I’m trying to muster sympathy for someone who tried to make a quick buck putting garbage into the world, but I just can’t get there.
We tolerate, even celebrate, radiation poisoning when it is killing cancer cells and allowing a person to live.
They don't really have a choice to avoid Spotify though, unless you consider giving up 30% of the streaming market (which itself is 80% of the overall music market) to be reasonable. Even Taylor Swift couldn't justify being off Spotify.
And yet services like Tidal can afford to pay artists 4-6 times more for the same amount of streaming.
I loved the software and high audio quality, but it just wasn't usable because it didn't have the music I wanted to listen to.
From what I've heard, about 70% of a Spotify subscription pays directly for content to the rights holders, and it is mostly distributed in proportion to 'listens.' This does mean that most of the money goes to a tiny number of extremely popular artists, but that seems more like a social dynamic that always existed with pop music, and not Spotify's fault.
And society. Oh well, billionaires are just a social dynamic. Can't all be rich, best to just accept being poor as rent rises.
Do you truly believe that life is a zero sum game, or is it seeing someone else be rich that in itself bothers you, even if it means you are also living better? Would you prefer to be much poorer, less healthy, etc. in order to make sure everyone else is also? That is the awful life-denying bargain your worldview is offering.
I agree. But the way we monetize life and business becomes zero sum. You don't become a billionaire by giving everyone a living wage. Music is accessible because the top 1% are satisfied and the bottom 50% is fighting for scraps.
If you're a Taylor Swift fan that's not an issue for you, but you can see why this starts to feel zero sum to me, no?
>is it seeing someone else be rich that in itself bothers you, even if it means you are also living better?
It's seeing the rich bask in what's only a evolve above slave labor, as it gets harder and hared for the supposed "middle class"
if you solve world hunger, you can be a trillionaire for all I care. But the sheer inequality and efforts to make it worse is why I'm inherently scrutiny of these companies. Not to even mention all the dark arts tech employs to more or less psychologically exploit people in general. These are not good people trying to do good things for the world.
>Would you prefer to be much poorer, less healthy, etc. in order to make sure everyone else is also? That is the awful life-denying bargain your worldview is offering.
I'd prefer to not psycho-introspect into my own life based on one comment as opposed to just asking me, thank you very much. I hope the explanation above suffices. Happy to clarify, but I won't be replying to any more swipes like this.
That rationalizes exactly how we came to this age of enshittification. If you don't value your time Spotify is cheap. But Adverts very much do and at this stage half of Spotify is just regurgitating ads to you unless you pay $10/month (or probably more at this point. They can charge $50/month and not much would happen because the free users will listen to ads anyway).
That's the true tragedy of 21st century capitalism. The invisible hand has failed becsuse people are too lazy to make a choice when they're being exploited.
I pay about $8.50/month (my half of a 2-person account) for unlimited access to any music I want with zero ads... seems like a great deal to me. I don't see any sign of "enshittification," "tragedy," or "exploitation" - just lots of good music for a low price- which was impossible before Spotify existed.
I mean, if people value their time so little, they probably simply couldn't afford even that tiny fee, so at least they get to listen to music they like, instead of listening to ads on the radio with music they can't choose.
I don't get why people think not offering something valuable and expensive to provide for free is evil or a tragedy.
Before Spotify that sort of budget would have paid for maybe ~6 new legal albums per year which I couldn't listen to before I bought, so many would end up not being listened to.
Now the same budget allows me to listen to anything I want anytime- and the money goes to the artists I like in proportion to how much I actually like them instead of how much I expected to like them before I actually got to listen. That seems like the opposite of a tragedy.
we haven't been in the same tech industry the last decade, have we?
>I don't see any sign of "enshittification," "tragedy," or "exploitation" - just lots of good music for a low price- which was impossible before Spotify existed.
I guess you aren't in the US. We just got a price bump
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/3/24170301/spotify-us-price-...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/03/tech/spotify-price-increase/i...
Which is the 2nd price bump this year. But this goes to the workers right?
>Spotify recently increased subscription prices for international subscribers, cut costs and underwent several rounds of layoffs including drastic reductions to its podcast business.
This is what happens with market capture. They run at unsustainable rates for years, and then the squeeze happens when people are too lazy to step out of the pot. And then they squeeze the workers as well by making them do more with less staff.
I wish people wouldn't so easily excuse monopolization. It doesn't end well for anyone but the C-Suite. But as they say:
>Nobody gives a care about the fate of labor as long as they can get their instant gratification. - Squidward Tentacles, 2001
In a way, the same tends to be true whenever people take from “corpos.” That money ultimately comes from people in some form.
Worst part is that Spotify gained a lot more than 10m from letting this go on for 7 years. I doubt they weren't aware of this, but allowed it becsuse those bots let them attract a lot more than $10m worth of viewers. That's why I have no sympathy.
Here’s mine:
“ Unlike physical sales or downloads, which pay artists a fixed price per song or album sold, Spotify pays royalties based on the artist's "market share"—the number of streams for their songs as a proportion of total songs streamed on the service. Spotify distributes approximately 70% of its total revenue to rights holders, who then pay artists based on their individual agreements. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify
Spotify didn’t make a single cent less than they usually do because of this.
This is basically a 3rd party helping with the first step. If you want to look at raw revenue over 7 years, maybe Spotify made less. But they definitely profitted by time by allowing it to go on until it was not longer useful (especially now. As Spotify is using music to train their own AI models. Ai generated music will just mess up the model).
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Do I have any hard evidence Spotify specifically does this? Not on hand, but I wouldn't be surprised if I can actually dig up Spotify dirt. This is documented for several other large scale tech companies. I'd honestly be surprised if Spotify was a special case.
I hope that explanation suffices, or is at least more satifactory than what you interpreted as "no, you're wrong".
I listen to a lot of EDM on Spotify while working, and nobody has ever accused me of tasteful discernment when it comes to music. I suspect it's only a matter of time before I 'like' an AI-composed song that no one else has ever heard before, after a bot uploads it automatically as part of some kind of scam and Spotify recommends it based on my previous likes.
Borges more-or-less said this would happen, so when it does, I won't be able to say I wasn't warned.