38 ms·

Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

357 points by buro9 3y ago

badgersnake 3y ago
[flagged]
Lacerda69 3y ago
And the enshitification begins. Remember that you as users are next. Find a sustainable alternative now. I personally recommend bandcamp + youtube combo. Yt to explore and find new music, Bc to buy the music I enjoy and __own__ it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- paranoidrobot 3y ago
  I find new music through YT fairly regularly - it's what got me into a whole bunch of artists I'd never seen/heard before. Unfortunately with YT I've had to cancel my Premium subscription on - they want $34/month, and I'm not paying that. I'll move to using third party apps/adblockers, and paying some of the creators I watch directly.
  - dacryn 3y ago
    why do they want 34? I pay 12
    - nottorp 3y ago
      Probably some dark pattern where they hide the actual price for just youtube music and show you the subscription for a bundle of services you don't want...
    - paranoidrobot 3y ago
      Australia, and Family plan. Also, I got it wrong, it's $32.99/month. > To continue delivering great service and features, we're increasing your price to A$32.99/month.
- baumschubser 3y ago
  It is not exactly the new kid on the block, but I find tons of interesting music on the music blog aggregator Hype Machine. YMMV depending on your preferred genre.
- wiz21c 3y ago
  Owning the music is the thing.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  Discogs and RYM are great for discovery. Slsk is also still alive and well
  - xlbuttplug2 3y ago
    sputnikmusic is my go-to.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  What works well for me is a metal discord community (run by writers of a review blog [0]). Tons of interesting recommendations, including sometimes non-metal stuff, my favorite album of the year so far is chamber folk / Americana [1]. For new music, I tend to at least give a few seconds to every new release that is of an even slightly interesting sub-genre, older stuff sometimes shows up in what people post they are listening to, but there are also listening pods (me and two others are currently doing a one album a day discography run of Necrophobic), and adopted months: March was Screamarch, where two people curated a list of Screamo and adjacent albums/eps for every day, now it’s Finlapril where a Finn curated 1-2 albums a day moving through the history of Finnish metal. Since joining, my monthly bandcamp purchases went pretty far up, though. And I’m only buying digital albums, there are quite a few who do vinyl purchases for even higher bills. [0] https://www.angrymetalguy.com/ https://www.angrymetalguy.com/ [1] Vera Sola - Peacemaker https://verasola.bandcamp.com/album/peacemaker https://verasola.bandcamp.com/album/peacemaker
  - cageface 3y ago
    I hardly ever listen to metal any more but I still often check Angry Metal Guy just because it's such a well run independent music review and community site. Unfortunately such sites are increasingly rare these days.
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      And no ads/payment whatsoever. Purely volunteer-run, for the fun of writing/reviewing.
paranoidrobot 3y ago
I think this is the wrong approach. If they have issues with people abusing the revenue model by publishing white noise and generating fake plays - go after that. However the 1K streams per track thing is going to negatively impact small artists who might have relatively large collections, but few over 1K annual streams. If it's a processing cost issue then make it so that payouts need to meet some reasonable minimum threshold. > between $1 and $2 will be added to monthly bills for customers in several territories, including the UK, Australia, and Pakistan, Bloomburg reports. This is said to cover the cost of audiobooks, added to the platform late-2023. More recently, video learning content was introduced to further diversify the offering. I don't want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app. They mention that there will be another tier added which doesn't have these -- great, so long as it keeps the audio quality for music at the same level, and doesn't have ads.
- HenryBemis 3y ago
  > I don't want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app. Regarding Spotify, which I use daily, I also dislike their updates. I remember some months back I could disable/hide "Recommendations". Now in all my (personal & private) playlists I get a list of Recommendations. It's an annoyance because when I scroll fast to reach the bottom "to listen to that one song" it end up surfing the Recommendations (did I mention I dislike them?). So, it makes me want to go to apkpure, find an apk from 2020 and use THAT (slim chance it'll work) because most updates are "to increase engagement" (pester you/me/all) with 'new and exciting content!!!' (bleh) Sidenote: for podcasts I am using a 2021 version of the Podcast Addict (the one displaying the full screen ad)(which you can block with NoRoot Firewall)
  - snailmailman 3y ago
    My Spotify app almost daily shows me a full screen advertisement for some new album when I open the app. It is clearly labeled sponsored content. I can then click a tiny 3 dots menu, click “stop showing me this” and “I don’t want to see sponsored content” and it will say “sure thing! We will no longer show you these” and the next day it will show me a new advertisement and I repeat the process. So annoying. The whole premise of premium is that there are no ads! But now I’m constantly getting visual ads in the app. Every artists page has ads for their merch. Spotify notifies me about exclusive merch for artists I listen to. And is constantly trying to get me to go to concerts of artists I listen to.
rightbyte 3y ago
"Additionally, Spotify now requires a minimum number of unique listeners for royalties to apply. This attempt to stop "further manipulation by bad actors"" What a load of manure. The only reason manipulation of royalties even works is that they pool the streams such that the consumer wont pay the artist he listens too. Just tie the royalties to what each user listens to and what they pay. Solved. No abuse possible. But no. Have to have an opaque algorithm and do hacks upon hacks to obscure its funamental flaws.
