Goodbye Spotify(coppolaemilio.com) |
Goodbye Spotify(coppolaemilio.com) |
https://github.com/jwallet/spy-spotify
Offline library slowly growing.
Spotify, 2023.
I pay a distributor (distrokid) to send out music, and do not have a direct agreement with Spotify. As far as I'm concerned, monetizing my music without my consent is theft.
Their argument is that the stream amount is so low it ends up not being worth the transaction. On a moral level, I'd argue that it's their responsibility to pay out the money generated even if it costs them money to do so for a small number of streams.
This is estimated to generate $40m annually for them (which they've said they will be distributing to other artists instead), which isn't deeply significant, but this is money that is only generated because of small content creators that have uploaded their content to their distributor (which they pay for) which then distributes to spotify.
If I were to upload directly to Spotify for free, I'd consider the terms different, because I'd expect distribution as the exchange in the relationship. But in this case I pay a distributor, who then sends to spotify, who then decides to offer my content for free and pocket the money. Not acceptable for me.
(note: I consider this relevant to the original article because it is mentioned, as well as because it is one of the variables involved in music purchasing/accessing)
edit: corrected the $40m statement to show where money was going.
I think it's likely they kept this number very low specifically to keep people arguing about whether or not the amount was important, versus if it was OK to be doing in the first place.
And pointing how low the royalties are is not a valid argument for not paying artists anything!
When streaming became an option, music distribution platforms that appeal to a lower barrier of entry became more popular.
If the industry were refreshed today, it would make more sense to directly upload content directly to the streaming platform, like Apple Music or Spotify, just like we do with social networks.
Unfortunately, this put Spotify in a weird position because while they are a distributor, they are a secondary distributor. Unlike YouTube, or other platforms that directly host the content. (yes, I know they're hosting the audio files, but they are still secondary, because distro kid is primary).
Again, I pay for distro kid, everyone who uploads music to platforms, pays their distributor. So unfortunately, it's more complex than monetization and ownership rates around content on YouTube or something like that.
spotify is distributing without paying the artists
That's precisely what he's going to do. Did you read the comment?
> This comment is so entitled and pathetic.
Ironic.
My music consumption goes something like this:
1) Queue up a known band on Spotify. See what else similar to them Spotify puts into a playlist
2) Listen to the new music, decide what I like or don't like
3) Head over to Bandcamp or Discogs with the stuff I really like. Buy it in vinyl and DRM-free digital. Put it in my Subsonic server.
4) If it's not available, head to P2P app of choice - they always have it.
Yes, Bandcamp and Spotify might be ephemeral, but Spotify did wonders for discoverability - there are a lot of albums from tiny tiny bands I'd never have bought if it weren't for Spotify, and Bandcamp helped re-establish the market for physical, DRM-free media.
Music has never been in a better place. I finally get to have my cake and eat it too. What people are complaining about (Spotify not paying enough to smaller artists) is conveniently ignoring that I'd have never even heard of those artists 25 years ago, because they couldn't have paid for distribution. Spotify didn't reduce what artists make, they redisributed what I spend across way more, but smaller, bands.
We shouldn't be complacent and let Spotify make earning a living even harder for artists.
I don't understand how enabling access to music from anywhere in the world has made earning a living harder to music artists, the industry was always extremely hard outside of a few lucky ones hand picked by labels to be marketed. The local scenes were (and still are) where most artists could grow their audience, sell albums and merch, it's still the same hard work but now you are able to release your music worldwide in an instant.
Streaming doesn't pay enough on any platform to enable earning a living if you are a small act. And it never will, it's basic economics, there's not enough money from subscriptions and ads to support the millions and millions of artists.
Support the artists, that's orthogonal to Spotify or other streaming services. Buy their albums, merch, go watch their shows.
I cannot recall the details now, but this has happened at least 3 times over the last couple of months.
This is driving people towards piracy again.
0: "Let me just open spotify to listen to.. NO, I don't want last year's recap... NO, I don't want to follow my friend's playlist.. NO, I don't want to try browsing your recommended audiobooks.. OK, now that those popups are gone, what was I .. Ah yes! This song, here it is. Play. .... No? Play. It's not playing. Maybe close and reopen the app?" <-- this happens often. Spotify Premium, the app that consistently fails at the literal one thing it's supposed to do, play music.
But then, I hear about things like Bandcamp being sold, artists being pulled from streaming sites, etc., and it feels nice to know that in principle, all the songs I've purchased over the decades remain within my power to listen to.
Some of the songs I have, and still regularly listen to, I'm honestly not sure if I could find anywhere online anymore.
So far I’ve been trying Apple Music, and have liked it so far. I’ve tried in the past but didn’t stick around long enough to learn how to use it.
Also, I have HomePods as speakers for my living room tv and found that “streaming” to them using Apple Music isn’t streaming, it sends the channel over to the device so you can do whatever on your phone or leave the house and it still plays. Much like Sonos.
Am I confused here? I've personally never seen popup ads in (paid) Spotify, either on mobile or desktop.
