I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come.
I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember those - the headphones hanging from the wall with 5-10 albums pre-loaded) never had Metal Albums.
My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. The entire backwall of my room was taken up by a stereo and an ocean of CD stands.
That was expensive. Really expensive. At somewhere around $15-20 dollar for an Album, buying an Album a week took up about all my allowance - and most of the measly income from side jobs I've made as an adolescent.
Would you have told me back then, that for just 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. And I would have a super knowledgeable entity that suggests new stuff to me. And I could just listen to a track or two without buying an Album. And it wouldn't take up space. And it didn't have CDs that could get scratched - I think I would have fainted.
Long story short - yes, Spotify isn't perfect - but dear god, is it (and related services) amazing relative to what I had when I was tiny.
By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...)
But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole - that kid playing some pop song on repeat 24/7, that restaurant playing Bangla music in the background whenever it's open, or the spammer uploading 10000 machine-generated tracks and setting an army of bots with stolen credentials to listen to them on random shuffle - they all direct Spotify's artist pool money much, much better than you.
Weren't we all complaining 20 y ago that music labels were giving bands pennies on the dollar and the only way they could actually live off of the music was by touring and selling merch?
I think Radiohead then did the groundbreaking selling of mp3s for a pay what you want fee.
Now the baddie is Spotify.
Didn’t Louis C.K sell his standup stuff direct to fans for 5$ for a DRM free downloadable mp3, from his website?
Why don’t more artists do that?
They do. Bandcamp is a thing, and it's pretty much that, minus a fee for the infrastructure.
But it's not a panacea. An old classmate of mine who's a decently successful Jazz artist now (by Jazz artist standard), had scammers upload her album to Bandcamp without her knowledge. They defrauded a lot of money from her actual fans, probably more than she ever made on Spotify.
Was your classmate already on Bandcamp?
* Bandcamp, now owned by Songtradr, that promptly fired half its employees.
Ironically part of signing onto a label is providing protection from stuff like this.
Amazing, thanks for mentioning this! I had no idea. He looks to sell everything on there, not just mp3s, and they are well priced! Just bought a couple of videos of his performances, and it does indeed include DRM-free .mp4 downloads. Even includes a .srt file for subtitles!
I bought it when he released it. It was good for him but arguably he lowered his worth and took a pay cut, and it also set a bit of a price ceiling base rate for comedy specials at 5$, which if you aren’t the #1 comedian at the time like Louis was you can’t bring in the same sales volume.
Doesn't Spotify share half its profits too? From my understanding it's still the music labels that are not giving the artists their share.
What profits?
It's actually 70% of REVENUE according to this: https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per....
If that is the case, the artists can easily sue the labels for violating the terms of the contract. But the fair share is just what the two signing parties agreed to.
Yes, the music labels have a conflict of interest because they took financial positions (equity) in the streaming services in exchange for giving artists lower rates. So they don't really represent the artists. They instead joined up with the streamers to screw over the artists.
It wasn't that groundbreaking. Radiohead were already massively popular despite taking the anti-Britpop, anti-commercial rock route in the '90s. The online MP3 thing in 2007 was a bit of a publicity stunt -- the record was still distributed by XL , which retained all the traditional distribution channels.
I believe Smashing Pumpkins actually beat them to it by several years by releasing Machina II for free online in 2000 after the breakup of the band.
It was ground breaking, taking into account that Radiohead released a critically acclaimed album. In Rainbows had a digital release that was pay what you want, not exactly the same as putting something out for free after breaking up.
Worse than that, I remember reading articles about how some artists didn't "make" a single dollar from their first album that sold millions. It all went to the record company and paid for marketing and advances.
Sometimes they didn't begin to see revenue until 2nd or 3rd albums.
Labels did scum stuff like have sublabel go belly up (oops no royalties anymore), not paying royalties, not giving artists royalties when on VA album, and downright piracy, and enforcement of centralization via signing rights away to (equivalent of) RIAA. These are just examples from memory talking to artists.
I feel like the biggest loss from the days of big record companies is that no one is going to front a promising young band enough to go away together and make their 'Dark Side of the Moon' or 'OK Computer'
* I know both bands probably could've self-financed those projects by that point in their careers, but would they have? And would their role as investors have changed their artistic decisions?
What is noteworthy about these albums that the artists would not have made them otherwise?
Pink Floyd’s next album had the cover and best song dedicated to saying how much they hated the record label
It was also when CDs were $19.99-25 which I distinctly remember because I was 10 in 1995 when I bought my first CDs (smash, it was written, dookie) and I could rarely afford to buy them.
