While it's nice to have an open source client, please think twice about bypassing the premium subscription/ads to listen for free.
Musician deserve to be paid for their work, and it's not fair to them to bypass all of the mechanisms to do that. Spotify doesn't pay musicians well, but there are still indie artists making a living from it nonetheless.
I hear a lot of people these days complaining about ads, and that's totally fair. But when it comes time to pay for content, those people rarely are willing to pony up. You can see this happening with journalism, music, apps, etc.
Similarly, most people hate subscriptions, but you can always buy music directly if you don't want to subscribe! A lot of smaller artists provide ways to purchase their music that give them a large percentage of the proceeds, and you can get the music DRM-free if that's something you care about.
Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and the distribution system, not to this. If everyone who uses this software were to use Spotify direct, ads and all, in the long run it would make pennies for the artists at best. You're better off listening to music however you please and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists; a lifetime of spotify listening will make less money for an artist you like than buying a single album from them on Bandcamp.
Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify.
I'm not sure that "they get paid so little that we may as well stop paying them anything" is an argument you really want to make here? Yes, Spotify pay is crap. Not paying anything is crap too. Two wrongs don't make a right.
If you care about the artist here pay them directly either through bandcamp, by going to the physical shows and buying merch, ordering physical copies of their music at the label, patreon, or whatever form of direct support they have set up.
Spotify is just leeching of the culture and as drew pointed out you will be 10000 times more effective if you use one of those options.
Spotify is more or less just a signal booster nowadays - because you have to be on there since everyone uses it.
I for one would never put my music on Spotify, even if I get what like 20$ out of it, what a horrible company and service.
Not everyone is on bandcamp. Seems like some sort of north american website.
Bandcamp is widely used all over the world. My band made 6 times more money from Bandcamp than from all the streaming sites combined. People from all over Europe, USA, Canada and Australia bought our music.
Not really.
My opinion is based on the stats Bandcamp provides me. Care to elaborate on why you proclaim otherwise?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066807
curious how do ppl discover your band on bandcamp?
Through Bandcamp itself, social media, music blogs...
does bandcamp give you this info?
Yes. The free version gives you basic stats, the pro version gives you detailed stats.
Europe, US, Canada and Australia is your whole world? Local metal guys I know is on Spotify and not on Bandcamp. I wonder what you think of that. I’m in Asia btw, largest continent of the world.
Of course not.
Those were only a few examples from the top of my head. We also had sales in S. Korea and Japan.
I listed four other concrete options and closed with “or whatever other direct support method they have set up” — I assure you that every artist that wants to make money will have set up _something_ besides Spotify since it’s practically impossible to make money through them.
you are wrong in your assurances( eg: i am listening to this on spotify at the moment Odeon Yılları Album by Nesrin Sipahi ) and your "other options" have nothing to do with how you listen to their music. Ppl listening on spotify also go to concerts they are not mutually exclusive.
Are you saying Nesrin Sipahi, who received a personal award from the president, has nothing but Spotify?
No idea who that artist is. It something spotify recommended and I am into it.
I didn't find that artist on bandcamp or any other non-streaming platforms. only on spotify, youtube, apple music. Are they not equivalent, didn't realize you were making a point specifically about spotify.
And yes I will surely go to that artist concert if they are in my area. Me listening to on spotify has nothing to do with it. If anything I would've never found that music if it wasn't for spotify.
Nesrin Sipahi is a far cry from a small indie artist that relies on support by their fan base.
And there are many options to buy her music as physical copies directly from her labels.
Of course it’s fine to use Spotify to listen to music and find new artists - I’m saying the worst way to pay artists that rely on their fan base for income.
Who said this though?
This is what you originally said.
I responded to this
Why did you bring 'far cry from a small indie artist ' into the picture all of sudden when you said 'every' in original comment.
Your original comment was about 'small indie artist' only ? You should've said 'small indie artist will always set up something' if you meant that. agree that might be true for small artists.
Of course a celebrated artist with a 50+ year career that is a national icon won’t be reliant on digital distribution…
I think that would be obvious to anyone that wants to have a conversation in good faith.
The argument is that this artist is only available on streaming, and that that's where most of their revenue came from?
https://www.amazon.com/CDs-Vinyl-Nesrin-Sipahi/s?rh=n%3A5174...
They're selling CDs, Vinyl and MP3s on Amazon, but their SoundCloud only has 29 followers.
Maybe they screwed up when they went all-in on indie digital distribution back in... 1978?
https://turkishvinyl.com/record/57/
Please connect to reality.
If that implies connecting to Spotify, no thanks. If your reality is based on catering to VC funded tech companies I pity you.
Read harder.
So, instead of interfacing with the actual argument (which is that Spotify pays almost nothing and if you really want to support an artist you actually pay them directly), you decide to zero in that one singular platform of many is not available where you think it should be?
If you didn’t want to support artists you can just say so and cut out the gymnastics.
i support artists in a lot of ways. spotify introduced me to many new artists and told me about their concerts in my area
classic projection
I'm not making that argument. I made an argument that you have better options in which the artist is paid more.
Taking the music without compensation and pretending that you're totally going to buy some music or merch from some other artist doesn't actually lead to artists being compensated. While in the plan where you buy music and only listen to the music you bought you don't need this app at all.
I've spent thousands of dollars on Bandcamp over the past several years, attended many live shows, bought merchandise, etc. Suggesting that one is "pretending" to do these things when making this argument is a hell of a strawman. I feel like pretending that you're supporting your favorite artists by listening them on Spotify is a bit more of an appropriate comparison.
You're supporting the artists you listen to more uniformly (via spotify) though.
If you and I listen to 1000 artists over the course of a year, and you spend $1000/year on album purchases (let's say $10 each) while I subscribe to spotify, I pay $90 a year while supporting all of the artists I listen to, loosely based on how much I listen to them, while you much more significantly support up to 100 of the artists you listened to.
I think what you're doing is better, don't get me wrong, but I can only afford $90 a year anyway.
In your case though, you could support all the artists you listen to by paying for a spotify/itunes/whatever subscription and using that as your primary listening service, while also purchasing their music via bandcamp. You probably won't feel the additional subscription price.
And I think most people who can afford $1000/year for music are not going to be using YouSpot, so I'm not sure why you're pointing out that people can leech off of spotify and then support the artists directly, when the above person said "please also support the artists"
Yes, but most people can't afford this. It's good that YouSpot is available for people who can't even afford spotify (no one upthread said otherwise), and many people aren't going to be able to pay bandcamp $1000 per year to support maybe 10-50% of the artists they listen to. So please save your thesis for somewhere it's relevant.