Alternative: "For now, I’m just back to the weird p2p programs where I can try to find the music I bought or the ones that are just impossible to get."
Result: "listening to music feels more meaningful, not a thing that happens in the background"
Is there really a lot of music neither available on CD, nor for MP3 download, but on vinyl?
Unless you mean FLAC or something, CD is still higher quality than other formats, and they keep longer than vinyl or cassettes.
Inb4 the "only audiophiles with high end equipment" arguments: if you were around in the days of Blade Encoder tweaking options and trying to fit mp3s onto a 32MB player the size of a cigarette box, you know what digital artifacts sound like.
I’m spending more time listening to the music I love and the massive collection I already owned from back in the day. There’s something about not having unlimited access that helps me appreciate what I do have to a greater degree.
And sometimes if you clicked it, nothing would happen
https://github.com/kristopolous/music-explorer/
This is a problem I've been working on since 2007(!) and this is approach #4, started in 2020
If you only listen to music you already know you like, then sure Bandcamp or whatever is amazing for the artist.
But personally, I just launch my "liked" playlist and use their enrich feature to fill in titles. Or use their thematic playlist generations that use a genre but take into account what I already liked of this genre.
Though if someone showed me an alternative with discovery features that work as good as this and pays artists decently I'd switch instantly.
Their very good recommendation algorithm can expand your horizon and you can buy the music you really like while using the same playback experience (would be nice if they allowed you to buy and download music directly though).
Using which funds? Afaik they pay out quite a lot of the income, they could try to cut costs (the most meaningful thing there probably being to lay off staff) in order to maximize payouts but the only alternative pushes people to competing services that are cheaper and can't pay artists better for the same reason.
One thing they could reasonably do is to offer for people to pay more for their Spotify subscription, where the surplus (anything you pay above the base subscription) goes 100% to the artists, proportionally to the ones you listen to. One can speculate how much that would help the problem. I just find it weird to see people always saying (look up any Spotify-related thread) that Spotify pays so poorly and that people should cancel their subscription altogether instead.
Edit: got curious and looked it up
> within the pie chart detailing the total revenue that Spotify generates through music streaming, “roughly 70% of it is going to rights holders ---https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-...
At this moment shows I used to watch are removed from all the platforms too, leaving me the only option to "buy" them on Amazon. "Buy" because they will still be in a cloud, and one harsh blow of the wind can make the cloud gone. The wind of changes I mean.
I find it to be socially toxic that anyone expects massive companies to tailor their content to one's narrow sensibilities. Furthermore, the complaints rarely if ever go the other way in terms of platforming middle-of-the road personalities that land on the other side of the line. Though, they could in-volume. Man, was it terrrrible when the Smartless crew had Rachel Maddow on their show. Grumble grumble...unsubscribe...grumble
Spotify spending USD$100-$200 million on, say, that particular angertainment professional got a lot of people riled up because a) he's actively, demonstrably harmful, b) they had zero interest in patronising him, let along listening to him, but mostly c) their subscription costs had gone up to cover this indefensible payment.
Like TFA, I get my podcasts elsewhere, partly because the spotify app is unwieldy for music, but just plain user hostile for podcasts - but I'd appreciate a multi-tiered service offering from Spotify where I don't use, and therefore don't pay for, any podcast content from them.
Similar to the different package options for TV services, where live sports were expensive but you could opt out of them.
No it didn’t. It got a tiny minority of a certain insignificant type upset. Step out into the real world and the number one podcast is, by definition, well received.
I’m also glad to be on an app that doesn’t try to constantly push podcasts on me.
But they pay little to the artists.
What do you use?
Big gateway keepers will always be full od questionable people.
Politics is also full od questionable people should we not participate in it?
I have to agree. I’m 66 years old. When I was in my late teens, I was intensely into music and doing my best to explore and learn about a variety of genres.
It was hard. I couldn’t afford to buy many albums, the music played on the radio was limited, and the only way to hear obscure music that I had read about was to go to a large public or university library and hope that they might have the records in their collection.
Now I can listen to nearly any music I want to with just a few clicks. There are also many great streaming channels for discovering music I didn’t know about—I particularly like BBC Sounds, especially Radio 3. My 19-year-old self never could have dreamt of such riches.
https://davestrickson.blogspot.com/2020/05/john-peel-session...
Musicians are largely struggling while a few giant corps take all the money. Thats not a good place at all.
I think you are conflating “music” with “music consumers”
>I think you are conflating “music” with “music consumers”
I think you somehow missed the very first sentence of my comment:
>Music consumption has basically never been in a better place.
But that’s the way it has always been.
Like many home/IoT services, Spotify uses mDNS to enumerate and announce its peers when they are L3 local but they are also controllable remotely by dialing-home to their API albeit with a slightly longer delay. Spotify is hilarious when playing from the Everywhere group (all devices) where desktops, tablets, phones, the thermostat, stereo receiver, and Amazon Echo devices all insist on playing out of time like a crowd of teenagers singing a song.
