Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

I am in a small and new band. In 2023 we earned roughly

     500 Euros via Bandcamp (digital, physical and merch)
     300 Euros selling merch on gigs
    2000 Euros playing gigs
      20 Cents on Spotify

I’m not sure how it can affect those artists given it’s like $0.5 for 1k streams. I mean, I guess if they have 100 songs all at like 999 streams, that’s about $50 loss/year if they never pass that threshold. It sucks obviously, but not enough to for artists to pull out.

My understanding is they’re playing a cat-and-mouse game with auto generated content, that syphons away some percentage of the royalties.

It surprises me how much of my Spotify library is no longer available. There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out. A lot of good songs too.

This probably has more to do with publishers and licensing contracts than artists pulling their music off from platforms. Sometimes even bigger artists' albums disappear when publisher is sold or goes out from the business. Or the licensing contract's period runs out. As sad it is, many artists don't own the rights to their music, and if the rights owner is defunct, then there are missing albums or even discographies.

Back to torrenting I guess. If I’m not mistaken snoop said he made 45k off 1 billion plays. Thats ridiculous

I have roughly 25-30 tracks on Spotify.

They send me a monthly email detailing the number of plays I received as an artist, and it averages around 300.

So each track is getting around 10 plays per month.

So none of them come anywhere close to the minimum threshold.

I made around $10/year from Spotify plays, it's a pittance, but over all the streaming platforms I would get enough for a new plugin each year, this makes it "worthwhile".

I absolutely will not allow Spotify to have content on their platform without reimbursement.

The only people losing from this are the handful of fans who like my music.

This is the reason I have stuck with Apple Music so long (and previously Google Play Music). I have a fair number of sentimental tracks that I've carried with me in my collection for decades which aren't on streaming sites.

Spotify doesn't have an answer for this. Just don't listen to things outside the Spotify library. Apple Music (and GPM before it) lets me upload my own tracks and sync them between my devices.

I use YouTube Premium 90% of the time now for this reason. All the remixes and other indie mixes that I listen to are on YouTube and YouTube has so much more that I find it a hard value proposition to beat.

There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out.

As infuriating as this is, it's the reason I still use Spotify. A music service that hides their catalog changes by subtly modifying my playlists is a no-go. Having the songs still appear lets me know, as it gives me the opportunity to find those songs elsewhere.

The mechanism there is kind of "dontcareism": yes, indie musicians will go away, but Spotify doesn't care, because ultimately this won't stop listeners from using it, over time most of them will forget what they really wanted

It’s not just about the money. It’s about the exposure! If you’re not a big band you’re making money from touring. More people listening and discovering you online = more people attending your tours and maybe reaching a threshold where you can make good money

And maybe it wasn't removed by their choice. Below is a video of someone who had all their Spotify music removed with no recourse, due to a claim the were buying streams. No recourse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVY7-Ti77UQ

I don’t know much about how music licensing works. But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify?

A lot of smaller artists don't have a say regarding licensing and distribution. They're usually managed by a local minor label, which in turn has specific agreements with bigger players (Columbia, UMG) once your music sells more than, let's say 50.000 copies and they need a partner to publish a release on more territories. A few artists also get their own label.

For example, Peggy Gou tracks are usually released trough Dudu Records (Her own label) -> Ninja Tune -> XL Recordings, which is basically the same label that nowadays publishes Adele and Radiohead. Adele went even a step further, and her music is handled by Columbia Records for the US market.

Until you reach this level of clout, you have very little direct control over your syncs and streaming rights in the "regular", Billboard-tracked, market.

I think royalties from <1k streams are basically nothing anyway. Giving up the ability to distribute your music for free and reach more people would be a terrible idea.

I don’t know much about how music licensing works. But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify?

It might, but then there's this:

(1) they're not making money already anyway (they'd be getting like $3 for 1000 streams before)

(2) that's were the listeners are (not the listeners they have, since they don't have many to begin with, but the ones they wish to attract)

(3) most of such a low number as 1000 streams are usually themselves, band members, friends, and family, plus whoever they sent a link to and gave it a short listen before moving on.

I have a few thousand of streams per month and I make pennies from it. It's not like I care about being demonetized on spotify and losing a few pennies.

