After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year
When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
I mean, Spotify is a great service for the consumer. One reasonable monthly fee for most of the music in the world.
If a similar video streaming service existed for 40€/month, I'd pay for it in a heartbeat. Now I have a plethora of arr apps and a vpn, and Plex. But it's a hassle sometimes.
We're all aware of the issues it created for the artists, and I'd be willing to double the fee if that money directly went to the artists, but this is where the capitalist model fails, as that won't maximize the profits for shareholders.
If we ever come up with a way to fix the underlying greed models that come with publicly traded companies, that would be great.
As it stands, it is what it is, but I'm glad we have this, instead of a "different Spotify per music publisher".
I'd pay 40€ a month for an officially licensed private torrent tracker. If they gave discounts based on the amount seeded I doubt they would even need the stupidly expensive infrastructure.
I don't even have the arr stack because it's cheaper, just because it's more convenient and no one can take it away from me
Maybe it's because my schema for torrents is dichotomous with licensed uses, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this.
Is the distinction you're making here between your proposed 'licensed private tracker' and something like a subscription-based catalogue (à la Audible) simply the way it's distributed (in this case a centralized vs peer-to-peer)?
I like the idea of distributed media networks, but I really doubt any copyright owner would go for a distribution network that they don't have any level of control over. The idea of an 'officially licensed private torrent tracker' seems incompatible with how that industry works.
I'd happily pay for an unlicensed private torrent tracker, though.
Totally agree, they'll never go for that. I meant licensed as in that the media is being legally distributed. But they wouldn't go for it as it would mean that customers might have an amount of ownership.
The distinction is that the private tracker is legal to run, as you'd be paying the licence holder for the ability to torrent using their private tracker.
Licence is probably the wrong word as I'm not anywhere near an expert on this
Plus ads.
I was perfectly happy with Napster, before it got blown up.
As it stands, I've been leaning on SoundCloud and Bandcamp when I'm hunting for something indie and pirating or going vinyl for anything mainstream.
Spotify's model is doomed to fail over time. Far better to own the media than stream it.
This right here. At the very least, unless they are not beholden to shareholders, it will eventually reach market saturation and will have to cut artists' share, hike prices up, or add more paywalls to keep the line going up
Not sure about the ads? If you mean when the app notifies you about live gigs etc. then yeah, that's shittification. Luckily it doesn't happen on my desk or car, but I wish it didn't sometimes appear on my phone. That's the one thing that might push me to add music to my video streaming arr stack.
Certain content (podcasts, most notably) insert ads into the feed above and beyond what Spotify Premium ostensibly removes. There's also Spotify's persistent need to blow up your phone with notifications and bloat your in-app screen, but at least some of that you can silence manually.
My wife has Spotify and she's noticed the increased pressure to be always-online, as well. We were on a flight, and she's got her take-off chill music, when she discovered putting the phone in airplane mood before starting up the app caused a bunch of bugs in her selection screen. Which - in the middle of a take-off that she did not enjoy - fucking sucked.
The service is definitely getting worse over time. And when you can keep an enormous library of music locally, the service becomes harder and harder to justify imho.
I'm perfectly happen to send $30/mo to Patreon for a few of my favorite artists. $12/mo for Spotify just feels like money down a well.
I'm not familiar with the free tier, but if you don't pay anything, I think ads are fine.
Paying and seeing ads is wrong on the other hand.
What would be wrong with a model where artists had their own website where they could distribute their music? That's what Faircamp does. Then people could actually download it, rather than use a companies crappy client with DRM.
I was referring to the sharding that happened with video streaming services. It used to be Netflix had mostly everything, in the start, similar to Spotify. Now there are services per publisher that contain their own catalogues.
Fuck. That.
So you'd rather a monopoly?
Spotify isn't the only service currently.
Like I said in my op: it's good service for the consumer. It might not be if enshittification ensues.
But compared to video streaming, it's awesome.