For the average person who can maybe comfortably afford $90 per year, a subscription service is a much more viable way to support the musicians they listen to than buying 4-9 albums
You say that it is better to pay 90$ for 1000$ worth of goods than to pay nothing. This is a false dilemma, there is a third choice that is paying only what you can afford. Paying only 9% of a physical good wouldn't make anyone less of a robber.
A lot of people here would rather blame those who steal better than they do, than question the industry that allows artists work to be sold off.
Furthermore, I would say that most people using Spotify and alike services do it only for convenience, but certainly not to "support the artists".
These aren't physical goods, and (my issues with the categorization of piracy as theft aside) given that we're talking about legally listening to music you have access to through a service you pay for, I don't even know how to engage with the suggestion that this is theft (on the part of the consumers anyway).
If you have the means and inclination to pay more I strongly urge people to pay more also. There are issues with the intermediaries, but there is no practical way for people who can't afford $1000/yr to support the artists they like legally, while still being able to listen to them.
So if your suggestion is that someone who can afford $90/year should only have access to the albums they can afford to purchase through bandcamp because those support the artists more directly, I strongly disagree. This just further creates a wedge between the wealthy and regular working class people.
Are you suggesting poor people make do with the few albums they can purchase from bandcamp and then whatever they can listen to on the radio? On youtube? Because I fail to see how those are any less 'theft' than just paying spotify and listening there.
edit: I'm actually legitimately confused about what your idea is here and I'd like to understand. It seems like we're both coming at this from an anti-capitalist perspective, but your idea that poor people should have reduced access to the arts doesn't seem to align with any anti-capitalist ideology I'm aware of.
Or are you just opposed to the consolidation of the distribution channels which exploit the working class (artists in this case) but somehow haven't drawn the connection that this is a condition of late-stage capitalism?
If so, I'd recommend listening to some content by the wonderful Cory Doctorow
Also, if, once a year, every spotify listener picked one band they liked at random, and paid them the amount of an annual Spotify subscription ($132), there'd be a hell of a lot more money in artist's pockets than there is currently.
There are 8 million artists on Spotify, and 551 million monthly active users. That's $9000 per band on average per year. The 99.9th percentile band on Spotify makes $50K, and the 80th percentile artist makes $0. If we split the money across the 20% currently making any money at all, that's $45K per year per band. Therefore, the "pirate + directly pay one band at random" strategy would fund ~100 times more artists then Spotify does.
Also, if Spotify went bankrupt tomorrow and 100% of their users switched to pure piracy, we'd only lose roughly 15K below-minimum-wage jobs globally. There are currently 36,000 Spotify listeners for every band being paid what would be a median income for one person. If a tiny fraction of them decided to go to concerts or donate to appropriate non-profits, etc, it'd be a net gain of jobs for artists.
Note: There are only 220M premium subscriptions, so my numbers are a bit inflated. Ignoring the 330M ad supported listeners would lead to numbers that are too low. Also, I assumed people would pay for a spotify subscription which is more than the assumed $90.
Maybe divide everything I said by two?
Link to subscriber numbers:
https://www.statista.com/chart/15697/spotify-user-growth/
I think you're missing a few relevant things:
An annual spotify subscription in the U.S. is $99 (possibly less with boxing day deals and such), but I'd assume the majority of subscribers are outside the U.S. where prices are lower across the board.
But 6M of those artists may be AI-generated filler content, possibly published by bots. I don't think the correct idea is to divide the potential money people can spend by the number of artists. There should be some connection with what people are actually choosing to listen to, anything else would reward opportunistic publishers of low-effort, uninspired music (and encourage people to do even more of this).
Which then brings up the problem: If people were to fund one artist they listen to (lets say an artist they choose to listen to rather than an artist they accidentally listened to a song by once), are they going to choose at random from their list of such artists? How do they then get that list to pick from? How do they discover new music to potentially listen to more of in the first place
Apps like Spotify, (or OSS like YouSpot that piggybacks on Spotify) are both valid answers to those questions.
Then you have the dilemma of who's paying the cost of the bandwidth, and the development costs.
If you want to be fair, I think people should be encouraged to pay what they comfortably can with their budgets. They're using the infrastructure and platform of spotify (or similar) for discovery, so Spotify or similar should reasonably expect some money to cover costs and pay their devs. Then they can also pay any number of random artists whenever the mood strikes them.
If they can't afford spotify, they can still use YouSpot, kick the YouSpot devs one or several dollar per year, and then purchase music from their preferred artists up to the amount comfortable for them.
Using YouSpot is the closest actual thing to 'stealing' btw, because they're actually consuming a resource (bandwidth and server time) that's intended for subscribers, from a company that pays for it. Add to that, by using their software (and spotify's upstream), if they're not financially supporting the YouSpot devs and the Spotify devs for the work they're consuming then we're back to the initial claim (which I already said I disagree with) that consuming something that can be 'copied' ad infinitum without paying the producer is theft.
But I think any of the above are reasonable options for people who want to maximize the support of creators of the things they consume while staying within their means
I mostly listen to long-tail artists, so if I were to pick one at random, it would probably be in the 80-99.9th percentile group. (Assuming 80% of Spotify's catalog is spam -- that could be, but I don't use Spotify, and have never encountered spam any of their competitors).
This would pull some revenue away from the > 99.9th percentile artists, but that's OK with me.
I'm more worried that, even if we count jobs that are way below minimum wage, Spotify is only supporting 15K bands worldwide. That rounds to zero when compared to their listener base and their revenue.
Anyway, I pay more than just a streaming subscription annually, but I went with an estimate of what's going into just Spotify for my calculations. I'm not convinced there'd be much societal impact (in terms of artists not being paid) if they disappeared tomorrow.
It being legal doesn't do much about its unfairness.
The option that you describe as the best for people who can't put more than 90$ a year on music (which is perfectly fine), is going through a subscription service, because even if a lesser amount of that money goes directly to artists, more of them get to see a bit of it.
I disagree with that, because you don't know for sure where your money is going, as all of this distribution system around streaming services is pretty opaque. As far as I know, the money from subscriptions on Spotify is not equally distributed among the artists that a user listens to. Bigger artists tend to get more per play than smaller ones.
The other option would be to spend that same amount on buying albums each year on a service like Bandcamp, which is known to distribute the money in a more direct and transparent way, and where artists actually have more control over what and how they want to sell.
It definitely means making a choice about what to buy, but it is still better than letting an obscure algorithm make that choice for you.
We should also consider that we can favor artists who are in need over those who are already earning large amounts. This is the opposite of what streaming services seems to be doing.
