'Death to Spotify': the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the app | Hacker News Reader

'Death to Spotify': the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the app

theguardian.com

130 pointsmitchbob147 comments

Interesting, though I wonder what they propose as an alternative for allowing discoverability. Do they just want platforms that give artists better terms, like Bandcamp? Or are they proposing moving away from online platforms altogether, in which case I guess we would go back to radio to find new stuff?

As a consumer, my primary objection to streaming platforms is that you don't own any of the stuff you pay for. That's obviously different to these artists' main objection, but if the solution they propose (whether it's switching to Bandcamp or something else) also addresses that concern I could get on board with it (and will always have sympathy for artists who want a bigger cut vs the middle man).

I do still pay for Spotify despite that objection. I find it provides just enough value to justify the cost. I have found it good for discoverability and, unlike other streaming services, Spotify gives me access to pretty much any music I might like to listen to. (Others with more niche tastes might disagree.)

we used to have very good discoverability platforms, e.g. https://last.fm . then streaming came along and destroyed everything.

Last.fm and similar platforms provide intentional discoverability for people who care enough to put in the work. Only radio and Spotify have provided the unintentional discoverability that I crave.

Re: unintentional discovery it's college radio and YouTube for me

I think having some intentionality and work in discovery is probably the answer to the wave of AI slop songs filling up streaming services which rely on an algorithm just shoving the song in front of people who aren’t paying attention.

Way back last fm had a plugin for Spotify and I started finding new music at a rate I haven't since downloading peoples Napster libraries when I wanted just one song, figuring they liked stuff I had a probability of liking as well.

Last.fm still works though. You can still connect Spotify to it.

Still discovering good songs through Spotify's algorithm, like Release Radar and such. And last.fm still exists and works.

Not owning what I stream sucks but I listen to a lot of music that I absolutely could not afford to pay $10+ per album for, nor $1-$3 per single for. Fortunately I own Massive Attack from the pre-streaming era but now I really have to go out of my way to listen to King Giz. No hate on either party for dropping the platform and I appreciate the stance being taken, but now I just don’t listen to King Giz because it would involve hoops.

Apple Music gave me a 90 day trial as soon as this Spotify snafu started, and it imported all but maybe 50 of my 5000+ songs from Spotify without issue, including King Gizz. I haven't touched Spotify so far this month, and I think I'm going to cancel it. I would say the music discovery features on Music are worse, but I also haven't tried to use them much yet. (That, and Spotify had gone massively downhill, I'd be lucky to get one or two new songs a month I liked with their recommendation pipeline. Which is a shame, because it used to be one of the best for me.)

That’s missing the point no? It seems to me that the movement in the article is against unlimited music streaming, just as much from Spotify as Apple Music.

Yeah I'm not going back either.

I'm happy to stream, ownership or not, if my song isn't on a service, I just listen to others.

The convenience and discovery is just too good for me to ever want to pay per album or song.

Call me naive, but can't an artist just refuse to be listed on Spotify? No meetings, groups, boycotts necessary. If an artist feels like the payout isn't high enough, they can just exclude their catalog from the app. And if they don't own their own catalog, then that's a decision they made knowingly and they gave up their right to control where it gets hosted. If they got exploited or didn't know, then they should take it up with their agent, whoever was advising them or the person that owns the rights. They can also try to buy their rights back. Has nothing to do w/ Spotify.

This anger against Spotify and other streaming services just strikes me as misdirected. Spotify pays out ~70% of its revenue to music rights holders, which strikes me as reasonable, although I have nothing really to base this on. But I feel like the people behind this kind of movement expect a much bigger payout, so even if Spotify paid out 100% of their revenue to rights holders, they would still think its too low.

If only it was that simple. Record labels own the whole pipeline and you're unlikely to make it if you don't submit to signing away your rights and the majority of your royalties [1]. Even the best selling artist on the entire planet at one point (Taylor Swift) had to put up a fight to regain control of her records [2].

Even if they could pull their music from the platform, it's like shooting yourself in the foot. You lose most of the exposure that will lead to actual revenue: physical albums and show tickets.

[1] https://informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-ar...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift_masters_dispute

In edm most large artists now just have their own label. It’s easier than ever to do. Even a single individual can do it easily. There are a lot of decent distribution services that will get your music on all the services.

I’m sure the big labels are still valuable for advertising but after you’ve grown enough I can’t understand why you wouldn’t just have your own label.

> after you’ve grown enough

In the mainstream music industry you can’t grow without being signed, so it's a bit of a catch-22.

Even artists known as "independent", like Billie Eilish, only have their big breakthrough after signing a deal that gives them access to producers, funding for music videos, radio shows, publicists, interviews, concerts, etc.. having access to streaming/publishing is only 10% of the deal.

2 things:

1. Saying "hey, you can just not list on Spotify" is naive. Unless you're a major artist, you don't have the market power to convince people not to use Spotify. Essentially every labor movement is about pooling the collective power of individuals to fight larger entrenched market owners, and that's what this boycott is about.