And then artists still weren't getting paid but an even bigger portion of my income went to them. shrug.
Sure did
https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.
I may be in the minority, but I just don't really find the "support the artist" argument that compelling. I have artists I like and I grew up with. If I saw them in public I'd get giggly and maybe try to say an awkward hello. But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist.
I assume the artists are reasonable rational adults. If they're on the platform, its economically advantageous to them. If they sold their rights at some point in time for money, or pay their tax debts, or whatever, I assume they did so knowing full well what that means. If Spotify is no longer advantageous to them, they would pull their music off and I may search other ways to listen to it.
We have a system to deal with these sorts of things, it's called voluntary exchange and it's the only way things change. If artists pulled their music, Spotify would have to adjust. In the meantime I just don't have the time or energy to track every individual employee grievance
What has that to do with anything? You don't pay because you want them to like you, you pay because you want to give them the chance to keep making music in the future.
For that reason, on free support platforms like Patreon, I'm pretty tough about not "gilding the lily". If someone is clearly well-funded enough to have artistic freedom, with a good margin of safety, I look for someone else to support, even if I love them.
What does that have to do with Spotify? If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in. Just sell me something I want at a price I find reasonable. I don't need a story about how it's so hard for you to pursue your passion or how you can't continue in the future.
To me this reads the same as "I can't be bothered to consider ethics for every economic transaction I participate in".
I'm not sure its possible to do it 100% of the time, but I try to constantly consider it.
What ethics are there to consider besides 'money can be exchanged for goods and services'? Everyone is a willing participant in the transaction.
Off the top of my head.... -How was the labor sourced for those services? -Child Labor, illegal immigrant labor? -What are the working conditions for the labor?, is it sweatshop -what inputs go into the goods/services? -what do they do with their waste? -where do the inputs come from? My country, another country, my town, a town in my state...
you may think the government plays a role to enforce some of these, and they do to a point...
You can go on in your own head about all the things behind that simple exchange of money for something. If it's a perfectly competitive market sure, that may work but there aren't many if any markets in the US that are that level of competitive.
A personal anecdote for you. My uncle owns an auto parts re-manufacturer, so they rebuild car parts and sell them. I worked there a lot growing up. The normal input is buying "cores" from service stations....your starter motor isn't working and you get a new one, that old one is sold to someone like my uncle who refurbs it.
Often we had people come by with very clearly stolen parts....should we have just exchanged money for those? This ranged from a tweaker who would show up with one part, to full scale organized theft rings with pallets of parts...
So, do we buy those since the price is much, much better? There is a an ethical decision there...
I think it’s more of a function of mental leisure time. People like worrying about these things and wrapping up simple transactions (“I’d like to stream music this month for $10”) into some moral and ethical quandary as if they can resolve or contribute to an existing relationship between two other parties.
It’s nice that we have the luxury to think about these things. But for the most part, I ignore it and discount people who bring it up to other people, unless they genuinely think people aren’t aware of the situation.
Maybe it’s guilt over benefiting from this. Maybe it’s just internet points for demonstrating one’s knowledge and virtue. Beats me, I hope it reduces.
Again, it's about voluntary exchange. Imagine if someone did that to you? I worked low wage jobs before. If some do gooder started lecturing me about how I'm being exploited I would rightly tell them to f off. If they wanted to throw me some money I may or may not be appreciative but I have autonomy about my choices and I extend that same belief to others
"I assume the artists are reasonable rational adults. If they're on the platform, its economically advantageous to them." - Your assumption is wrong though. Artists aren't on spotify because it's economically advantageous for them, they are on spotify because they have no other alternative. It doesn't matter if it's streaming platform A or B or C, they are ubiquitous and as an artist you want your music to be heard, so you have to play the field. In this case, the field sucks and mirrors capitalism, skewing the gains towards the top of the pyramid.
Is there some other market system that produced better music?
This one has its flaws but it seems to be optimizing for a great variety.
What alternative do you suggest and why would it work better than capitalism?
One basic reason to support artists you like is just because you want them to make more stuff.
Are you implying that Spotify distributes by number of plays, not by number of plays, weighted by account utilization? (where a play on a one hour a month account would count considerably more than a ten hours per day account).
If it's not (inversely) weighted by utilization, then I'd assume that it's less the fault of Spotify but more the fault of licensors being unable to think beyond simplistic money-per-play metrics in their negotiations with Spotify. From Spotify's perspective, it's kind of obvious that the "gourmet play minute" is more valuable than the "gourmand play minute".