This is not my idea and I didn't say that. I criticize those who waste their time chasing the "theft", who they blame for being the origin of the artists being poorly paid, when the subscription model being proposed as the best solution is actually far from it and could also be considered as theft when you put out the numbers of how much artists are asking for their work.
I meant the generic "you" of an user of this app. I'm sure you specifically don't actually use this app, and just listen to the music you bought.
But the main selling point of this app, i.e. the actual submission, is to get the music for free and no ads. The target market of it is not going to be paying a cent, because the entire reason the app exists and was submitted is to avoid paying much smaller amounts for music than what you're paying.
There's also the artist's point of view in this thread, multiple people saying they made many times more money from Bandcamp than steaming services.
While it might be true that they get more money on bandcamp. They get exposure through streaming websites like youtube, spotify that brings ppl to bandcamp.
This is perhaps true (but I'm not sure it is), but consider the context of this thread: we're specifically making arguments to an audience of people who care about artists being paid.
I don't understand what does attending live shows have to do with how you listen to their music. Ppl who do listen on spotify also do that.
Live shows are generally the largest source of revenue for musicians.
So what? You think only ppl listening on bandcamp go to live shows? How is it relevant to the current topic.
If the purpose of Spotify is to pay artists, then it's objectively a failure.
If you want pay musicians for their music, then you'd be better off buying albums on bandcamp or attending concerts. Paying Spotify is marginally better than just lighting your money on fire.
If the purpose of Spotify is to allow you to listen to music with minimal effort and cost, and don't care if the bands get paid then it does a middling job among paid services. It's probably more convenient than piracy, but I don't know what the state of modern music piracy is (I could imagine a gray-area Internet group that does a better job with metadata and recommendation algorithms than the paid sites do, and that links to a popcorn time style torrent thing.)
I spend quite a lot on bandcamp and amazon's mp3 store (couple of hundred bucks a year maybe?)
I am very very happy to pay for DRM free music
however this getting increasingly difficult as companies don't even seem to want to provide it for sale at all
under no circumstances am I going to pay a monthly subscription for a digital product that can be delivered as a one off download
I know people that still buy CDs.
I've been meaning to dump my Tidal artist list to a spreadsheet or something, and figure out how to pay a few dozen artists directly this year.
One possibility is to buy their albums and copy them to my NAS. Paying for DRM-free downloads seems easier / better, but I'd want to make sure the artists' cut is higher than with streaming.
For what it's worth, iTunes is apparently DRM-free these days. I don't want to figure out their terrible GUI, but presumably there's some tool that'll copy the songs out of it and into a filesystem.
I would buy CDs and rip them up until about 5 years ago at which point the stuff I liked vanished
I'll try this!
You said "Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and the distribution system, not to this." but that's not the problem this specific software can solve. However the authors of this software can work on adding reporting the plays back to Spotify. (And I believe they should)
This software is not trying to solve the problem of getting artists paid, and the suggestion that people should listen to Spotify ads and all is not really going to solve that problem, either.
This is false. And I mean, dramatically.
It's roughly 200$.
Number of songs per hour: 60 minutes / 3 minutes per song = 20 songs
Total listening hours per year: 8 hours/day * 365 days = 2,920 hours
Total streams per year: 20 songs/hour * 2,920 hours = 58,400 streams
Total earnings: 58,400 streams * $0.004 (average pay rate) = $233.60
How high do you think that number should be, to be non-"whopping"?
I am seriously confused about what or who anti-streamers think they are zealoting for, what alternative fantasy they are defending.
As someone who has worked in the music industry (i.e. the people actually making a living through music) I witnessed Spotify/YT and the likes as an absolute force of creation of a new class of musicians, that would never have existed before.
You and I did the same back-of-the-napkin math and arrived at slightly different numbers; I used a 5 minute average song duration and $0.003 average payout. See my other comments for elaboration on why the Bandcamp model is ultimately better for the artist.
I don't deny that Spotify has improved the situation for many artists, but rather that it hasn't done enough and other approaches do it better, and I believe this is factually true.
Yes, Bandcamp leaves a bigger percentage to the musician - from nothing/less. For a variety of reasons, Bandcamp is not actually being used and thus not doing for artists what Spotify has. You can start a personal crusade to combat that, but as long as you do not actually make it work (and I think there is good reasons rooted in what Spotify does well over Bandcamp and the service the former provides that the later won't), this is what is actually factually true.
Let's just skip the part, where we imply it's somehow okay to circumvent fair use, because nobody is making money off of streaming anyway or any such nonsense. Streaming as intended is fine for now. People can just use Spotify, or any of the alternatives, as they are intended and that's fine and on the whole better than anything we had before.
I didn't actually make that argument, though. I said that a user who circumvents ads on Spotify and buys albums from Bandcamp is more profitable for the artist than someone who just listens to Spotify ads, and I believe that this is factually true. A quick review of Google will turn up endless testimonies from artists who make more money from Bandcamp, usually by an order of magnitude or more. Spotify may be better than anything we had before (I don't believe this is true, but assume it for the moment), it is not better than anything that came after.
For the record, I am steelmanning a position in which abject piracy is a social negative, which I do not actually believe, but if we take that at face value my arguments still hold.
1. If you _really_ like an album, buy it on Bandcamp, because it gives more money to the artist.
2. If you just listen to the occasional song, listen to them on Spotify. Artist gets _some_ money, but nowhere near as much as #1.
3. If you don't care about the artist getting anything at all, then use workarounds like this tool, or download on torrents.
Most people used to do #3, and are now doing #2. #1 is just not going to happen, because there's too much friction.
0. If you really want to support an artist, just ask what is the best way to just send them some hard cash every month? Patreon, ko-fi... even straight wire transfer (isn't FedNow already working?).
Why do we keep insisting on having middlemen?
I don't believe most people care about a lot of the artists they listen to enough to seek them out and send money this way.
Not that I believe it's good or bad either way, it's just cumbersome. People want easy solutions. A few of my long distance friends are artists, and it makes them happy to see that I have bought their new cassette or vinyl on Bandcamp above the regular price, and send nice notes with it.
I can do this for more people more easily thru Bandcamp than figuring it all out myself.
Fair enough. Then don't pay anything?
On the other hand, I do not want to buy merch, I don't care about physical media and I flat out refuse to buy something with DRM and/or through exploitative middlemen.
What's the median payout? i.e. is it skewed by some very high earning artists?
$0.
13,400 bands (not artists) got paid over $50K by spotify in 2020:
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/how-many-artists-are-...
There are 8 million artists on spotify, and over 80% had under fifty monthly listeners:
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on...
Put another way, 0.16% made over $50K. That's median income in the US. If you assume the money gets split across 5 band members, that's median income in Indonesia.
