Angry Metal Guy Speaks: On Spotify | Hacker News Reader

Angry Metal Guy Speaks: On Spotify

angrymetalguy.com

27 pointsnixass19 comments

Buying an album from e.g. Bandcamp is a better way to support a band than streaming their music on Spotify by literal orders of magnitude: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-artists-e...

These days I listen to virtually all of my music from a Plex server containing all the music I've bought over the last few decades of my life. They have an app called Plexamp that brings almost all of the conveniences of Spotify to your local music collection (searching, streaming, offline downloads, smart playlists, auto artist mixes, etc.)

On the first Friday of every month (sometimes, but not always, "Bandcamp Friday") I buy a few more albums for the collection. I wind up spending more on music monthly than I would for a Spotify subscription, but not by a whole lot.

I've recently adopted this model (though I've been buying on the iTunes Store as it's DRM free and I have a hard time finding the larger or really tiny artists on band camp). Plexamp has been awesome and while I miss the discovery of Spotify, I am glad I left. I was a customer from 2012 to 2023 (11 years) which is kinda nuts when you think about it.

Another good place to get DRM free music is 7Digital! That's my go-to place when Bandcamp doesn't have it. Their prices are often a lot better than the sites that cater to audiophiles, though you can still buy high-res FLAC there if that's your thing.

https://us.7digital.com/

For the unaware: on Bandcamp Fridays, artists and labels get 100% of what you pay. You can see the schedule for the rest of the year here:

https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays

https://isitbandcampfriday.com/

I release on Bandcamp, and then on streaming platforms slightly later, exept for Spotify which I never release on because they're awful. As a small comparison, for over 400k streams across all platforms, I've earned a grand total of €9.25. In the same time on Bandcamp, somewhere around €1k.

* Anything I make from my music gets donated to charity, so I'm obviously not in it for the money anyway.

I fully get this, but I think the reality is more complicated.

Prior to Spotify, if you didn't have money you were pirating. Whilst there was something magical about knowing every drumfill on an album as a 15 year old because you could only afford to buy one or two a month, Spotify absolutely opened up the world. As a listener you could discover without cost or piracy. Being a musician (that made money) was never easy, but now it could be done without a label and with some hustle.

Aside from a few 'Tidal only' exclusives, the music industry has mostly avoided the fractured model the TV and Film industry suffers from. Pretty much every record ends up on pretty much every service (as opposed to me needing to subscribe to Netflix, Prime and Disney).

It pains me to think we'll end up (back) in a world where you need 3 subscriptions (or worse) piracy. And sure, people could go back to buying every record, but they won't.

Anyway. Complicated.

And FWIW, I agree, Spotify does itself zero favours and could do soooo much better for artists.

What could they do? They have a pot of all the money they make, 70% gets paid out to artists, 30% goes to Spotify. Same as Tidal, more than Apple Music. Any plan will involve shuffling around the same pot of money and the last time they tried to "concentrate" the money by dropping songs with less than 1000 plays everyone hated it.

Zooming out to all the services, how the royalty model currently works out is that's all the money there is in streaming. And divided up it's pennies. All that can be reasonably done is shift how we allocate it. And large rightsholders who have the most leverage love the current system where the allocation is by total plays globally across the service.

I don't know? As I said. Complicated. Are they still paying bigger artists a larger proportional share? Perhaps start with that.

They negotiate lower royalty rates with music factories churning out content, then tweak their playlists to use more of the cheaper music.

So I guess, at minimum, they could avoid undercutting the artists on their platform

https://archive.ph/dudYu

I've recently discovered there's a lot of stuff like covers even by relatively mainstream artists that you can get from YouTube Music but not on the other platforms like Spotify.

Using AI generated art in a blog post where one of the major points is big companies using AI art to replace artists is ironic.

He defends this choice in the comments by saying they have no art budget. I wonder if he would be cool with me only listening to AI generated music because I have no music budget?

Probably?

Yes, though I also liked the overall point of the post. Spotify recommendations are shit, and any playlist made by Spotify is full of garbage. I guess Ek knows this and, perhaps unconsciously, sees himself as evil, doing what's legal no matter how bad it is, with his weapon investments...

As someone who's been reading Angry Metal Guy for more than seven years, I hated the decision to use the AI-generated images in this post, too. But don't let that get in the way of the main idea: buy albums on Bandcamp if you can afford it, use Apple Music or Tidal otherwise.

I vividly recall Weird Al's video not-so-subtly criticizing Spotify's payment model. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvePsU0IgKA

> Spotify pays an average of $0.00318 per stream. That means it takes over 314 streams to make a single dollar on Spotify. [...] By contrast, Tidal pays $0.01284 per stream ($12,840 per million), while Apple Music pays between $0.008 and $0.01 (8-10,000 per million).

This is extremely misleading. Spotify has regional pricing; for streams from the US it's around $0.01/stream (not on my music computer right now so can't see the exact number). The "average" may be a lot lower just because Spotify is available in more countries with lower per-stream rates.

> AI tracks falsely attributed to deceased artists like Blaze Foley—a country singer who died in 1989—were found on their official Spotify pages, which raises a ton of questions about how these are curated.

I hate this too and I wish Spotify would do more about it, but this is a common nefarious tactic by musicians, not by Spotify. The idea is that you upload a song with multiple artists credits including yourself + some more popular musicians. Preferably famous enough to get streams but not famous enough to get instantly noticed. Unsuspecting listeners will get your track in their Release Radar, Discover Weekly etc feeds because they're following the more popular artist. You collect the stream revenue.

People who do this should be insta-banned from Spotify, for sure, but this isn't Spotify doing anything malicious.

> In response, bands that I have never fucking heard of like Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu have announced they are removing their music from Spotify

I realize it's a metal blog but c'mon, if you're a music blogger you can take the five seconds to search (or ask an LLM...) to find out that Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu are extremely popular indie darlings, and not sub-100 follower Soundcloud artists.

I suspect that in truth, he did look them up, but wanted to shit on non-metal music subtly.

His main beef, which I share, is the idea of music related profits bieng funnled strait into weapons technology development is flaunting a sneering dismisal of anything decent. And Angry Metal Guy seems to be a basicly pro music and have fun be good type of person, and I enjoyed the read, and will see if any of the music they review, clicks.

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