But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify?

It's already happening. Even some artists which are above the limit pull out to show their support for smaller artists.

Or it would force small musicians to advertiwse more. Which is mutually beneficial to Spotify and the user.

1k is a relatively low number to hit at least they didn't set the demonizations level the same as other platforms.

The way this should work is that there can be some minimum earning threshold the seller has to achieve to be paid out by the platform. But! once the seller achieves it, they should be paid in full for all the units sold/streamed before achieving the threshold as well.

E.g. App Store requires you to earn $100 equivalent to pay out earnings in Colombia. In many countries the threshold is currently $0.02, but it used to be much higher.

https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/reference...

That's not quite right. If they do reach 1000 plays they will be compensated for the first 1000 plays (which is like $4 dollars), and all streams thereafter.

What would you change about contract legislation to prevent this?

My wife is a professor in a field where they regularly publish books. "Zero royalties for the first N copies sold" appears to be common in the academic publishing contract world. It's a mess.

Steam does something similar for indie publishers. Unless you reach $100 in sales, you will not receive a check.

Feels like Spotify is restructuring systemic issues instead of trying to solve them. It's almost amazing how little, since the advent of Internet, the music industry changed, it did change, for established names more than small artist but the fundamental issue remains the same : fair & stable redistribution of value generated from artists.

You could try to equate it with theft, but you'd make a poor argument. It's typical for licensing and other contracts to include provisions for minimums (in either direction, depending on who the bigger company is). Spotify isn't paying for an inventory of 1000 plays to give to its users, it has licensed the songs for unlimited (I assume) use within the platform from the publihers. Artist streaming payouts are a small line item in the contract.

manufacturer not being paid for the first 1,000 candy bars sold at a grocery store

This happens, in any case. People set up deals with grocery stores for 100k units. The store changes its mind. You're left with a huge inventory to either sell to them at a discount or find a new buyer.

Just cancel your Spotify subscription. I did, and now use a combination of Roon and Tidal.

I have a much better listening and discovery experience through Roon and artists get paid more with Tidal.

This is an issue I've seen with every platform that primarily exists online. They buy every digital service and increase prices with or without the customer's consent. Aside from being annoying and largely pointless, it's anti-competitive because if you subscribe to Spotify you are discouraged from subscribing to some other, better podcast service you actually want because you're already paying for one. It gets even worse as more services get bundled together.

I don't want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app.

Regarding Spotify, which I use daily, I also dislike their updates. I remember some months back I could disable/hide "Recommendations". Now in all my (personal & private) playlists I get a list of Recommendations. It's an annoyance because when I scroll fast to reach the bottom "to listen to that one song" it end up surfing the Recommendations (did I mention I dislike them?).

So, it makes me want to go to apkpure, find an apk from 2020 and use THAT (slim chance it'll work) because most updates are "to increase engagement" (pester you/me/all) with 'new and exciting content!!!' (bleh)

Sidenote: for podcasts I am using a 2021 version of the Podcast Addict (the one displaying the full screen ad)(which you can block with NoRoot Firewall)

All that is listed are what reasonable customer and people would have assumed. However, things in corporate world seems to have the mind of it's own. It is normally in the interest of centralisation in the name of efficiency, and sadly at cost of human productivity and buyer and seller interests.

Wait, what. Are you saying that the costs of using the service should be tied to how much listening one does? Because if you're not, then what you are saying should have no bearing at all on how much royalties anyone gets.

Something like 15% of spotify's revenue is from ads, and so even if you do that you have to address the ad-fraud problem.

You also aren't even addressing one of the issues here, which is functionally "listen-time" related fraud on Spotify, but simple solutions don't really work, since yt has the same issue in reverse.

As a general rule, if you think something like "No abuse possible.", you are unfamiliar with the problem space.

I've recently learned how extraction of funds from gift cards and hacked accounts works. What I've come to understand that obfuscation of monetization model, with simple info for the creators "beyond this many discoveries, we'll pay you some portion of general activity" is actually a good way to avoid abuse and allow for easier management of apps funds in general.

You could just listen to your buddie's streams on loop while your asleep so they get a portion of your fees.