Yes, this is how it works. There are separate pools for ad-supported plays, and I believe separate pools per country now (because Spotify premium costs a lot less in India than in e.g. the US), but it's still pooled.
It used to be the case that the big record companies demanded pro-rata licensing. Tidal (before Jay-Z bought it) commissioned studies on user centric licensing and approached the record companies about it, but they were uninterested.
Now, however, it seems the record companies want user centric licensing, but Spotify resists it. It's hard to say exactly what kind of politics lie behind that opposition. I'll note, however, that Spotify seems to have adapted a lot to "gourmand" listening with their background playlists.
Those per country pools are an interesting tool: being as German as I happen to be, my natural reaction to subscriber share (this seems to be the established term for weighted by utilization?) is "can't do that, because Data Protection". We do like to imagine that it should in some miraculous way be possible to use streaming without the streaming provider knowing what we stream, and that Bad Things Will Happen if that miracle fails to materialize.
Separate pools could be the way out: take the division by country and subscription status, but further divide each bucket by utilization. Ten percentile blocks for example. It would not have to be perfect to be well good enough. And I suspect that it would be easier to communicate in negotiations than an accurate formula, similar to how many countries seem to have ended up with discrete tax brackets instead of one universal formula across the entire range.
There's no chance that this is blocked by data protection laws. This is looks exactly like the kind of case where data can be collected and processed without consent, since it's needed to operate the service and meet the contractual obligations of paying the musicians the right amount.
(And that doesn't mean that they could keep the data indefinitely or use it for other purposes without consent.)
On top of that this data can be completely anonymised without compromising the data. All you need is an entry "a user listened to a song".
This probably gets more hairy when it comes to a user's listening history and things like Spotify Wrapped, discover weekly etc., but this is one of those areas that fall under expectations from a service, legitimate interest etc.
I think this discussion was about switching a pooled model to one where a user's subscription payment is directly split according to that user's listens. That requires unaggregated and unanonymized listen data.
Heh, I don't even doubt the legality, I was talking purely about subjective expectations, about how it feels to us.
You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label.
The best way to support a band, as far as I know, is to turn up to their shows and/or buy their merch. Royalties were always a dicey revenue stream.
For fringe metal music? Not likely!
By "fringe metal", they're likely talking about mainstream thrash and groove metal. And those bands where on these exact labels;
Reign in blood - Def Jam (1986) Pantera - Atco /WB (1986) Megadeth - Capital (1986) Sepultura - Roadrunner/WB (1989) Anthrax - Island/Universal (1985)
This does read like a slight snark (the step from 'fringe' to 'mainstream' - who wants to be mainstream?). It further emphasises the point that in the 80s and early 90s looking for non-local 'long tail' music as a youth was pretty much impossible. Especially if / when too young for bars and concerts, all you could find had to be signed on mainstream labels. I had the luck in that I could go to local concerts, thus discovering local talent (and buying their cassette tapes). You needed venues and allowing parents for that. Currently listening to several artists with < 500 streamers a month on Spotify. Nothing in the 80s and 90s can compare with that discoverability.
If OP was going to his local record/cd store and not some fringe underground market, he was 100% supporting some record company. Maybe not one of the ones listed, but in the 80s it would have been a company.
A lot of boutique labels are just sub(-sub) labels ran under the big three. Including metal.
Often they’re ran by artists under contract with one of those three big labels and their big sublabels, mostly as a perk/favor to those artists. They have a bit more creative freedom and leeway who they sign, but the money is still kicked upward and the marketing and recording budget still comes from upstairs.
This could be solved by a "donate" button to reward bands you like. Edit: (such an obvious idea, they've already done it: "fan support" feature).
No thanks. E-tip jars belong on Twitch and Youtube Live. Something about that feels very "off", it feeds that parasocial interaction thing in ways that a band selling merch does not.
but... I generally don't want their 'merch'. I don't need another t-shirt, hat, keyring, whatever. It literally just adds to more waste that I don't want to contribute to. We'd all be better off if I had an easier way to just send $4 to a band/artist I like. I do that for some via patreon. I've known people overpay on bandcamp to get a few more $ to someone. There are artists that will never come to my area. There are artists that simply can't travel/perform due to any number of factors. "Sell merch via Shopify or Spotify" just feels like pushing people in the wrong direction.
All music/sports/etc fandom has a similar parasocial element. Same thing, only different manifestations.
Yeah, or maybe a tip jar? Perhaps some PG at Spotify can copy the stripe tip screen and when before playing a song you get asked the infamous 18%,20%,25%,NO TIP question?
No thank you.
It seems the 'fan support' feature is not available on the Spotify website, only the native app. Explains why I haven't noticed it.