This will also roughly be true for Bandcamp (albeit for each commercially failed band there's at least 3 friends and a mom, who will buy something off of the store and at a show, once when given the chance but I hope no one is cynical enough to argue about that being a lot better than $0).
The fact that every creative endeavour or sport is a mix of a few pros and a lot of amateurs (in the sense that they do not make a living) is not an issue.
The value of Spotify and the like to most artists is enabling them to publish to everyone for basically free, no matter how fringe or bad, and to do it all the time. I think that's wonderful.
They don't break down the distribution of how many artists got paid at all, but it looks like they're probably close to the estimated 15K bands that got non-trivial payments from Spotify this year:
https://bandcamp.com/about
Note that $194M is less than 10% of Spotify's revenue.
I'd love to see a breakdown by percentile income per band, but one thing's clear: If I buy something there, then more of my money goes to the artist I'm trying to support than they get from me streaming their album.
Interesting to know. What are the comparative figures for youtube and TikTok videos?
This computation is assuming streaming fraud though. If they see an account doing that, they'll flag it.
Assume the album has 10 songs, is one hour long and costs $20. Ten songs means they get $0.04 each time you listen to it. So, you need to listen to the album 500 times for the artist to be paid for the album. I mostly listen in the car; call it under 2 hours a day, but lets assume 4 hours a day of listening to Spotify.
A Spotify subscription is $11 a month. I can fit 4 non-fraud plays of the album into each day, so that's 4 * 30 = 120 streams. It'd take 4 months of listening to nothing but this one album for the artist to break even, and it'd cost me $44.
Bandcamp + bittorrent would give the artists about twice as much money on average. Buying merch also pays artists more, assuming the cost of the item plus shipping is under half what they charge.
How exactly do you do this ? What a dishonest comment to support stealing.
By reading the rest of my comment.
Copying is not theft.
I did. You made a silly assumption that all artists put their music up on bandcamp. No one even knows what bandcamp is my area.
Bandcamp is available in more markets than Spotify. Not sure how that's relevant to my argument, though.
Here is an example of an artist not on bandcamp . This is what i am listening currently on spotify( I have no idea who this is)
Odeon Yılları Album by Nesrin Sipahi
So mail her a check? Do we have to think of everything for you?
How do I find an artist’s mailing address? And what is a check?
Why would artists not put their music up on one of the most well-known platforms that allow people to significantly support them by purchasing a copy of their music.
I legitimately don't get it.
I don't necessarily believe that Spotify is necessarily worse as a way to make money from their music (I think ad-supported and subscription "bundling" services such as Youtube and Spotify probably result in more money going to artists than all the options for purchasing artists' music piecemeal, like Bandcamp), but artists should definitely make their music available somewhere for fans to purchase regardless
Substitute Bandcamp with Google/Apple music or whatever, the point remains, one can use Spotube and choose to support artists buy paying for their music.
I don't think most people are actually doing this though..
Because its not " one of the most well-known platforms" outside english speaking countries. I assure you no one in Sri Lanka or India know what bandcamp is.
This kind of western arrogance is kind of infuriating to ppl from other parts of the world. Like american tourist demanding that ppl speak to them in english in turkey.
I’m the only one buying stuffs on Bandcamp in my family. Casual listeners see no reason to be on Bandcamp when they can listen it on YouTube or Spotify.
For the parent comment, it’s better to support artists on whichever platform they want to be in, because parent comment feels like he has an axe to grind on Spotify.
Copying is robbing the artist of their revenue. So you are actually proposing a solution to make life worse for artists.
What a dishonesty.
Copying is not theft, it is materially different.
Moreover, I have proposed ways of engaging with music which makes substantially more money for artists. I am not the one being dishonest here.
i mean, that sounds fair?
Maybe, maybe not. If an artist makes up 1% of your listening, that goes down to a dollar, and if you factor in more realistic listening habits that goes down further. Consider that this is paid to the rights holder, not the artist, as well -- the artist usually gets even less. Buy one album on Bandcamp for $10 and the rights holder gets $8.50 (on Bandcamp this is usually the artist directly).
Fact of the matter is that in terms of getting artists paid, Spotify's business model and distribution model is inferior to other solutions and the economic cost of circumventing the ads is little to none, and in fact if you take advantage of Spotify's distribution model for convenience and buy elsewhere for economics then you are performing a net social good.
People are saying about 70% of Spotify revenue goes to rights holders, whereas you're saying about 85% of Bandcamp's revenue goes to rights holders. It really doesn't seem like that much of a difference?
Maybe what you're saying is, you end up spending much more buying merchandise and labuns directly than you would spend on Spotify. (I'm not sure this would be true for everyone though)
Maybe then the solution could be to have a way to just pay more to Spotify (conditional on keeping the revenue split intact).
Something I don't like about Spotify though, is that I don't get to have any kind of say on how the revenue is split. I'd personally prefer if there was an egalitarian bias in payment, and the artists with less revenue would get a greater share of my subscription. But there's no way I can control that, that's the most frustrating to me personally, and I'd gladly switch to a system that pays more (since I currently have the means to).
In fact, I've proposed FunkWhale, the federated (libre-)music streaming platform, should get a subscription service like that, and that I should have some control over the revenue distribution (maybe there would be a minimum revenue split, and the rest I can 'choose my own algorithm', for example one that heavily favors less popular musicians). I agree that meanwhile the best I can do to support them would be paying them directly, and I've found a few have Liberapay (or Patreon) accounts as well.
You don’t understand, there is a parallel universe where people don’t pay for Spotify and totally spend 500 bucks per year on merch for each artist they listen to
Especially considering that Spotify claims over 500 million users. The traditional bottleneck in the music industry and the entertainment industry has been distribution.
Of course, 500 million users does not mean that 500 million potential fans will be exposed to your work.
>You're better off listening to music however you please and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists;
Often, the "listening to music however you please" will contradict "buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists" ... because the particular artists the listener wants to listen to are on a big label and thus, their albums are not on Bandcamp.
The "buy on Bandcamp" advice only works if one likes to listen to the type of artists (typically indie) that happen to release on Bandcamp.
On the other hand, if music listeners want the mainstream stuff (Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Rolling Stones, etc)... they're only on the big tech music streamers like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc.
it also sidesteps the whole discovery issue. I would love to know how that person is discovering music that they buy on bandcamp.
Any of the locally-run radio stations in the SF Bay Area are good choices:
https://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/locate?select=city&city=mo...
Here are some that I have found new music on (no particular order):
KZSC, KFJC, KZSU, KSJS, KCSM, KKUP, KSJO, KBCZ, KDFC, KPOO, KALX
There's also SomaFM.