Free Users don't pay anything. But Spotify still wanna money from ads. So tying royalties to what users pay would be unfair to the musicians.

If this is true, I demand that I only pay Spotify if I listen to more than 1000 songs a month

I find new music through YT fairly regularly - it's what got me into a whole bunch of artists I'd never seen/heard before.

Unfortunately with YT I've had to cancel my Premium subscription on - they want $34/month, and I'm not paying that.

I'll move to using third party apps/adblockers, and paying some of the creators I watch directly.

What works well for me is a metal discord community (run by writers of a review blog [0]). Tons of interesting recommendations, including sometimes non-metal stuff, my favorite album of the year so far is chamber folk / Americana [1].

For new music, I tend to at least give a few seconds to every new release that is of an even slightly interesting sub-genre, older stuff sometimes shows up in what people post they are listening to, but there are also listening pods (me and two others are currently doing a one album a day discography run of Necrophobic), and adopted months: March was Screamarch, where two people curated a list of Screamo and adjacent albums/eps for every day, now it’s Finlapril where a Finn curated 1-2 albums a day moving through the history of Finnish metal.

Since joining, my monthly bandcamp purchases went pretty far up, though. And I’m only buying digital albums, there are quite a few who do vinyl purchases for even higher bills.

[0] https://www.angrymetalguy.com/

[1] Vera Sola - Peacemaker https://verasola.bandcamp.com/album/peacemaker

Discogs and RYM are great for discovery. Slsk is also still alive and well

Owning the music is the thing.

It is not exactly the new kid on the block, but I find tons of interesting music on the music blog aggregator Hype Machine. YMMV depending on your preferred genre.

Because that would be extremely complex and expensive to do for a negligible effect.

It's not hard. The company would simply prefer to take your money and spend it on whatever they want.

If people could decide how their money would get split up, they couldn't give Harry and Meghan $25m, let alone Joe Rogan $250m.

As a side-gig musician and composer - my wife and I as a matter of fact - this is a non-issue. It's a few bucks a year, maybe $5 to $15, depending if we release some new album. It's symbolic, not even a tip, and we can't cash it until it reaches I think $60 or more iirc. Spotify is not (or barely) making money out of our work, but we otoh are "making money" by using its platform and visibility as means to reaching to our small fan base that will finance our work through concerts.

For Spotify otoh, these few bucks add up to a long-tail loss of an increasing and disturbing magnitude. Additionally, bad actors are in fact exploiting it, ruining the experience for me as a musician and as a user. The issue, if any, is that in all fairness we should all be making money, proportionally, from the platform. But under 1000 streams, as an artist, you are probably getting more value from having your work uploaded and streamable.

I think that’s a too-narrow way of looking at it.

For an individual artist it’s not much. For Spotify it’s huge, all of those nickels and dimes add up quickly.

It also doesn’t matter if their current plan is to redistribute 100% of the gains to other artists, since this becomes profit they didn’t need to sacrifice to appease big acts. I.e. small artists pay so Spotify doesn’t have to.

Most importantly the artists didn’t sign up for this arrangement when they first joined Spotify, but now due to Spotify’s size they may feel compelled to give away their work for free for the chance at being successful or keeping fans happy.

I'm inclined to believe that filling the service with an endless stream of generated garbage is their ultimate endgame - why bother with unreliable and costly human creators when you can just emulate them well enough for undiscerning listeners. No substance, just vibes.

It depends on the amount here, which I'm still not actually sure of.

Lots of companies today only pay you out once you reach $X, usually some nominal amount. It sounds like that could be the case here.

Why deal with payment processors, billing disputes, etc for a customer only earning pennies?

Seriously, if you're a small artist with less than 1,000 streams per YEAR on your tracks, Spotify (or any streaming service for that matter) is already today not a relevant income stream at all.

I did some research on this recently and it's a bit tricky to pin down as some of the information is out of date or doesn't include certain services, but the three that appear to be the best on payouts are: Tidal, Quobuz and Napster.

Bandcamp :)

it's like if I said I was going to "disrupt the supermarket industry" by giving away free food

Please don't give investors any ideas...

They made losses every single year, not just from 2018 on.

