audience. I would argue that one with that much marked power should be held accountable for such actions, e.g. with stronger marked regulations preventing arising monopolies.

Spotify and the internet as a whole has liberated the music industry from the strangle hold of record companies. And you still can't just upload your songs to Spotify, you need to go through some publishing group. Getting Spotify to pay more per stream is siding with the record companies, and you can be sure they are lobbying hard on behalf of their interests. It's a tricky situation.

yes, once our system is used by nearly everyone we will change the payment system so that while the small fish get no money (which shouldn't bother them because they weren't getting much) but obviously this scales to significant amounts of money remaining in our pocket. And if anyone complains we'll just act like the past doesn't exist!

On the internet, it’s all network effects so competition and proper alternatives is almost impossible. You can’t say “just don’t choose to use it” as flippantly in these cases

The part that's missing from that is is Spotify doesn't just take music and put it up. The music owner agrees with Spotify beforehand.

If you give me a free taste of ice cream, that doesn't mean I'm stealing from the farmer.

You could try to equate it with theft, but you'd make a poor argument. It's typical for licensing and other contracts to include provisions for minimums (in either direction, depending on who the bigger company is). Spotify isn't paying for an inventory of 1000 plays to give to its users, it has licensed the songs for unlimited (I assume) use within the platform from the publihers. Artist streaming payouts are a small line item in the contract.

> manufacturer not being paid for the first 1,000 candy bars sold at a grocery store

This happens, in any case. People set up deals with grocery stores for 100k units. The store changes its mind. You're left with a huge inventory to either sell to them at a discount or find a new buyer.

My wife is a professor in a field where they regularly publish books. "Zero royalties for the first N copies sold" appears to be common in the academic publishing contract world. It's a mess.

I wrote a programming book back when tech books were a thing you had to go physically buy from a physical store (more than 20 years ago now). The publisher sent advanced royalties, which was money that was mine, free and clear (it wasn't a small amount either - certainly enough to compete with a full time salary for similar time commitment and knowledge/skills needed). I wouldn't see any more royalties until I'd sold enough to equal what my advance was. If I never sold enough, then I wouldn't see any new money - the original advance was still mine.

I did end up seeing royalty checks, though not until the book was translated from English to Italian. For some reason, it sold comparatively well in Italian, pushing me over the threshold to earn royalities. The one actual royalty check I saw for my book was a grand total of $0.02. I never cashed the check and keep it in a desk drawer somewhere.

It's actually really pitty to hear. I think there are authors who contribute valuable research and knowledge to their fields and still not able to get royalties...

It is worse than that. We will pay thousands of dollars out of our own pockets for tasks like editing, proofing, and indexing.

I mean all financial risks are on the publisher side since he has to print some books with his own money and be sure it can get some money back if it doesn’t sell.

Steam does something similar for indie publishers. Unless you reach $100 in sales, you will not receive a check.

As does YouTube, there are minimum levels of consumption required for any given channel to receive monetization, and ads are still displayed on this channel before the uploader receives any money.

Feels like Spotify is restructuring systemic issues instead of trying to solve them. It's almost amazing how little, since the advent of Internet, the music industry changed, it did change, for established names more than small artist but the fundamental issue remains the same : fair & stable redistribution of value generated from artists.

I don’t know much about how music licensing works. But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify?

I listen to a lot of music on Spotify. And some of it is from smaller indie artists. Not a huge amount, but I’ve definitely listened to songs that are in that <1000 plays category, and for some undiscovered artists that’s a good amount of their library.

It surprises me how much of my Spotify library is no longer available. There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out. A lot of good songs too.

As much as I love Spotify and music streaming, it seems like the economics of it fundamentally doesn’t work and can’t work.

Back to torrenting I guess. If I’m not mistaken snoop said he made 45k off 1 billion plays. Thats ridiculous

That was apparently a track that was not his own, he was only a partial co author of that track.

To be fair, that's because the label siphons the rest. Spotify pays $4 per 1000 streams.

Where do you get those numbers from? I'm a self published artist. I had 150k streams on Spotify last year. I only earned roughly $450. There's no label or other middleman here taking a cut. Spotify is just cheap.

It's somewhere around $3.5/1k streams - you're not exactly super far off their estimate either, though. It varies a bit based on (listener, or artist?) regions too, I believe.

Snoop's number was $0.045 per thousand plays.

ansc's number was $4 per thousand plays.

Your number is $3 per thousand plays.

It sounds like you basically agree with ansc. While Spotify might be cheap, that cheapness is not the problem Snoop is having.

That's not too far off, is it? 150 * $4 = $600 ≈ $450.

They say: $4 / 1,000 = $0.004 per streamed track.

You say: $450 / 150,000 = $0.003 per streamed track.

The two sets of numbers don't seem so far apart that the discrepancy cannot be explained by rounding errors.

Ah. Music income numbers, where the details are not actually details. He did say that[1], but the statement is misleading (and has little to do with Spotify).

A very rough global average per-stream payout is often estimated at around $0.003 to $0.005. That brings the payout for 1 billion streams between $3,000,000 and $5,000,000. Let's go with the lower end. This is actual money paid out by Spotify for 1 billion streams, as in, a bank transfer of $3,000,000.

How do you get from there to $45,000?

- As with any legacy artist, the record label gets most (maybe 70%). Why that is, oh well. It's less shocking if you think of the label as an employer and how little an average employee gets compared to what they produce. Do you need an employer? Absolutely not. Do you need a record label? Absolutely not. Anyway, a 70% cut would leave the artist with $900,000.

- Expenses: There are various costs associated with producing, distributing, and promoting music, hotel costs. Let your imagination run wild. Safe to say: This is a black hole, depending on how you want the process to look. If Snoop wants to sit in a big studio for months, he pays prices, for month, but that's not required to make music. Renting a high end studio on end is lifestyle. Sure, it's an expense, but it's like complaining about your profit while driving a Porsche. Awkward. Let's assume a 20% deduction here, reducing the revenue to $720,000.

- Focus on Publishing Royalties: Publishing royalties are just one part of the total royalties an artist earns. So there's quite a bit of double accounting going on if you want to pretend that the above costs are all deducted from your Spotify income.

If we assume publishing royalties make up only 10% of the total, that brings the figure down to $72,000.

- tldr: Snoop is living the big life, confused about money, and then proceeds to confuse others about money.

[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/s...

If the ownership is with the publishing studio then AFAIK they pay the producing, distribution and promotion. It is an investment into the artist, so they shouldn't have these costs.

A record label is probably much more of a VC than it is an employer.

The business has changed since streaming and self publishing but the labels took bets on artists and gave them expensive recording studios and marketing dollars, gave them some basic money, and in return took the majority of rights to the first few albums.

They also knew that if the artist truly made it big they would likely go to a different label where they could get better terms or start their own where they’d keep all the money after the initial contract which drove their side higher.

The record label model clearly doesn’t work as well in modern days but it was successful for good reasons at the time it really flourished.

Ah yes performative postering by people who 'really care' about artists getting paid.

> Back to torrenting I guess.

Or just buy it on bandcamp friday and give it all to the artists :)

I hear taylor swift is a billionaire. Is she on Spotify?

> It surprises me how much of my Spotify library is no longer available. There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out. A lot of good songs too.

This probably has more to do with publishers and licensing contracts than artists pulling their music off from platforms. Sometimes even bigger artists' albums disappear when publisher is sold or goes out from the business. Or the licensing contract's period runs out. As sad it is, many artists don't own the rights to their music, and if the rights owner is defunct, then there are missing albums or even discographies.

It’s infuriating.

Spotify for instance had some Spotify exclusive “DJ mixes” that were all an hour of well-mixed playlists. Spotify got artists to curate them and would have “XYZ’s DJ Mix”. They were perfect for seamless music listening at the gym. No breaks between songs. Non stop music. I listened to them all the time.

But one day a few months ago they all just vanished. Every one. I had added several to my Spotify library. For a bit they were playlists of grayed out songs. And then the playlists themselves vanished too. This content was all Spotify exclusive- the music is just gone now. It’s not available elsewhere.

It was all “mixed” versions of songs with smooth transitions in an out. Luckily I had added most of the original songs to other Spotify playlists that I had. But still, the mixes themselves are gone.

You should know: Apple Music filled that niche to perfection. Hands down, better than it ever was on Spotify. More choices, easier discovery, more collaboration with external brands, etc.

https://music.apple.com/us/curator/apple-music-dj-mixes/1441...

Interesting! I’ll definitely take a look. I’ve been meaning to try Apple Music.

It's the reason I use both. Spotify's recommendations and social features are much better than Apple's - but the exclusive DJ sets and recordings of concerts etc are a great value add.

Frankly, this is why I always ignored Spotify and other streaming services and keep a jolly roger above my head.

If you had pirated or ripped those mixes off Spotify, you'd still have them. And you probably paid enough months of subscription to feel okay with that.

Because in the end https://xkcd.com/488/

Thanks for the comic link and enjoy the riff off the book title “steal this book”.

Just looked into deleting my Spotify account through the app and appears that’s not an (obvious?) option. Ugh

The comic does not make sense for iTunes, since if you buy music from Apple, you get the non DRM file that is yours to use however you want.

It’s xkcd number 488, it was probably made when iTunes was still selling or just after it stopped selling DRM music.

Good point, the comic was published Oct 2008 according to xkcd and Apple stopped selling DRM music in Jan 2009.

Not sure what genre you listen to, but soundcloud and mixcloud are the place to go for high quality mixes imo. That's where the DJs post. It's not immune to takedowns and tracks disappearing. But I have a playlists of hundreds of mixes curated over years and they're all still there. Many even with an option to download if you so wish

A lot of that is also bad meta data. I have a few playlists for around 10 years or so. Every so often I have to go in and hunt down greyed out tracks that are no longer there but are available in identical versions elsewhere. Publishers apparently regularly update what they have on the platform and there's a lot of duplication as well between best off albums, remastered albums, etc. And some artists, like Neil Young, actually pulled most of their content. Spotify seems very happy to just break everybody's playlists continuously.