- loctal 3y ago
  If this is true, I demand that I only pay Spotify if I listen to more than 1000 songs a month
- estomagordo 3y ago
  Wait, what. Are you saying that the costs of using the service should be tied to how much listening one does? Because if you're not, then what you are saying should have no bearing at all on how much royalties anyone gets.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    Assuming a fixed fee, it's a tradeoff. Do you let the people with more plays steer everyone else's money, or do you let plays from different people be worth different amounts? I think the first option is worse. Neither option pays a fixed amount per play, so that factor doesn't favor either choice.
  - hmry 3y ago
    I read this as splitting each user's monthly payment only across the artists they themselves listened to (like how YouTube premium works) instead of pooling everything together. So artists with more paying listeners would get more, while artists who only get listened to by free bot accounts wouldn't get anything.
    - rain_iwakura 3y ago
      how would this work if i listen to 1000 bands? the split would be miniscule.
VS1999 3y ago
How much of an issue is this? Does it work like ad revenue on youtube? If something has under 1k streams I have to assume that was only a few dollars hobbyists get occasionally, if even that.
- ojosilva 3y ago
  As a side-gig musician and composer - my wife and I as a matter of fact - this is a non-issue. It's a few bucks a year, maybe $5 to $15, depending if we release some new album. It's symbolic, not even a tip, and we can't cash it until it reaches I think $60 or more iirc. Spotify is not (or barely) making money out of our work, but we otoh are "making money" by using its platform and visibility as means to reaching to our small fan base that will finance our work through concerts. For Spotify otoh, these few bucks add up to a long-tail loss of an increasing and disturbing magnitude. Additionally, bad actors are in fact exploiting it, ruining the experience for me as a musician and as a user. The issue, if any, is that in all fairness we should all be making money, proportionally, from the platform. But under 1000 streams, as an artist, you are probably getting more value from having your work uploaded and streamable.
  - basisword 3y ago
    >> we can't cash it until it reaches I think $60 or more iirc This is highly dependent on your distributor. It can be as little as $10. >> Spotify is not (or barely) making money out of our work, but we otoh are "making money" by using its platform and visibility as means to reaching to our small fan base that will finance our work through concerts. This is an odd way to look at it. Without music, Spotify doesn’t exist. People subscribe to Spotify and listen to their ads in exchange for unlimited music access. So Spotify is making money from your music.
    - ojosilva 3y ago
      > This is an odd way to look at it. Without music, Spotify doesn’t exist. People subscribe to Spotify and listen to their ads in exchange for unlimited music access. So Spotify is making money from your music. Spotify has expenses too and is hosting and streaming our music, distributing and maintaining an app and api for access, all basically for free for the musician. So "making money from your music" from my 800 streams a year is a very optimistic view of how the whole thing works out, I'd say we are cooperating fairly.
easyThrowaway 3y ago
This should be renamed to "Spotify admits demonetizing all tracks under 1k streams with no previous contractual agreements". Next step would be explaining why artists with the same amount of streams (but different labels) have wildly different payouts.
snailmailman 3y ago
I don’t know much about how music licensing works. But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify? I listen to a lot of music on Spotify. And some of it is from smaller indie artists. Not a huge amount, but I’ve definitely listened to songs that are in that <1000 plays category, and for some undiscovered artists that’s a good amount of their library. It surprises me how much of my Spotify library is no longer available. There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out. A lot of good songs too. As much as I love Spotify and music streaming, it seems like the economics of it fundamentally doesn’t work and can’t work.
- cranberryturkey 3y ago
  Back to torrenting I guess. If I’m not mistaken snoop said he made 45k off 1 billion plays. Thats ridiculous
  - reliablereason 3y ago
    That was apparently a track that was not his own, he was only a partial co author of that track.
  - ansc 3y ago
    To be fair, that's because the label siphons the rest. Spotify pays $4 per 1000 streams.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - djxfade 3y ago
      Where do you get those numbers from? I'm a self published artist. I had 150k streams on Spotify last year. I only earned roughly $450. There's no label or other middleman here taking a cut. Spotify is just cheap.