Financialization of businesses has unmoored it even further from capitalism. You can be a billionnaire without ever turning a profit, as long as you can convince investors that the real money in a music streaming is acshually going to come from podcasts.

And/or something like Amazon Prime Video and how it aggregates its main subscription, ad-driven licensing, VOD and, that's what I'm getting at, hosted third party subscriptions into one UI.

I actually hate that in Prime, because discovery for shows and movies is never a positive experience but a setup chore separate from consumption, and advertising stuff that isn't already paid for always makes it worse. But for music I think it could actually be enjoyable, because you can consume and browse at the same time is actually a thing. Like diving into discogs.com while listening. I could easily see myself listening to some artist's main albums as part of some standard subscription (that pays as badly as spotify?) and then shell out a single digit payment on one hundred pay-per-listen tokens for obscure B-sides from the label that the artist is signed on, or something like that. Or reimplenent radio, by offering a licensing model where what would have been single releases in the olden days are part of the ad based subscription, but album content is only available through purchase or (various?) subscriptions.

Make it a marketplace of monetization models! Perhaps the right company to try this would be someone completely unexpected like cloudflare? Being a blank slate from both consumer and licensor perspective could almost be considered a prerequisite for a project like that...

In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash.

There are donation buttons for some artist on Spotify. I guess the artist need to enable it? ("Signum Regis" is an artist that has a Donate button for example)

Cool prediction, but false; AI generated music will be added to the pile of genres.

Honestly there's an existing factory of low effort music being churned out already, AI will become part of that existing pipeline. There will be more music produced, but it won't become mainstream.

Music isn't only about music, it's about the creators and their stories as well. Anyone claiming AI will replace traditional music creation is but a functional consumer. It's the same type that exclusively drinks soylent and wears black turtlenecks to avoid having to think about things or taste anything.

Could you explain how artists are paid more? The subscription fee is roughly the same.

Seconded!

See my comment about Qobuz on another post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39428327

Because after 18 years, Spotify’s net income looks like this:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...

And their market cap looks like this:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...

And your competitors are Apple/Amazon/Alphabet. And your vendors with whom you have zero negotiating power are Universal/Warner/Sony, and their whole interest in supporting a music streaming business like Spotify is to maintain leverage against Apple/Amazon/Alphabet, so music sellers only need to keep the streaming business limping along.

There is no play here without reform to copyright laws that limit copyright to 10 years.

i guess the economics are not favorable because the music industry is already well positioned to extract wealth from populism and will give a hell of a legal/drm battle if threatened. the long-tail of indy artists doing essentially nothing for the bottom line doesn't help either.

Kind of crazy that we used to spend $20 for a CD with 12 songs on twenty years ago.

The change in isolation from Spotify may not impact individual bands. However if this is adopted across all the seven major streaming services, then artists can in theory have 7,006 streams per track without generating a penny of income, even though the streaming vendors have generated revenues.

If YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Deezer, Soundcloud, and Amazon all adopt this practice, taking your edge-case artist, they're out of pocket for $3,500 per year.

That makes a situation where the more highly concentrated Spotify's monopoly is, and the less productive an artist is, the fairer the outcome for that small artist. Meanwhile the $3,500 is distributed between the monopolist, and the very large artists on the service. That's a quite uniquely perverse set of economic outcomes.

I think it makes sense to have a lower threshold on "plays per artist", since it involves billing overhead etc. But plays per song? Why? Are they trying to fight spam?

And even so, it's so little money and little overhead, just do it for the goodwill.

No same, I don't get it; 1000 streams a year is not an unrealistic goal, and Spotify is flooded with low-effort garbage - and this will get worse with AI generated stuff.

bandcamp is a bit more of a level playing field - the artists can decide whether they want to use the platform to stream or sell their music, while being given some control over the number of streams per listener before a song will be unavailable to stream (although this does lean on cookies, I think, so not difficult to get around...)

just pirate and donate directly if you really mean it.

they said rather loudly […] buy one of their CDs instead even if you never play it because they need to eat

They could try making music people actually want to listen to. If they can‘t, that career may not be for them.

What percentage do Tidal and Spotify each pay?

No reason to get in a hurry.