The issue isn't the service model, but the capitalistic shit behind it, that attempts to maximize profits instead of paying artists fairly.
Are you seriously throwing might into this sentence?
I suppose you could say when you throw a ball up in the air it might come back down but that is kind of being disingenuous isn’t it.
Here’s another thought, doesn’t it impact the quality of the service for the consumer if the workers doing the labor to create the substance of the service, the basic thing that gives the service value to customers, are not being rewarded in a sustainable fashion for their time and labor?
Do you really think all your favorite artists are going to keep cranking out music in this environment? More importantly, do you think your favorite artists would have ever been able to invest the time and effort to get big enough to become that 1% of the successful musicians if the environment they began in was as hostile towards musicians earning money as it is now?
The amount of quality recorded music being released is going to plummet as musicians just stop bothering to do it. We will look back on the 2000s-2010s as a golden era where music production tools were distributed and affordable but venture capital hadn’t yet destroyed the ability of up and coming recording artists and audio engineers to actually devote the time and focus to becoming professional.
At least 50% of the bands I’ve seen, toured with, or heard don’t record music to make money. There’s just too much music for it to be dependable income. They do it because they wanna share something neat with their friends. They upload it to sites like Spotify or a decade ago MySpace or a decade before that zines so other people can find cool shit. If they get lucky, that stumble upon nets a shirt sale which actually nets the band some income.
The sweeping generalizations you’re making do not apply. Stop trying to make music about money.
Edit: mailing tapes was a thing a few decades ago. Are you saying I ripped off those folks because I wanted friends on one coast to hear shit friends on the other coast recorded? That’s a really fucking hard DIY tour to build. You’re fucking Skinner saying all us kids are wrong.
…what?
Are you angry at me for saying your friends were still getting underpaid for their labor even back then?
For someone opposed to capitalism, you sure seem to think everything should be a grind mindset.
You’re underpaying all of us for our labor in interacting with you. You’re late on your “pay everyone on the fediverse” invoice. Don’t forget to pay your family for their “putting up with insufferable bullshit” time.
If a friend asks me to help with something, I don't removed and moan about my unpaid labour. Fuck that, they're my friends and I wouldn't take the money even if offered. That's just what friends do. The same applies to if I wanted to do something nice for them, like sending them a cool mixtape I made. That's how you build communities! Focusing on payment like you do reduces everything to capitalism but with even less empathy and humanity.
I don’t understand where you are getting the impression that I think money is the point, I never said that.
What I said is the labor of recording musicians being totally eviscerated by capitalism is a tragedy and that I don’t buy the narrative that this was inevitable for one second.
I said multiple times “lots of folks do music for fun.” You said “you’re undervaluing their labor.” That’s why everyone thinks you think money is the point.
You also seem to not understand market saturation. If a fair value for a recording is $20 (just pretend for a minute), consumers are happy to pay $20, and artists sell for $20, why aren’t musicians getting rich? It’s because there are more musicians producing an incredible volume of work than the consumers can completely support. Nowhere in that statement is an attack on the value of that labor just an acknowledgment that there’s too much to consume.
In addition, you seem to fail to understand the difference between value to the artist and value to the consumer. Physical and digital radio provide incredible value to the consumer. They don’t really provide value to the artist unless you have an incredible amount of fame. A very good question to ask is “how do we create a solution that’s good for the consumer and the artist?” I have no idea. Making music about money (like you continue to do) instead of about fun (like a good number of artists who aren’t topping charts do) makes it very difficult to balance what an artist should get paid against what consumers can afford to pay (assuming we remove all middle layers).
I am focusing on money because I think it is wrong the society exploits artists for their labor and then tells itself this is fine to do because artists love what they do.
Making music because money is the worst reason to make music, I don’t dispute that (why would I?) but that means for 99% of extremely talented musicians that they can’t devote very much time outside of day their job that pays the bills to make music. I want musicians to get materially rewarded for the labor of creating recorded music so they can afford to divert time from their day job to do it.