2. To me the main issue is not the payout percentage, but how it's divvied up. I believe this is still the case, but payouts are divvied up by averaging across all plays. But the total plays are dominated by large artists. A better deal for smaller artists is to allocate each individual subscriber's revenue based on what that subscriber listens to. For example, if I love Obscure Artist A, and 90% of my songs are Obscure Artist A, then Obscure Artist A should get 90% of my $15 or whatever subscription fee (minus Spotify's cut). But instead, Spotify says "Obscure Artist A only had .000001% of total plays, so they only get .000001% of total revenue" - it ends up being a better payout for the big names but a worse deal for all the smaller artists.

So someone needs to make a substack for music basically. That's what we are talking about here. Question is, do people think a certain artist or song is important enough to pay $5/month to individually? My sense is no, but perhaps...

> someone needs to make a substack for music basically

Isn’t this Bandcamp?

It is. And it’s also the fairest platform for musicians pay-wise. Though Epic apparently acquired Bandcamp[1] recently (presumably to stuff its IP catalogue for Fortnite Festival, so who knows how long that will be true for.

[1] https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-la...

> Though Epic apparently acquired Bandcamp[1] recently

The article you linked is about Epic selling Bandcamp, which happened relatively quickly after they acquired it. I guess they didn't find any use for it in the end.

>Question is, do people think a certain artist or song is important enough to pay $5/month to individually? My sense is no, but perhaps...

Abso-fucking-lutely! I pay $3.50 a month to listen to a madman with a mohawk rant about Formula 1. I doubt there's anyone who wouldn't pay their favorite artists $5 a month. On the flip side I would get to listen to three artists and every other artist would lose me as a listener. I don't feel anybody wins in that scenario.

There was a study that looked at the economics of this [1]: user centric (UCPS) vs market centric (MCPS) payment system. In short: UCPS would transfer some revenue from the top artists to the middle rump of popular artists, but the small and obscure artists would not be affected much since they hardly make much in the first place.

My take on this: of course the top artists should not be taking a disproportionate cut at the expense of the less popular artists, a UCPS is not a panacea but it would be an improvement.

[1] https://legrandnetwork.blogspot.com/2021/02/user-centric-mod...

I think the real issue that needs to be solved for this is how you will convince big artists to sign while giving up some revenue to less popular artists ... because you absolutely need them.

Thanks so much for linking this, I think it's a great study.

And I agree, I don't think it would be a panacea. But I think it would be a lot fairer, and would help a large selection of artists in that middle tier. For the most obscure artists, while the study says it has a "low impact" on them, they actually had the highest percentage increase, but since their royalties are already so low the euro amount increase was in the single digit euros. And again, that seems fair to me - if hardly anyone is listening to you, you're not going to be getting a big payout.

> For example, if I love Obscure Artist A, and 90% of my songs are Obscure Artist A, then Obscure Artist A should get 90% of my $15 or whatever subscription fee (minus Spotify's cut). But instead, Spotify says "Obscure Artist A only had .000001% of total plays, so they only get .000001% of total revenue" - it ends up being a better payout for the big names but a worse deal for all the smaller artists.

Why would the former pay obscure artists more? Are non-paying users more likely to listen to mainstream artists? Or do fans of obscure artists just play fewer songs each? Is ad revenue shared in the same proportions, but just lower per user? Is revenue really shared on the basis of plays, rather then playing time? If so, and if obscure artists make longer songs, does that contribute to their lack of revenue?

It seems like if anything the current model would end up paying obscure artists more? (If you assume that people who listen to obscure music tend to listen to more music overall, which would be my guess.)

> Why would the former pay obscure artists more?

I don't want the obscure artists to get more ― or less, for that matter. I want the artists I listen to to get my money, obscure or not. That's a simple transaction and has worked forever. If I buy a CD from artist X, I know I won't be supporting artist Y with my money, just X. If I then want to listen to Y, I can support them as well. But in any case Z won't be getting any of my money because they make noises I don't consider music.

> If I buy a CD from artist X, I know I won't be supporting artist Y with my money, just X.

That's not entirely true, since by buying X's CD you're also giving money to the label/publisher of that CD, who may be allocating that money to Y if Y is also one of their artists. However, overall I agree that the buy-a-CD model makes it more clear where your money is going.

Money is fungible. Where “your” money went means nothing, just what the final payout the artist got at the end of the month.

It doesn’t seem obvious that smaller artists have audiences who stream music less than listeners to Taylor swift. Because that’s the only way the current system might rip people off.

> Why would the former pay obscure artists more?

A sibling commenter linked a great study:

https://legrandnetwork.blogspot.com/2021/02/user-centric-mod...

Because they make less.

I just want to understand this a bit more clearly.

So I have never even opened Swift’s page on Spotify — let alone played a song (if there are fans here, please don’t come after me). I pay for Spotify. So did you mean to say the largest portion of my monthly fee goes to Taylor Swift?

That is correct.

The difference is:

1. Put all money in a big pot and pay out depending on all streams.

2. Put your money in a pot and pay out depending on your streams. Do the same for all users.

The total sum of money stays the same. If your audience listens to more music than the average Spotifier then you will get paid less using method 2.

All in all the difference isn’t massive.

No, you pay Spotify, and then Spotify pays artists per stream they received. “Your” money goes in to a pool at Spotify where it can’t really be traced further.

If you listen to more music than the average listener, those artists get paid out more than what you put in, and if you listen to less, they get less. But on average it all levels out anyway.

Unless people who listen to a particular artist on average stream less music entirely. Which doesn’t seem to be the case.