It looks like Pirate Cat Radio finally sold out to The Man, and got a broadcast license for their transmitter. Need to check them out again:
https://kpcr.org/about/
Apparently, there are now a handful of high school radio stations around here too. Does that mean the cool kids have kids in high school now? I must be getting old.
Also, music podcasts are a thing. I like Dark Compass for metal.
I think the "buy on Bandcamp" advise extends to any other of a large number of marketplaces you can purchase popular artist albums from.
I personally want to own music that I like and not just lose it if I decide to cut my subscriptions. I use Bandcamp for smaller acts and Qobuz for everything I can't find on Bandcamp.
Spotify pay 70% of their revenue back to the rights holders, leaving 30% for operating costs and profits. What percentages would you recommend, and what are you basing it on?
I would not recommend a different revenue split, I would recommend a different business model. And I did!
This Spotify client could autolink to artists on Bandcamp.
Radio playlists often have artist links. Sometimes they work. For example:
http://www.kser.org/content/live-playlist
I don't get how this is justification for individuals to pay artists zero with thus bypass. Indie musicians who grow to have 10-100k+ monthly streams are making a nice chunk of money from it.
The lion’s share of Spotify subscription data goes straight to the labels. The labels are the ones not paying artists.
It’s crazy to expect all the music in the world on demand for $12 a month or whatever. Spotify can probably do better in some ways but I don’t see how any of this justifies not giving the artists the pennies your mentioning.
I'm sceptical that Drew DeVault has a sock puppet account on HN, created 3 months ago, in addition to @ddevault. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I don't like non-satirical impersonation.
Is that not reasonable? I mean, obviously this number represents a market price point: the system has reached an equilibrium where the "aggregate value" of being able to listen to music full time is $100/year (plus or minus all the confounding factors like who bears it and how it's distributed, etc...).
Is $100/year wrong? That is, after all, right about the price of the subscription you're likely paying already. So... it sounds right to me? What's the mechanism you are imagining where customers paying for subscriptions of that order somehow produce payments to the artists that are significantly higher?
I think a lot of the disconnect here is that the idea of "music revenue" is different in today's world than it was in the days of the 70's rock star. People used to pay a lot more for music! But they don't anymore, and all the parties take a hit, not just Spotify/Apple/et. al.
That doesn’t paint the full picture, though. Artists get something from Spotify in return - exposure to listeners (even those that wouldn’t traditionally listen to an artist or never discover them otherwise), global and immediate distribution, marketing, and simple payment handling.
Today, artists don’t need most of the services traditional record labels provide, which treated them way worse over the last half century. And that’s a good thing.
Not to say I think it’s fair how little streaming services pay to musicians, but this is more nuanced than just Spotify exploiting artists.
It's not bypassing anything. It gets the playlist data from Spotify, and streams the song from YouTube, arguably still providing income for the musicians.
YouTube pays less per stream to the rights holders than Spotify, however.
I don’t know where you get your info but Spotify just effectively demonetized the majority of music on their platform. They’ve decided they have the right to just stop paying small time artists so they can funnel more money upwards to the record labels.
If you mean the changes declared in https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-..., then I find it hard to reconcile the description given there with your editorialization.
This will take my Spotify income from pitiful to non-existent.
Fuck Spotify.
Spotify pays ~$0.004/stream.
1,000 streams is $4.00. That's a coffee.
Lots of services for creators have minimum payouts. Google AdSense won't pay you until you reach $100. Patreon has a $10 minimum payout using PayPal. A threshold of just $4 is actually very much on the low side.
I genuinely don't understand how this is something to get upset over. It's comparable to what an artist used to make in royalties from a single CD sold. What's more surprising to me is that Spotify previously didn't have a minimum at all.
You’re looking at it wrong. That $4 per song! What artist only releases one song ever?
Spotify and other streaming platforms pay royalties to an artist’s distributor and that aggregate of royalties from all platforms gets paid out to the artist when they reach the distributor’s threshold. Spotify is making that money no longer exist at all for indie artists.
Ah sorry, I hadn't picked up on that -- thanks. But it still doesn't change the overall point at all.
So if you've got 2 albums of 10 tracks each, then you need 1,000 listens of each album to reach a minimum payout of $80, which you've got an entire year to accumulate. So Spotify isn't on the low side -- it's comparable with AdSense's minimum payout of $100.
But honestly, compared to the effort involved in producing an album, that's... nothing. $80 is not the difference between making or breaking your music career. It's under $7 a month. A slightly more expensive coffee.
I just don't understand how that can be upsetting. If your streams on Spotify are that low, then you're doing it as a hobby anyways, for the love of it. Which is wonderful. But it isn't your source of income.
You are correct. This isn’t really about income. It is the principle of the thing. Spotify is redistributing subscriber fees and ad revenue from the struggling artist to the record labels and superstars.
As I said in another comment, I’ve cancelled my account so in my case it is costing them more than they are saving. I’m also no longer sending fans to Spotify and this year not all of the music I release will make its way to Spotify.
Yea, I don’t get it either. This makes sense as a spam reduction move. If an emerging artist wants to make money, you would probably be more successful performing live until you boost your numbers significantly.
As soon as this change was announced, I cancelled my Spotify subscription. I know it won’t mean much of anything to the overall number but at least in my case, they saved less than $10 in royalties at a cost of $132 in subscription fees.
I tested getting off spotify last year, but the other apps were so bare bones and featureless. I tried most of the popular ones, Quboz, Tidal, Spotify, Apple music, youtube music, amazon music.. i think 1-2 others. Thankfully there's an app called soundiiz that for like $2-3 will sync all of your music app playlists/favs/etc to one another.
ALL of them had absolutely useless/bad Android Auto/Carplay apps. I know at least half of them (quboz tidal for sure) didn't have a way to search in the car app. Quboz or Tidal didn't even display your subscribed albums/playlists. I forget exactly but I think I could only play their recommended stuff. Exacts are off here but I remember specifically sitting in my car with both of those apps wondering why I couldn't figure how to play my fav playlist or search for an artist.
Then the social stuff. I share collab playlists with a few friends. Apples adding these feautures IIRC. Surely not important to most people but they really make the other apps just feel barebones. I like gamification, rewinds, badges, etc.
The Carplay thing is the killer for me, though.
I haven't had many issues with Tidal's CarPlay support. I've only used it in rental cars (so cars that shipped mid to post pandemic) though.
It definitely shows subscribed albums, etc. The one exception was that, on an older Toyota, it only showed the first dozen or so albums in my collection one time out of the dozen I drove the rental. Parking the car then coming back a few hours later fixed it.