The math is very simple, every dollar less that a musician can realistically get from recording music is a dollar they have to make up elsewhere (especially in an environment where, at least in the US where I live, most people are on an economic knife edge and are one or two disasters away from their life spiraling out of control), and even if the amount of money an average moderately successful musician could realistically make even without a middleman like Spotify taking the lion’s share (to say the least), every dollar more a musician makes from their recording hobby on the side is one step closer to that musician being able to invest real time and energy to their craft (not just the vanishing amount of energy left over after they have paid the bills).
I live in the US, people cannot afford to devote actual energy and time into something unless it is their job or they are young and have a huge amount of extra energy. This is why I keep talking about money, it isn’t because I think musicians should approach music from a cynical money-making perspective, quite the opposite I want to live in a socialized society where housing, healthcare and basic necessities are provided as a baseline, so people can choose to develop their musicianship and audio engineering skills into professional careers without feeling like they are buying scratch tickets for a lottery they are likely never going to win anything from.
You missed the market saturation. Again. You addressed everything except the last part of the sentence there. Music is a lottery, like most jobs, because there are too many people trying to do music. Streaming, radio, labels, exposure, these aren’t the problems at all. The number of people who are good at a thing and enjoy it are.
I follow maybe 30 artists fairly closely. I regularly listen to maybe 200. Across the genres I hit each month (way down from my music heyday), there’s probably 500 in regular rotation. I work in tech and make decent money. I can’t afford to support all of these amazing people. Sharing their music gets them more exposure which might lead to merch sales which is how they actually make money. If I had to sell their music every time I shared it, that would go away. Samplers, mix tapes, music videos, all of that is to drive merch sales. I buy on Bandcamp and still stream, meaning artists are getting more money from my consumption than back in the day when me buying a cassette was the final sale.
Unless you’re going to put some sort of barrier to entry in front of music, this problem does not go away. You’re advocating for the shitty cover band making the same amount of money as the original artist putting blood, sweat, and tears into a long career. That just doesn’t work. And, unfortunately, there are too many killer artists out there for all of them to earn a living doing music. Even if I could support all the artists I love in my country, there are that many or more in other countries.
Not everyone gets to do their dream job. Decent analysis if a bit scathing. My dream as a kid was writing. Turns out that dream was held by a ton of kids like me and none of can survive on that.
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No, dude… Spotify doesn’t have exclusive streaming rights to its music
They were talking about how each publisher was making their own streaming service as if the solution would be to have them all under one roof aka a monopoly.
No, the solution would be for every app to be able to licence the music without any exclusivity, making them compete over the features their apps and services have instead of on the music itself. Video streaming is an oligopoly right now, which can be just as bad as a monopoly.
I mean, nobody intrinsically cares how many competitors there are, so long as the all content can be retrieved from a single source. Of course that doesn’t mean people wouldn’t care if a single company were to abuse their monopoly e.g. by charging unreasonable rates or forcing ads (looking at you, cable).
It’s worth remembering that monopolies aren’t inherently illegal in the U.S. or anywhere else really; it’s not against the law to have the best product by a mile, nor should it be. Antitrust is illegal, which in this case would be defined by signing exclusive rights for all content and then providing a shitty service.
Is there a median breakdown of the split on Spotify. How much the artist get, the label and Spotify. I get that the split between artists and labels could probably vary a lot. But I get the feeling that Spotify aren't the only one whos beeing greedy
You'd be correct
The greed isn't inherent in the system, in the humans. We have to fix our self-serving nature first.
Oh yes why fix economic system when we can just defeat human nature. Great idea that’ll be much easier.
facepalm we are literally the same species of Homo sapiens we have been for thousands of years, the problem is most certainly inherent in the system and we need to smash the system and make something kinder.
In 2023, Taylor Swift got $100 million from Spotify. How much should she get?
Not sure what the relevance of this comment was, considering what I said