> Spotify seems very happy to just break everybody's playlists continuously.

definitely possible to avoid this, but given it would be a follow-up cost from the failing core business, it probably could not be done. hell, they didn't even get around to making basic meta-data reliably present.

>Spotify seems very happy to just break everybody's playlists continuously.

This is an artefact of the industry and not something they have much control over. Labels for larger artists just don't just sell global streaming rights in perpetuity. They will carve it up by region and time in order to try and maximize profit.

> Spotify seems very happy to just break everybody's playlists continuously.

I remember this being particularly infuriating with movie soundtracks or other compilations, where individual tracks would often evaporate one day for bogus (licensing) reasons.

> And some artists, like Neil Young, actually pulled most of their content.

Yeah, I actually left Spotify with Neil. Apparently though he and other artists like Joni Mitchell that left at the time are now back on the service as of a few weeks ago.

These disappearing tracks are the reason I moved back to managing my own music collection.

I do have YouTube Music for listening to stuff I don't own yet, but primarily I use Jellyfin these days for music.

I’m not sure how it can affect those artists given it’s like $0.5 for 1k streams. I mean, I guess if they have 100 songs all at like 999 streams, that’s about $50 loss/year if they never pass that threshold. It sucks obviously, but not enough to for artists to pull out.

My understanding is they’re playing a cat-and-mouse game with auto generated content, that syphons away some percentage of the royalties.

While it might not have a big impact on smaller artists financially, the idea of a multi billion dollar company deciding unilaterally to steal a few cents from you could be enough to drive you away.

Probably if being actively exploited by a multi billion company is a problem for them, it might be better for them to change dream.. or species

>the idea of a multi billion dollar company deciding unilaterally to steal a few cents from you

So, like all the rest of them?

I though labels job was to prevent content like that

Spotify allows people to self publish.

Not to mention people can set up labels themselves, it's just a company like any other.

I'm sure we don't want big labels being gatekeepers. They have their own set of problems, and make streaming even more difficult for everyone but very large artists/groups (and sometimes even for those, as they eat a big chunk of royalties).

Spotify does not allow you to self publish. However, you can pay a distributer like DistroKid an annual fee in order to upload to the platform (and all other majors).

Ah thanks for the correction. I also used DistroKid.

As a part-time indie artist, one can do a lot with $50 you get on the side from streams.

Also, what is Spotify going to do with these 50$? What if it happens twice, 100$... do they pay you back eventually? Perpetually free access to all their premium services?

That wss an extreme example I think. Most probably end up with less than $5 loss

it's not up to Spotify to decide what I do with that. What if I use it to pay a sub for some app I like and helps me create music? Then Spotify is taking value away from 2 Indies, not just one.

I'll take this bad faith argument, and give you even a worse one - $50 is about 5 drinks or less at a bar with tips nowadays. I genuinely doubt a serious person who makes music on the side will look at that number as a potential loss of income.

And if you have made 200 songs (so loss of $100), all streaming less than 1K each, maybe your current production is not marketable on Spotify, and yeah, maybe you should find another venue. Eventually there will be a marketplace for this type of production, and hopefully willing users to pay for it.

You're assuming every artist lives in a first world country. The problem seems a lot more severe under a more general lens.

Must artists are struggling, so that loss of $50 means picking up an extra shift at McDonald's to pay rent instead of making or promoting their music.

Seems silly. The reason they have that problem is that their logic for funneling subscription revenue to streams is broken. This won't fix that fundamental problem. You can still use Spotify to scam money out of the system.

You can, but the game isn’t to drive the abuse to 0. It’s about to bring it down, and hope abusers find an easier target to extract money from. It’s the same concept as “why would you steal a secured bike, when there’s an unsecured one right next to it”, and hope you’re the one who secured yours.

> The reason they have that problem is that their logic for funneling subscription revenue to streams is broken

Changing it to splitting out a users monthly payment to what they're actually listening to, would make the abuse they're trying to stop easier and not harder (as it would mean all the money they're trying to launder will go to the correct artist instead of just some of it)

Not saying that that's a good argument for the current system, but it wouldn't fix the issue they're trying to solve

Yea there are better ways to fix the problem but the problem is selling that fix to the big labels. The current system gets them a larger share of the revenue so why would they be interested in changing it?

I would much rather prefer that my subscription money gets split between niche artist I'm listening to instead of going to Taylor Swift. I assume it's harder to calculate royalties, you can't keep single counter per track, you have to agregate listens within a month for each user. But that doesn't seem insurmountable. Or maybe it is on Spotify scale?

I don't think any subscriber (i.e. people giving them money) would prefer current model over where your money goes directly to who you listen.

Laundering would be easier yes. But extracting money from the system would be impossible. I was talking about the latter where you pay for an account of 10 usd/month and extract > 10 usd/month in stream revenue.

I use YouTube Premium 90% of the time now for this reason. All the remixes and other indie mixes that I listen to are on YouTube and YouTube has so much more that I find it a hard value proposition to beat.

Slightly off topic, but where do you go to find this now?

Why compensate YT to listen to tracks they're not compensating the artists for?

I am in a small and new band. In 2023 we earned roughly

     500 Euros via Bandcamp (digital, physical and merch)
     300 Euros selling merch on gigs
    2000 Euros playing gigs
      20 Cents on Spotify

There is no monetary reason to be on spotify, the only reason we are on there is because fans asked.

Similar experiences (but from a few years ago).

Even people who have Spotify end up buying stuff in Bandcamp, anyway. I never had merch but had CDs, and sometimes people would buy two physical copies, one to gift.

For me there was never any difference between Spotify and piracy.

Absolutely. I always buy music from artists to support them on Bandcamp. Spotify lets you discover bands that are little known, which is cool, but it's not a place that enables you to support those artists. Unfortunately, Bandcamp might also change since they are changing owners.

I use Spotify because my SO wants it for podcasts and stuff and family subscription is just tad more, and it's in my car and similar which is convenient.

I also buy the music I listen to a fair bit on Bandcamp or at concerts.

As an example, last fall a song from a band came up in the randomized post-album "radio" on Spotify as I was driving, and I added the band to my favorites. A month ago Spotify notified me the band was playing in town, so I went and ended up buying several CDs, including from the warmup band as well.

That said, I agree that Spotify should pay more to small artists. I really dislike that my money goes to Talor Swift and similar artists who have more than enough and that neither I nor my SO listen to.

Those are fair points, and I agree.

I think I should have said that Spotify is the same as piracy from an artists POV.

It's definitely not illegal for users, and it definitely helps with "exposure", but it's not really a platform for making real money with your music, except when it's listened to in massive quantities.

For me, it's no different than putting a free album link in Instagram, or when Nine Inch Nails put it on PirateBay as a stunt...

I'm intrigued. What's your bandcamp page? :)

Warning — we are probably pretty niche with our noisy music, but here ya go: https://maschinkaput.bandcamp.com/

Listening on Bandcamp right now - the song 'drop'. I like some pretty out there stuff, and this is right at the outer limits, and I mean that as a compliment.

I might not "enjoy" it as one would traditionally enjoy listening to music, but I enjoy that it exists and the uniqueness of the experience it provides.

If you can handle LAMC by Tool, you can handle this.

'kabelbrand' is giving me flashbacks to Providence by King Crimson, just a bit more raw and industrial. All build-up without the instruments actually synchronising together for the payoff as per Providence.

The band name is great; apt.

i second that. i would not go to a concert, but it does have a certain quality. i can see this used in games or exhibits of industrial art.

We are an improvisational band, so no concert is alike ; )

Nee, ich mag's. Danke für den Link, und Grüße nach Hamburg!

Nice! Reminds me of Nazoranai.

Would you/your band be interested in trying out a pay-what-you-want system? I started the work to add crowdfunding support to communick (described on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39399121) and I'm looking now for musicians/artists/FOSS developers for some beta testing.

it's already possible to do pay-what-you-want in Bandcamp

always good to have more options though!

But does it provide a way for them to stream all of the artists catalog?

Yeah, most artists let you listen to the whole album before you buy it. Sometimes there are songs that don't have previews, and I think there are sometimes hidden songs included with the album but not even listed, but in general you can stream a few times before buying, and then stream as much as you want afterwards.

> but in general you can stream a few times before buying, and then stream as much as you want afterwards.

Not exactly what I have in mind. I am working with the model where all songs are always available (like Spotify) and people simply choose how (a) how much they want to give per month and (b) how to split this amount among their preferred artists.

In effect, it's the same as a "pay as you want", but there is no overhead of thinking about which songs to "buy".

I'd wager the income from playing gigs would be substantially lower if you weren't on Spotify.

Your arguments veers close to the "for exposure" payment.

People don't go to indie concerts because of a spotify track. Nor to big name concerts. And 20 cents corresponds to around 50 to 100 plays according to the numbers mentioned here.

> People don't go to indie concerts because of a spotify track

Do you have numbers behind this claim?

I definitely got aware of some unknown artists thanks to Spotify and YouTube, some of them had low hundreds views/listens.

Ended up supporting them, going to concerts and buying merch.

Same. I see a show advertised and I want to hear what the bands sound like, the easiest way (for me) is to search for them on Spotify and check out the top few tracks and the new release. If I like what I hear then I'll buy a ticket and go. I probably could have found the tracks other ways if I really tried, but this way just works, almost always.

> And 20 cents corresponds to around 50 to 100 plays

Unfortunately more like 5000+ plays. People tend go to concerts of music they listen to and for a lot of people that means hearing it on Spotify

Actually, the spotify rate is 0.003 cents per track, which reflects my 83 plays ‘earning’ $0.25 on Spotify before this.

It is extremely common and often perfectly rational for creatives to do things in exchange for exposure. There is nothing fallacious about this.

> People don't go to indie concerts because of a spotify track.

Yes they do.

If there's any fallacy here, it is comparing "for exposure" between a gig at your local dive bar (this is where you typically hear the phrase), and uploading your material to Spotify.

The first requires committing time and effort to get 50 people to see you, 20 of which are your personal friends. The second is making the music you have already produced available to millions of people around the world, with virtually no effort.