Taking the news directly from Spotify? Try this for another perspective: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2024/01/11/spotify-stream-m...
I listen to a lot of music under 1000 streams, artists with 10s to 100s of monthly listens. Based on the junk that makes it to my discover weekly or release radar, some big percent of that <1000 listen cohort is spam that’s ai generated or has erroneously added real artists as collaborators to get well positioned. I have a lot of respect for actual musicians trying to make money, but I am honestly ok with Spotify setting a threshold for payouts to divert that cash to real artists.
Sources please?
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2024/01/11/spotify-stream-m...
1000 annual listens? That's likely less than 1$/mo revenue the artists get no? Even small time musicians I know have about 1000 listens a month
Seems to me just like yt monetization partner program which required like 50€ revenue for payout and 1000 subs+approval for even enabling monetization (some time ago unsure if it's still limited for new accounts )
Unless I'm missing something it mainly just trims out mass produced content
It is similar but different to what YouTube did (which also sucked).
How many musicians do you know of that only ever released one song? This isn’t about the streaming revenue for one song (though that is how Spotify tries to frame it). There are 1000s of artist who might have even been fairly successful at one point who have dozens or more songs in their back catalog that don’t have over 1000 streams per year. Add up the lost revenue from all of those together and it isn’t about just a couple bucks anymore.
Further, even approaching the argument from how much it means per song is granting Spotify a pass that this is in any way fair to artists. Why should the top 1% of artists take even more money while the struggling musician now gets nothing?
Agreed in general.
"and it isn’t about just a couple bucks anymore."
And I want to add, that for quite some musicians, a couple of bucks can make the difference between being able to (partly) pay the rent, or not.
And those are usually the ones making interesting music. So I rather would like the trend reversed, less for the superstars, more for the unkown artists. But this is unlikely to change with these services.
On every single one of their tracks?
Let's say they have 20 tracks on Spotify.
1000 plays/month across 20 tracks gives 50 plays/track/month.
50 plays/month gives 600 plays/year, less than the threshold.
ARTIST GETS NOTHING FROM SPOTIFY.
Fuck Spotify.
This is quite interesting. I'd be interested in more information on this.
I don't know the numbers. What I was trying to point out that there's no nefariousness going on.
No, you weren't just pointing that out. You claimed that it is "arguably still providing income for the musicians". How is it arguably providing income for tyhe artists given the app is obviously not playing ads?
First of all, the tool’s description doesn’t say anything about ads. Second, I’m neither the developer, nor user of the app.
Third, I didn’t say definitely, but arguably. I might be wrong, but I’m not endorsing anything here.
Lastly, I’m an ex-musician, too and prefer to pay for premium and buy proper albums when I can.
So pointing fingers doesn’t do any favor to anyone.
Have a nice day.
If it streams from YouTube then it's not really a Spotify client, is it?
It's aptly named SpoTube, to be frank.
It describes itself as follows:
An open source, cross-platform Spotify client compatible across multiple platforms utilizing Spotify's data API and YouTube (or Piped.video or JioSaavn) as an audio source, eliminating the need for Spotify Premium
A very large fraction of music on youtube is also monetized by ads (for free users).
So it shows the ads from YouTube?
People here all day defending p2p piracy but when you are taking the bandwidth from a multibillion, multinational corporation then you're the devil himself :'( :'( :'( :'(
"bandwidth from a multibillion, multinational corporation" that started out as a frontend for the pirate bay. They were probably friends, as both are from Sweden.
So they started out pirating music and then decided they want to get rich from stolen culture while giving nothing back. That is taking the whole pirate meme a bit too literally.
Their Beta yeah, but the vast majority of their wealth is built on venture capital where they give many things back. It's a very popular service that musicians want to be on. Neither popularity nor musicians would happen if they didn't give anything back.
"If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"
I think the "hacker" part of "hacker news" doesn't mean much anymore.
The Hacker in hacker news was never meant to imply black hat/malicious types of hacking. There’s quite a difference between say, tearing something apart, reverse engineering it, breaking into something that _you_ own, versus trying to tear into something you don’t own without a really good reason. At the end of the day it’s about judgement and taste, there isn’t so much a hardline but there is a line on what we consider acceptable and unacceptable areas of exploitation. Beyond the piracy point, I think few could find this exploitative, it seems like a cool open source project that could genuinely offer better and customizable user experience.
What in this project is about piracy? It does not give you free access you cannot have without it.
The article is still link here, so I say the hacker part is very much alive.
That the comments aren't 100% all aligned is great, I come here for vigorous respectful debate. It helps me reflect on my position on topics.
What's the problem?
Well people tend to forget this is Hacker News. Finding creative workarounds is part of the fun.
HN has sadly become a bit of a #warezcentral. People demanding free stuff, either to train their ai models or for personal consumption.
What is more hacker than bypassing rules and paid services? What was phreaking all about?
Stealing content is not the type of rule breaking that phreaking was about.
phreaking was literally theft lol
"Theft of services", yes -- but the marginal cost/loss to the provider was effectively zero.
In this way, phreaking was exactly like media piracy.
But all of the above are entirely unrelated to the meaning of "Hacker" in HN.
Right? People get so attached to their political views that they dont even notice it.
Kevin Poulsen, just wanted to win the Porsche for the poor...
you were probably not there or in any warez bbc...
I think there's a difference between hacking for fun and feeling entitled to and arguing with weak arguments how you should be able to play music for free.
This entire thread has absolutely nothing to do with e.g. telling how Spotify can be hacked and everything to do with script kiddies at best wanting to download a binary from GitHub to listen to music for free.
But sure, maybe HN is that sad distribution mechanism now and, what's more, we're calling this hacker culture!
I don't think people want only to play music for free. I don't. But for sure this new definition of "what hacking is" is for sure annoying.
This. Period.
“ It is still recommended to support the creators by watching/liking/subscribing to the artists' YouTube channels or liking their tracks on Spotify (or purchasing a Spotify Premium subscription too)”
Likes/subscribes are not support. Artists deserve to make a living.
I’m supremely frustrated by the current state of TV shows (need 8 subscriptions and still have shows I can’t watch). Music on the other hand is wonderful. Many services to choose from, all including basically all music. Different price points for ads/quality level. We should be delighted to pay $10 a month for unlimited music (or free ad supported) and not ruin a good thing.
It should probably be said that the cuts artists get from the streamers are seen as insufficient and that platforms where you give more directly to artists, like BandCamp, are a better way to support artists you like.
Also: choose a platform that pays artists more. Apple and tidal pay out much more per stream than YouTube/spotify.
But any form of paying is much much much better than piracy.