So they finally added a way to directly support artists. That's nice, but disappointing they excluded the web app from this feature. Its omission hurts potential donations. Spotify also lowers audio quality on the web app, gee it's almost like they don't want me to use the web app.
This has always seemed like fear-mongering to me, because for the pooled proportion of plays to be completely different from the mean of the per-user proportion, there would need to be an extreme discrepancy in amount of songs listened to per month and/or in the kinds of songs played by those who pay for premium vs. those who opt for ad-supported. No, if I only play the same artist for an entire month, they likely won't get $10 (-$2 in expenses), maybe it's $7 or maybe it's $12, but I don't see how you can go from there to "Beyoncé is getting all your money!?!?!" Are there any specific examples of artists that get much more or much less than you'd expect, or is this all just a thought experiment?
It's pretty easy to do some math on this.
There are pseudonymous background music artists who have just released one or two tracks, and who have more listens than famous bands with a 30-year history, because they were featured in one of Spotify's background music playlists. It is of course rumours that this music is commissioned by Spotify (which they deny) or that they get kickbacks in some other form.
You don't get exact numbers (because Spotify won't share them!) but there's no question background music is vastly more profitable on Spotify than the kind of music people go to concerts for, and it's at the latter's expense.
That's a good point and a legitimate reason to get rid of the pool, but I guess I was talking more about often-voiced worries that big artists are getting richer and indie artists are getting poorer due to Spotify's algorithm -- and those worries long predate the weird ambient stuff.
The share is determined by contract, not by some fair-minded algorithm. You would have to listen to that artist over 3000 times in a month for them to get $10 at the normal artist's $0.0032/play. Big artists don't see such low figures, though more obviously goes to the system that pays the salaries of the people who get those deals for them.
Well, sure, but whether an artist gets the full amount or a pittance from their label is not relevant to the question of whether Spotify's pooled numbers are unfair to some artists. The ultimate payout is not something Spotify has a say in.
That's the criticism I can wholeheartedly get behind. I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone).
However, I think it's a hard problem to solve.
The huge fanbase of who listen to Tailor Swift on repeat will have some of their money go towards less popular bands. If all their money goes exclusively to Taylor Swift (and similar artists), it's possible that there will be quite a number of bands who will see their earning drastically decrease.
There's also the question of where will the money go for the deceased artists. Today, it goes to rights holders and effectively disappears with no accountability on the part of the rights holder.
All you have you have to do is buy the music. From either the band’s website, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.
I rarely listen to a band. Or even to an album. I often listen to music of a specific genre, and for that Spotify (and similar services) are great: I discover artists I'd never discover otherwise.
Bandcamp gives the highest % to the artist/label, and I would argue also the best place to buy music.
This argument can be used to justify basically any business practice. It's a weak argument. Should I be forced to buy 10 inedible doughnuts to find one editable one in the name of allowing people to practice making doughnuts out of random things they find in their kitchen? Should I have to buy 5 cars before I find one that doesn't break after a a month in the name of supporting the auto industry?
Obviously, this is nonsense.
I think there's a strawman here. I look for different things artistically and functionally about the things you mentioned. Cars should function well and feel good when I test-drive them, but I wouldn't buy a hideous car.
Music is somewhat functional (does the cd or record play? does it skip at all etc) but then you have to listen to it. Years ago we might have seen a music video, heard a song on the radio, then went and bought a whole album to hear the rest. I guess I'm saying the buying process is different and it doesnt make sense to apply it to every imaginable product or industry.
Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?
It does remove songs, or at the very least disables some (you can toggle a setting to see disabled songs) presumably due to copyright/licensing issues. But worse, it sometimes _replaces_ a song with a different version, with no warning and no recourse
It's impossible to listen to some albums because of song replacement. You can try to do so, but when you click play on some albums it replaces several tracks with their single versions.
I noticed this last year with Dark Side of the Moon, although that's since been fixed.
Sometimes Spotify swaps them for others by the same artist. One of my favorite instrumentals got swapped out for the version with vocals which I can't stand. I can't for the life of me understand why it could be a licensing issue.
It's a multilayered issue:
- licensing could be expired, could change hands, could be removed, could...)
- naming and attribution:
A single song by a single artist will have a gazillion versions (ep, lp, original, re-recorded, re-released, re-mastered, re-re-mastered, best hits, best songs, essential, released for the European market, released for the Japanese market, Christmas special...).
On top of that distributors and rights holders have very shitty metadata that also varies between rights holders.
