1y ago

Spotify made £56m profit, but has decided not to pay smaller artists like me. We need you to make some noise | Damon Krukowski

www.theguardian.com Spotify made £56m profit, but has decided not to pay smaller artists like me. We need you to make some noise | Damon Krukowski

What its Wrapped campaign doesn’t say is that indie musicians and labels are treated terribly, and deserve a better deal, says Damon Krukowski

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If you want to do the maths, the maximum one can possibly earn in Spotify royalties is $0.003 a stream. It doesn’t add up to a living wage for most artists.
And now, to make matters far worse, starting in 2024 Spotify will stop paying anything at all for roughly two-thirds of tracks on the platform. That is any track receiving fewer than 1,000 streams over the period of a year.
So if my maths are right, this means people not getting paid...are people that would make less than 3 dollars in a whole year?
- Which really illuminates how fucked it is that they aren't paying those people.
  These tiny artists earning barely anything are evidently a major enough cost sector that it's worth Spotify just telling them to get fucked. Playing their content is evidently significantly important to Spotify, but not enough to justify an annual check that isn't even enough to buy a beer.
  
  With hits that low, youre basically just advocating for UBI at that point, you cant expect pay for every little amateur hobby folks have.
  
  People want to listen to it tough, don't they? Don't these amateur musicians provide a service that people value?
  
  Thats just it, number of hits is the metric for that, if its low then folks dont want to listen to it.
  
  Would you say that folks don't want to listen to artists with 48k hits?
  
  Lol thats a lunatics take. You absolutely can be expected to pay every person who gives you content to farm users off of.
  Imagine applying your take to any other business. "Sorry john, I loved the soap, but you only have 4 people a week asking about you, so Im going to be keeping it for free."
  "Love the scarf, really, but you only sold what, 25 this year? 50? Nah, Im just going to keep this. Let me now when you shift real sales, maybe then you will deserve being paid."
  Nah dude thats lunacy
  
  the product isnt being taken and needing replacing, this is like people coming to look at the soap you made. And if enough people come and look at it, an advertiser might give you some money to put an ad by the soap.
  Now, there's nothing stopping you from selling the soap instead. There are avenues to sell your music instead of having it on a freely accessable platform.
  
  Except thats incorrect. Spotify is a store, asking musicians to give them the rights to sell their songs as a package deal in exchange for a cut based on popularity. All music gets ads. There is no "low popularity ad free" section.
  And now you, and spotify, are saying "yeah I know we agreed to pay you based on how many customers came in here for your stuff, but I think what you rightfully and legally earned is chump change, so I wont be giving it to you."
  You are advocating scamming people because you, personally, think the money owed is a pittance. Thats an evil, black hearted mentality.
  
  It's sort of a sliding scale between: making content that is popular enough for a platform to make considerable revenue from it and wants to pay you a portion to keep you there, because your content is competitive and could be making other platforms money. Or, it's a free hosting site for data you're uploading that's funded with ads. Every other platform I know with this model, like Youtube or Twitch, have a cutoff between the two, it's a hosting site for users until they're popular enough to become business partners with a monetary agreement. It's two way freedom between each party, spotify doesnt have to pay anyone anything, and no one has to host their content on spotify.
  This isnt a retroactive change of terms, it's new terms starting next year. Everyone's getting what was agreed to this year. If they dont support the new terms, they can leave the platform. They wont, because they're using it as a free hosting platform and not a money maker, maybe with hopes they'll be popular enough someday.
  
  "Its a sliding scale, we want your content but we dont want to pay you for it, so if we think youre not popular enough to take us to court over this we are sliding the scale of how much we pay you for the content to zero"
  You sound like an evil cartoon robin hood villain, do you get that? Are you floating about in chains and a nightgown, in preperation for scaring jeff bezos this christmas eve?
  "Nah its like youtube bro, the other super evil and morally bankrupt company!" Thats not a defense, why are you saying that like its a defense
  
  His point is legitimate, though. Content people aren't willing to pay for is a net cost.
  There's some line where permissive ability to upload costs them money.
  