Surely Spotify should improve on compensating artists, but all-in-all it is still a better deal for the artist than the "for exposure" gig at the local bar.

I'm not sure what your basis is for this claim? I've most certainly discovered artists from Spotify and later on bought e.g. merch to support them. I would in a heartbeat also go on their concerts if I was given the opportunity with travel distance, vacation plans etc.

Spotify can't give you these experiences no matter how hard they try so this claim doesn't make much sense to me. A concert isn't exactly competing with streaming services or anything.

Same. Anecdotally I discovered khruangbin on spotify and will be seeing their concert next tuesday.

Your absolutist claim is already false by virtue of the fact that I have gone to an “indie” show after hearing a track on Spotify.

Next?

Next should be the advice to not take comments of that form as "absolutist" but understand them to mean as "in general"...

> People don't go to indie concerts because of a spotify track

Anecdotically I've attended multiple gigs for artists I discovered via Spotify.

If Spotify's search page wasn't so broken and useless, I'd probably have gone to _more_ indie concerts.

>Your arguments veers close to the "for exposure" payment

While it does, note that paying or doing stuff free "for exposure" is exactly how many artists got big and huge hits were made, from payola to DJs (starting way earlier than Alan Freed with radio DJs, and going all the way to EDM DJs being paid to break a track), all the way to paying for artist ads or record shop placement, buying fake streams, followers, and views to appear more popular and drive exposure, or doing for free (or, often, paying for) the support spot on a bigger band's concert.

I have no data on that, but my stochastic feeling (based on conversations I had with people visiting our concerts) does not imply that at all. Most came because (in that order of frequency):

1. They saw our sticker/poster and thought the name is interesting

2. They checked the venue/festival-site and thought it sounded interesting

3. They knew us from social media

Exactly zero times I had someone tell me the found us on spotify and came because of that. Of course that doesn't mean no such people exist, my sample size might be too small. There might also be people who find us on spotify and then buy on bandcamp, no way to check on that.

But my feeling right now is that our more traditional boots on the ground marketing does a lot more than the online stuff. That doesn't mean that dynamic can be totally different for other bands or other genres tho.

Yeah for some bands, letting people listen to a sample of their music before paying the cover charge might work against them ;)

This is exactly the reason why my preferred method of music consumption is piracy + Bandcamp. Every Bandcamp Friday (when Bandcamp doesn't take a cut) I buy about 2 to 6 albums I've listened to in the past month or a few. If an artist is not on Bandcamp, I'm less likely to listen to them, but if I do, I eventually pirate their stuff.

All the music I buy and pirate is in FLAC and funneled into my local library, where I can enjoy it without any streaming service taking it away from me.

And I usually end up contributing more to my favorite artists financials than fans who use streaming service, so that's a bonus.

In case of smaller artists we'd be better off pirating music instead of helping cement Spotify's brand as a central platform. The only person losing money in this case is the platform holder so we could argue the decentralised aspect of piracy helps fighting monopolisation of the industry.

But don't they give out a flat % of what they earn from the subscriptions? The low return would mean that either:

a) Spotify doesn't charge enough for a subscription

b) Spotify takes too big of a cut right now from the subscription revenue

c) The model doesn't work as a lot of people from low-income (and low subscription cost) countries are "sucking out" the money that goes mainly from rich ones. So 1 listen from USA = 1 listen from India even though the USA listener pays around 7-8x times more and the subscription income gets divided equally by listens.

People use Spotify because it is comfortable and provides additional features liked by users. That has always been the only way to beat piracy.

These numbers definitely give piracy a shine.

What's better for music as a whole? Boosting Spotify's share price and Taylor Swift's private jet habit? Or putting that $11/month towards some gigs for an artist you really like?

If bands are not on Bandcamp, I buy them on mp3million.com, which is legal but feels like piracy given their pricing.

Wow thats cheap! How is that even possible?

https://musicfans.stackexchange.com/questions/1045/do-those-...

Thanx a lot. That’s insightful.

> mp3million.com

Reminds me of allofmp3.com before the WTO asked Russia to kill it if they wanted to join.

Well. It doesn't seem that legal, and certainly not a good solution is your primary goal is to help artists : https://musicfans.stackexchange.com/questions/1045/do-those-...

Very shady at best.

Problem is that in take of new music is harder with these.

I don’t know if YouTube is any better, but I have switched all of my music consumption to youtube music app with the premium subscription.

I don't require a huge intake of new music: I obsess over those dozen albums I really love a month, always listening to them in full and appreciating them as art. Browsing Bandcamp tags, music review and catalogue sites, and music critics album reviews is really all I need to get that hit.

But it's not for everyone ig...

Where do you store the files, how do you take your music with you on the go?

There are media servers you can host locally and Bandcamp has an app you can play music in.

Not the poster you're replying to, but I acquire music the same ways as them.

a1) on my computer, in folders. I manage it using iTunes/Music, but could just as well use anything else, or do it manually. I also have Serato for DJing, which imports my iTunes/Music library xml to share the same collection.

a2) to be fair, in the past year, I've gotten lazy and started streaming from the band camp app for more recent purchases. I'm not DJing much these days.

b) I buy phones with a lot of storage and don't upgrade very often

Music is just files, so just use any filesync service like iCloud, Google Drive, Keybase, OneDrive, DropBox etc.

I have both a Jellyfin and a Subsonic-compatible (Gonic) server on my local NAS. Those are used for streaming and work anywhere where there's internet thanks to Tailscale. If I need to go offline, for a flight or something, I pick a dozen albums to download full quality to my phone and listen to them with the Retro music player.

> Every Bandcamp Friday (when Bandcamp doesn't take a cut) I

It's great that BC still does BC Fridays... but if fans only buy music from BC on BC Fridays, BC will lose all revenue and will fold or resort to shitty tactics. BC are one of the few "good" businesses in this space, and have reached an impressive scale. I'd hate to see them fold. I reckon it's worth buying some music on normal days as well as BC Fridays.

BC was acquired recently, so that may come sooner rather than later. It's not due to BC Friday, bur rather that selling MP3s piecemeal is a hard business. Artists sometimes also remove their albums from BC if they sign with a label that wants exclusive distribution rights.

Selling mp3s piecemeal might be hard but they were profitable for 12 years prior to the previous sale to Epic. Spotify havn’t turned a profit in 18.

I too fear the recent change of ownership will bring on changes in business model. But I live in hope that it wont, because it doesn’t need to.

Well, I do sometimes buy on normal days too, but not as much :)

And if they removed BCFs or took a small cut I wouldn't stop buying from them either.

> All the music I buy and pirate is in FLAC and funneled into my local library, where I can enjoy it without any streaming service taking it away from me.

Where do you get these FLACs? Do you have a pipeline/automated system or it’s done manually? Asking for a friend.

You can get these FLACs via Bandcamp. In some cases, you can download for free (enter $0.00 if there is a "name your price" tag)

If you wish to sail the high seas, look up "piracy megathread". Soulseek and Doubledoubletop are some of my favorites.

Your process sounds a lot like this new change by Spotify... Anything you don't listen to very much doesn't get paid for.

It ain't piracy if the record I want is out of print and no longer commercially available. Most of the music I listen to is pre-2010, so there are a lot of records that fit that description.

Same goes for live recordings, remixes and radio sessions. P2P has had this for 20+ years, Spotify doesn't and never will.

Same here. A lot of artists and a good chunk of the recording crews from before the early 1980s are dead and have been for decades, and the only ones getting the money are the record companies. Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Jim Croce, Stevie Ray Vaughan, all of them have been gone for thirty years or more at this point. Not even their kids or some sort of charity managed by their estate get any of the money. Piracy of their albums is denying wealth from graverobbers, really.

It’s still copyright infringement just like copying the latest Taylor swift album is.

Taylor Swift albums are not out of print and she owns her record label. I am talking about recordings that were never released commercially, or released by labels that are long gone. This is closer to the videogame emulation legality argument than it is Metallica v Napster.

Still copyright infringement (assuming it’s not so old to have left copyright). Doesn’t matter if it’s a song that was last printed on a 78 in 1945 and the artist decided to burn all copies, or the latest album from some k-pop band that you can get free with your cornflakes.

Being in print or not makes no difference

> There is no monetary reason to be on spotify, the only reason we are on there is because fans asked.

This isn't an excuse for Spotify not paying much for plays, but I bet having music on spotify helps the gig revenue though.

In some ways this is also true for Taylor Swift et al - they also make thousands times the amount from playing gigs than 'selling' albums, streaming, and radio plays but that drives ticket sales.

Indie: No one pays you.

Popular: Gigs pay you.

Taylor Swift: Governments pay you millions of dollars for regional exclusivity. (essentially, play 2 - 3 concerts instead of 10+)

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/mar/05/taylor-swift-s...

Of course that's a quite rare case of a small nation with many neighbors with interested listeners, trying to get an artist to play there exclusively in order to drive concert tourism.

The music industry is the most vicious example of inequality.

While some artists are so big that governments compete to have you come to their country (and NOT to your neighbours), the vast majority has trouble even getting to play free gigs.

Spotify should then be run as ad business—charge artists to let them advertise on Spotify.

Isn't that exactly what they do if they have the stream-cutoff discussed in this thread then? At least implicitly..

This is literally their current business model. Large music distributors pay for streams, the songs rise up the charts, people see the songs. If that’s not advertising I don’t know what is.

That sounds like good old fashioned payola.

Reading this has made me buy the last two physical items on my Bandcamp wishlist.

Bandcamp isn't perfect, but it fits well with my listening habits and I'm glad it earns _some_ money for you in the grand scheme of things.

Yep. Last I checked, it still pays 90% royalties to artists, all with a sane interface that is pleasant and just works, and no dark patterns.

Thanks for supporting your local artist : )

Yeah, no cash in it but I figure it's mainly to gain exposure to hopefully later on get those into the "playing gigs" / merch audience, because reach is on the other hand massive on Spotify.

How many Spotify plays was that?