You said "no" but your explanation says yes

It doesn’t though. There is no transaction between you and Taylor Swift.

If you listened to less music than the average person then some of your fee went to the people who listened to more music, and the other way round if you listened to more music. Which is going to average out in the end anyway, while massively simplifying the accounting. Spotify can also tell artists exactly how much they are getting paid rather than having to wait for the end of the billing period to work it out. Only to come to roughly the same amount anyway.

There is no tracing routes with a pooled fund. Only inputs and outputs. And the outputs would seem to be pretty much identical in the pooled system vs individual pools per user.

Ok so still yes taylor swift is indirectly or whatever getting some of your money

In the same way that your small time artist is getting some of Taylor swift fans money. In the end the artists still get paid the same under either system.

But they do not get payed the same. Let's say Spotify has two users that total 100 listens, 99 Taylor listens and one listen for the obscur artist.

If payed by total listens Taylor gets 99%.

Now if those 99 listens are from the one user and the other from the other user. Paying by listens ratio per user, Taylor will get 50%.

That only matters if as a whole Taylor swift listeners listen to Spotify for longer than obscure artist listeners. Which hasn’t been shown.

Over the entire population of Spotify listeners you are going to have high and low listen count users that average out.

No, it was shown this doesn't average out, there is a study linked upthread.

The obtuseness of your responses is incredible. Can you not even concede anything?

The money you pay doesn't have an identity attached to it so Spotify has to just pool the money and pay out. But if it helps, you can think of it the way you stated, zero of your money goes to Taylor Swift. It works out that way.

The only difference is that you bet that your audience listens to less music than the average Spotify user.

Some will make less. Some will make more. In the end the pie stays the same: ~70% of Spotify’s revenue.

That revenue model makes no sense. How would paying an artist on the relative user plays make any sense? So basically there is no direct relationship with number of plays and revenue? You need to abstract that part out. Artists should be paid some amount per stream.

Is there a market that actually uses a system like that? It just seems convoluted. It sounds like just some idea someone made up to back into paying some artists more in favor of others. And I'm not even sure it would have the desired effects. I'm sure Swift is on a lot more playlists that Spotify pushes than Obscure Artist.

It makes sense because each user is paying. I would like the my personal payment to Spotify to be split between the musicians I listen to, and none of it to go to Taylor Swift.

Yes, it wouldn't be a direct relationship between number of plays and payout. It would instead be a direct relationship between user payment and payout.

>Is there a market that actually uses a system like that?

Yes, physical media.

Number of streams shouldn't necessarily be directly related to payout anyway. If you purchase a CD the artist gets that payment once, and you can listen to it as many times as you like.

I don't understand the argument about paying all artists a fixed amount per stream when customers aren't paying a fixed amount per stream in an unlimited subscription model. If I listen to artists X, Y and Z, it makes a lot more sense to me that the only people who get paid from my subscription money are artists X, Y and Z. As opposed to the situation we have now, where, as a sibling comment points out, if I never listen to Taylor Swift the largest portion of my subscription fee still goes to her.

On a very very large average, and assuming that Spotify pays out now in precise proportion to the total plays (just as you wrote - if 0.1% of plays, then 0.1% of payouts), then changing to your proposed system would literally change nothing. Average number of plays in total versus average number of users listening to an artist would be exactly the same statistically, starting from several tens of thousands of users, and Spotify has millions of them.

> then changing to your proposed system would literally change nothing.

That's simply wrong. Another commenter posted a study that looked at exactly this question, https://legrandnetwork.blogspot.com/2021/02/user-centric-mod... . It's not an enormous change, but on Spotify the top 10 artists would have their income reduced 12.5%, to be redistributed to lower tier artists.

I mean, the article is likely correct, but only if the current distribution of royalties in Spotify isn't proportional to the play count (which was presumed in the top comment). And it is totally believable that Spotify adjusts them to entice bigger names to the platform.

But if the distribution would have been equal, then there will ne zero difference with the user based distribution. Because it would be the exact same number counted differently.

User A listens to artists 1, 2, 3 in a 50%, 25%, 25% proportion on a 15$ sub (same below)

User B listens to artists 1, 2, 4

User C listens to artists 4, 5, 6

So by current system, artist 1 has 4 plays, 2 has 2 plays, 4 has 3 plays, 3 and 5 and 6 have 1 play. So 1 gets 15$, 2 gets 7.5$, 4 gets 11.25$, and 3,5,6 all get 3.75$

If we recalculate to the per user scheme, then from user A, 1 gets 7.5$, 2,3 get 3.75$. From B, 1 gets 7.5$, 2,4 get 3.75$. And from C, 4 gets 7.5$, 5, get 3.75$. Sum it up and we get 1 get 15$, 2 gets 7.5$, 4 gets 11.25$, 3,5,6 get 3.75$.

It's very basic arithmetic, from shuffling numbers and then summing them up differently, the total won't change.

So what needs to be changed is a skew artificially made towards big names, that is the real root cause.

user-centric (pay for what people listen to) is explicitly not proportional to play count. that's why your arithmetic does not work.

to make it simple

-----

userA: 999 plays of artist A: pays 5$

userB: 1 play of artist B: pays 5$

pool-centric: A gets 9.99$, B gets 0.01$

user-centric: A gets 5$, B gets 5$

-----

bonus: in spotify system artists under a certain threshold get 0$. which gives guaranteed distortions even if you suggest ideal conditions for the pool/user thing up there to not matter (independence and large numbers).

extra bonus: spotify also dilute the pool by running mass music production sweat shops aaaaand by running more and more AI music for which they run the money back to themselves.

in practice small artists lose money on spotify, and a significant section of spotify artists would earn more selling a few cds a year on bandcamp than on their spotify ever.

it's a scam.