      - 3y ago
estomagordo 3y ago
This change quite obviously can't negatively impact small artists in any meaningful way. When googling for how much Spotify pay artists per stream, ranges vary a bit. But it seems like a high number is $0.005 per stream, or 200 streams to the dollar. Even if a very prolific artist has 200 songs, averaging 500 plays per year, this would only ever amount to $500 per year. It is not peanuts for a hobby musician, but it would represent an unusually productive artist who happens to be just under this limit with most (or all) their songs, and also who manages to somehow get paid in the upper parts of the span.
- Shrezzing 3y ago
  The change in isolation from Spotify may not impact individual bands. However if this is adopted across all the seven major streaming services, then artists can in theory have 7,006 streams per track without generating a penny of income, even though the streaming vendors have generated revenues. If YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Deezer, Soundcloud, and Amazon all adopt this practice, taking your edge-case artist, they're out of pocket for $3,500 per year. That makes a situation where the more highly concentrated Spotify's monopoly is, and the less productive an artist is, the fairer the outcome for that small artist. Meanwhile the $3,500 is distributed between the monopolist, and the very large artists on the service. That's a quite uniquely perverse set of economic outcomes.
- polski-g 3y ago
  Kind of crazy that we used to spend $20 for a CD with 12 songs on twenty years ago.
qnleigh 3y ago
When I read the headline, I assumed this was to disincentivise uploading thousands of cheap AI-generated songs. There's tons of this on the platform, and it looks like it was generated automatically in bulk. But the article makes it sound like this was not a factor?
- supernes 3y ago
  I'm inclined to believe that filling the service with an endless stream of generated garbage is their ultimate endgame - why bother with unreliable and costly human creators when you can just emulate them well enough for undiscerning listeners. No substance, just vibes.
  - whstl 3y ago
    Even Spotify is smart enough to know that people will leave them if this ever happens.
    - reducesuffering 3y ago
      No, that's the end game here. People already mostly have parasocial relationships with artists. There's already famous AI personality Instagrams and Vtubers. With the advent of Generative AI video like Sora and Generative AI music like Suno, people will find their perfect generative AI niche and follow an artist story/interaction that they can't even tell is real or not. Generative AI will create millions of niches, it will hit that spot.
      - fuzzfactor 3y ago
        You might just be spot-on. Some generative stuff will be more discernible than others. The ones that don't even try to emulate the full experience of having a real artist involved will have a lot less friction. And it's not like you're going to have a small niche audience that settles for artificial music, no there will be a niche that prefers it. The size of that niche right now has nowhere to go but up.
      - 3y ago
AtNightWeCode 3y ago
The 1k streams limit will probably only financially effect "artists" that spams the platform with new tracks. It is not like it will make any difference for real artists.
- wokkel 3y ago
  So by your definition a real artist should have more than 1000 plays. I listen to small artist from my country which will probably never reach a global audience and they definitely do not get 1.000 plays but are verified artists according to spotify. This policy basically drives more drivel music and leaves out alternative and indie bands. It's a bad policy that needs an investigation by the authorities to force Spotify not to discriminate smaller artists.
  - AtNightWeCode 3y ago
    No small artists cares about this at all. Grow up.
cjk2 3y ago
I suspect the truth around this is that it contributes to their eternal losses actually paying artists so they worked out another way of not doing it for their balance sheet. I was at a gig for a moderately successful band recently and they said rather loudly they were bastards and buy one of their CDs instead even if you never play it because they need to eat.
- Hendrikto 3y ago
  > they said rather loudly […] buy one of their CDs instead even if you never play it because they need to eat They could try making music people actually want to listen to. If they can‘t, that career may not be for them.
  - cjk2 3y ago
    I don't think you know how the music industry works
basisword 3y ago
This shouldn’t be legal. It’s a massive abuse of power. Small artists need to be on Spotify (pulling their music in protest is not viable and not going to lead to change anyway). What gives Spotify the right to arbitrarily decide “you make so little money it’s not worth our time paying you”? There’s no other business you could get away with this in. Scum.
- silisili 3y ago
  It depends on the amount here, which I'm still not actually sure of. Lots of companies today only pay you out once you reach $X, usually some nominal amount. It sounds like that could be the case here. Why deal with payment processors, billing disputes, etc for a customer only earning pennies?
  - basisword 3y ago
    >> Why deal with payment processors, billing disputes, etc for a customer only earning pennies? Spotify doesn’t have to deal with these things. Artists work with distributors who then deal with Spotify on their behalf. The distributor pays the artist. For me the issue here is they’ve changed the deal to the detriment of the littlest of the little guys. A company that just signed a non-exclusive $250m deal for Joe Rogans podcast, can’t afford to pay $10 a year to a whole bunch of independent artists. That’s outrageous. For me it’s the ethics of it rather than the amount.