I liked the good ol' days when you could buy an LP/CD album and know that you'll have access to the music without depending on subscription services keeping them available.
I'm particularly annoyed by Spotify only keeping 'Remastered' versions of tracks that sound smooth/full/pleasing to new-time listeners but shave a lot of character off the original.
You still can buy albums if you want. New, used, digital. Lots of options.
The „remaster plague“ is extremely annoying. But that's because artists re-record their music in order to have to give the record label less money.
If you only listen to music that is on streaming services, then of course you would think that they have "basically all music", since everything else is forgotten. I pirated music before Spotify was available, which exposed me to a wide variety of international artists, and I still periodically look up some of my favorites on streaming services, only to find that they are still absent. So I continue to pirate and buy albums from time to time.
Buying used records or borrowing them from the library does not earn artists money either, but no one bitches about that. As far as I'm concerned, downloading rips is the digital equivalent.
Spotify has been missing almost every hip hop b-side I've ever looked for. Like, the eps and lps that got these artists careers started aren't there. I had no idea how many b-sides some of them have until I started looking them up on soundcloud etc too.
I would rather support the artists on YouTube premium. But I have no easy way to port my music from Spotify to YouTube premium
But do you need to get paid for each time someone listens to a copy? The artist isn't doing work for me when I listen to a song. Spotify should pay artists when their songs are added, not when listened.
It’s not your job to decide what Spotify’s business model is.
and is your job to say what people should do or not?
Obviously you have had your feelings hurt. If you don’t work for Spotify, it is by definition not your job.
You know... I have very little empathy for Spotify. Their whole company is built on pirated music
I think this sentiment is wrong. Personally, I pay for content and services that I find value adding (Kagi, Fastmail, etc.)
That said: I am never going to pay for YouTube. The issue is that the entire platform and all of its content is catered to ad-revenue.
I could be convinced to pay for a video service like YouTube where everything into its core and legacy has been based around user payments.
Likewise I am never going to pay for news services that has adjusted their entire offering and content towards ad-revenue.
But until I discover such a platform I am going to keep on my ad-blocker.
While it would be a convenient reality, the people on HN are not even close to representative of the general population, and you can't generalize their tendencies. How many Kagi and Fastmail users are there compared to Google and Microsoft? Look at Google Play reviews for apps that front paid services: even for astonishingly cheap ones, a considerable percentage essentially say "not free: uninstalled! Those conniving bastards!"
And if you're willing to pay for services instead of using ad-supported platforms, you must pay all of your music and other content, then? You don't even have to stomach the DRM from Apple Music, Amazon, e-reader platforms, et al with music shops, book stores, movie theaters, Bandcamp, Patreon, Substack -- there are so many services through which you can exercise your principles and pay for content directly.
It's pretty common for the tech crowd to wag their finger at people who feel entitled to free commercial software and services (e.g. Kagi, Fastmail,) yet do the same exact thing with arts and entertainment. Getting access to content on ad-supported services isn't your right. There are alternatives.
I'm not saying you must uninstall your ad blocker-- there are many unavoidable and essential things-- e.g., things for work-- that contain ads even when they really shouldn't. But you can't just assume that since you pay for some stuff, then everybody else is paying for some stuff, and since the distributors are real jerks, you have ethical carte blanche to take people's work without any payment. Creators don't have a choice to use these systems because people won't pay (directly) for things.
I am quite sure I do not have the ethical card in any of these discussions. I also pay way less than the combined sum of the value I receive from the internet.
But there is a marketplace. And the content of YouTube is not worth the price of YouTubes premium offerings because they embed ads. Ie. I pay to remove YouTube's ads, but not video sponsorships.
That would be like paying for Kagi and still only be presented SEO-optimized worthless content – I pay for Kagi because I feel like they can filter away that content much better than Google.
I am saying that a product you pay for is not the same as an ad-supported product. It is not just about stripping the product of ads after the user has paid.
So everybody not willing to pay for a Gmail offering without ads, I completely understand them.
I actually don't mind ads. They're fine. The classified section of newspapers used to fund journalism in the US. Someone's got to pay Clark Kent, after all.
What I do mind is algorithmic targeting. On the ad serving front, it funds an entire industry that does nothing but violate people's basic human right to privacy. On the personalized recommendation front, it provides a strong incentive for publishers to produce click-bait.
There's one commercially viable corner of the internet that hasn't been ruined by this: Podcasts.
Spotify is trying to ruin that too. Screw them.
Also, if you're looking for a decent music service, consider something privacy preserving like Apple Music, or (better) something that uses metadata-based targeting, like Tidal.
I find most of my music by following hyperlinks in album / band reviews that were written by actual humans. There's a button for that in Tidal. I've heard Amazon Music has such a button as well. I've also found listening to high-quality (local) radio stations with good DJ's is a goldmine, as are music podcasts.
I've also found that non-tailored recommendations (people who like album X like album Y, grouping of opening acts with bands, and, when done right, old-fashioned display ads) also provide a decent signal, since they're typically curated or use the things I just mentioned as signal (instead of using your cookware preferences, or sexual orientation, or whatever).
In addition to being the ethical alternative, it turns out that having bands and critics list things that influenced an album or were influenced by an album is a much better way to explore the space of modern music than via payola with a dollop of high-dimensional clustering.
So, in addition to the ad blocker, I'm not paying for anything that tries to spoon-feed me payola or clickbait.
Deserve to be paid by whom though, Spotify already pays nothing?
A song with 10000000 (10 million) streams , a pretty big hit and only reserved for big artists will give you 500 dollars before cuts, taxes etc.
So not even the biggest artists will make anything substantial.
why are they publishing music on spotify then?
I've discovered many artists on spotify and have paid for their live concerts.
Curious, how do you discover music ?
I also use Spotify and like you have discovered a bunch of stuff.
Spotify is just the state of things, the monopoly. Like lots of other current status quos bad for on everyone but investors, old money, the richest but there's no real alternatives.
Though i know at least some smaller artists have moved off the platform, but people live in the biggest apps now so it's hard.
Soundcloud somehow never really translated and bandcamp just went bad after it was sold to investors.
I wonder if the scene is ripe for new platforms that's better for artists.
There’s a lot of misinformation on this post.
A 10 million stream song will gross about $30-40k. After cuts for an artist, depending on the structure, they might get anywhere from most of that to $5-10k.