I don't know how recent the feature is, but I recently stumbled upon YouTube Music's parameter-driven personal channel feature "Your music tuner." One of the parameters is how much music outside your favorites it will find for you. That works really well in my limited experience.
Another example: Pluto TV (run by Paramount) hosts as much hate as AM radio in the form of OAN, Blaze, Newsmax, and (previously) RT America, OTOH they have Scripps, Cheddar, and Sky News.
Moral purity is the privilege of extremists appeasing their tribe through conformity to closed-mindedness and foot-stomping that they must live in a voluntary intellectual and reality apartheid. The American right and left are both guilty of this, perpetuating a division that was artificially introduced for profit reasons by grifters and widened by different flavors of mass media that promote these spheres of influence.
I've seen claims that they pay artists better than anyone else besides Tidal, but I've seen no official statements.
I guess how one perceived the reaction to that transaction comes down to one's own biases.
If you wish to discount some people's problem with paying a misinformation-peddler hundreds of millions of dollars while, as per TFA, genuinely creative people are paid nothing because 'it's too hard to handle the transactions' - then that gives us a little more insight into you.
> Step out into the real world and the number one podcast is, by definition, well received.
Number one in the USA, you mean, right?
Podcasts are a niche medium, with extremely poorly reported listening figures, but so far I can tell this guy has an average of 11 million listeners.
That's less than 4% of the USA (around 0.1% of the real world).
I get that anger and controversy are highly saleable products - crime content makes up a surprising amount of the podcast leaderboard.
However, in a country where 230 million people believe angels are real, it shouldn't be surprising, nor held up as an arbiter of quality or sanity, that 11 million people think this guy is credible / worth $200m a year.
That may be what you're talking about, since clicking on the heart icon is how songs end up in "Liked Songs" to begin with...? Note that I only use it in the Spotify -> AM direction, not vice versa.
I finally figured out where the service file was, and changed it to IP, and now it works.
Although OTOH, people play lossy MP3s over lossy SBC via Bluetooth and don't care, so perhaps the bar of "acceptable quality" is much lower than it seems...
Transcoding 320kbps MP3 to some other lossy codec, once, is really not that bad. LAME at 320kbps is transparent to many people, and while I don't have any A/B test data to back this up, I'd be surprised if re-coding once to Opus at, say, 160kbps, would fare noticeably worse in A/B tests.
> OTOH, people play lossy MP3s over lossy SBC via Bluetooth and don't care
Further evidence that transcoding from one high-bitrate lossy codec to another really isn't that bad :)
Maybe that's the nature of things but I think part of that argument is there could be something better. Maybe it's beside the point from a practical perspective but I guess I agree with that too. I think finding and supporting small artists probably never has been better, but I'm not sure if that's because of Spotify per se, or social media and the Internet in general.
Something is broken: the market for music.
People are not willing to spend a lot more for music (not digitally at least), so the economics of it are broken, there's a lot of content, done with passion, and any passion industry is bound to underpay because people will do it for non-monetary reasons like self-fulfillment, expression, etc.
Actually worse, they say they do pay someone for it, they spread it among the other creators who they ARE paying.
You could try to think up ways to rationalize it like "publishing fee", but I don't see any reason why anyone should.
A third-party that used to pay for streams of my music, has decided to, instead change their terms, and use my music to generate more revenue (which in this case they are using to pay other artists, which is very strategic of them, because now they don’t have to pay those other artists more from their own pockets).
I negotiated with my distributor, distrokid, And paid to have my music distributed to services that pay for streams of my songs.
Suddenly one of these services altered their terms to the above.
And just to clarify, I’m not trying to be difficult. The fact of the matter is that my content has been taken by a third-party, and instead of paying out based off of an agreement, they have decided to take money from the content, creator, and instead use it to pay other artists (it is my strong suspicion that they did in order to not have to pay for transactions, even though this was all part of the arrangement from the beginning).
They have effectively saved themselves $40 million and more popular artists feel better because they are making more money, and the only people that lose out are people that have no real leverage in the situations.
I completely agree three dollars is very little money and is pretty insignificant. But it doesn’t change the fact that this was very strategic and the money that is generated is coming from creators, who have paid to have their content hosted, in exchange for money generation.
If you remember how big of a deal limewire was, this is a similar situation for songs under 1000 streams per year. It is distribution of music, without the consent of the artist, and worse off the platform is monetizing it and the artist does not get that money.
This is a very different situation than something like YouTube ad sense paying out after 1000 views, given that a content creator directly uploads content to YouTube and agrees to their terms.
The argument that this is only benefitting “popular artists” and hurting small artists is really quite misleading here. It invokes the Taylor Swift against everyone else image, but it’s really not that. This friend of mine is very far from a big shot, but when she publishes a new title, she posts it on social media, and within the hour, probably minutes actually, the 1000-stream threshold is hit. And they’re giving a year… I don’t have stats but I have a feeling that this is going to primarily hit borderline plagiarizing (or actually plagiarizing) content mills than real artists. Not passing any judgement on you naturally, I don’t even know if you’re quitting out of principle or practicality.