So if a song changed to a different version, it's quite possible both that the contract for that song changed hands between rights holders and the new rights holder uploaded incorrect/invalid/mangled metadata that Spotify disambiguated in this way.
Or, even simpler: original metadata pointed to the incorrect version, but now points to the correct version. Which is incorrect from your point of view :)
I have several Spotify playlists back in 2014, I don't see any songs removed. I am not sure why Apple Music will remove them?
Quick scan on my spotify liked songs, on 331 ~5% is greyed out.
I'm working on an app to help solve this. It's still waiting for Spotify's approval but I can whitelist some users while in development mode and some beta testing / user feedback would be appreciated. The profile shows my email.
Yes, it has happened to me on Spotify multiple times. More often, they change a song with a different version (e.g. same song from a different album or recorded live performance)
They do yes. But it seems pretty rare. The most recurrent case I've seen, is for remixes of popular song. Probably that labels can signal these.
The fact that you can say "Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever" when they basically pay the musicians nothing is amazing to me. Have we come this far into individualism? "It's good for me, so it must be the best thing ever".
Would you say that the Spotify era is a worse time to be a musician than the UMG / Sony / Warner era?
I’m not a musician but it seems to me it’s always been difficult to make a living as an artist. I wonder if it’s easier to find an audience today than it was 50 years ago?
It is a joke now compared to what it was.
There are entire parts of the music industry that no longer exists.
There use to be working musicians in every city that were basically unknown outside the city. NYC or SF had their own entirely unique music scenes.
There use to be entire bars that were goth bars or punk bars in even mid sized cities. Imagine opening a bar in 2024 that only caters to people who like punk music? It doesn't even make sense.
Music has been degraded in importance by streaming video and social media. To just compare the distribution channels misses the plot.
Every city use to have a knock off free paper of the Village Voice that was mostly for promoting live music. Now even the Village Voice itself is basically dead.
Anyone who thinks things are good now, simply can't comprehend what they missed out on.
Music teaching is a good example I think. There use to be all kinds of professional music teachers. If you were a gigging local musician you had the other income stream of teaching. Youtube is great for a music teacher that happens to win the music teaching lottery at the expense of all other music teachers. Of course, if you ask the youtube lottery winner they will say things have never been better. Scale that process across everything to do with music and that is the reality compared to the old reality.
You can't ask the gigging local musician who teaches on the side how things are because they are mostly doing something else now and don't count.
It is like asking the lottery winners if it is worth it to play the lottery. Not surprisingly they all say yes, best thing ever.
I don't think this is the root cause of your findings. I rather think that this development started with the DJ and rap culture which made musicians virtually obsolete. It is and was much cheaper to hire a DJ than a band, and people don't seem to care whether it's just a guy pressing some buttons or a bunch of people with real musical instruments. There is no longer any appreciation for real musicians. The public is satisfied with a few sampled tracks or cheap sequencer arrangements. In consequence fewer and fewer people see a need to learn an instrument. As a result, fewer and fewer music teachers are needed.
https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/the-creator-economy-cant-rel...
But the post didn't say that. It just described the benefits of using it.
When you were born I was a teenager in France recording music from the radio to a tape praying for the announcer to be short and not to talk over the song. And that the song is not cut.
Such a tape was fantastic until you had to use a pen to rewind it.
Spotify at that time was science-fiction movie worthy.
This said, I listened to 20 sounds at that time and I have probably about 50 now that turn around :) The discovery functionality is great though
Hey, back in the time I was recording ZX Spectrum games broadcasted once a week over one of the radio stations.
Commodore 64 owners were jealous of us, since this couldn't work with C64 due to different tape recording system.
Maybe they were jealous but you still owned a Speccy!
Hahaha, I did that in Ireland too. I'm pretty sure DJs deliberately talk over the song intros to make illegal recordings unviable.
Lots of us remember taping the radio... I have old recordings where I pretended to be the DJ announcing the next song. Oh man was I bad!
I remember using my 64mb MP3 player on repeat with 15 or so songs, but never really casette tapes.
Interestingly, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€ so you could actually do whatever you want and listen to your music the way you want.
The current situation is that you don't own anything and you can't just deal with raw files (which locks you into a quite shitty UI).
It has never been easier to own an easily copiable and backup-able form of the music you want and use it with myriad ways to play it and listen to it.
People just don’t want to pay a dollar or two for their favorite songs.
Or... don't want to repay. I've followed some bands from vinyl to tapes to cds to now. I've bought some of the same songs 4, 5, 6 or more times. Listening for 'free' via streaming is good enough for most stuff any more, even if it means I'll lose access to some stuff. If I'm really desperate, maybe I'll look for a torrent, but I haven't done that in years.
>, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€
Assuming you meant to write, "Spotify could have been as streaming service _and_ an MP3 shop" ...
No, Spotify didn't have the leverage in negotiations with Big Record Labels to offer streaming plus DRM-free mp3 files for 0.5€.
Apple is more powerful than Spotify and they eventually relented to Big Labels demands and added a more expensive tier of songs at $1.29 instead of all songs being just $0.99 pricing.
Too generalize... to consider the realism of any hypothetical alternative business models for Spotify to have, you also have to consider whether the Big Labels would have even made those ideas possible when Spotify was negotiating the licenses.
Spotify allows you to play local files, add them to playlists, etc. So no you can't buy the files from Spotify, but if it's important to you, you can buy them elsewhere and import them.
The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies.
I don’t personally mind music services too much. I don’t use Spotify because Apple Music comes with our family plan, but I might use it otherwise. It has value for me because my daughter listens to a lot of different music, but for me personally I frankly only listen to the same old songs most of which weren’t even released in this millennium. So for me spending the equivalent of buying an album every month wouldn’t really be worth it otherwise.
I do think Spotify might eventually suffer from things like Apple and Google bundling music services with other things. I don’t think Apple Music is particular great, but I do like the other things that comes with the family plan so we would have it with or without music. At least until they keep raising the subscription to the point where I’ll actually be annoyed enough to set up something different for storage and purchase sharing. Which is soon. But as long as we have the bundles service there is very little reason to have Spotify, and I suspect we’ll eventually pay for YouTube since I’m the only one in the family who still watches it through Firefox (Adblock), at which point we’ll have YouTube music or whatever it’s called. Spotify hit the market with good timing, but how many young people are going to chose it in the future?
I was a roadie on my friend's metal band around 2000-ish, they were not in any record company and just sold their CDs through DIY, during live shows, word of mouth, etc. My point is not all bands are in a record company, most are just doing it via DIY. Now, these indie, DIY bands, whatever you call it can now upload and share their music worldwide. That's a huge win.
A win for availability and potential audience, but if it causes less people to buy your CD/USB stick/whatever at shows - perhaps a significant reduction on income for the majority of gigging bands?
Do any of the streaming platforms let you direct fans to your own website/Bandcamp to make a purchase?
Are more or less acts making a living off their music now or back then? Absolute numbers and percentage-wise?
How do we decide what number is "fair", or what we as a society want? Surely it's not reasonable that every band that's just started out in a garage should be making bank.
I don't think that it's more difficult to be a professional musical artist or musician today than it used to be, although the business model may be different. But even if it is, I think that's a decent compromise for all the benefits the streaming services bring.
I have a few friends who were selling CDs back in the 90s for their own bands, none of them make almost any money out of it. Even the ones that got some kind of distribution deal to some specialised record shops, it wouldn't sell any meaningful amount to even cover the costs of printing the CDs.
The lucky ones with a label deal got almost no money after covering recording, printing, distribution expenses.
The only kind of people who ever made money from selling albums are exactly the same making money from music in 2024: big artists, with a lot of marketing and hectic touring schedules.
Nothing has changed in that front, at least now musicians can put their songs up for the world to consume instead of just the patrons of a corner shop in their neighbourhood.
except the huge amount of music that will never be on there.
and it's $11 every month, forever.
So the complaint is that not enough money is being paid for music and that it costs too much?
and was there but isn't anymore
If I bought an album a month for the rest of my life, I would have 600 albums. In the last MONTH I have listened to music from that many albums on Spotify. So the forever argument doesn't really pain me.
I can count on one hand the amount of times this has happened to me in the last decade.
Is it fair to say that you have fairly esoteric taste in music? I don't think it's the norm among Spotify users to feel that there is a ton of stuff that's missing from the library.
And if you are among the ones who can't find the vast majority of the music they want to listen to on that platform, then that's fair play - it's probably not for you. You likely have alternatives that suit you better. That doesn't really take away from the experience of the normies for whom it's got everything they want.
If you were basically born with Spotify, like many of us here (or at least, had it or something like it from a young-ish age), then unfortunately there's no way we will ever appreciate it. It's like someone from a century go saying how amazing it is that we all having flushing toilets in our houses and refrigerators. It's just life now, it's the new normal, not amazing.
Ok, but what is your point?
I'm also curious what do you/your generation consider amazing nowadays?
The point being that even though Spotify could/should be made better, it is arguably the best music play and discover tool ever invented.
There are people here alive that have used records, 8 tracks, tapes, CDS, mp3s and now Spotify. There is no comparison that Spotify is better for playback and discovery.
