Honestly, Spotify is only half bad compared to the real scumbags of this industry, and that’s the “rights holders”.
It’s not the artists who created the music I’m talking about. It’s the record companies taking the largest piece for themselves.
They are the ones earning on other people’s talent and success.
But…but…muh “discovery”
I’ll die on that hill. 90% of the artists I listen to, I found through spotify’s algorithms.
Ok, but why not find a human that curates the kind of music you like? They are called DJs.
I don’t understand why we need to get rid of human DJs that seems like the last job we need to replace.
edit why do y’all think I am talking about radio DJs? You…. know there are wayyyyyyy more DJs out there than just radio DJs right?..…right?
….like y’all know mixes exist right? Like mixcloud or whatever?
Sometimes my car decides to play some radio before connecting to my phone. It’s an unfortunate side-effect of owning a not-too-nice car.
Radio DJs are little more than advertising agents nowadays. Or worse, wannabe entertainers.
Compare the top 40 to your Discover Weekly and the answer is obvious.
I hate the radio, I’m not talking about radio DJs unless it is the very occasional weird college radio station that is fun just for the curveballs.
I’m talking about all the other DJs, real life human beings who for fun spend hours hunting down the kind of music you listen to and arrange it into mixes. Like a recommendation algorithm but a human! There are plenty of them, you might not know of one that exists for your specific niche, but rest assured they definitely exist.
They play sets for bars and stuff with music they have collected in whatever genre they are into, it is a whole thing.
I don’t know why I am explaining the concept of a DJ.
You’re explaining because people know DJ to mean radio or in person, and neither are practical in context, so everyone is confused on how it’s relevant. People who use streaming service algorithms probably aren’t looking to go to a bar or event every time they want a recommendation.
Not to mention that bars and stuff with music usually cater towards upbeat music. If you’re sure these niche DJs exist, why not name some, or at least provide vague instructions on locating one? It would be a lot more useful to provide actionable advice to people looking for recommendations based on their taste
I am not talking about having to go anywhere to listen to DJs.
Ok, Mixcloud
I use Spotify to avoid other people. You go to clubs and listen to what people spin? Too crowded. I’m happy with an algo that knows my tastes and find that shit for me.
facepalm no, DJs often put mixes up for you to listen to. Again mixcloud is a good example.
There’s a classical station in Dallas that calls their programming music with context. And they’re right! When there’s a good DJ in the booth you will end up learning something about the music being played.
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Yeah, let me go ask my DJ friends I totally know and are also a Californian who enjoys South African Deep House and Prog House, or post rock, but not post metal.
Do you know how many people exist that can do that for me? Exactly zero. It’s perfect for computers and algorithms. Humans are amazing at creating music and knowing where it fits, but they aren’t the end all be all of knowing where more like it exists. Especially when it’s not like I can reach out to my favorite artists of South African Deep House (like Kyle Watson) and ask him personally for recommendations. He’s busy with a job.
Mixes also don’t often times give you the full song for you to understand whether you truly like it, and they often have obscure remixes that aren’t released due to creator copyright or other rules. You’re creating a problem to complain about.
Yeah, let me go ask my DJ friends I totally know and are also a Californian who enjoys South African Deep House and Prog House, or post rock, but not post metal.
Do you know how many people exist that can do that for me? Exactly zero.
Hmm, let’s see if I google “South African Deep House DJ Mix”
First result: https://m.soundcloud.com/deephouse_sa
This is what drives me up a wall, people WANT to believe that only robots can help them with their super specific artistic tastes because they are too niche even if it means ignoring tons of artists and curators out there who’s passion it is to collect and share that specific type of music.
We have been sold AI curation as a way of placing a corporation between you and the communities of listeners and curators who share and find the types of music you like so art can further be corporatized and divorced from the artists who actually create the art. A corporation isn’t going to promote humans sharing music they have collected with humans because if that human gets popular they could just go somewhere else with their fans, i.e. there is a community and corporations see that as a threat compared to an algorithm they own and can manipulate any way they want.
I am not saying never use algorithmic recommendation, but it is depressing how the vast majority of people seem to have utterly abandoned the idea of being interested in communities of humans collecting music and sharing it in artistically arranged mixes.