  - whstl 3y ago
    > Lots of companies today only pay you out once you reach $X, usually some nominal amount. It sounds like that could be the case here. This seems to already be the case, in practice. Spotify claims that there's about 40 million in unpaid royalties for people who can't withdrawal yet. https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-system https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-...
- fundatus 3y ago
  Seriously, if you're a small artist with less than 1,000 streams per YEAR on your tracks, Spotify (or any streaming service for that matter) is already today not a relevant income stream at all.
rain_iwakura 3y ago
I think they should basically turn it into Twitch, where I can "sub" to an artist and maybe get their tracks earlier than others or some other additional content that costs artist $0 to produce for the most part (podcast, making of, e.g. a la Patreon). In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash. It's a shame that these hacks (streamers) become multimillionaires while real talents make pennies off actual art.
- rnestler 3y ago
  > In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash. There are donation buttons for some artist on Spotify. I guess the artist need to enable it? ("Signum Regis" is an artist that has a Donate button for example)
- usrusr 3y ago
  And/or something like Amazon Prime Video and how it aggregates its main subscription, ad-driven licensing, VOD and, that's what I'm getting at, hosted third party subscriptions into one UI. I actually hate that in Prime, because discovery for shows and movies is never a positive experience but a setup chore separate from consumption, and advertising stuff that isn't already paid for always makes it worse. But for music I think it could actually be enjoyable, because you can consume and browse at the same time is actually a thing. Like diving into discogs.com while listening. I could easily see myself listening to some artist's main albums as part of some standard subscription (that pays as badly as spotify?) and then shell out a single digit payment on one hundred pay-per-listen tokens for obscure B-sides from the label that the artist is signed on, or something like that. Or reimplenent radio, by offering a licensing model where what would have been single releases in the olden days are part of the ad based subscription, but album content is only available through purchase or (various?) subscriptions. Make it a marketplace of monetization models! Perhaps the right company to try this would be someone completely unexpected like cloudflare? Being a blank slate from both consumer and licensor perspective could almost be considered a prerequisite for a project like that...
lawgimenez 3y ago
So which platform pays the highest royalty?
- nicholassmith 3y ago
  I did some research on this recently and it's a bit tricky to pin down as some of the information is out of date or doesn't include certain services, but the three that appear to be the best on payouts are: Tidal, Quobuz and Napster.
  - nmisko 3y ago
    Can you explain how these platforms pay more royalties if the subscription cost is the same?
- Mashimo 3y ago
  Bandcamp :)
ulrikrasmussen 3y ago
Even if this doesn't really impact the small artists, Spotify is not even profitable for shareholders yet AND still doesn't pay a meaningful amount to most artists. It is only going to get worse from here. I do not believe that their business model will ever do anything but fuck over the artists. It's also deeply disturbing to me that there are only a few options left for people to actually own their music and the rest is rent-seeking platforms.
- Helmut10001 3y ago
  Self-host Funkwhale [1] * (or something else). Curate your own music library. This is the only way forward. * I self-host this internally, for my family and me, since 2019. One of the best designed interfaces / UX you can find. [1]: https://www.funkwhale.audio/ https://www.funkwhale.audio/
dclowd9901 3y ago
How is Spotify not the loser here? Isn’t it more important to say “we have basically every song ever made” than save a few bucks over small fish streaming?
kkarpkkarp 3y ago
Clickbait song titles enters the scene...
- ykonstant 3y ago
  You won't believe believing is without you you won't believe anymore~
scary-size 3y ago
Kristin Graziani wrote a comprehensive explainer on this in November: https://consequence.net/2023/11/spotify-royalty-model-op-ed/ https://consequence.net/2023/11/spotify-royalty-model-op-ed/
truegoric 3y ago
Streaming services will be regulated in the coming months in EU https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/17/24041343/eu-music-streaming-platform-artist-pay-europe-regulation https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/17/24041343/eu-music-streami... EDIT: as it’s been pointed out, the article doesn’t mention a time, which is a speculation on my part
- code_runner 3y ago
  That’s not quite what the article linked says. If anything is done it could be years. It’s also unclear if they have any price per stream in mind and how they even think it should be calculated on an ongoing basis. Sounds pretty early stage
andrewstuart 3y ago
It's THEIR money.
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
What is the going rate for a service that "organically" plays a track / album 1000 times? To misquote Bezos: Your silly policy is my buisness oppertunity.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  the going rate is probably what spotify pays for that 1000 plays, minus tax
mfashby 3y ago
Does anyone know of a service where I can feed in my Spotify playlists, and it tells me where I can buy those tracks?