  That cost is paid 100000000000000x over from the other artists they are underpaying. If this was really such an issue of cost, and not penny pinching, they would have a filter for content that isnt played enough and remove it from the service.
  Why dont they? Because they cost is almost nil, its covered a thousand times over by the money gained from the platform, and they just want to keep more cash from the people they know cant fight back.
  His point doesnt apply to spotify. They arent a struggling indie service trying to cover server costs. Massive super star artists frequently complain about penny pinching from spotify. Theyre just greedy.
  
  Im an artist trying to make a living with my art. Its not like a normal job where youre profitable from the beginning. Shit is competitive, people dont want to spend money on stuff they can get for free, unless its really good. A thousand free views doesnt amount to a dime for anyone. I can and do outright sell some art, but its taken like hundreds of thousands of free views before i was good enough where anyone would give me money for it. You could also compare like patreon subscribers to twitter followers, it is a huge ratio, way more than 1000:1. You can sell your art, you can go a subscriber model, you can be hired for your art, there are plenty of avenues to profit from your art, but the bottom line is people have to willingly pay money for it.
  
  Cool story bro, it has nothing to do with spotify ripping off artists.
  Good for you that youre okay with being ripped off by spotify? I guess? But we arent talking about what immoral actions you are willing to ignore to further your potential career.
  People are willingly paying spotify either monthly or via ads to listen to these artists. They have paid for the art. Spotify doesnt want to give the earned cut. Your willingness to give up your fair share in the hopes of future recognition is a personal decision, but that doesnt make it right. It just means you, personally, arent willing to fight off the boot on your chest.
  Which is the mentality spotify is counting on to get away with ripping off you and everyone else who cant afford lawyers.
  
  so take your music off of spotify, no one is making you give them your music.
  
  What they're actually advocating for is dividing each user's pot by their listens.
  If a user primarily listens to a handful of small bands, why shouldn't their cut go to those bands, rather than being thrown into a big pool to be diluted? At first glance they'd be similar, but they're arguing that if you do the math out they aren't.
  
  To be clear, what I said is Spotify should be sending them their annual several dollar checks. They shouldn't be allowed to just trim away that cost entirely because the artists are small and Spotify wants more profits.
  And what you're saying is that they shouldn't get anything because it's "just a hobby".
  Fuck you, seriously.
  
  Like, i dont think i deserve any money for getting some thousands of views of my art. I think im getting paid about how much money im making the platforms its on, which is nothing. Im not yet good enough to get a job making art, or to sell my art instead of making it freely viewable.
  
  Well thank god you arent in charge of any company worth a damn, you little scammer
- Any track, not any artist. You could have a hundred tracks getting hundreds of streams a piece. Maximum before cutoff would be about $3/track. Not a ton but could be hundreds of dollars. And combining that from dozens to thousands of artists potentially in that boat.
- Your math assumes those people only have one track on Spotify. I currently have 25 tracks on Spotify. Without advertising or promotion of any kind, I earned about $12 this year. The big problems are:
  New rules apply per song, so if ALL my songs got 999 streams, that would be $75 they wouldn't pay me--if ONE song hit the magic 1000 streams they would pay me $3 and I still wouldn't get the other $72
  They are still making money off my streams, they are just coming up with ways not to pay me for it while still claiming to be "artist focused"
  They claim the "small payments" usually don't get claimed anyway so they don't see the need to make them--this is ideologically "paying with exposure"
  By your logic, since $33,975 annual income is the federal poverty level, anyone making less than that should not complain about not getting paid at all--you can obviously insert any arbitrary amount here to support the "logic" of "that's not much so nothing at all is just as good"
  I have no delusions about ever making a living off Spotify (or my extremely niche music in general), but the idea that a corporation should be able to monetize my work and not have to pay me anything for it is sort of distasteful
  
  you dont have to let them monetize anything. host it yourself, or sell your music on other sites.
- And it's likely a good bit less than 3

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