Well, their CEO Daniel Ek’s investment company Prima Materia "invested €100 million ($114 million USD) in Helsing, an artificial intelligence company based out of Europe that assists in military technological ventures. "
So I’m happy to take my *streaming business elsewhere.
After being the earliest adopter of free and paid that I know personally (and I work in tech), Joe Rogan was the nail in the coffin for me. I was already paying for YouTube premium (download for subway, and close screen while playing) and saw music was included so the decision was simple.
This was also exactly why I moved away from Spotify.
What does a record company even do? Why do they have rights?
Basically they fund artists to record and then handle things like promotion.
If I can personally promote a subreddit to 8.5 million subscribers with no talent of my own, anyone who can make decent music can handle their own shit.
Yes, promoting a subreddit and promoting yourself as an artist are the same thing.
I didn’t even have to sing.
Yo. I can be a record label. Come hang out in my apartment while I pay the bills and BAM! I get all the royalties!
Sounds like stealing with extra steps. Actually it sounds like just being rewarded for having money to begin with.
Actually it sounds like just being rewarded for having money to begin with.
That’s most of the economy.
Sometimes, I see some of the takes on here, and it’s hardly surprising that the fediverse isn’t particularly popular.
Spotify are somewhat responsible for their current position. They hired too many people, extended into markets they didn’t need to enter, and have a CEO that has blown money in places that didn’t need it. Let’s not forget that Spotify spent $300m on sponsoring FC Barcelona, which could have allowed Spotify to employ ALL of the employees it laid off for 1-2 years. Spotify had no need to give $200m to Joe Rogan, either! That’s half a billion spunked up the wall on decisions that have done nothing for the company but cause grief. Instead, they could have focused their efforts on paying more out to smaller artists that provide the long tail for their service, while also making deals to promote merch and tour dates where possible.
With that being said, if you think that Spotify didn’t play a huge part in making music streaming accessible you’re just being contrarian for no reason. They provided (at the time) a solid application, good connectivity with services like last.fm, and had the social connection sorted from the start. Once phones took off, Spotify removed the need for mp3’s for the majority of people, largely killing iTunes. Spotify was the winner of the music streaming wars.
Frankly, a lot of people were praising Spotify for their “good” severance package, but IMO shareholders should be livid, and should be calling for a new person at the helm.
removed the need for.mp3s
Im not sure this was a win
Completely agreed. If they focused on their core business they would’ve already been in much better shape.
I doubt Joe Rogan and Barcelona has only caused grief. There’s a reason huge companies throw absurd amounts of money on advertising and right deals. It’s often lucrative and worth it.
As we don’t have the numbers we can only speculate in what return they got on those deals. But it was most definitely not 0.
Tour deals, merch and independent artists are great, but you do not reach critical mass when it comes to a general audience that way. It’s basically like trying to advertise on the Fediverse versus advertising on Reddit.
Marketing like that doesn’t have solid numbers. Did sponsoring FC Barcelona cause people to signup to Spotify? How many? How much revenue did they get from each one?
Even when people fill in the “where did you hear about us?” option during signup, the data there is murky, at best. You can try to do tracking like “we saw a 20% increase in signups during and immediately after FC Barcelona games”, but that’s still just a proxy measure. Maybe it isn’t 20%, but more like 2%, and that could easily be noise.
These deals tend to have an amorphous “increase in brand awareness” that has little hard data to back it up.
I can take your word for it, or I can consider the fact that basically every major company in the world does it. Somehow I don’t think it’s totally useless.
Yeah, that dude’s take reads just like climate science denial and flat earth conspiracies.
People who are good at marketing have convinced people with money to do it, yes.
Yeah spotify did wind up how most people listen to music, and podcasts. They had what people wanted and made it cheap. Then they also made a lot of decisions that wasted money. Dont know for certain but i doubt the exe there stopped geting big bonuses or pay cuts over those decisions
In it’s whole history, Spotify only made profits in two quarters and if I’m not wrong the other streaming services aren’t profitable either so it doesn’t looks to me that the problem is just over hiring but the nature of streaming business itself You also underestimate the power of sponsorship especially sponsoring sport. I’m sure a lot of people are using Spotify just for that. Investing in podcast make sense because it’s more profitable than music, Spotify need to diversify it’s revenues. You said that Spotify have good connectivity with lastfm but that’s not true. Most of issues lastfm users have with lastfm is related to Spotify.