- geraldhh 3y ago
  idk but this seems usefull https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
chgs 3y ago
I spend £17 a month on Spotify. If all I do is listen to “Bob Bobson sings Bob Bob Bob”, then my £17, minus commission (1%, 5%, 30%, whatever), should go entirely to Bob Bobson That’s not how Spotify works. Instead a lot of it goes to Taylor Swift, who I don’t listen to.
- Arkhaine_kupo 3y ago
  Even worse like 90% of the money comes from paid users, but most of the streams comes from free users with ads. Some some barber shop is playing drake 24/7 having ads and 16£ of you 17£ are going to drake because you only listened to Bob bobson 20 minutes today instead of 23 hours:59 minutes like the barber shop. The pay model is ridiculous, every update is terrible and there is no mechanism to let the company know they are running the product into the ground. It used to be heaven for power users,now if they simplify it any more the app will just pick what it thinks you should listen to, give the money to ed sheeran regardless of what you end up listening to and not even let you pause cause an extra button might be too complicated for you.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
noirscape 3y ago
IMO the problem is that Spotify is fundamentally breaking the "spirit" of the deal that allowed them to get in the position they are right now. Spotify's entire promise was "we solve the music inequality problem by just pooling all subscriber money together and then we do an equal(-ish, record labels iirc got slightly different deals) split depending on how many people listen to your music." It kinda sells the idea that if you're just popular enough, you can make it big on Spotify. Of course practically that's been a lie for ages (numbers showcased that only the top 0.1% could afford to live off of Spotify alone, and all those songs are owned by the established record companies anyway), so you could say this is just dispensing with the charade to avoid transaction costs. I do wonder about the ripple effect this could cause for indie artists; Spotify just told them to go fuck themselves and there's pretty much no incentive to use Spotify anymore now that they pulled this stunt. If you want to support artists directly, it's still always better to just buy the albums. Most of them have Bandcamp pages and for now, Bandcamp provides a good deal (and as a customer you can just download the FLAC files).
- quitit 3y ago
  Essentially Spotify now pays small artists in “exposure”. Looks a lot like abuse of market position.
- thirdsun 3y ago
  Did anyone really expect 10 dollars a month to be enough to be sustainable? That's the price we used to pay for a single album and it seems way too low for a sustainable flatrate music service.
dcb_lu 3y ago
I hope this doesn't affect Matt Farley[1] too badly, as it seems like he relies on having many songs with only a few streams each as his main strategy for generating income from Spotify. I once commissioned a Mother's Day song from him -- sent him 10 facts about my Mom and our family and he came back a few days later with a funny and charming little tune. Best $30 I've ever spent. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/magazine/spotify-matt-farley.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/magazine/spotify-matt-far...
megalomanu 3y ago
I highly recommend trying Qobuz! Artists are paid more, the catalog is rich and comprehensive (I recommend to early users who might have felt a lack of content to give it another try, as it's now much richer), most albums are available in Hi-Res Audio, the UI is nice, there is no fluff (just music, nothing more), and most importantly, content is curated, with many articles written by critics and journalists, artist interviews, and, for each album, a small review or a piece of text informing about the album's significance. Compared to the awesome but "industrial" recommendation system of Spotify, this is something more personal and curated which, in my opinion, better helps to understand some music genres.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  Seconded! See my comment about Qobuz on another post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39428327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39428327
- nmisko 3y ago
  Could you explain how artists are paid more? The subscription fee is roughly the same.
  - thek3nger 3y ago
    Any service without a free tier pays more than Spotify because only premium users contribute to the number of streaming that will be payed. In some sense, premium Spotify users pay also for the free users and, therefore, the average is lower (yes, there is ads income but I bet is negligible).
nottorp 3y ago
Can you see how many streams an artist has? I'm generally happy to let Spotify stream whatever for background noise, but it looks like I should play some local bands manually once in a while.
max_ 3y ago
The market is hungry for a well-done music streaming service. I don't know why there is no venture backed competitor.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  i guess the economics are not favorable because the music industry is already well positioned to extract wealth from populism and will give a hell of a legal/drm battle if threatened. the long-tail of indy artists doing essentially nothing for the bottom line doesn't help either.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Because after 18 years, Spotify’s net income looks like this: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-technology/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn... And their market cap looks like this: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-technology/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn... And your competitors are Apple/Amazon/Alphabet. And your vendors with whom you have zero negotiating power are Universal/Warner/Sony, and their whole interest in supporting a music streaming business like Spotify is to maintain leverage against Apple/Amazon/Alphabet, so music sellers only need to keep the streaming business limping along. There is no play here without reform to copyright laws that limit copyright to 10 years.