You should really double check your "very basic arithmetic", because it's wrong. If a user listens to fewer total songs than the average Spotify user, then the artists they listen to will get a larger payout under a per-user model compared to an aggregated model, and the study I linked shows that this results in the top 10 artists earning ~12% less, which causes a larger distribution to smaller artists.

If an artist has full control of their IP, yes they can just take their music down.

Dissatisfaction with the payout is only one aspect of why some artists are leaving Spotify. I personally find it super weird how much Spotify profit is getting funnelled into arm manufacturing. Like why should listening to music help new AI drone tech to get developed? Tf?

Is it? Sounds to me like it's the Spotify's owner, not Spotify, that's plowing his money into military spending regardless of the source.

Because people who recognize a good investment see both Spotify and arms as good investments.

Assuming you pay taxes, your money is probably being funneled to arms manufacturing anyway.

Spotify's profit is not being funneled into arms manufacturing though, only by stretching that the money Daniel Ek made by being the founder of Spotify is "Spotify's profits" which he then used to make an investment into Helsing. Even though Spotify wasn't profitable at all for most of the almost ~20 years of existence.

"The goal, in short, was “down with algorithmic listening, down with royalty theft, down with AI-generated music”."

In the article they do mention Massive Attack, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Deerhoof and Hotline TNT delisting their music and then further speaking out in protest- removal being 1/3 parts of the listed "goal".

But really it seems like the discourse on Spotify is making waves again with the recent reveal of Ek's Helsing investment. Given this is the same dude who said that "the cost of making content is close to zero", it's understandable that people are speaking out.

Spotify in the UK has all the Massive Attack albums I remember, so doesn't seem like they tried very hard to "pull" them.

Never heard of the others, but only King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard seems to be totally gone.

>Call me naive, but can't an artist just refuse to be listed on Spotify? No meetings, groups, boycotts necessary.

They want the listeners to change their habits away from Spotify and engage with music differently -- on another platform -- e.g. maybe like Bandcamp. The listeners would discover music at Bandcamp and make purchases there where the artists get more money.

But only a minority of hardcore fans will buy music à la carte like that. Most other mainstream listeners would prefer to have ~100 million songs for a flat monthly subscrption. The tiny 0.04 cents per stream is not a concern of the subscribers. That's why it's an uphill battle.

Seems that it may be at least partially a discounted cash flows/time value of money and a risk shifting issue for the artist.

Nothing has really changed in this regard. When I was younger, most people didn't have huge collections of tapes or CDs, most just turned on the radio and had one or two CDs that they really only listened to one song of. Spotify giving _any_ money to artists improves this scheme (not to make a judgement on "fair").

The vast majority of music listeners aren't music collectors. Those people mostly want to listen to what others are listening to in order to share something in common. It's a very different approach to music than the collector who's looking for new music they've never heard of.

Artists typically fall into the latter category and want everyone else to also. They fail to understand that music, for most people, is a cultural touchstone, not a hobby.

The radio stations paid royalties to licensing pools who presumably funneled some of the money to the artists.

This is indeed naive. Spotify is part of any contract an artist signs with distributors. They will simply not work with an artist if they don’t agree to it, because their business model is based on it.

It's not naive, it's literally what the artists did in the article.

The trade you make is reach, you can't benefit from being discovered on Spotify, it's harder for prospective fans to become fans when they can't listen to your music. You could upload your music to other places but they seem to largely be against "uploading it online and giving it away for free."

> Call me naive, but can't an artist just refuse to be listed on Spotify? No meetings, groups, boycotts necessary. If an artist feels like the payout isn't high enough, they can just exclude their catalog from the app.

Actually no. Or at least not completely. Radio-style play has mechanical licensing with statuatory royalties. Users wouldn't be able to request specific songs, but they could request a similar songs or similar artists station and likely hear your music.

> “I find it pretty lame that we put our heart and soul into something and then just put it online for free,” Rose says.

How absolutely entitled. Almost 20 years ago I would have killed for a distribution platform as slick as what there is today. Is it a generational thing maybe? I don't know, but just because you create doesn't obligate people to consume.

It's also kind of dismissive of the entire FOSS ecosystem which basically runs on hearts and souls you can git clone for free.

But I think that's more about lack of knowledge rather than anything else.

It's also dismissive of a million different types of art and expression that don't have the benefit of this type of platform. Art and its value is always intertwined with artist. Is art diminished when it's known that the artist did it only to get paid?

I want universal basic income just so the most artistic and interesting of us can go and try cool innovative stuff without fear of death.

IMO open source thrived is also driven by the ZIRP era boom. Lots of engineers who made bank and lots of free time (basically self manifested UBI) were free to take risks and create things without worrying about the basics.

It is the most successful UBI experiment.

Now that the gravy train is over, I suspect open source projects will suffer and will increasingly be at the mercy of corporate funding or VCs.