Spotify has a lot of Blockbuster energy, but with a mixture of something far worse, since they did indeed stand by Rogen and profit off him.
Sometimes, I see some of the takes on here, and it’s hardly surprising that the fediverse isn’t particularly popular.
You genuinely think the reason the fediverse isn’t popular is because people have negative opinions of Spotify? As if these opinions wouldn’t also be prevalent on Reddit? As if having to see opinions you didn’t agree with was ever holding reddit back to begin with?
And yeah, Spotify made music streaming accessible, but the overall problem is they did what all tech companies at the time did: burned money to establish themselves hoping the profit would come later.
You’re praising them for killing iTunes, but maybe iTunes didn’t need to be killed. Maybe breaking markets with a type of streaming that wasn’t profitable and fucked over artists has given us a few years of good streaming, but the honeymoon is coming to an end, and we’ll all be worse off when the stockholders start demanding profit.
Same thing that happened with YouTube, basically. Company runs something at a loss for so long they’ve effectively broken the market and now that it’s time to make money, we’re all fucked over.
IMO shareholders should be livid
Why? Shareholders gave Spotify billions of dollars - they expect the company to spend that money. Shareholders are quite capable of depositing their own money in a bank if they didn’t want it to be spent.
My take is Spotify hired over 5,000 employees over 2020 and 2021 when the economy looked great. Then Russia Invaded Ukraine in 2022 screwing the global economy and particularly Europe which is Spotify’s biggest market. They’ve laid off about half the people they hired, which is unfortunate… but it’s understandable. The couldn’t have foreseen the economic shift.
Spotify removed the need for mp3’s for the majority of people, largely killing iTunes
Huh? Apple’s music service has about a hundred million users. Up from eighty million a few years ago. Spotify has more than twice that, but iTunes is hardly dead.
Apple Music the music subscription service is different from iTunes the music purchasing store. When’s the last time you heard of anyone buying an individual song / album on iTunes?
I still buy music on iTunes. I prefer having my collection available on CD, but if I only want a single track or two, I just go to iTunes and buy the songs. This year, I think I bought 4 songs. It isn’t ton, but it is still in my mind.
When’s the last time you heard of anyone buying an individual song / album on iTunes?
I’m yet to hear a first time, and I remember when mp3s first became a thing.
You’ve never heard of someone buying music on iTunes?
Genuinely, never. It wasn’t that popular in my country.
I hear people buying music from Bandcamp everyday
Yarrrrrr
This is the way
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I call bullshit. Yeah I’m sure they spend 2/3 of their income on rights holders, mainly Joe Rogan, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift.
The average musician isn’t making shit, and yet the spotify execs are sipping champagne.
The rights holders are the record labels. As much as artists want to complain about Spotify they should direct their criticism to their record labels.
What about independent artists?
“not making profits”
Just massive salaries and equity
You know they don’t pay the artist directly? Like with physical the ones taking the biggest share are the labels… Also the average musician isn’t making shit cause compared to a very few bigger artists they represent an extremely low percentage of the overall streams on the platform.
Average musician probably makes more than you think https://youtu.be/qjb-pJIfQXI?si=Zbi54GvD3NqomIrv
Taylor Swift somehow being a hallmark of the times makes me wish the whole world would end in a giant ball of fire.
She’s not the worst role model we’ve ever seen, so at least the world isn’t completely mad. I think her music is mediocre, and don’t understand the fanfare, but to each their own.
I think as a person she’s fine. But as a branding machine… meh.
I’m glad bands I like aren’t big so I can afford to go to their shows :)
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I’m 30…and you? (kinda afraid to ask at this point lol)
I’ll take “Unethical accounting” for 500, Alex
And the artists still don’t really make shit from it.
It was them or Joe Rogan
Ugh, yes poor poor spotify, fuck that. Artists can’t even make a living making music anymore thanks to spotify. Fuck off blaming artists for trying to get paid. Fuck this article. Oh no it only gets a third of the revenue?! Abhorrent, no it should get ALL the revenue, for doing what, having a server with music on it. Amazing. Fuck spotify.
