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I think what may be happening is that we hear loudly and often from the mega-stars who used to comfortably earn millions from each new album release or even sin
by zuminator 3y ago
I think what may be happening is that we hear loudly and often from the mega-stars who used to comfortably earn millions from each new album release or even single release and now get lower streaming revenue. But we never hear from the hundreds of thousands of "long tail" smaller performers who previously would've earned zero within a couple years after releasing their last CD, but who now get a small but steady trickle of income from streaming. I've got dozens of songs on my Spotify playlist that the world has entirely forgotten about in terms of radio or public exposure, and the performers themselves might be middle-aged realtors or office workers by now who have entirely given up their music careers, but their songs were little earworms to me back in 2003 so I still play them occasionally. Not that the people negatively impacted don't have cause for complaint. But we're only hearing one side of the story.
- rchaud 3y agoThey're slashing royalties to the very same long-tail artists you think you're supporting. > A new threshold of minimum annual streams that a track must meet before it starts to generate royalties. The threshold, according to MBW, will de-monetize tracks that had previously received 0.5% of Spotify’s royalty pool. https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-changing-how-pays-artists-stream-thresholds/ https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-changing-how-pays-arti...
- zuminator 3y agoThat's ostensibly to deter the proliferation of noise and programmatically generated junk where one "artist" might upload hundreds or thousands of tracks in the hope of getting paid due to accidental clicks and the like. Anyway if the cutbacks only represent 0.5% of the total royalty pool, then they don't impact what's typically meant by the long tail, wherein the smaller back catalog items, in aggregate, end up being a substantial fraction of the total sales.
- avgcorrection 3y ago> I think what may be happening is that we hear loudly and often from the mega-stars who used to comfortably earn millions from each new album release or even single release and now get lower streaming revenue. I vaguely recall that Taylor Swift took her music off Spotify over concerns for the small artists. Like doing it on behalf of them. I have my doubts about that being the reason, though...