Note: I'm not talking about audiophile comparisons, just ease of use for the average listener.
Although true in comparison, it is still relative.
I was born in 1991 in an underdeveloped country. Buying CDs was a luxury and i lived out of torrents and pirated CD copies. I still bought original CDs from time to time.
But the biggest appreciation for me, and maybe for the original commenter, is the amount of music itself.
I love music, is my main hobby and passion. And having all of this available at all times is still mind blowing for me.
Ironically, i still buy my favourite music in CDs cuz i love them, but one would not replace the other.
Spotify (or streaming services overall) is indeed amazing.
How do you deal with availability overload?
First half of my story feels surprisingly similar, despite being born much earlier and in a very developed country. Piracy only through tapes, later writable CDs and eventually also mp3 on writable CDs. When the Napster wave hit, I had my first "real" money beyond kids affordance and started buying a little more. Napster and its successors just felt too easy, that music did not feel sufficiently "mine", like a handmade copy on physical media did, despite being just as unlicensed. Very often, the records I did buy were quite a disappointment at first, before they started growing on me, and some of what I consider the best today would have never made it past that threshold if they happened in the abundance of Spotify or the heyday of unbounded internet piracy.
It's actually quite ironic: all my friends who indulged in Napster et al now have spotify accounts, whereas I have just stopped extending my repository of CD rips.
CDNow was amazing before Amazon bought and killed them. Their recommendations were great and turned me on to artists I wouldn't have ever thought about otherwise.
For discoverability these days? Radio, mostly college radio. Much of it is streamed over teh intertubes. KXSF (ex-USF), KEXP (UW), KALX (Cal). Of course there's internet only stuff like SOMAFM or Midlands Metalheads. And there are aggregators like Sound Garden. But I've never once felt that Spotify was something missing from my life.
KEXP deserves a special shoutout because they put a lot of their sessions on Youtube and have an excellent production crew.
Wow. I hadn’t thought about CDNow in a long time. I spent a lot of my teen years (80’s) flipping stacks in record stores looking for obscure music. I discovered CDnow in 1995ish on Telnet and their selection blew my mind. I feel like using my credit card with them via command line interface on a dark scree was maybe the riskiest financialI thing I’ve ever done —but it worked well and I got some CDs i thought I’d never find . Great dusty memory.
Yes, KEXP is great! I regularly discover new artists there.
Pandora is much better at discovery (Spotify is actually really terrible by comparison), and cheaper too. Unfortunately, they refuse to implement high quality streams for whatever reason, or I could finally ditch Spotify. As it is, I just use Pandora's free tier for discovery to help curate my Spotify playlists.
It is drastically better than Spotify. I am surprised this isn't more well known. Maybe people just haven't tried Pandora recently.
The most I can get from Spotify is about 40 songs in a custom Radio playlist that I can't refresh or update.
My question would have been "But how do artists get paid?" Which is still a murky answer today if you're not touring like crazy and going hard on ancillaries, like merch, ads, etc.
Relatedly, the music industry has never really cared if/how artists got paid - all they care about is that the businessmen (and they have primarily been men, historically) get paid.
All of this is because of the technological change (MP3, internet speed) not because of the streaming service.
All of this is *possible* because of the technology. The existence of the technology doesn't mean the software exists, or that the software is any of good/useful/cheap.
In the UK my public library had CDs including metal and that was how I discovered music as a teenager.
Various libraries in Metro Vancouver still have CDs, though they tend to be more popular artists.
Before the general population figured out ripping, you could often return things if you did not like the music.
I often went to HMV (333 Yonge, Toronto Canada), bought 6+ CDs, listen them for a week or two, and return the ones that I didn't like (keep 2-3). I would then repeat the process and buy a bunch more.
They stopped this policy in (IIRC) the late-90s or early-00s, as people were just ripping CDs and returning everything they purchase the day before.
I love fast-paced, riff-focused metal. I didn't find out until I got Spotify that that genre was called thrash metal. I absolutely would not have found all the albums and artists I listen to daily without Spotify. It's one of the few proprietary apps I don't mind on my phone and PC.
HMV; WOW what a throwback.
I was born in 1986 and we have the same story but my road leads to punk and hardcore. Which I believe the records (CDs, cassettes) are very hard to find compared to metal. I listened to a lot of Dead Kennedys when I was young, so I really don't mind if the quality is lossless or shitty. I am just glad that I could listen to it on repeat.
They put the fucking unlike button 2 pixels away from the fucking play button. In the app and notification widget. It's irreversible, permanent, and immediately unsyncs the song. There's no development team I resent as much as Spotify.