Is Spotify the villain here or is the “big three”? Because it sounds like Spotify is delivering a service and deserves some profit from that.
But what are the big three doing? Seems like they are just skimming because they hold the IP rights. Are they providing any service?
Spotify is definitely not the villain here, they have created the best music streaming platform in the world. The big publishers also can’t be called the villains per say, but it wasn’t so nice of them to force a small startup (Spotify in it’s early days) to sign contracts that will permanently force it to payout about $0.66 out of every $1 it makes.
The “best music platform in the world” sure hates paying artists, tho. I know you are obsessed with labels, they pay indie artists fuck all too
Spotify picks it’s price point. It’s picked a price point (free) that meams artists can’t get paid. And it’s price point (free) means that artists can’t compete either.
So yeah fuck spotify, pay artists what they are worth and having servers to download mp3s on isn’t worth taking 1/3rd of the revenue. They should get less not more. Adjust their prices (maybe it shouldn’t be free so artists can fucking pay rent and spotify can pay employees)
Blaming artists for wanting to pay rent and eat food is some bootlicking bullshit.
Blaming artists? What are you smoking?
I was asking if it’s Spotify which is relatively new and, as pointed out in the article MUST get this contract or die, or if the problem might be the big three that hold all the power in this negotiation.
Speaking of which. Isn’t it the big three that actually pay the artists. So how would Spotify, if they were so inclined, manage that payout? (It’s an interest idea though. I wonder what would happen if they offered a tip-the-artist button).
Spotify is not new.
Spotify already manage their payout. To labels and indies. They screw over both massively.
It’s not free. There are ads.
It’s free. You are the product.
Free is literally why they have the market they have. Completely silly point.
You can’t assume the price point changes and the market remains the same as well. It’s more complicated than that. We literally have talks of people leaving Netflix every other week from the constant changes being made this year.
Yes, and they don’t deserve a market if they can’t pay artists to make the content. They should not exist if they can’t do that.
That just leaves us nowhere to go though. We know artists aren’t paid enough, but if our only answer is the one that clearly takes them out of business, then it’s just sitting on a soapbox while another company comes in and does the same thing.
Either the solution has to be feasible or someone will eventually show up to ignore it.
To reemphasize, this is regarding “they have the market because they’re free”, it’s not regarding something else like just paying the artists more, or getting a better deal with labels.
You can buy music. You can use subscription services that are less shit to artists.
I do buy music.
I know most people don’t and won’t though.
You can’t make a solution that ignores evil and apathetic exists.
Have you ever looked into the operating costs of having a server with music on it which over 400M monthly active users use?
I actually work in cloud engineering and regularly price this kind of thing up.
Their costs are salaries not aws bills.
But that’s practically true of any large tech company. It’s been conventional wisdom in the tech industry for over a decade that tech is cheap, people aren’t.
Yes. Spotify needs to figure out their burn rate for their salaries because taking more money away from artists isn’t the solution like op wants.
But taking money away from employees is?
No one is saying pay employees less. Spotify needs to figure out how to make its business work. That’s for sporify to figure out. If you think Spotify deserve more of the pie when they contribute… a download server, vs. the artists who do all the actual work, then you can honestly just fuck off. We live on totally different sides of the conversation, you want to shill for big tech, I want the artists that make the music to get paid.
Not that high. Spotify uses some pretty tight compression (not good, just tight); most users get 96-128kbit/s AAC, premium can go a bit higher if opted in. That works out to about 16KB/s or 58MB/hour, assuming nothing’s cached.
Bandwidth pricing very much goes down with scale, not up. But even the non-committed AWS pricing at Spotify’s scale is 2 to 3 cents/GB. You end up paying way less than that with any kind of commitment and AWS isn’t the cheapest around to begin with.
Man, you weren’t alive before napster were you?
Yes, I was alive in the time when artists could barely scrape by. Now, I’m alive in the time when artists can’t even do that.
You live in the opposite world of all of us. Or are just very confidently incorrect…
Before Spotify and the like the only artists that could make any money were hand selected by the record labels. Virtually all profits artists made were from merch sold at live shows, because the record labels took all the profits otherwise.