cynicalsecurity 3y ago
Why use Spotify at all when it's so much more helpful to subscribe to patreon of new and promising artist?
logro 3y ago
I think "theft" closer describes this rather than "demonetization"
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Nah; the artists entered an agreement with Spotify, it's legally on board. If the artist believes Spotify breached contract they can either end it one-sidedly, or try and sue but I'm confident Spotify's side is rock solid.
kypro 3y ago
This seems quite reasonable. I have quite an uncommon taste in music so I tend to listen to artists with very small followings. I know most songs I listen to only have a few thousand views in total on YouTube, so I was initially worried that it would be similar on Spotify so just took a look... Spotify seems to be about x10 whatever the stats are on YouTube so almost all of the songs I listen to qualify for monetisation. The only exceptions are tiny self-recording artists I've randomly stubbled on from browsing Soundcloud or other corners of the internet. I find it hard to see how this decision would impact small artists to be honest. Maybe if an artist had thousands of tracks all with ~500 streams then it might impact them, but I'm guessing small artists who are currently monetised are making almost nothing anyway from their handful of songs with under <1,000 streams – assuming they only have 2-3 albums worth of music. Supporting monetisation on all songs is probably more headache than it's worth when you're dealing with paying out a few cents. Honestly the best thing you can do to support small artists isn't stream their music, but share it with your friends, donate to them and buy their merch (assuming they have merch because many won't).
geraldhh 3y ago
acceptable as a reaction to the cost of tracking engagement and paying the long-tail of artists. then again this could probably be fixed with a minimum payout policy and a donation button in the app.
ctenb 3y ago
Are there any other comparable (but more ethical) platforms out there that I can switch to?
- geraldhh 3y ago
  just pirate and donate directly if you really mean it.
- milesjag 3y ago
  bandcamp is a bit more of a level playing field - the artists can decide whether they want to use the platform to stream or sell their music, while being given some control over the number of streams per listener before a song will be unavailable to stream (although this does lean on cookies, I think, so not difficult to get around...)
epolanski 3y ago
I'm not understanding the harsh criticism here. Pretty much all platforms have some kind of soft threshold before paying. This is actually very common in real world as well, e.g. in sales you don't get commissions if you don't meet certain thresholds too.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  No same, I don't get it; 1000 streams a year is not an unrealistic goal, and Spotify is flooded with low-effort garbage - and this will get worse with AI generated stuff.
- konschubert 3y ago
  I think it makes sense to have a lower threshold on "plays per artist", since it involves billing overhead etc. But plays per song? Why? Are they trying to fight spam? And even so, it's so little money and little overhead, just do it for the goodwill.
anentropic 3y ago
> Since going public on the stock market in 2018, the company has lost money every year they don't even have a business model the whole thing is a massive scam that devalues music just to earn some VCs a big payout it's like if I said I was going to "disrupt the supermarket industry" by giving away free food
- worble 3y ago
  > it's like if I said I was going to "disrupt the supermarket industry" by giving away free food Please don't give investors any ideas...
  - fuzzfactor 3y ago
    Too late. There's a current TV commercial showing real customers' reactions to a promotional pop-up sample-tasting booth set up in a grocery store with all the little half-ounce cups for customers to try for themselves and see if they like it. These are sometimes like a marketing study for new products or variations. Now in each little cup is a toothpick sticking up from a rolled-up dollar bill, like it was a piece of artisan cheese or something. It's a commercial that candidly filmed a live promotion for a cashback app. Even then the customers were mostly hesitant.
- rchaud 3y ago
  They made losses every single year, not just from 2018 on. Financialization of businesses has unmoored it even further from capitalism. You can be a billionnaire without ever turning a profit, as long as you can convince investors that the real money in a music streaming is acshually going to come from podcasts.
fimdomeio 3y ago
"You wouldn't stream a car for free would you?" This is just playing with meanings but for most musicians having their music on Spotify or on torrents is pretty much the same. the only difference is that only in one case there's a company profiting in the process.
- maxcoder4 3y ago
  Musicians put their music on Spotify out of their own will. If they don't like it they can withdraw. Unless they sold the rights to a music label, but that's also their decision.
baxtr 3y ago
I find it funny/interesting/annoying that Spotify plays the hero when it comes to condemning Apple for its App Store policies yet has no issues to be the villain when they have a chance to show how to handle such issues better.
fifticon 3y ago
isn't this partly to combat people who commit search listing flooding by abusing the upload ability to upload 100.000 variations of the same thing?
LightHugger 3y ago
When they say demonetize, are they saying they aren't playing any ads on them or are they just not giving creators a cut of the ads? Those are very different things. These platforms have every incentive in the world to continue monetizing them but just cut the creator out of that monetization their work earned.
