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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?

  • Some context is that this is Spotify's first profitable quarter in quite a while. Also, there are 11 million artists on Spotify. I won't pretend to have any data on listening distribution, but even naively and stupidly going with a uniform split, that's of course $5 per artist if you eliminated Spotify's profit entirely. In reality, most of those will have next to no listeners, and the vast majority of streams are going to the top several thousand.

    The deeper question to ask is where all the streaming revenue is actually going, and the answer to that isn't to line Spotify's pockets; it's to the labels.

    • It's a bit of a confusing situation. Spotify pays the labels for the rights, but also has to pay the artists? Do the artists not get money from the labels for the money they got from seeling their songs? Do artists that own their own songs get a larger cut from Spotify?

      And yeah 56mil is nothing to a business like this, I'm surprised it's not more profitable with all the subscriptions and ad money. It's like THE platform for music nowadays.

  • 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.

    Honestly, does the 1k floor matter much? Based on the above text, the most that such a track can possibly make is $3/year. It's a safe bet that most aren't sitting right at 999 views and the maximum revenue per track; most are probably well below that. I have a hard time seeing someone caring much about that.

    I'm not saying that there isn't possibly some kind of business model for which a track making $1/year or something this might make sense (massive numbers of cheap machine-generated tracks targeting very specific tastes, that all get a few views each). But for conventionally-produced music, I think that if you're making a song that's generating 50 cents or 10 cents a year or something, it's basically not on your radar financially.

  • Fuck em..
    Just buy music directly from the artist whenever possible....

  • After several of my favorite songs disappeared from Spotify, I've adopted a different approach to music.

    If I see on on a band show merch stand, I buy a cassette. It's more of a novelty item and a way to slightly support the band. While I do have a portable tape player, I only rarely take it out. I switched from LPs to tapes because of the costs and huge effort associated with playing or storing them (that is, if you do it right are are not OK with fucking up your LPs), but tapes are cool and don't have that many storage or playing problems.

    Other than that, I've stopped paying for any kind of streaming services, and save the 10$ per month to just buy one or two (new or old) albums from my favourite artists on Bandcamp, that I've spend the last month listening to the most. The albums I buy I add to my NAS library, which usually replaces stolen copies of said albums that I've previously got from Redacted.

    This allows me to keep a pretty expansive library, by just stealing what I need, but with a promise that I'll eventually buy the album (using the money I saved on streaming services), if it's something that I've listened to extensively. I'm also not at mercy of streaming services, that can take away my music whenever they decide to.

    So far I've been doing this for a few years, and even increased my budget for just buying albums if I can't immediately find them on Redacted.

  • I have some questions about the royalties and the collective bargaining:

    1. Are the payments from streaming in addition to payment for being a songwriter via ASCAP or whatever royalty facilitator is used?
    2. If you have not signed to a label, or had a previous contract, is there anything stopping that person from collective bargaining? It seems to me if there is no contract, then they are not a supplier unless they want to be.

    I don't use Spotify or any paid service, they rarely have the music I listen to anyway. I do give donations to SOMA FM for groove salad, but I imagine they too are paying the bare minimum - a radio type royalty. But I also tend to buy physical music from the musicians I like and I do go out to see performances. By the way, although I don't know Galaxie 500, I do recognize the Ornette Coleman reference; I do listen to Ornette live music from time to time.

    There are a lot of issues here. I think you should have the right to own the company (streaming service) if you could be allowed to collectively get musicians to create a co-op or something like that. On the other hand I find it confusing when compared to my own work, where the company owns the code I write. I do not get paid every time it runs for the rest of my life, so why should you? But I get that the music industry corporations are ruthless, exploitive and chew up talent and spit them out, and are using the streaming services for their own benefit.

    Some people might say what are you complaining about? You have a platform that is freely advertising your music, it is up to you to convert that to money. Other people might say that without your music, there would not be a platform. So once again, it seems the only way out is to have your own musician ran platform. So I support that, thanks for the shout out to the issues you face in collective bargaining, and the current legislation in the US.

    • I do not get paid every time it runs for the rest of my life, so why should you?

      Sorry if I misunderstood you, but this feels rather easy to answer: because you are being paid to write the code. Spotify doesn't pay anyone to write music (well maybe they technically do for some ads or something, but it's definitely not how they acquire more music to add to the library), they just pay for streaming rights on music that was somehow already independently produced. And tiny unknown musicians have no leverage to negotiate better terms than what Spotify offers.

  • 🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary My current band, Damon & Naomi, only provided the soundtrack for a comparatively modest trek, “from Berlin to Beijing three times”.

    We’ve been hearing these slogans for decades, while watching our incomes from creative work go down and down, until finally now, for many of us on Spotify, they will hit absolute zero.

    Down at the level of most tracks on the platform, a devoted fan who listens to the work of a lesser known artist over and over still pays most or all their subscription money to Ed Sheeran, Drake, Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny.

    You can count me among that number, along with the US-based advocacy group I am a part of, United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW); or Tom Gray of the band Gomez, who launched the very visible campaign #BrokenRecord in the UK.

    We have been calling for a switch from this so-called pro-rata accounting, to a user-centric system that would reward artists directly with the money paid into the pot by those who actually listen to our work.

    None of these three extremely well-capitalised corporations need to listen to artists at the low end of the scale like me, even though collectively we are providing the bulk of content on their platforms.

    Saved 78% of original text. :::

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