Not sure, and I am too lazy to ask our drummer for that ; )

I buy my music at bandcamp and other sites. I always feel a bit angry if an artists doesn't offer a proper download for their music.

Whether or not you buy Only The Shit You Love by Damian Cowell's Disco Machine on bandcamp:

https://damiancowell.bandcamp.com/album/only-the-shit-you-lo...

you can get the "free" synced multi episode animated web comic from youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkRxIMJ3GpPH_NurdvJLL...

Wow, that's really Only the Shit I Love. It's now on my wishlist until my bank account allows to buy it.

Talking of Aussie bands: https://drunkmums.bandcamp.com/album/beer-baby and https://3pod.bandcamp.com/album/middleborough-rd

I wonder if is there a monetary reason to be on youtube (music)?

I listen to most music on yt music (although their client sucks) and buy stuff on bandcamp whenever i love some band and it's available there. I've never seen a value in spotify - limited library with no ability to fill the gaps with custom files (like you can do on YT music), client is meh, additional cost or ads are meh too.

real heads buy music from bandcamp

do you have listener numbers for spotify and bandcamp?

lots of commercial endeavors rely on investment, capital or otherwise, to increase exposure and growth. sucks to be feeling like you're working or 'spending' for nothing in any context. but hopefully you guys ultimately see the return you deserve.

> But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify?

It's already happening. Even some artists which are above the limit pull out to show their support for smaller artists.

> There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out.

As infuriating as this is, it's the reason I still use Spotify. A music service that hides their catalog changes by subtly modifying my playlists is a no-go. Having the songs still appear lets me know, as it gives me the opportunity to find those songs elsewhere.

Yeah I have to admit, Spotify uses the least amount of cruddy dark patterns. Their model is very upfront about paying, so they have never nagged me for anything. Their interface isn't the best but it's consistent.

These days there's a lot of worth in that, the bars been set quite low.

I think royalties from <1k streams are basically nothing anyway. Giving up the ability to distribute your music for free and reach more people would be a terrible idea.

Or it would force small musicians to advertiwse more. Which is mutually beneficial to Spotify and the user.

1k is a relatively low number to hit at least they didn't set the demonizations level the same as other platforms.

>I don’t know much about how music licensing works. But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify?

A lot of smaller artists don't have a say regarding licensing and distribution. They're usually managed by a local minor label, which in turn has specific agreements with bigger players (Columbia, UMG) once your music sells more than, let's say 50.000 copies and they need a partner to publish a release on more territories. A few artists also get their own label.

For example, Peggy Gou tracks are usually released trough Dudu Records (Her own label) -> Ninja Tune -> XL Recordings, which is basically the same label that nowadays publishes Adele and Radiohead. Adele went even a step further, and her music is handled by Columbia Records for the US market.

Until you reach this level of clout, you have very little direct control over your syncs and streaming rights in the "regular", Billboard-tracked, market.

The mechanism there is kind of "dontcareism": yes, indie musicians will go away, but Spotify doesn't care, because ultimately this won't stop listeners from using it, over time most of them will forget what they really wanted

They do care, they're just exploiting the indie musicians' lack of leverage. Together they matter a lot, they're just powerless individually.

It's the same dynamic companies use against ununionized labor.

I have a few thousand of streams per month and I make pennies from it. It's not like I care about being demonetized on spotify and losing a few pennies.

It’s not just about the money. It’s about the exposure! If you’re not a big band you’re making money from touring. More people listening and discovering you online = more people attending your tours and maybe reaching a threshold where you can make good money

It's the opposite. If you're not a big band, you usually cannot afford to go on tour. You have no manager, no contacts, you have to handle booking venues, lodging and transport yourself and hope that you can make some of it back in ticket sales.

Most bands can't do this. They're not full time musicians, many have a day job. The ones that can are likely to come from rich families where they get time and money to pursue their passions, insteas of going to college and getting a job.

Lana Del Ray, Grimes and Billy Eilish are some of the biggest artists of the 2010s, all of them grew up rich and connected.

If not a tour you play in cafes and bars

I have roughly 25-30 tracks on Spotify.

They send me a monthly email detailing the number of plays I received as an artist, and it averages around 300.

So each track is getting around 10 plays per month.

So none of them come anywhere close to the minimum threshold.

I made around $10/year from Spotify plays, it's a pittance, but over all the streaming platforms I would get enough for a new plugin each year, this makes it "worthwhile".

I absolutely will not allow Spotify to have content on their platform without reimbursement.

The only people losing from this are the handful of fans who like my music.

Article states "threshold of 1,000 plays in the preceding 12 months".

Sounds like you're well over that, at around 3-4K plays per year.

If I understand correctly it's each and every track needs 1k plays. As an artist over all my tracks I'd meet the threshold of 1k plays, but I don't think that's how it works.

Yeah, good point. This would probably be better received overall if it were a per-artist minimum rather than a per-track.

On the other hand, that would make it pretty trivial for garbage/AI content distributors to circumvent.

If they really cared about musicians they would have just left it at fining the aggregators for allowing crap on the platform. Just a tiny amount of KYC from the aggregators would solve the problem, but instead the aggregators were just as greedy as Spotify and were happy to allow any old shit in, so they could grab another slice of the pie.

This is the reason I have stuck with Apple Music so long (and previously Google Play Music). I have a fair number of sentimental tracks that I've carried with me in my collection for decades which aren't on streaming sites.

Spotify doesn't have an answer for this. Just don't listen to things outside the Spotify library. Apple Music (and GPM before it) lets me upload my own tracks and sync them between my devices.

Finally, someone else who feels the same pain as I do. Believe me you, I keep subscriptions of both Apple Music and Spotify. Apple Music for the better in general catalog and better syncing, Spotify for better discovery. I plan on creating a tool that would allow me to download all the songs in my library so that I don't lose on them when Spotify or AM decide to remove it from their catalog. Apple Music, at least, shows the track details but greys it out. Spotify simply shows an empty entry, which frustrates me even more.

There’s an app called song shift that works 90% well. It’ll transfer the music over from one service to another. Also you can export Apple songs to CSV using desktop iTunes

That's solving a different problem. If you have a track that is not on any service, Apple Music will still accept the song file being added to your library and sync it for you. Spotify will not as it does not do cloud file sync.

And maybe it wasn't removed by their choice. Below is a video of someone who had all their Spotify music removed with no recourse, due to a claim the were buying streams. No recourse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVY7-Ti77UQ

>I don’t know much about how music licensing works. But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify?

It might, but then there's this:

(1) they're not making money already anyway (they'd be getting like $3 for 1000 streams before)

(2) that's were the listeners are (not the listeners they have, since they don't have many to begin with, but the ones they wish to attract)

(3) most of such a low number as 1000 streams are usually themselves, band members, friends, and family, plus whoever they sent a link to and gave it a short listen before moving on.

I think this is the wrong approach.

If they have issues with people abusing the revenue model by publishing white noise and generating fake plays - go after that.

However the 1K streams per track thing is going to negatively impact small artists who might have relatively large collections, but few over 1K annual streams.

If it's a processing cost issue then make it so that payouts need to meet some reasonable minimum threshold.

> between $1 and $2 will be added to monthly bills for customers in several territories, including the UK, Australia, and Pakistan, Bloomburg reports. This is said to cover the cost of audiobooks, added to the platform late-2023. More recently, video learning content was introduced to further diversify the offering.

I don't want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app.

They mention that there will be another tier added which doesn't have these -- great, so long as it keeps the audio quality for music at the same level, and doesn't have ads.

> I don't want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app.

Regarding Spotify, which I use daily, I also dislike their updates. I remember some months back I could disable/hide "Recommendations". Now in all my (personal & private) playlists I get a list of Recommendations. It's an annoyance because when I scroll fast to reach the bottom "to listen to that one song" it end up surfing the Recommendations (did I mention I dislike them?).

So, it makes me want to go to apkpure, find an apk from 2020 and use THAT (slim chance it'll work) because most updates are "to increase engagement" (pester you/me/all) with 'new and exciting content!!!' (bleh)

Sidenote: for podcasts I am using a 2021 version of the Podcast Addict (the one displaying the full screen ad)(which you can block with NoRoot Firewall)

My Spotify app almost daily shows me a full screen advertisement for some new album when I open the app. It is clearly labeled sponsored content.

I can then click a tiny 3 dots menu, click “stop showing me this” and “I don’t want to see sponsored content” and it will say “sure thing! We will no longer show you these” and the next day it will show me a new advertisement and I repeat the process.

So annoying. The whole premise of premium is that there are no ads! But now I’m constantly getting visual ads in the app. Every artists page has ads for their merch. Spotify notifies me about exclusive merch for artists I listen to. And is constantly trying to get me to go to concerts of artists I listen to.

"NoRoot Firewall" and I have allowed IPs and URLs that I've trialed-and-errored to Allow. Then . to block everything else. Fun fact: most of the garbage/ads/albums/pushes/etc, as well as your Annual Wrap-Up (or whatever it is called) it is provided by a tracker (I can't remember/see because I haven't individually blocked it - it's blocked under the . rule)(first 10-15 IPs & URLs are allowed, all else is blocked).

I believe that using an Android phone without a Firewall must be a horrible experience/it increases the positive experience by A LOT.

It also helps to see which apps are sneaky and run on their own - even if you disable the 'background run' (e.g. TuneIn Radio starts itself bypassing battery/power settings)

I really like Podcast Addict. Its price is like 10$ per year to hide a small ad on the bottom and to get a choice which screen is the first to show.

I got no prob paying for apps (I buy/subscribe to all of them). I simply hate it when I pay them, and they merely 'hide the add' but still 'talk' to adjust, googletagmanager, and so many other advertisers/trackers.

"Recommendations" never seem even close to what I want, on any platform.