Not that Spotify is an equitable payment system but let’s be honest about the numbers.
signing up for a free service (or even just using it without an account with youtube music), and playing music for free, is the easiest way to support a creator, at no cost to you.
the bar is so low - support creators with ad money for free, and some people still can't clear it, or refuse to clear it. the complaining is not fair, it's annoying. if you can't pay, or wouldn't pay otherwise, and still opposed to things like ads, that enable you to get something for free - you didn't deserve to get it in the first place. get over it and pay up or shut up. or rather, put your principles to work and refuse to engage with ad-supported content at all. instead of being like "well...i still want it. so let me get it completely for free. even though i could get it for free, but that's not enough for me." the complaints at their core are just 'i got it for free and i'm still not satisfied'. the annoying kind of entitlement that wants something so badly, it doesn't even dare to just refuse itself the thing it wants.
I feel that your comment is poorly articulated and ignores the primary reasons that many people use adblockers (malware protection). However, your point is very valid and I 100% agree. Compensate with your time or compensate with your money. I personally still have a large collection of compact discs. The sound quality difference is amazing, though people listening to music produced in the last decade might be less affected as that most of that music was engineered to be played over highly compressed lossy streaming and a half cm mono speaker that cannot reproduce anything below 100 or above 16000 hz as found on a smartphone.
in context of music/video streaming (maybe even youtube and spotify specifically), if there's no malware in video and audio itself of ads that would be getting blocked, that isn't really "blocking malware". juuust a little disingenuous there.
even with ads blocked "for malware protection", malware could end up being promoted within content, or just encountered somewhere, and there's more actual malware protection (some is built in to OS). so...it's not about "blocking malware" with blocking ads altogether, is it. especially when a bunch of ads are non-interactive and not even about software but stuff like food and other things. it's more about not seeing ads at all.
and sometimes, ad blocking just isn't an "anti-malware" solution in itself. like, if you wouldn't be able to navigate app catalogues and kinda sus out what could be malware or just steer away from untrustworthy apps altogether, ad block isn't gonna help you much there. "native" ads (promotional content) throw an even bigger wrench into that.
I would actually pay extra for proper open-source, minimal win32 client for spotify which runs every damn winbox. This electron apps Spotify been trying to get right for so many years is such a waste of information and cpu cycles sometimes. Can't believe a company which manages such enormous amount of data is so bad at UI
There are platforms other than windows. Electron is one of the simpler ways to get software released on multiple operating systems without having to support different builds and architectures.
"buy music directly if you don't want to subscribe! A lot of smaller artists provide ways to purchase their music that give them a large percentage of the proceeds, and you can get the music DRM-free if that's something you care about."
Amen. If you have the money and really like a band or artist, find a way to put some money directly in their hands if at all possible.
One: They're going to see a lot more money this way and be able to make more music in the long run.
Two: Music can and does disappear from Spotify and other services due to rights and licensing issues.
Three: It's not super-common but sometimes the originals are replaced with remasters or something that isn't quite right to my ears. Robyn Hitchcock's first album ("Black Snake Diamond Role") is on Spotify, last I looked. But it was remastered for digital or whatever and they couldn't find all the original masters - meaning that one of the songs that used to have saxophone doesn't. It sounds entirely wrong now.
Producers and record labels do provide a service with distribution which artists share their commissions for. The idea that the record labels don't deserve their cuts is confusing, do they also not have employees and artists?
Jack Harlow might be one example, but you see the dearth of D2C music and platforms like TIDAL that the marketing and distribution network does matter, and helps good artists take off. Whether you believe mainstream music is "good" or not, is up to your preference
If anybody actually cares even one tiny bit about a specific musician they should go to live events, buy the original merchandise and/or buy the CDs.
Paying Spotify and similar services is the least efficient way to get money into artists’ pockets.
Okay, I’ve thought twice and I don’t care. Is it okay if I use this now?
I agree. Does Spotify use my money to pay the people I listen to on a given month? They do not. They lump all the revenue together and use it to pay for content in a set of deals with music distribution companies, and some individual artists/podcasters. Which means the percentages are skewed in favor of the big names and labels.
A fair subscription music service should be transparent, and even be able to provide detailed information about how much you are paying to the artists you listen to. E.g. if I don't listen to Coldplay, none of my money should go to Coldplay. If the streaming service wants to, they can use part of their cut to pay Coldplay a bit of extra money.
You can and should buy music you like on Bandcamp (or even directly from artists when they offer it), after you've thrown then a fraction of a cent via streaming.
I work in the music industry and am intimately familiar with streaming earnings. While you are technically correct, I would much rather someone use this tool and buy a ticket to a show or an LP that stream over Spotify. In fact, the ad supported tier of Spotify is one of the lesser equitable ways to pay artists.
Your intent is good but gatekeeping people to use an inequitable system is not the solution.
Paying Spotify does not pay musicians. It pays Taylor Swift and Joe Rogan. The musicians I am listening to are receiving fractions of a penny per song.
Please nobody needs such disclaimers. If people are not willing to pay for it, they won't pay it. If they are, they will do.
I get mixed feelings when reading this comment while remembering the many people gushing about how they formed lifelong friendships through what.cd.
if you think musicians should be paid for their work then you shouldn’t be using music streaming at all
Which would benefit them more? Buying CD or listening on Spotify?
I’m have a list of artist I want to pay back to:
- the Monty Python - Tom Lehrer - Arrogant Worms - “Weird Al” Yankovic - the Dead South
their work helped through different hard times.
With latest update Spotify’s Home is one scroll away from instagram story like short videos with a timer bar on it, trying to rush me with a decision on what to listen.
OP is the answer to my new routine on consuming music, after which I’ll need more direct ways to support the musicians than using using some Silicon Valley cooked poison.
And not just that, bypassing restrictions put in place by Spotify, and where they make money from removing such restriction is a great way to get their attention and either receive a C&D or them adding further restrictions to break this bypass, making it a cat and mouse game.
Nobody prevents them from doing live performances, you know?
There is negligent connection between my buying a Spotify subscription and the artists I listen to getting paid because of the scheme they devised to support big fish only. So I try to support musicians directly and treat Spotify as a discovery tool (rather lousy I'd say).
Claiming that the same people who complain about ads are also those who won't pay for services is just wrong.
If you want to support musicians buy their music on bandcamp or go to their gigs and buy their merch. Don't think you're going to Spotify and doing them a favour by giving them 0.0005$ per play.
Spotify is part of the problem, not the solution.
Personally I recommend you check if your favoured artist is on Bandcamp and buy their music DRM free. The artist will get 85% or 90%, Bandcamp will take 15% or 10% (based on sales volume).
As a hypothetical, if you found them selling an album for $5 and you bought it to download on Bandcamp, they'd earn $4.50, which is about the same as streaming their songs about 400 times on Tidal, 1,000 times on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music or Deezer, or 4,000 times on YouTube, Pandora or SoundCloud