I see more companies supporting FOSS. Maybe not through direct funding, but with code contributions. You do need a bit of both.

Artistic and interesting is highly subjective and definitely not universal, thus it is best handled by the market approach.

I mean what’s going on right now IS the market approach. And it’s why artists are revolting.

Indeed, very strong "One fish turns to another and asks, What is water?" vibes.

Even if you exclude all the discoverability functionality, just the pure distribution aspect, at this scale, makes the Spotify system impressive. Why should that system and all the work that went into it, be free?

I don't think there are any legal barriers for someone to go ahead and build their own music distribution system that is more fair than Spotify. It's just a matter of putting in the time, no?

Before that, it said: "Others such as pop-rock songwriter Caroline Rose are experimenting too. Her album Year of the Slug came out only on vinyl and Bandcamp, inspired by Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, which was initially available only on YouTube and the filesharing site Mega." So her inspiration was someone distributing for free online. The whole article has the feel of an anarcho get together with half the participants stoned.

lol - wouldn't be surprised.

You're grossly misquoting Rose, as harvey9 also pointed out. Noone suggested "just because [musicians] create [doesn't] obligate people to consume". They're criticizing the compensation rate for lesser-known artists on streaming.

How is this that much different to criticizing the cut that a dominant distributor takes from vendors in e-commerce or video games?

I like Spotify but it has got a bit bloated with audiobooks, podcasts and features like videos that I do not care for. I also find Spotify makes finding and listening to albums less intuitive, it feels like everything is setup for passive listening to algorithmically generated playlists. That's fine and it is how I listen to music sometimes, particularly for music discovery. But I use other services and means to have a library because Spotify's UI for it isn't great. I can't help but think that's intentional for some reason.

I will also throw some points Spotify's way for having half decent support for API clients, decent hardware support (that is for consumers, not sure what the experience is like for a developer). I have an NFC card system setup for albums and playlists so I can have a limited physical library. This uses Spotify's libraries because the support is good.

For no fuss music Tidal has been good, but it certainly has fewer artists.

> it feels like everything is setup for passive listening to algorithmically generated playlists

Even worse, algorithmically generated playlists of algorithmically generated music

> I use other services and means to have a library because Spotify's UI for it isn't great. I can't help but think that's intentional for some reason

It is intentional. That kind of poor UX takes _designing_.

I have no trouble ignoring the auto-generated playlists and finding the album. In my experience their recommendations pretty terrible, always a step behind my current taste.

The "song radio" playlists are useful though, you get a decent list of songs in a similar style when you are in that mood.

My new music discovery is almost entirely outside of Spotify, mostly online radio.

I have listened to Audiobooks so no issue with that myself, it was a sweetener when they started ramping the price after COVID. Handy for young kids as an TV alternative as well.

The desktop client UX has gotten much better over the last ~2 years. Nice compact layout options and really responsive scrolling artists with massive catalogues like in classical. It's the first time I've felt it matches their pre-Electron native UI client from 2012-ish.

What do you mean? I can search for an artist, get to the artist page and see all their albums listed by type (album, single, EP, compilations, etc.).

I don't see what is not intuitive about it, how could it be better?

As a counter-point to streaming services and to try and provide an alternative, I'm busy building https://jam.coop - the intention is to be a music store owned collectively by artists and the people who build it. I think it's really important to explore alternatives in this space.

My favourite band (king gizzard) removed all their music from Spotify. I took the opportunity to switch to navidrome with tailscale and started obtaining music via bandcamp and ripping old CDs. It works much better than I expected, even transcoding from flac to mp3 on the fly from my phone app.

Investing the Spotify fee every month into my own music collection is a great investment, and it has meant that I am actually listening to the music and not just playing the same songs off a Spotify playlist every now and then again

If you want to migrate off Spotify but are worried you’ll lose your library, feel free to checkout my tool Libx (libx.stream). It’s a tool to export your entire Spotify library to a nice and neat CSV file

I like minimalistic websites, but I feel like that's too far. No information what so ever about anything at all, just a "Login with Spotify" button. What happens once you're logged in? No one knows.

I suppose there's a lesson in there that they could write an explanation of what happens when you log in on the page but you'd still have no actual knowledge of what happens. No explanation is honest.

This doesn't appear to work. It exports a csv with only headers.

Always tilted by the megastars that pretend to be part of the protest when in fact their asymmetrical comp is a large part of why small musicians get such as a low payout

It’s almost like they’re funneling wealth from masses to a few superstars.

One might be a paid subscriber and only listen a few small musicians, and yet majority of their money would go to the superstars and almost none to the musicians they listen to.

What you are describing is not a subscription service, but the "label/artist" relationship. If you remove streaming services from the equation, this exact same system crops up with precisely the same RIAA middlemen. It's why we call it "the music industry" now; rightsholders get the ultimate say.

Though with a record label, the sales of small musicians do not actively go to the superstars, they may receive a higher percentage of their sales but not the money from small musicians.

I’m not supporting music labels, but Spotify is not a good company either.

It’s not like superstars are responsible for other artists not becoming one.

The whole system follows a brutal power law induced by network effects and engagement feedback loops.

Superstars demanding a greater share of revenue than their share of playtime is directly responsible for lower payouts, however.