With greedy record companies as part of the structure from the beginning, looks like they are fairly consistently demonetizing themselves.

When a business depends on a resource that's so well-heeled it can truly afford to waste substantial amounts, you really hope that resource will not run out.

If the balance tips toward dependence on consumers who can not afford much waste if any, that portion could very well be subject to collapse under the strain.

As for demon-ization, looks like that's already in progress quite a bit too.

Self-host Funkwhale [1] * (or something else). Curate your own music library. This is the only way forward.

* I self-host this internally, for my family and me, since 2019. One of the best designed interfaces / UX you can find.

[1]: https://www.funkwhale.audio/

That’s not quite what the article linked says. If anything is done it could be years. It’s also unclear if they have any price per stream in mind and how they even think it should be calculated on an ongoing basis.

Sounds pretty early stage

Disruption, or even fully destructive complete tear-downs are a lot easier than building value.

May not be quicker, but definitely easier for the less-skilled to pull off.

One requires a demolition mindset, the other an engineering mindset.

In some capitalist cultures there has been a tendency to value disruption as if it was the thing that added value, just because it was a noticeable component of a few high-profile bonanzas.

It's like a prevailing superstition can take hold, and a belief spreads where "if it's not disruptive, it can't be good".

The less-recognized builders who don't divert energy to disruption do have to operate with much less visibility, since there's not some established structure crumbling (usually under its own weight) that looks like a result of their efforts.

The engineering-focused creative builder that can make something out of nothing, without having to tear down anything at all, ended up hopelessly outnumbered by weaker-performing substitutes having far-less-unique qualities.

Imagine what it would be like if something capable of applying that kind of leverage to resources had access to scaling capital.

Among some classes of performers, anybody can build a viable business if they started with $1 Million, and barring undue disaster, all will grow & prosper.

Even without any failures, each one will obviously have differing performance.

I guess you could say that one who ends up with a $1 Billion operation would be so rare, might as well be a unicorn.

That's about a 1000x return one way or another.

How does that compare to someone who can build anything viable at all from basically nothing to start with?

Makes 1000x look like a small number.

I would pull everything except 4 tracks off the platform then.

Spotify gets paid for that long tail, but you do not.

Essentially Spotify now pays small artists in “exposure”.

Looks a lot like abuse of market position.

idk but this seems usefull

https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader

Nah; the artists entered an agreement with Spotify, it's legally on board. If the artist believes Spotify breached contract they can either end it one-sidedly, or try and sue but I'm confident Spotify's side is rock solid.

You won't believe

believing is without you

you won't believe

anymore~

Are you paying more for Tidal than Spotify, or why are you saying that artists get more money if you use Tidal?

Musicians put their music on Spotify out of their own will. If they don't like it they can withdraw. Unless they sold the rights to a music label, but that's also their decision.

Even worse like 90% of the money comes from paid users, but most of the streams comes from free users with ads.

Some some barber shop is playing drake 24/7 having ads and 16£ of you 17£ are going to drake because you only listened to Bob bobson 20 minutes today instead of 23 hours:59 minutes like the barber shop.

The pay model is ridiculous, every update is terrible and there is no mechanism to let the company know they are running the product into the ground. It used to be heaven for power users,now if they simplify it any more the app will just pick what it thinks you should listen to, give the money to ed sheeran regardless of what you end up listening to and not even let you pause cause an extra button might be too complicated for you.

But would those cases remain in the sub-monetization bracket? If their goal is to get the double benefit, laundered gift card or identity theft money and taking popularity, then they'd surely want to focus farmed streams on fewer songs, not spread them. Or are Spotify popularity heuristics really so laughably bad that they consider a bazillion plays on a bazillion separate "tracks" as good (or better?) a signal for popularity as a less unnatural pattern?

the going rate is probably what spotify pays for that 1000 plays, minus tax

So by your definition a real artist should have more than 1000 plays. I listen to small artist from my country which will probably never reach a global audience and they definitely do not get 1.000 plays but are verified artists according to spotify. This policy basically drives more drivel music and leaves out alternative and indie bands. It's a bad policy that needs an investigation by the authorities to force Spotify not to discriminate smaller artists.