The worst is Facebook (I have friends and family who don't use any other mode for regular contact), where it often behaves as if the ideal way to engage me is, in order of appearance on the timeline:

• "People you may know" (usually devoid of people I've ever even met, and when I do know them they're not people I'm going to add)

• One real post

• A suggestion of a corporation or group to follow

• An advert for something I'm not even capable of getting ("Are you an American living in the UK who wants to renounce their citizenship for tax purposes?" — no on all counts)

• Three more suggestions of a corporation or group to follow

• More ads for things even less relevant than the email spam I got in 1998

Even YouTube, where I can recognise the value by comparing what I see when I'm logged in to not logged in, the recommendations are still only 50% useful and 50% dross. (Not logged in it's 98% dross, and yes I did just count 50 items before finding one video I might watch in order to not be a statistic made up on the spot).

This is an issue I've seen with every platform that primarily exists online. They buy every digital service and increase prices with or without the customer's consent. Aside from being annoying and largely pointless, it's anti-competitive because if you subscribe to Spotify you are discouraged from subscribing to some other, better podcast service you actually want because you're already paying for one. It gets even worse as more services get bundled together.

You’re free to cancel, and I’m sure customer service would give you the refund on the extra cost for the first month.

I’ve noticed this in restaurants too, they just change the price like a normal business in an inflationary environment.

I bet you get raises too, or ask for them and move on if you don’t get them.

I have no idea how that relates to what I wrote.

Edit: Actually I see now, you're replying to where I said they bought services and raised prices without the customer consent. If we're using a restaurant comparison, it'd be like your local burger shop raising prices because your meal comes bundled with discounted carwashes. Consumers generally don't want bundles, they want to buy the thing they're interested in.

> Consumers generally don't want bundles, they want to buy the thing they're interested in.

They have been able to buy the individual song for $1 to $2 for a long time.

I mean bundling unrelated services. A subscription to just access all the music is pretty useful if you want to listen to music, but then they decide it should also be attached to a subscription of cloud gaming, shopping, podcasts, it becomes anti-consumer. Eventually you won't be able to just subscribe to the thing you want, but you'll also have to rent the kitchen sink.

Those seem to be arbitrary lines to draw. What if someone only wants to stream heavy metal, rap, classical, electronic, English, Spanish, Hindi, 1950s to 1980s, etc.

Building podcasts or audiobooks or even other services is just a business decision. It’s like cable/satellite TV used to be. The market will figure out where to settle.

Thank you. I don't understand why Spotify licenses all this rock and rap music when I'm only interested in pop music. So ridiculous. Why can't they just exclude all the stuff I don't care about?

I assume you're sarcastic, but Spotify is spending hundreds of millions on Rogan alone (and many other podcasts on top of that), and I have yet to listen to a single podcast on Spotify. They're making you pay for branching out to other content than music. If I want podcasts I go to my podcast app(s).

They aren’t making you pay anything, there’s a wide variety of music services.

A company offering an entertainment service is hardly forcing anyone to do anything.

In the context of Spotify customers, they are. They could have a separate tier including podcasts.

Most restaurants also do this, ever ordered a combo?

Ever gotten a car wash from a gas pump?

If you don’t like it there’s plenty of restaurants that don’t do combos. And plenty of gas stations that don’t have car washing.

Just cancel your Spotify subscription. I did, and now use a combination of Roon and Tidal.

I have a much better listening and discovery experience through Roon and artists get paid more with Tidal.

The problem is that Spotify is the only one that really works well on Foss with libspotify / spotify-qt.

All the others don't have clients for my OS and I don't have DRM in my browser which they require.

Ah annoying, I'd assumed Roon had a Linux client but it appears not to, despite having a compatible server and a bridge client.

lol. Tidal, the guys that tried to sell us snake oil like MQA.

That said you sound like a Meridian shill.

Err, thanks. Heaven forbid someone shares software that they actually like.

If only Tidal (or Qobuz, or...) would implement a Connect feature that allows me to control my PC desktop from mobile, then I would, but it's been on the "promised features" list for years now. It's a deal-breaker for me.

I use deezer and when I play a track on mobile I can continue it on PC. Is that what you mean?

Yeah Spotify Connect really is solid but that’s why I also went with Roon as it allows me to do that and more.

Yeah it looks like Roon can do this. Might be worth checking out, thanks!

Did you try KDEConnect?

Same here. I am on Apple Music. I like it. The automated playlists are way better on Spotify though.

Subscribed to Tidal for about a year until my patience ran out. It has to be one of the buggiest pieces of long living software ever. Pressing the next button would skip two songs ahead for playback and one song ahead UI wise, making the UI tell you the wrong song was playing. That's just one of a wall of bugs I struggled with while I stayed on that service.

The way I use it, I don’t interact with their app at all, it’s all streamed through Roon.

All that is listed are what reasonable customer and people would have assumed. However, things in corporate world seems to have the mind of it's own. It is normally in the interest of centralisation in the name of efficiency, and sadly at cost of human productivity and buyer and seller interests.

IMO the problem is that Spotify is fundamentally breaking the "spirit" of the deal that allowed them to get in the position they are right now.

Spotify's entire promise was "we solve the music inequality problem by just pooling all subscriber money together and then we do an equal(-ish, record labels iirc got slightly different deals) split depending on how many people listen to your music." It kinda sells the idea that if you're just popular enough, you can make it big on Spotify. Of course practically that's been a lie for ages (numbers showcased that only the top 0.1% could afford to live off of Spotify alone, and all those songs are owned by the established record companies anyway), so you could say this is just dispensing with the charade to avoid transaction costs.

I do wonder about the ripple effect this could cause for indie artists; Spotify just told them to go fuck themselves and there's pretty much no incentive to use Spotify anymore now that they pulled this stunt.

If you want to support artists directly, it's still always better to just buy the albums. Most of them have Bandcamp pages and for now, Bandcamp provides a good deal (and as a customer you can just download the FLAC files).

Essentially Spotify now pays small artists in “exposure”.

Looks a lot like abuse of market position.

Did anyone really expect 10 dollars a month to be enough to be sustainable? That's the price we used to pay for a single album and it seems way too low for a sustainable flatrate music service.

This change quite obviously can't negatively impact small artists in any meaningful way. When googling for how much Spotify pay artists per stream, ranges vary a bit. But it seems like a high number is $0.005 per stream, or 200 streams to the dollar.

Even if a very prolific artist has 200 songs, averaging 500 plays per year, this would only ever amount to $500 per year. It is not peanuts for a hobby musician, but it would represent an unusually productive artist who happens to be just under this limit with most (or all) their songs, and also who manages to somehow get paid in the upper parts of the span.

The change in isolation from Spotify may not impact individual bands. However if this is adopted across all the seven major streaming services, then artists can in theory have 7,006 streams per track without generating a penny of income, even though the streaming vendors have generated revenues.

If YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Deezer, Soundcloud, and Amazon all adopt this practice, taking your edge-case artist, they're out of pocket for $3,500 per year.

That makes a situation where the more highly concentrated Spotify's monopoly is, and the less productive an artist is, the fairer the outcome for that small artist. Meanwhile the $3,500 is distributed between the monopolist, and the very large artists on the service. That's a quite uniquely perverse set of economic outcomes.

Kind of crazy that we used to spend $20 for a CD with 12 songs on twenty years ago.

> Since going public on the stock market in 2018, the company has lost money every year

they don't even have a business model

the whole thing is a massive scam that devalues music just to earn some VCs a big payout

it's like if I said I was going to "disrupt the supermarket industry" by giving away free food

> it's like if I said I was going to "disrupt the supermarket industry" by giving away free food

Please don't give investors any ideas...

Too late.

There's a current TV commercial showing real customers' reactions to a promotional pop-up sample-tasting booth set up in a grocery store with all the little half-ounce cups for customers to try for themselves and see if they like it. These are sometimes like a marketing study for new products or variations.

Now in each little cup is a toothpick sticking up from a rolled-up dollar bill, like it was a piece of artisan cheese or something.

It's a commercial that candidly filmed a live promotion for a cashback app.

Even then the customers were mostly hesitant.

They made losses every single year, not just from 2018 on.

Financialization of businesses has unmoored it even further from capitalism. You can be a billionnaire without ever turning a profit, as long as you can convince investors that the real money in a music streaming is acshually going to come from podcasts.

I highly recommend trying Qobuz! Artists are paid more, the catalog is rich and comprehensive (I recommend to early users who might have felt a lack of content to give it another try, as it's now much richer), most albums are available in Hi-Res Audio, the UI is nice, there is no fluff (just music, nothing more), and most importantly, content is curated, with many articles written by critics and journalists, artist interviews, and, for each album, a small review or a piece of text informing about the album's significance. Compared to the awesome but "industrial" recommendation system of Spotify, this is something more personal and curated which, in my opinion, better helps to understand some music genres.

Seconded!

See my comment about Qobuz on another post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39428327

Could you explain how artists are paid more? The subscription fee is roughly the same.

Any service without a free tier pays more than Spotify because only premium users contribute to the number of streaming that will be payed.

In some sense, premium Spotify users pay also for the free users and, therefore, the average is lower (yes, there is ads income but I bet is negligible).

I'm not understanding the harsh criticism here.

Pretty much all platforms have some kind of soft threshold before paying.

This is actually very common in real world as well, e.g. in sales you don't get commissions if you don't meet certain thresholds too.

No same, I don't get it; 1000 streams a year is not an unrealistic goal, and Spotify is flooded with low-effort garbage - and this will get worse with AI generated stuff.

I think it makes sense to have a lower threshold on "plays per artist", since it involves billing overhead etc. But plays per song? Why? Are they trying to fight spam?

And even so, it's so little money and little overhead, just do it for the goodwill.

How much of an issue is this? Does it work like ad revenue on youtube? If something has under 1k streams I have to assume that was only a few dollars hobbyists get occasionally, if even that.

As a side-gig musician and composer - my wife and I as a matter of fact - this is a non-issue. It's a few bucks a year, maybe $5 to $15, depending if we release some new album. It's symbolic, not even a tip, and we can't cash it until it reaches I think $60 or more iirc. Spotify is not (or barely) making money out of our work, but we otoh are "making money" by using its platform and visibility as means to reaching to our small fan base that will finance our work through concerts.