I feel that the algorithmic listeners problem will not be solved with this. Nothing to solve there actualy. That's how some paople are, and that is all fine. They will not become more engaged in conscious music listening. And those paying attention can use it the way they need, seek out music they like, not leaning into the lukewarm stream of suggestions.

I used Spotify a lot until I quit many years ago not because of not having my freedom to listen (their approach of lossless drove me away). I use Tidal, it is a piece of sh*t, the player is made by unattentive stupid children with no clue, the single worst piece of software I had the unfortune to use, but the access to the catalogue and the reasonable price I got keeps me there still. I can browse, discover, build up my own beautiful playlists that I listen to for months so the individual palylists become the sound of an era in my life.

If there was a different service from musicians themselves with rich database - must contain lukewarm lemonade too! as sometimes it is lukewarm lemonade day, also oldies and goldies - and not too high prices but a better player (not hard to do), I'd switch in an instant never looking back.

Just like I did with Spotify (for a different reason).

I'm old enough to remember physical media, mp3s, Napster and Spotify. As a consumer, I'm very happy with it. Low monthly price, everything I could ever want. Im sure it's not ideal, but considering the evolution, it's pretty amazing.

Is blockchain the next evolution for tracking media ownership, access rights, and consumption? I hate "blockchain" being the fix for everything, but seems logical.

As a very casual music listener, I have spent ~5x more on music through subscription services than I have before they existed.

If they went away tomorrow, that spend would not magically be transferred to a more artist-friendly form or platform. I'd just not pay for new music. There's already more than enough old music I own/free music than I would ever need.

I can't imagine I'm an outlier.

This is kind of moot. If the artists literally can't afford to make music, they have no incentive to maintain relationships with any kind of distribution platform. So everyone will be listening to a lot more "old music", not just you.

Is this actually happening though? I don’t have actual numbers and would be open to be proven wrong, but my impression is that there are more people making music than ever (barriers to entry have been lowered) and more people making a living off their music and related enterprises such as touring and merch than ever (markets are globalized and contain more people with more disposable income)

I’m not sure why people believe that artists selling copies of their music being a viable source of income in itself is something that’s necessarily critical and/or a moral imperative to preserve. Humans made music for thousands of years before technology made that possible, and after some decades technology has now made that particular business model less lucrative (it’s now very easy and basically free to share essentially unlimited copies of a piece of music, which has tanked the monetary value of such copies)

As long as music is being made, I don’t think it’s a disaster for society that some artists’ preferred way of making money isn’t so viable anymore (if it ever was - what percentage of acts were ever making real bank selling albums?)

I think my point my have been lost somewhere around how much making music actually costs.

Yes, anyone can _do_ music at little cost at any time. But there is a real cost to make "good music" and it isn't in sheer musicianship or equipment - it's also in time.

I've never done music full time but I've been in several studio and live sessions and I assure you it's exhausting and time consuming.

And are more or fewer people able to put in that time now than before piracy and streaming became a thing? The answer to that question is not obvious to me, but I lean towards ”more”, or at least ”roughly the same”

Even if the answer is ”fewer”, and we thought that was such a horrible thing that we had to have a massive social movement or introduce strict regulation to move away from streaming, how would you put the genie back in the bottle when piracy is so easy, and people have become used to the technological advancements we’ve made?

It's tricky. From everything I know first hand and reading, both piracy and streaming never had a net negative impact on the artists themselves. This was often only a concern for labels.

I don't want this to come off as backpedaling - the original comment I was responding to said that if the artist became unavailable on streaming services, then they would not engage with the artist. As it turns out, artists don't rely on these people for income.

Both streaming services and piracy have the knock-on effect of increasing concert and merchandise sales (through reach), which have much higher margins for artists. I've obtained studio grade LP's from several artists entirely for free, as they have the expectation that we'll be paying them in person at concert. If the only way you support your artist is through a streaming service, then your specific engagement doesn't matter.

I don't think you can really compare because the culture is so different.

Before the internet, you weren't going to get famous without being an actor, musician, artist, author, etc.

Sam Walton was not famous the way Elon or Jeff Bezos are famous.

I would think there is less because music just isn't as important as it use to be and there are just so many other creative outlets now. The hard thing to account for though is electronic music. You would have had to spend quite a bit of money in the 90s just to make a track and now you can do it basically for free.

If it was 1990, I would be in a band because there wasn't much else to do. Being in a band then was like having a podcast now.

The music industry was never this static thing either. There isn't much before 1950. It is hard now to imagine how huge folk music was in the 70s. MTV was such a big deal in my youth but that only had a 25 year run of being relevant if that.

I don't think there is a real alternative to streaming or the power law distributions that are going to come with that.

Just because it's exhausting and time consuming doesn't mean that it will be good or popular. Those are subjective measures anyway.

If they can't afford to make music maybe they should change their profession or get a "real" j o b.

Yes, and to extend this line of thinking: Spotify pioneered this model as a solution to rampant music piracy and consequently very low and diminishing revenues for recorded music. For the music consumer it's a beautiful proposition to have this enormous catalog for $10 or so a month. The music industry now has record revenues, and the streaming platforms can, and often do, turbo charge a new artist's career.

When I browse Spotify randomly I'm frequently surprised by coming across artists that I've never heard of with 1 million, 3 million, 15 million, etc monthly listeners, and then finding good, interesting, historically significant but obscure artists with just a few hundred or thousand listeners.