Now, artists that are independent can make money and get listeners much more easily. This is directly thanks to Spotify and the like. However the record labels are still the ones stealing most of the profits for artists they sign and record.
It is ONLY better for the artists now, despite it still sucking. You are blaming the improvement not the problem.
Now, artists that are independent can make money and get listeners much more easily. This is directly thanks to Spotify and the like
You need to speak to an independent artist sometime about how they make money so easily thanks to spotify. (Spoiler, they don’t. At all. And they can’t sell physical anymore because of spotify)
Wooh. 👀. This isn’t Spotify’s fault. They can’t pay artists if they don’t have money.
Is that your blog or whatever you keep posting?
Yes, it is. It’s entirely spotifies making. It’s the situation spotify has created. And the answer is absolutely not ‘starve artists even more than we do today’.
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Equity.
In total, at the close of last year, SEC documents show that exactly 65 percent of Spotify was owned by just six parties: the firm’s co- founders, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon (30.6 percent of ordinary shares between them); Tencent Holdings Ltd. (9.1 percent); and a run of three asset-management specialists: Baillie Gifford (11.8 percent), Morgan Stanley (7.3 percent), and T.Rowe Price Associates (6.2 percent). These three investment powerhouses owned more than 25 percent of Spotify between them — a fact worth remembering next time there’s an argument about whose interests Spotify is acting in when it makes controversial moves (for example, SPOT’s ongoing legal appeal against a royalty pay rise for songwriters in the United States).
Furthermore, according to MBW estimates, which my sources suggest are still solid, two major record companies — Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group — continue to jointly own between six percent and seven percent of Spotify (Sony around 2.35 percent and Universal around 3.5). With Sony and UMG added into the mix, then, the names mentioned here comfortably own more than 70 percent of Spotify.
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/who-really-owns-spotify-955388/>And yet, they still aren’t even close to the highest paying service when it comes to musicians getting their cut.
https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-do-music-streaming-services-pay-musicians
It’s hilarious that Napster now tops the list. I use Tidal, myself, since it’s got great quality audio. Spotify is horrible quality for 2023.
as a young 20 year old i doubt those services have new music. Spotify has albums SAME day
im sure that works great for oldies like blink182 tho
They do
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Honnestly Deezer Student has “HIFI” file on in so it’s great for me But I’m quite certain when Spotify HIFI will be launched I’ll already pass on to Quobuz because I wont be a student anymore
If you want to support an artist pirate their music and see them in concert.
This is outdated and bad information. Most small artists lose money touring. Bigger artists might break even.
If you can buy merch, do that, if you can buy physically do that. Spotify is gonna pay pennies for thousands of streams, so nothing you do on spotify is going to benefit an artist. But “pirate and see live” is probably gonna result in a negative bank balance for artists.
I think Taylor Swift just about broke even, mostly thanks to my wife and her friends.
Nice try ticket Master!
Some artists that people like may never come to their city
Buy merch
It’s rare for me to find merch worth buying, I prefer buying the music.
Maybe buying it directly from their website might be the better option in this case? 🤔
It’s about the effort artists make for merch, I don’t want to buy a t-shirt with a simplistic design or just a sentence on it
I meant buying the CD/music on their website
Unless it’s a ticketmaster concert because fuck them.
Lol. Yes, ticket service fees, venue fees, and reseller makerts is totally the best way to support an artist, especially if you live no where near a tour location.
This is probably why you get a nearly endless stream of covers and remixes if you just let Amazon Music play random music.
How much money would they want to skim to distribute the music? 33-66 split doesn’t sound so bad considered that they don’t produce the music, sign artist, promote them, etc
They can always start their own label if they believe that vertical integration will be more profitable for them.
They tried that with podcasts and it didn’t go as planned
33% is a massive amount for effectively just being a download service. massive
For reference, the Steam store of the gaming distributor Valve charges 30% of each sale, however the Steam service provides quite a bit of incentive. Having community and discussions easily accessible, cloud storage that links to screenshots and saves, branches, I’m sure there’s more.
Meanwhile Spotify gives you, what, playlist creations?