For Spotify otoh, these few bucks add up to a long-tail loss of an increasing and disturbing magnitude. Additionally, bad actors are in fact exploiting it, ruining the experience for me as a musician and as a user. The issue, if any, is that in all fairness we should all be making money, proportionally, from the platform. But under 1000 streams, as an artist, you are probably getting more value from having your work uploaded and streamable.

>> we can't cash it until it reaches I think $60 or more iirc

This is highly dependent on your distributor. It can be as little as $10.

>> Spotify is not (or barely) making money out of our work, but we otoh are "making money" by using its platform and visibility as means to reaching to our small fan base that will finance our work through concerts.

This is an odd way to look at it. Without music, Spotify doesn’t exist. People subscribe to Spotify and listen to their ads in exchange for unlimited music access. So Spotify is making money from your music.

> This is an odd way to look at it. Without music, Spotify doesn’t exist. People subscribe to Spotify and listen to their ads in exchange for unlimited music access. So Spotify is making money from your music.

Spotify has expenses too and is hosting and streaming our music, distributing and maintaining an app and api for access, all basically for free for the musician. So "making money from your music" from my 800 streams a year is a very optimistic view of how the whole thing works out, I'd say we are cooperating fairly.

> So Spotify is making money from your music.

not really: https://www.statista.com/chart/26773/profitability-developme...

> Since the beginning of 2017, the streaming service has generated a positive net balance in eight quarters, two of them in 2021.

I would guess the huge sums they've blown on exclusive podcast deals and the repeated awful unnecessary redesigns go a long way towards that.

I think that’s a too-narrow way of looking at it.

For an individual artist it’s not much. For Spotify it’s huge, all of those nickels and dimes add up quickly.

It also doesn’t matter if their current plan is to redistribute 100% of the gains to other artists, since this becomes profit they didn’t need to sacrifice to appease big acts. I.e. small artists pay so Spotify doesn’t have to.

Most importantly the artists didn’t sign up for this arrangement when they first joined Spotify, but now due to Spotify’s size they may feel compelled to give away their work for free for the chance at being successful or keeping fans happy.

This should be renamed to "Spotify admits demonetizing all tracks under 1k streams with no previous contractual agreements".

Next step would be explaining why artists with the same amount of streams (but different labels) have wildly different payouts.

I think "theft" closer describes this rather than "demonetization"

Nah; the artists entered an agreement with Spotify, it's legally on board. If the artist believes Spotify breached contract they can either end it one-sidedly, or try and sue but I'm confident Spotify's side is rock solid.

Streaming services will be regulated in the coming months in EU

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/17/24041343/eu-music-streami...

EDIT: as it’s been pointed out, the article doesn’t mention a time, which is a speculation on my part

That’s not quite what the article linked says. If anything is done it could be years. It’s also unclear if they have any price per stream in mind and how they even think it should be calculated on an ongoing basis.

Sounds pretty early stage

Can someone ELI5: Why is it so hard to just split my monthly subscription money on all the artists that I listened to, proportional to their air time to the total listening time? I really don't get it

Because that would be extremely complex and expensive to do for a negligible effect.

I'd argue this would be a lot simpler and cheaper to setup than the byzantine distribution system we currently have in place.

It would also make the economics of streaming viable for the majority of artists rather than the small pool of folk raking in the bulk of the money.

How? The current system is super simple:

revenue * 0.7 = total payout total payout / no. of streams = payout per stream payout per stream * streams of an artist = payout for artist

In the proposed system you'd have to calculate the payout per stream on a per-account basis and have additional complexities like how to handle family accounts etc.

Computers are very good at doing these calculations

Obviously, but as I said it's much more complex and therefore more expensive to do. With a negligible effect.

a) SQL queries are not expensive.

b) As I said, the effect for the vast majority of artists would be quite the opposite of negligible.

It's not hard. The company would simply prefer to take your money and spend it on whatever they want.

If people could decide how their money would get split up, they couldn't give Harry and Meghan $25m, let alone Joe Rogan $250m.

I suspect the truth around this is that it contributes to their eternal losses actually paying artists so they worked out another way of not doing it for their balance sheet.

I was at a gig for a moderately successful band recently and they said rather loudly they were bastards and buy one of their CDs instead even if you never play it because they need to eat.

> they said rather loudly […] buy one of their CDs instead even if you never play it because they need to eat

They could try making music people actually want to listen to. If they can‘t, that career may not be for them.

I don't think you know how the music industry works

When I read the headline, I assumed this was to disincentivise uploading thousands of cheap AI-generated songs. There's tons of this on the platform, and it looks like it was generated automatically in bulk.

But the article makes it sound like this was not a factor?

I'm inclined to believe that filling the service with an endless stream of generated garbage is their ultimate endgame - why bother with unreliable and costly human creators when you can just emulate them well enough for undiscerning listeners. No substance, just vibes.

Even Spotify is smart enough to know that people will leave them if this ever happens.

No, that's the end game here. People already mostly have parasocial relationships with artists. There's already famous AI personality Instagrams and Vtubers. With the advent of Generative AI video like Sora and Generative AI music like Suno, people will find their perfect generative AI niche and follow an artist story/interaction that they can't even tell is real or not. Generative AI will create millions of niches, it will hit that spot.

You might just be spot-on.

Some generative stuff will be more discernible than others.

The ones that don't even try to emulate the full experience of having a real artist involved will have a lot less friction.

And it's not like you're going to have a small niche audience that settles for artificial music, no there will be a niche that prefers it.

The size of that niche right now has nowhere to go but up.

I find it really hard to imagine people following famous AI personalities as much as real musicians if they know that the AI are AI. Humans are social creatures.

I guess at some point there will be a popular "musician" who is relieved to be an algorithm, and we'll see what happens.

We're already seeing an explosion of people doing AI chatbot therapy and AI relationships. "Human-ness" factoring into someone's enjoyment of music is already below well below both of those.

Considering that according to what I can see online, artists get around $4 per 1000 streams, it doesn't look significant and it probably saves on processing fees.

One would need to be an artist with a lot of songs just under 1k to make it more than enough for a cup of coffee. The kind of money it isn't even worth the time putting songs on Spotify (it may be worth it for promotion though).

The general issue with underpaid artists remains but this particular case doesn't seem to matter much, in fact, if what they imply is true, it is arguably an improvement since what they save in processing fees will go to artists instead of banks.

I hope this doesn't affect Matt Farley[1] too badly, as it seems like he relies on having many songs with only a few streams each as his main strategy for generating income from Spotify.

I once commissioned a Mother's Day song from him -- sent him 10 facts about my Mom and our family and he came back a few days later with a funny and charming little tune. Best $30 I've ever spent.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/magazine/spotify-matt-far...

This seems quite reasonable. I have quite an uncommon taste in music so I tend to listen to artists with very small followings. I know most songs I listen to only have a few thousand views in total on YouTube, so I was initially worried that it would be similar on Spotify so just took a look... Spotify seems to be about x10 whatever the stats are on YouTube so almost all of the songs I listen to qualify for monetisation. The only exceptions are tiny self-recording artists I've randomly stubbled on from browsing Soundcloud or other corners of the internet.

I find it hard to see how this decision would impact small artists to be honest. Maybe if an artist had thousands of tracks all with ~500 streams then it might impact them, but I'm guessing small artists who are currently monetised are making almost nothing anyway from their handful of songs with under <1,000 streams – assuming they only have 2-3 albums worth of music.

Supporting monetisation on all songs is probably more headache than it's worth when you're dealing with paying out a few cents. Honestly the best thing you can do to support small artists isn't stream their music, but share it with your friends, donate to them and buy their merch (assuming they have merch because many won't).

It really amazes me how tech companies like Spotify manage to disrupt an entire industry, but fail to find a sustainable business model that makes them profitable. This is far from sustainable and it makes the world worse. There really should be laws that limit how much losses a company may generate during their "disruption" of existing markets.

Yes, I'm aware that I'm commenting this on HN.

Disruption, or even fully destructive complete tear-downs are a lot easier than building value.

May not be quicker, but definitely easier for the less-skilled to pull off.

One requires a demolition mindset, the other an engineering mindset.

In some capitalist cultures there has been a tendency to value disruption as if it was the thing that added value, just because it was a noticeable component of a few high-profile bonanzas.

It's like a prevailing superstition can take hold, and a belief spreads where "if it's not disruptive, it can't be good".

The less-recognized builders who don't divert energy to disruption do have to operate with much less visibility, since there's not some established structure crumbling (usually under its own weight) that looks like a result of their efforts.

The engineering-focused creative builder that can make something out of nothing, without having to tear down anything at all, ended up hopelessly outnumbered by weaker-performing substitutes having far-less-unique qualities.

Imagine what it would be like if something capable of applying that kind of leverage to resources had access to scaling capital.

Among some classes of performers, anybody can build a viable business if they started with $1 Million, and barring undue disaster, all will grow & prosper.

Even without any failures, each one will obviously have differing performance.

I guess you could say that one who ends up with a $1 Billion operation would be so rare, might as well be a unicorn.

That's about a 1000x return one way or another.

How does that compare to someone who can build anything viable at all from basically nothing to start with?

Makes 1000x look like a small number.

The annoying thing is it is per track, not per album. This essentially demonetized all my bands albums since 1997 except for four tracks.

I would pull everything except 4 tracks off the platform then.

Spotify gets paid for that long tail, but you do not.

I think one of the main benefits for more obscure bands to be on streaming services is discoverability.

In the Discovery weekly and Release Radar you often get bands I have never heard of.

Also, if someone says "Oh I like this new band xxxxx" then you can find them on Spotify and see if you like them or not.

Fron that perspective Spotify is a free service for bands to be discovered and generate more fans.

Yes I do agree that bands should get a bigger piece of the profit pile, as long as there is a profile pile

Personally, I like bying physical media. I am not cool enough to buy vinyl, I prefer cds. Finding places to buy cds is increasingly impossible

The best used to be going to shows and buying cds at the merch desk or the bands website, but more and more new bands do not even produce cds anymore. There seems to be more bands doing vinyl. I guess with the prices they charge that the markup is a lot better.

For now I try to buy digital music and burn it to cd myself. I would vastly prefer buying physical media directly.