My friend, a recording artist, recently broke the 1 million monthly listeners barrier on Spotify, he's dead chuffed of course, but this is more listeners than innumerable great, classic artists. I don't see this discrepancy as a failure of the streaming system, but as a success: my friend is a young artist making money and getting good exposure.

Just saying: yes Spotify has it's faults, but it's also great too.

As a user, I love Spotify. I would never discover new music in my more esoteric genres without it, and I would definitely never own ALL the artists I listen to. I'm certainly not going back to having to rip my own mp3s; I don't even own the devices to do that. My car doesn't have a CD player. So whether it's licensed or owned, it's digital for me. My tastes change too. I don't listen to all the same artists I did 5 years ago. I don't WANT to own my music. I won't even have the same tastes in another 5 years. Sure I have some stuff I still like, but for the most part, I get new thrills and ditch older ones.

I'm sorry the artists get screwed over, but this needs to be worked out between them and Spotify and whatever music labels are in the picture.

Something I’ve heard said within the last 5 years and I find true in practice:

Nobody (not enough) pays for music, and streaming made that even more true.

Most of the music I don’t intentionally listen to, I instead hear is often out in public (or outside my control): grocery store, restaurant, hotel lobby, subway station, park, neighbors speaker, person on a bike, etc.

A lot of this music is often either the radio or ad-based streaming platforms.

The only people who pay for music are either die hard fans or people who have been guilted into paying for a streaming subscription. Often times even die hard fans/enthusiasts will purchase an vinyl LP or only use the streaming purchase to offset the pirating they do for high quality formats or rarity reasons.

Most listeners of music are not paying for it; if you are…you’re a sucker.*

* I have a Tidal subscription

I remember when Sony wanted to launch their own music streaming service. Naturally only with their catalogue. They're large in Japan, but really small elsewhere. Didn't go well.

This has been coming up every other year. The problem is that everyone trying to build a platform wants $10. I'm not paying for two such services, because the marginal benefit over the first is maybe $2. Perhaps the solution is regulation, I dunno. But keeping marginal costs down needs to be part of the solution. Or it'll be Netflix all over where movie studios started doing the Sony thing, and (some) customers went back to pirating.

I mean, I have three services now. Spotify, Amazon Music (comes with prime), and YouTube Music (comes with YouTube Prime ad free streaming). If either Amazon or YouTube improved the experience, developed dedicated Music apps, and added Tesla integration I'd dump Spotify tomorrow.

They do have dedicated apps don't they?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.mp3...

I recently switched to TIDAL and got off Spotify. Better music quality. Better payouts to the artists. Great playlists. I don't miss Spotify at all.

> Better music quality

Doesn't Spotify do lossless now? How can it get better than lossless?

> Great playlists

That sounds like a skill issue if I've ever heard one.

It's literally brand new for lossless to come to Spotify.

Also that's a really rude comment. Curated playlists are great for those of us who aren't regularly exposed to new music in any other way.

What does lossless really mean. Sounds like an amorphous buzz word. It's only lossless from the master/copy they receive.

Well, what I found is that 'music quality' is not the same as how compressed a song is. Tidal tends to have different mastered versions of album's that do give a different listening experience.

Yeah I've used TIDAL for 8 years now and I've loved it. The fact that they pay artists better and even have a system for paying the artist you listened to the most each month is pretty neat.

Tidal is using a revenue share model, just like Spotify. A higher per-steam payout just means users on Tidal are listening to less music than Spotify users.

Tidal doesn't have free users though.

I love Spotify.

I use the free version and put up with the ads. I make playlists of my favorite songs, sometimes Spotify suggests great music I didn’t know about.

It’s superior to any other way of listening to music, for me. I’ll keep using it ‘till something better comes along. Hooray for progress!

gigging

putting the energy into LIVE music and getting a few bucks, and a case of beer to split back stage is going to be a bigger pay day than what many ,many thoudands ever get from shitif6, oops,spottyfeh, sorry guitarer here,clumsy without strings attached, anyway the web is chock full of tunes so good it's a job to give some small percentage of that a proper listen, and it seems that most of it is stashed somewhere that it just plays when you hit the button, click, music, click music, oh! look a guitar

Yeah, sure, I get it, Spotify==Big Tech==Bad, self-hosting is nirvana, et cetera.

But, one simple question: how are the Creators (especially those not signed with a Big Bad Label) expecting to be paid in this marvelous post-Spotify era? Because, fact: like 80% of revenue (if not more, and the rest is pretty much evenly divided between YouTube, the remains of iTunes, and some niche portals like Beatport) flows through them these days.

And, for all Spotify's flaws, that revenue stream might be something to have a pretty good plan to replace, and I don't see any hints at that in the linked article?

Are non big label musicians even making any money on Spotify given the notoriously low per stream rate that Spotify pays out ?

Even if 80%[1] of all money is going through large platforms like Spotify and YouTube, the real question is how much % of indie money is going through them.

The best bet for semi professional or indie today is to do live performances, sell merch or have fans on Patreon or get viral on TikTok and so on, nobody is living on Spotify money.

Platforms are more used to grow audiences and improve discoverability than make any real money as an indie artist.

---

[1] Big platforms combined may very well be 80%, however I doubt Spotify alone is 80% of the even the English market, let alone global where it is just many times pretty much only YouTube or some regional player bundling services.