Because servers and traffic are free. Totally forgot how you don’t have to pay the people keeping the service alive either. A steam game you download once? Maybe once a year? Music gets streamed (downloaded) every single time unless you decide to download it. Can we maybe not pretend like Spotify does fucking nothing?
servers and traffic are basically free, it’s very low cost - their expenses are salaries not servers.
I didn’t mention servers because that is their only cost next to employees.
If they aren’t paying artists well, well what’s the point of having servers.
Maybe can we not pretend like Spotify is some up and coming startup that barely breaks even because of their benevolence?
Because apparently these servers cost enough that even with 400mil users they aren’t making profit? The point of Spotify is giving paying customers what they want so that hopefully Spotify can make a profit. Unsure why that’s so unacceptable for you? And small artists have been paid like shit long before Spotify was an idea. Take that up with the actual music industry. Or maybe accept that turning your hobby (making music) into a job just doesn’t pay the bills for everybody that tries. I have no idea how you can blame Spotify for payouts bigger than on YouTube or Twitch when it’s the music industry fucking with the numbers.
Many of their executives make over $300,000 and the CEO is a billionaire. I don’t know how you can’t blame Spotify for payouts.
Servers and employees. Nothing else. Got it. No office space, no advertising, no royalties.
What a genius business plan. No wonder they’re so successful.
Then I’m sure their executives would be happy to take a pay cut to make the business profitable.
Meanwhile Spotify gives you, what, playlist creations?
Distribution is hardly free. There are massive overheads - do you know all the details of sales tax law in your own country? What about in hundreds of other countries? They’re all different. And what about refund laws? That’s also different in each country. If someone writes you an email in a language you don’t even recognise… do you just ignore it? To give one example in my country if a customer asks for a tax receipt after a purchase, you are required by law to give it to them. That’s hard to comply if you don’t speak the same language as the customer. Spotify handles all those headaches for you.
What if your bank tells you they have refunded the payment someone made to buy your album, pending an investigation into wether or not the cardholder actually authorised the payment and received what was advertised. Can you prove it wasn’t a stolen card? Can you prove the album was delivered to the customer? The bank isn’t going to do that for you - they’re happy to just refund the payment (and might charge the seller a $50 processing fee…). Spotify is able to provide proof and will fight people who demand unreasonable refunds. You probably can’t prove it, which means anyone who wants a free album can just buy it and complain to their bank. And trust me, it will happen. Might not even be your customers asking for refunds - it might be a rival band that wants you to suffer. If there are too many refunds, the bank will just take way your ability to sell stuff.
Spotify takes 30 %, too. The ‘one third’ in the headline is just rounding.
And the question should be if digital markets and platforms should take 30 % or not. Because every platform does so from Steam to Apple App Store to Spotify.
Besides that Spotify offers more than Steam imho. Playlist creation, discovery algorithms, individualized playlist generation, AI DJs and if you consider Steam to also be a social platform, Spotify is too.
the actual article we are commenting under thinks its outrageous that Spotify only gets 30% and things artists should get less. so it’s not “should they take 30% or not”, the question posed is “why are the greedy labels not letting spotify take even more” for some reason, madness
Distributing the music is basically free these days - at least for the artist/label anyway. Artists can pay about ten bucks (per album) to various cloud services which will handle distribution - and that includes global physical CD distribution (via an online store, not retail stores). That cost is often $4 per disc and paid by the purchaser.
Recording an album and music video can cost a fortune, and marketing the album can cost an infinite amount of money. That’s where the record label spends most of their money and it’s not a fixed figure - it gets negotiated for each album. AFAIK the split between the artist and label usually varies depending on wether the label’s investment has been paid for yet. And marketing is an ongoing expense, the label can keep spending money on that indefinitely (and the artist probably wants them to keep spending money on marketing).
Profit can be distorted based on how much you’re paying your employees.
In this case royalties paid out to imaginary property holders means spotify is functioning exactly how it should. Those people are profiting, spotify’s employees are being paid. Everyone directly involved has more money than they need.
except tht artists, which is more the fault of the rights holders in this case really…
Poor Spotify. Here’s a Link to a documentary about the dark side of Spotify, by Slightly Sociable. Their illegal business, extortion of artists and support for scamming.