RCitronsBroker 3y ago
that’s BS and in no way solving their very real bot problem. This wasn’t reported on worldwide, but here in Germany, it got some press due to local hip-hop labels being involved. Malicious labels use click farms to push up the numbers on their artists, either by manipulating all platforms or locking their artist into Spotify. This, in addition to other forms of manipulation such as playlists-aaS, isn’t just a ploy to promote their music. As long as farming clicks is cheaper that the payout rate, they can get paid for laundering illicit gains that way.
- usrusr 3y ago
  But would those cases remain in the sub-monetization bracket? If their goal is to get the double benefit, laundered gift card or identity theft money and taking popularity, then they'd surely want to focus farmed streams on fewer songs, not spread them. Or are Spotify popularity heuristics really so laughably bad that they consider a bazillion plays on a bazillion separate "tracks" as good (or better?) a signal for popularity as a less unnatural pattern?
  - RCitronsBroker 3y ago
    you are absolutely right, that’s exactly my point in favor of Spotify being dishonest here. They are just looking for reasons to buy for less and sell for more, thats it.
egeozcan 3y ago
Can someone ELI5: Why is it so hard to just split my monthly subscription money on all the artists that I listened to, proportional to their air time to the total listening time? I really don't get it
- fundatus 3y ago
  Because that would be extremely complex and expensive to do for a negligible effect.
  - orangesite 3y ago
    I'd argue this would be a lot simpler and cheaper to setup than the byzantine distribution system we currently have in place. It would also make the economics of streaming viable for the majority of artists rather than the small pool of folk raking in the bulk of the money.
    - fundatus 3y ago
      How? The current system is super simple: revenue * 0.7 = total payout total payout / no. of streams = payout per stream payout per stream * streams of an artist = payout for artist In the proposed system you'd have to calculate the payout per stream on a per-account basis and have additional complexities like how to handle family accounts etc.
      - alexcannan 3y ago
        Computers are very good at doing these calculations
        fundatus 3y ago
        Obviously, but as I said it's much more complex and therefore more expensive to do. With a negligible effect.
        3y ago
schainks 3y ago
Seems like a second order effect: Google cloud is squeezing them, and now they are squeezing artists.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
According to this artist [0] Spotify will be irrelevant soon because infinitely streaming generative AI music will cater to all your "ever changing" desires. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39967745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39967745
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Cool prediction, but false; AI generated music will be added to the pile of genres. Honestly there's an existing factory of low effort music being churned out already, AI will become part of that existing pipeline. There will be more music produced, but it won't become mainstream. Music isn't only about music, it's about the creators and their stories as well. Anyone claiming AI will replace traditional music creation is but a functional consumer. It's the same type that exclusively drinks soylent and wears black turtlenecks to avoid having to think about things or taste anything.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    > It's the same type that exclusively drinks soylent and wears black turtlenecks to avoid having to think about things or taste anything. Nice. "Technology is a way of not having to experience the world" -- Max Frisch
Manheim 3y ago
Paying a nominal amount for each stream is one matter; however, compensating nothing for smaller quantities while you pay for larger amounts presents a fundamentally different issue. This scenario is akin to an author not receiving royalties for the first 1,000 books sold in a bookstore, or a manufacturer not being paid for the first 1,000 candy bars sold at a grocery store. Such practices can be equated with theft. It's perplexing how current legislation permits this.
- poszlem 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - arter 3y ago
    Weird for me the phrasing "presents a fundamentally different issue" is so hackernews-like. "Can be equated with theft" also. I feel like I have seen them a thousand times on here from regular old people. Maybe that part did not get rephrased.
  - soapdog 3y ago
    Eer… I write like that all the time; specially if the subject is something important to me.
  - ornornor 3y ago
    Or maybe it’s written by someone who has a larger vocabulary and knows when to use a semicolon? Trying to guess whether something was written by AI or not is, to me, akin to reading tea leaves. Furthermore, I don’t think there is a reliably consistent way to tell if a piece of text is AI generated or not so if you can tell better than randomly, you’ll make a fortune.
    - breakfastduck 3y ago
      author has already responded saying they wrote it then fed it through GPT because they're not native English speaker. So they were right on the money.