When they say demonetize, are they saying they aren't playing any ads on them or are they just not giving creators a cut of the ads? Those are very different things.

These platforms have every incentive in the world to continue monetizing them but just cut the creator out of that monetization their work earned.

I find it funny/interesting/annoying that Spotify plays the hero when it comes to condemning Apple for its App Store policies yet has no issues to be the villain when they have a chance to show how to handle such issues better.

i see the ethical arguments against this decision. at the same time, we got testimonials from up and coming artists saying that their current pay is literally a few cents per month for getting similar streams as the threshold.

i am no artist but have been making youtube videos on and off for the past 5 years, with only one video breaking 6 figures in views. yet i never reached the threshold in the platform to monetize my content, while youtube is free to play ads on my hundreds of (non - spam/short) videos.

if not receiving a couple dollars per month for my videos is what stops me from my passion, then i need to ask myself more pressing questions.

I recently demonitized Spotify and am very happy with Bandcamp and Newpipe.

Let's demonetize Spotify.

Cancel our accounts and campaign to others to do the same.

I cancelled my Spotify account, and now I am using Tidal, which pays the artists a higher percent.

No reason to get in a hurry.

With greedy record companies as part of the structure from the beginning, looks like they are fairly consistently demonetizing themselves.

When a business depends on a resource that's so well-heeled it can truly afford to waste substantial amounts, you really hope that resource will not run out.

If the balance tips toward dependence on consumers who can not afford much waste if any, that portion could very well be subject to collapse under the strain.

As for demon-ization, looks like that's already in progress quite a bit too.

What percentage do Tidal and Spotify each pay?

Tidal pays artists between $0.0125 and $0.015 per stream, with the potential to earn $1,250-$1,500 for every 100,000 streams.

Spotify pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream, with a 70/30 split in favour of the rights holders, which could include the artist, the label, or others depending on the artist's contract.

The actual amount artists earn per stream on Spotify is often less than these figures due to the distribution of payments to the rights holder and the artist's agreement with them.

https://www.lalal.ai/blog/music-streaming-payouts-2023/

https://virpp.com/hello/music-streaming-payouts-comparison-a...

I'm not sure the technical overhead is high enough to bother to do this... Unless the money made for it comes out to be too small to be worth bothering with after transfer fees.

It may be as someone else said, that there should just be a minimum threshold for payouts. Like, you get your money after it's at least reached $10 or $100.

Demonetizing the first 1000 streams is probably not a big deal, but it still sounds a little wrong.

What is the going rate for a service that "organically" plays a track / album 1000 times?

To misquote Bezos: Your silly policy is my buisness oppertunity.

the going rate is probably what spotify pays for that 1000 plays, minus tax

Here we go, Spotify coming in hot with it's own adpocalypse. There just isn't enough ad money to go around. What can you do? Targeted advertising is a bubble, at scale it provides little additional return and the industry is overvalued. The only thing that has been propping it up is startups looking for quick bucks to please investors, in the long run it was always going to collapse.

yup. their API is a joke and they neutered it for cost savings....not a sign that their ads are successful.

I get that people just want to save money but I absolutely cannot understand how we keep screwing over artists like this.

We pay a small amount, the middlemen gets all the money, 0.01% of the artists get more than a few hundred bucks, everyone else gets nothing.

Piracy is entirely justified. We should pay the artists and stop paying these leeches. The only real value created is from the artists themselves.

I think it would be fair if Spotify abstained from charging me for my subscription if I listened to less than 100 tracks in a given month.

Even if this doesn't really impact the small artists, Spotify is not even profitable for shareholders yet AND still doesn't pay a meaningful amount to most artists. It is only going to get worse from here.

I do not believe that their business model will ever do anything but fuck over the artists. It's also deeply disturbing to me that there are only a few options left for people to actually own their music and the rest is rent-seeking platforms.

Self-host Funkwhale [1] * (or something else). Curate your own music library. This is the only way forward.

* I self-host this internally, for my family and me, since 2019. One of the best designed interfaces / UX you can find.

[1]: https://www.funkwhale.audio/

According to this artist [0] Spotify will be irrelevant soon because infinitely streaming generative AI music will cater to all your "ever changing" desires.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39967745

Cool prediction, but false; AI generated music will be added to the pile of genres.

Honestly there's an existing factory of low effort music being churned out already, AI will become part of that existing pipeline. There will be more music produced, but it won't become mainstream.

Music isn't only about music, it's about the creators and their stories as well. Anyone claiming AI will replace traditional music creation is but a functional consumer. It's the same type that exclusively drinks soylent and wears black turtlenecks to avoid having to think about things or taste anything.

> It's the same type that exclusively drinks soylent and wears black turtlenecks to avoid having to think about things or taste anything.

Nice.

"Technology is a way of not having to experience the world" -- Max Frisch

"You wouldn't stream a car for free would you?" This is just playing with meanings but for most musicians having their music on Spotify or on torrents is pretty much the same. the only difference is that only in one case there's a company profiting in the process.

Musicians put their music on Spotify out of their own will. If they don't like it they can withdraw. Unless they sold the rights to a music label, but that's also their decision.

Kristin Graziani wrote a comprehensive explainer on this in November: https://consequence.net/2023/11/spotify-royalty-model-op-ed/

I think they should basically turn it into Twitch, where I can "sub" to an artist and maybe get their tracks earlier than others or some other additional content that costs artist $0 to produce for the most part (podcast, making of, e.g. a la Patreon). In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash. It's a shame that these hacks (streamers) become multimillionaires while real talents make pennies off actual art.

> In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash.

There are donation buttons for some artist on Spotify. I guess the artist need to enable it? ("Signum Regis" is an artist that has a Donate button for example)

And/or something like Amazon Prime Video and how it aggregates its main subscription, ad-driven licensing, VOD and, that's what I'm getting at, hosted third party subscriptions into one UI.

I actually hate that in Prime, because discovery for shows and movies is never a positive experience but a setup chore separate from consumption, and advertising stuff that isn't already paid for always makes it worse. But for music I think it could actually be enjoyable, because you can consume and browse at the same time is actually a thing. Like diving into discogs.com while listening. I could easily see myself listening to some artist's main albums as part of some standard subscription (that pays as badly as spotify?) and then shell out a single digit payment on one hundred pay-per-listen tokens for obscure B-sides from the label that the artist is signed on, or something like that. Or reimplenent radio, by offering a licensing model where what would have been single releases in the olden days are part of the ad based subscription, but album content is only available through purchase or (various?) subscriptions.

Make it a marketplace of monetization models! Perhaps the right company to try this would be someone completely unexpected like cloudflare? Being a blank slate from both consumer and licensor perspective could almost be considered a prerequisite for a project like that...

Can you see how many streams an artist has?

I'm generally happy to let Spotify stream whatever for background noise, but it looks like I should play some local bands manually once in a while.

How is Spotify not the loser here? Isn’t it more important to say “we have basically every song ever made” than save a few bucks over small fish streaming?

The market is hungry for a well-done music streaming service. I don't know why there is no venture backed competitor.

i guess the economics are not favorable because the music industry is already well positioned to extract wealth from populism and will give a hell of a legal/drm battle if threatened. the long-tail of indy artists doing essentially nothing for the bottom line doesn't help either.

Because after 18 years, Spotify’s net income looks like this:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...

And their market cap looks like this:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...

And your competitors are Apple/Amazon/Alphabet. And your vendors with whom you have zero negotiating power are Universal/Warner/Sony, and their whole interest in supporting a music streaming business like Spotify is to maintain leverage against Apple/Amazon/Alphabet, so music sellers only need to keep the streaming business limping along.

There is no play here without reform to copyright laws that limit copyright to 10 years.

I really wish my subscription to Spotify was just split to the artists I actually listen to, rather than going to a pool

Does anyone know of a service where I can feed in my Spotify playlists, and it tells me where I can buy those tracks?

idk but this seems usefull

https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader

Why use Spotify at all when it's so much more helpful to subscribe to patreon of new and promising artist?

I'm so happy with Tidal. Higher audio quality, more money to the artists and less b*hit overall.

Are you paying more for Tidal than Spotify, or why are you saying that artists get more money if you use Tidal?

Seems like a second order effect: Google cloud is squeezing them, and now they are squeezing artists.

Are there any other comparable (but more ethical) platforms out there that I can switch to?

just pirate and donate directly if you really mean it.

bandcamp is a bit more of a level playing field - the artists can decide whether they want to use the platform to stream or sell their music, while being given some control over the number of streams per listener before a song will be unavailable to stream (although this does lean on cookies, I think, so not difficult to get around...)

acceptable as a reaction to the cost of tracking engagement and paying the long-tail of artists. then again this could probably be fixed with a minimum payout policy and a donation button in the app.

isn't this partly to combat people who commit search listing flooding by abusing the upload ability to upload 100.000 variations of the same thing?

The 1k streams limit will probably only financially effect "artists" that spams the platform with new tracks. It is not like it will make any difference for real artists.

So by your definition a real artist should have more than 1000 plays. I listen to small artist from my country which will probably never reach a global audience and they definitely do not get 1.000 plays but are verified artists according to spotify. This policy basically drives more drivel music and leaves out alternative and indie bands. It's a bad policy that needs an investigation by the authorities to force Spotify not to discriminate smaller artists.

No small artists cares about this at all. Grow up.

So which platform pays the highest royalty?

I did some research on this recently and it's a bit tricky to pin down as some of the information is out of date or doesn't include certain services, but the three that appear to be the best on payouts are: Tidal, Quobuz and Napster.

Can you explain how these platforms pay more royalties if the subscription cost is the same?

Bandcamp :)

Clickbait song titles enters the scene...

You won't believe

believing is without you

you won't believe

anymore~

that’s BS and in no way solving their very real bot problem. This wasn’t reported on worldwide, but here in Germany, it got some press due to local hip-hop labels being involved.

Malicious labels use click farms to push up the numbers on their artists, either by manipulating all platforms or locking their artist into Spotify.

