Recent news revealed that Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek has been investing heavily in military tech companies, which adds another ethical layer to a platform already criticized for how little it pays musicians !
Spotify only pays artists about $3–5 per 1,000 streams, using a pro-rata model that directs most money toward major stars… By contrast, Qobuz (≈$18–20 per 1,000 streams) and Tidal (≈$12–13) pay far more fairly!
However Tidal is far from ethical. Most of its revenue is controlled by private investors and founders and small artists still earn very little…
More fair-minded platforms like Bandcamp, Resonate, Ampled, or SoundCloud’s fan-powered royalties prioritize musicians over investors.
With these more ethical alternatives available, why do we keep using Spotify?
It’s worse. My music is on Spotify - while I would no longer meet their minimum for payments, even before that change they refused to pay me or provide stats until I provided a twitter or Facebook page/IG page, none of which I have - despite publishing through an established publishing company who could absolutely handle payments and play stats.
Spotify is cancer.
Daniel Ek is investing in European defense companies. This is not unethical.
Spotify paying like shit to their artists and platforming Joe Rogan are totally valid reasons to move away though. But the thing is that Spotify is sort of like radio. How much did radio pay for artists for each time the song was played? Genuinely asking.
What I do is I do 90% of my listening on Spotify. Then when I hear something really good, I buy and download their album, usually on Bandcamp and mostly keep listening them on Spotify because it’s just so much lesser hassle. Seems like the best of both worlds. Thought about going to vinyls but I’m not hipster enough.
I buy on Bandcamp Fridays, but am suspicious of that platform since they changed owners so often without any input from the community or musicians.
I’m keeping my eye on https://subvert.fm/ as a hopefully more democratic option.
I’ve heard that Mirlo.space is a good alternative to Bandcamp, and as an artist myself, it looks to be a good replacement.
“So often?” I only heard about Epic acquiring them, have there been developments?
Well, shit!
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Epic Games bought Bandcamp in March 2022.
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In 2023, Bandcamp’s workers unionized under “Bandcamp United.”
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In late 2023 (October), Epic sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, a music licensing company.
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As part of that sale, many of the former Bandcamp employees were not offered positions by Songtradr, particularly those involved in union organizing.
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Songtradr stated it would continue Bandcamp’s marketplace model and its “artist-first revenue share,” but declined to confirm whether certain features (e.g. user experience, Bandcamp Daily editorial) would remain unchanged.
I had no idea. Union busting, now… What a great way to show you respect the people who generate your wealth.
Thanks for sharing, this is a better write-up than I would’ve done.
But yeah it really sucks because from the outside Bandcamp looks like a great “light touch” platform, but the truth is sadly much more cynical and anti-democratic.
I love your avi/handle combo
Thank you jerk face!!
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Old fart checking in … why not just buy the tracks instead of paying for monthly access that screws artists? I mean, each song is unlikely to be more than $1.49, and then you own it. I don’t have a streaming music account and never will because the idea of paying repeatedly for the same thing – with the option of it being pulled at any time – is nauseating.
Qbittorrent
That pays exactly $0 per stream to the artists.
You can donate to the ones who deserve it and still have access to the drm free music locally
Tell me you don’t know how Qbittorrent works without doing so. It’s not a streaming service. If you’re redownloading on BT each time you want to listen, my god, are you wasting disk space.
You know what I meant, don’t deliberately misunderstand.
That doesn’t solve discoverability of new content, which is one of the good features of Spotify
That’s slowly being replaced with “AI content”, Spotify is literally becoming more shit by the day.
I don’t really use it myself, but you can scrobble to services like last.fm and get recommendations that way.
And if you want to sponsor your favorite artists, just go to their concerts or buy some music or merch. You’re paying them way more that way than your plays on streaming platforms ever will.
Do you want payola? Because that’s how you get payola.
I’m still on Pandora and honestly have no idea how they stack up. I just use it as a radio station on long drives.
It’s the same old reason as always. Most users value their convenience more than anything.
this is an awesome video on why other streaming services are just marginally better than spotify and not a long term solution: https://youtu.be/gDfNRWsMRsU
with that in mind i’m trying to transition away from streaming but am using tidal as what i hope is the least bad option for now.
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Why?
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Lack of Feature Parity
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Stickiness of library transfer
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Stickiness of social network effects
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It’s still better ethically than Apple Music or YouTube Music, which behave anti-competitively
1: I’ve tried out Quobuz, it’s pretty good, but it does not have the Jam / Group Session feature which me and my friends use constantly while gaming remotely. It also does not have an Xbox app which I use while playing games. I find Spotify’s recommendations somewhat underwhelming, but Quobuz has a noticeably worse recommendation engine, at least for my genres and tastes. Those are the features that lack parity that matter to me, but for some others, it’s things like amplifiers having built-in Spotify, or there being a Roku or Playstation app or something.
2: Quobuz uses a third party service to automatically transfer your library, which worked pretty well, but did require jumping through a bunch of hoops and subscribing to a trial subscription that I then had to cancel. It also did not find matches for some songs. Could I make it work if I had enough reason to switch? Yeah, probably, but the lack of feature parity (/roadmap that includes them) is enough to dissuade me from really trying.
3: In addition to friends on Spotify all using Jams, there’s also an inherent niceness to just being able to text people Spotify links, especially since there’s no cross platform linking service that would otherwise make sharing music easy.
4: Supporting Spotify may not be great, but its still better than supporting trillion dollar anti-competitive corporations like Apple and Google.
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