Takes minutes to load cached playlists. Often stumbles on multidevice playback. It's constantly refreshing and hiding content I was about to click on.
If their recommendations weren't decent is happily yeet them. I guarantee their shit app loses them money.
Comparing a product to what it was like decades ago and declaring it good is not the same as discussing it on merit and as is.
I'd also add that, in comparison to its competition, it's fairly "open" API-wise.
TIDAL: no API. Soundcloud: API registration disabled. Apple Music: paywalled. Beatport: API registration disabled. Etc etc.
That isn't to say you can get everything via the API (you can't get monthly listeners, only an abstraction of it on a 0-100 scale, or artist's pick you sometimes see on artist pages), but compared to whom they're matched against, kudos to them.
What I love about Spotify and think shows that their engineering culture is really solid, is their progressive web app. I only use Ubuntu on my different computers, and my first task after a fresh install is to log into Spotify and save their web app on my machine. It just works: the icon appears in my favourites, the app renders really nicely in a native-like window, etc. It is by far the best progressive web app experience I have had. I totally forget that it's just a website with the browser UI switched off.
I can't stand spotify. I need indy artists, DJ mixes, flips and remixes, so Soundcloud is my go-to. Free tier is less annoying too, less ads.
I understand you - I am a bit older and did similarly, buying cassettes in the 70s
Yet, I miss the undivided attention of that first listening, listening to all tracks in sequence (picking the track sequence was an art in itself, creating an atmosphere across the album). Feeling the difference between Side A and B.
Those 10$ felt like great return. Exchanging tapes with friends, recording mixtapes, listening sit downs.
A lot of this is lost due to streaming in general. When you can get any song in history in a few clicks, it takes away part of the “mystical journey” of finding your new musical beat. More self reinforcing stuff, just like Social Networks.
About Spotify, I agree with the OP. Interface gets worse, price goes up, podcast content is irrelevant for me (but drives price up). I find it grating since I already pay for the Apple bundle which includes Music (which is somehow even worse than Spotify). If Apple had a better interface I could ditch Spotify.
Guess I must try Cider again.
I have a similar opinion, but with one big caveat (which means I'd be happy to drop Spotify in a heartbeat): I still have access to all those old albums I bought with my wages and allowance. I've digitized them, and they have migrated from computer to computer.
And a large number of those albums/songs... aren't on Spotify.
And all the songs I've 'discovered' on Spotify will also be gone some day, because they're not from mainstream artists. If I want to listen to them in another 10 years, I'll have to buy them.
We're from the same generation and I also loved heavy metal... I learned about new bands by buying magazines specializing in metal, renting videos from the big bands which usually would include opening acts with new bands (or even the famous guys or their fans on the video wearing other bands' t-shirts), from friends, by going to festivals (there were lots of them around if you were willing to travel around a bit, though I was in a highly populated area so that may not have been an option for you)... there was always more bands that I knew about than what I could possibly listen and buy albums... of course, today it's so much easier, but I feel like the problem today is actually the abundance of choice! You could just listen to the best couple of songs of each band, and still have more than enough music to enjoy. That seems to be what happens if you let Spotify or other services pick songs for you. You can still dig in if you really want, but I feel like most people won't do that... and you start having very high expectations from what a good song is as you only listen to effectively, the "greatest hits"!
Spotify is a convenient and affordable way to listen to music, but it is not without its drawbacks.
So, your overall spending on music is down about 90% now. I wonder, who took the most of this loss: artists, record labels or music stores?
Back in the day before Spotify existed you could use different options.
You could use Discogs to find similar music. Then you could use SoulSeek to find this music. Or simply join a metal channel/server on SoulSeek or IRC or DCPP and find other fans of similar music. But even before that you could also just look at a label catalog and travel to a vinyl or CD store (where you can listen before you buy...). Or you could use shortwave radio to catch a pirate station. Yes, this even worked for obscure genres like the one you mentioned. I have a broad taste of music and at times I've been into subgenres of the genre you mentioned.
Have I discovered new music via Spotify? For sure. Did different methods exist before? Yup. Is the Spotify method high signal to noise? Nah, the previously mentioned methods also worked very well. And I have virtually and IRL met tons of people, including people within the core of music subgenres. Thanks to Discogs, DCPP, and SoulSeek.
I do like one feature about Spotify showing shows near me (even though I have passed the age / time of my life where I went to artists as I have only time and money to do things like go to theatre with my kids). However that feature as well as buying merchandise also existed outside of Spotify long ago.