This, in addition to other forms of manipulation such as playlists-aaS, isn’t just a ploy to promote their music. As long as farming clicks is cheaper that the payout rate, they can get paid for laundering illicit gains that way.

But would those cases remain in the sub-monetization bracket? If their goal is to get the double benefit, laundered gift card or identity theft money and taking popularity, then they'd surely want to focus farmed streams on fewer songs, not spread them. Or are Spotify popularity heuristics really so laughably bad that they consider a bazillion plays on a bazillion separate "tracks" as good (or better?) a signal for popularity as a less unnatural pattern?

you are absolutely right, that’s exactly my point in favor of Spotify being dishonest here. They are just looking for reasons to buy for less and sell for more, thats it.

This shouldn’t be legal. It’s a massive abuse of power. Small artists need to be on Spotify (pulling their music in protest is not viable and not going to lead to change anyway). What gives Spotify the right to arbitrarily decide “you make so little money it’s not worth our time paying you”? There’s no other business you could get away with this in. Scum.

It depends on the amount here, which I'm still not actually sure of.

Lots of companies today only pay you out once you reach $X, usually some nominal amount. It sounds like that could be the case here.

Why deal with payment processors, billing disputes, etc for a customer only earning pennies?

>> Why deal with payment processors, billing disputes, etc for a customer only earning pennies?

Spotify doesn’t have to deal with these things. Artists work with distributors who then deal with Spotify on their behalf. The distributor pays the artist.

For me the issue here is they’ve changed the deal to the detriment of the littlest of the little guys. A company that just signed a non-exclusive $250m deal for Joe Rogans podcast, can’t afford to pay $10 a year to a whole bunch of independent artists. That’s outrageous. For me it’s the ethics of it rather than the amount.

> Lots of companies today only pay you out once you reach $X, usually some nominal amount. It sounds like that could be the case here.

This seems to already be the case, in practice. Spotify claims that there's about 40 million in unpaid royalties for people who can't withdrawal yet.

https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-...

Seriously, if you're a small artist with less than 1,000 streams per YEAR on your tracks, Spotify (or any streaming service for that matter) is already today not a relevant income stream at all.

It's THEIR money.

"Additionally, Spotify now requires a minimum number of unique listeners for royalties to apply. This attempt to stop "further manipulation by bad actors""

What a load of manure. The only reason manipulation of royalties even works is that they pool the streams such that the consumer wont pay the artist he listens too.

Just tie the royalties to what each user listens to and what they pay. Solved. No abuse possible.

But no. Have to have an opaque algorithm and do hacks upon hacks to obscure its funamental flaws.

If this is true, I demand that I only pay Spotify if I listen to more than 1000 songs a month

Wait, what. Are you saying that the costs of using the service should be tied to how much listening one does? Because if you're not, then what you are saying should have no bearing at all on how much royalties anyone gets.

Assuming a fixed fee, it's a tradeoff. Do you let the people with more plays steer everyone else's money, or do you let plays from different people be worth different amounts?

I think the first option is worse.

Neither option pays a fixed amount per play, so that factor doesn't favor either choice.

I read this as splitting each user's monthly payment only across the artists they themselves listened to (like how YouTube premium works) instead of pooling everything together. So artists with more paying listeners would get more, while artists who only get listened to by free bot accounts wouldn't get anything.

how would this work if i listen to 1000 bands? the split would be miniscule.

If you listen to one or two songs each from a thousand bands, the amount each band gets is minuscule with either method.

this was basically what I was asking. would this scheme actually make more money for the musicians? thanks for a reply.

The total amount doesn't change, but I think it would be fairer.

The split would be fair, and if the same algorithm applied to every subscriber, popular musicians would get paid more.

Do you mean, how do you handle $0.001 monthly payouts? Spotify could set a payout threshold. If the threshold is not passed in a given month, the balance carries over to the next month.

One way it could work is if Spotify divided say $8 per user across all the streams that user listened to that month. So if a user only listens to Justin Bieber this month, he'd get the full $8 in stream royalties, while someone listening to more artists would redistribute their $8 across all of them.

No I'd like my subscription (which I canceled due to the new UI and new ToS) should go only to the artists I listen to, proportionally to the amount of minutes played.

Search for white noise and you'll understand why this is not a great idea.

If that is what the user wants to listen to?

How big share of users play white noise on repeat really. One in 100?

I've recently learned how extraction of funds from gift cards and hacked accounts works. What I've come to understand that obfuscation of monetization model, with simple info for the creators "beyond this many discoveries, we'll pay you some portion of general activity" is actually a good way to avoid abuse and allow for easier management of apps funds in general.

If that's all they wanted to achieve, then maybe they can pool that "demonetized" money and raffle it to the smaller musicians. If the outcome is only that Spotify stops paying out on something they used to pay for, by unilaterally changing the terms for the users without any bargaining power, then it feels like any effect other than increasing net profit is just the cherry on top.

You can't just say "in order to improve your experience we've decided to stop paying you" and expect people to trust your motives.

You could just listen to your buddie's streams on loop while your asleep so they get a portion of your fees.

Yes, but it would generate less than the current system. Today you can generate more revenue for your friend than your account costs, ie a pure financial arbitrage opportunity. This has been successfully exploited already, and I assume they anti-abuse systems in place today.

Free Users don't pay anything. But Spotify still wanna money from ads. So tying royalties to what users pay would be unfair to the musicians.

Put a dollar value on the free accounts then? You could even base it off the amount of ads played per account. This is such an easy problem to solve. The pooling of streams is the main main incentive problem, like parent says.

Something like 15% of spotify's revenue is from ads, and so even if you do that you have to address the ad-fraud problem.

You also aren't even addressing one of the issues here, which is functionally "listen-time" related fraud on Spotify, but simple solutions don't really work, since yt has the same issue in reverse.

As a general rule, if you think something like "No abuse possible.", you are unfamiliar with the problem space.

> As a general rule, if you think something like "No abuse possible.", you are unfamiliar with the problem space.

Ok. The gains for the abuse is capped at the subscription fee minus Spotifys fees, per account.

This is, functionally, already true.

The gains from a lot of the abuse vectors they've mention are either ad-fraud related (your suggestions don't help), or are ways you steal from other creators by taking a larger than intended share. That is true whether the pool is $N,000,000 dollars statically, or a larger fraction than intended of 10000 $2 pools per user.

The other alternative is a pay-per-listen business model, but this kills the company.

I am not concerned with ad fraud, since it is more or less futile to prevent fraud in pay per impression setups.

My suggestion would however work, if ad money were distributed for plays proportional to how paying users listen, as long as Spotify's fee is larger than the ads share of revenue. I.e. each paying user don't "decide" more than a dollar of royalties per dollar paid.

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/great-big-spotify-sca...

They argue a guy in Bulgaria set up 1200 premium accounts. However, they don't have proof.

> I.e. each paying user don't "decide" more than a dollar of royalties per dollar paid.

Yes, you still run into the issue where 30 second whale songs get a larger than intended share of the royalties from whale-song-listening users.

I'm not sure where the disconnect is here.

I spend £17 a month on Spotify. If all I do is listen to “Bob Bobson sings Bob Bob Bob”, then my £17, minus commission (1%, 5%, 30%, whatever), should go entirely to Bob Bobson

That’s not how Spotify works. Instead a lot of it goes to Taylor Swift, who I don’t listen to.

Even worse like 90% of the money comes from paid users, but most of the streams comes from free users with ads.

Some some barber shop is playing drake 24/7 having ads and 16£ of you 17£ are going to drake because you only listened to Bob bobson 20 minutes today instead of 23 hours:59 minutes like the barber shop.

The pay model is ridiculous, every update is terrible and there is no mechanism to let the company know they are running the product into the ground. It used to be heaven for power users,now if they simplify it any more the app will just pick what it thinks you should listen to, give the money to ed sheeran regardless of what you end up listening to and not even let you pause cause an extra button might be too complicated for you.

And the enshitification begins. Remember that you as users are next.

Find a sustainable alternative now. I personally recommend bandcamp + youtube combo. Yt to explore and find new music, Bc to buy the music I enjoy and __own__ it.

I find new music through YT fairly regularly - it's what got me into a whole bunch of artists I'd never seen/heard before.

Unfortunately with YT I've had to cancel my Premium subscription on - they want $34/month, and I'm not paying that.

I'll move to using third party apps/adblockers, and paying some of the creators I watch directly.

why do they want 34? I pay 12

Probably some dark pattern where they hide the actual price for just youtube music and show you the subscription for a bundle of services you don't want...

Australia, and Family plan.

Also, I got it wrong, it's $32.99/month.

> To continue delivering great service and features, we're increasing your price to A$32.99/month.

It is not exactly the new kid on the block, but I find tons of interesting music on the music blog aggregator Hype Machine. YMMV depending on your preferred genre.

Discogs and RYM are great for discovery. Slsk is also still alive and well

sputnikmusic is my go-to.

Owning the music is the thing.

What works well for me is a metal discord community (run by writers of a review blog [0]). Tons of interesting recommendations, including sometimes non-metal stuff, my favorite album of the year so far is chamber folk / Americana [1].

For new music, I tend to at least give a few seconds to every new release that is of an even slightly interesting sub-genre, older stuff sometimes shows up in what people post they are listening to, but there are also listening pods (me and two others are currently doing a one album a day discography run of Necrophobic), and adopted months: March was Screamarch, where two people curated a list of Screamo and adjacent albums/eps for every day, now it’s Finlapril where a Finn curated 1-2 albums a day moving through the history of Finnish metal.

Since joining, my monthly bandcamp purchases went pretty far up, though. And I’m only buying digital albums, there are quite a few who do vinyl purchases for even higher bills.

[0] https://www.angrymetalguy.com/

[1] Vera Sola - Peacemaker https://verasola.bandcamp.com/album/peacemaker

I hardly ever listen to metal any more but I still often check Angry Metal Guy just because it's such a well run independent music review and community site.

Unfortunately such sites are increasingly rare these days.

And no ads/payment whatsoever. Purely volunteer-run, for the fun of writing/reviewing.

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