[2] iTunes may not be significant, Apple Music and Amazon Music are. They have enormous distribution due to install base and Prime, and they sell a ton of bundled deals with telecom and other packages.

Then there is TikTok which is huge for music too

There are other players in streaming like Satellite with Sirius XM or traditional FM/AM Radio who also pay for streaming music.

The organized music market is pretty vast, Spotify hardly controls 80% of anything.

Yes, they're absolutely making money there and probably more than they did in the era of CDs.

Distribution and discovery existed in the before times, it’s just that they didn’t take such an obscene slice of the pie. Bandcamp and iTunes at least give you the option to purchase music outright. The artist gets a more substantial cut and that music is yours to keep.

To your point though, streaming allows people to listen to a greater variety of music for little cost, and I’ve discovered music through other peoples playlists that have been really enjoyable. I think most people want to have a larger library without paying more and that’s a significant part of the problem.

This seems like a good time for musicians to start doing their own distribution. Not sure about the technical aspect; but I guess it's still possible to sell albums in iTunes? Or some other app?

The problem with Spotify, Apple Music's streaming and YouTube music's algorithm is that it wants you to keep listening and it will feed you whatever it guesses you will like. Which means they will feed listeners AI-generated slop if they can get away with it. So I guess it's time for independent musicians who can prove their humanity to just put a damn ad for their music in front of potential listeners and try the direct sales routes. Mind-you, a non-AI generated ad, created by actual human filmmakers with AI-free tools and workflows.

Of course, there may be a second problem, and that's the youth who can enjoy happy music are broke. Middle-agers are too busy caring for kids and for the elderly, and thus naturally depressed and running in coping mechanisms, and that's before coming to our ossified musical tastes. And anybody older than that must use their running-out time wisely and only shop for funerary tunes. Woe if the arts should depend on our patronage.

I've moved back to MP3 + piracy because I've realized I simply listen to the same set of songs over and over again anyway.

Now nobody including the billionaires will get my money out of me!

The RIAA might

If the boycott was actually about artist payouts it would have happened a lot sooner. The real reason for the boycott is Daniel Ek being on the board of Helsing, a company developing AI military strike drones (AI murder drones, to put it emotionally). This is the man that become a billionaire off the backs of hard-working musicians and used that money to invest in a company furthering the militarization of AI. Morally unconscionable for a lot of people.

As we all know, the bloody Russo-Ukrainian war remains ongoing, and Ukrainian civilians are targeted by hundreds of Russian drones on a weekly basis. Helsing is a defense contractor working for the Ukrainian and European defense sector. So let me flip this argument on its head:

Americans! Do you want to help defeat fascism in Europe? Are you tired of your tech companies capitulating to Trump? Do you really want your music to support the IDF in Gaza?

There is something very easy you can do: simply switch to Spotify. Cancel your Apple, Amazon and Google subscriptions. Pull your music from their platforms.

I'm pretty sure all the people claiming moral superiority will be begging for more AI drones (and blaming their government for not having them) when an enemy starts targeting where they live.

It is also disingenuous for millionaire artists to take this stand while they have the means to sit a war out in their mates bunker in New Zealand, and we die for them.

Ya no, not gonna work. Even I, a dyed in the wool pirate at heart, pays for Spotify. They are simply too convenient, too functional, too well priced.

Like 99.98% of the music I've ever looked up is there, even pirate sites don't have that much coverage.

yep same, and have family plan, everyone loves it

This is so stupid. Spotify pays out over 50% of its revenue to small artists, at a much higher rate than radio did. They dont have much pricing power or margin either.

If this is true, I agree with you. I have never used Spotify, do users get to choose their favorites on that platform ?

Artists are underpaid because subscription fees are too low to provide adequate payouts. There just isn't enough money to go around. Everybody wants artists to get better payouts but nobody would pay the $200 a month subscription fee it would require.

> Everybody wants artists to get better payouts but nobody would pay the $200 a month subscription fee it would require

This sounds very much like everyone does not want artists to get better payouts. (At least not all artists.)

No, it sounds like many people want artists to get better payouts, but not if it means they have to pay more, which really isn't the same thing.

If more than 50% of what listeners end up paying for the subscription goes to the artists, I guess they'd prefer that, rather than the money going elsewhere.

> $200 a month subscription fee

Where did you get this arbitrary number from?

And no, it doesn’t look like everyone wants artists to be paid more. What everyone wants is cheap access to a large catalog.

I find Spotify relatively expensive in comparison to say Netflix. It takes far more capital to record a movie then it takes to record music. The same is true for storage and streaming. Yet, Netflix subscriptions are much cheaper than Spotify and Netflix is far more profitable. Spotify's business model is simply broken.

Spotify needs to pay ~70% of the revenue as royalties, Netflix started their own productions to not have to disburse in royalties (and the quality suffered).

Netflix was the first ever streaming service I canceled the subscription without feeling I had lost anything, after more than 10 years as a paying subscriber their quality declined so much I didn't care about it at all. It's been 3 years and I never thought about subscribing again.

But then again, Qobuz pays much better: https://community.qobuz.com/press-en/qobuz-unveils-its-avera...

Radio wasn't a substitution for buying albums, streaming is. Arrogant wrongness is the worst kind.

“Death to Spotify”? Really? That’s the phrasing these people are going with?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com