ThinkBeat 3y ago
I think one of the main benefits for more obscure bands to be on streaming services is discoverability. In the Discovery weekly and Release Radar you often get bands I have never heard of. Also, if someone says "Oh I like this new band xxxxx" then you can find them on Spotify and see if you like them or not. Fron that perspective Spotify is a free service for bands to be discovered and generate more fans. Yes I do agree that bands should get a bigger piece of the profit pile, as long as there is a profile pile Personally, I like bying physical media. I am not cool enough to buy vinyl, I prefer cds. Finding places to buy cds is increasingly impossible The best used to be going to shows and buying cds at the merch desk or the bands website, but more and more new bands do not even produce cds anymore. There seems to be more bands doing vinyl. I guess with the prices they charge that the markup is a lot better. For now I try to buy digital music and burn it to cd myself. I would vastly prefer buying physical media directly.
pvorb 3y ago
It really amazes me how tech companies like Spotify manage to disrupt an entire industry, but fail to find a sustainable business model that makes them profitable. This is far from sustainable and it makes the world worse. There really should be laws that limit how much losses a company may generate during their "disruption" of existing markets. Yes, I'm aware that I'm commenting this on HN.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  Disruption, or even fully destructive complete tear-downs are a lot easier than building value. May not be quicker, but definitely easier for the less-skilled to pull off. One requires a demolition mindset, the other an engineering mindset. In some capitalist cultures there has been a tendency to value disruption as if it was the thing that added value, just because it was a noticeable component of a few high-profile bonanzas. It's like a prevailing superstition can take hold, and a belief spreads where "if it's not disruptive, it can't be good". The less-recognized builders who don't divert energy to disruption do have to operate with much less visibility, since there's not some established structure crumbling (usually under its own weight) that looks like a result of their efforts. The engineering-focused creative builder that can make something out of nothing, without having to tear down anything at all, ended up hopelessly outnumbered by weaker-performing substitutes having far-less-unique qualities. Imagine what it would be like if something capable of applying that kind of leverage to resources had access to scaling capital. Among some classes of performers, anybody can build a viable business if they started with $1 Million, and barring undue disaster, all will grow & prosper. Even without any failures, each one will obviously have differing performance. I guess you could say that one who ends up with a $1 Billion operation would be so rare, might as well be a unicorn. That's about a 1000x return one way or another. How does that compare to someone who can build anything viable at all from basically nothing to start with? Makes 1000x look like a small number.
GuB-42 3y ago
Considering that according to what I can see online, artists get around $4 per 1000 streams, it doesn't look significant and it probably saves on processing fees. One would need to be an artist with a lot of songs just under 1k to make it more than enough for a cup of coffee. The kind of money it isn't even worth the time putting songs on Spotify (it may be worth it for promotion though). The general issue with underpaid artists remains but this particular case doesn't seem to matter much, in fact, if what they imply is true, it is arguably an improvement since what they save in processing fees will go to artists instead of banks.
ioulaum 3y ago
I'm not sure the technical overhead is high enough to bother to do this... Unless the money made for it comes out to be too small to be worth bothering with after transfer fees. It may be as someone else said, that there should just be a minimum threshold for payouts. Like, you get your money after it's at least reached $10 or $100. Demonetizing the first 1000 streams is probably not a big deal, but it still sounds a little wrong.
Shorel 3y ago
Let's demonetize Spotify. Cancel our accounts and campaign to others to do the same. I cancelled my Spotify account, and now I am using Tidal, which pays the artists a higher percent.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  No reason to get in a hurry. With greedy record companies as part of the structure from the beginning, looks like they are fairly consistently demonetizing themselves. When a business depends on a resource that's so well-heeled it can truly afford to waste substantial amounts, you really hope that resource will not run out. If the balance tips toward dependence on consumers who can not afford much waste if any, that portion could very well be subject to collapse under the strain. As for demon-ization, looks like that's already in progress quite a bit too.
- nmisko 3y ago
  What percentage do Tidal and Spotify each pay?
  - Shorel 3y ago
    Tidal pays artists between $0.0125 and $0.015 per stream, with the potential to earn $1,250-$1,500 for every 100,000 streams. Spotify pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream, with a 70/30 split in favour of the rights holders, which could include the artist, the label, or others depending on the artist's contract. The actual amount artists earn per stream on Spotify is often less than these figures due to the distribution of payments to the rights holder and the artist's agreement with them. https://www.lalal.ai/blog/music-streaming-payouts-2023/ https://www.lalal.ai/blog/music-streaming-payouts-2023/ https://virpp.com/hello/music-streaming-payouts-comparison-a-guide-for-musicians/ https://virpp.com/hello/music-streaming-payouts-comparison-a...
Draiken 3y ago
I get that people just want to save money but I absolutely cannot understand how we keep screwing over artists like this. We pay a small amount, the middlemen gets all the money, 0.01% of the artists get more than a few hundred bucks, everyone else gets nothing. Piracy is entirely justified. We should pay the artists and stop paying these leeches. The only real value created is from the artists themselves.
deleted 3y ago
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icar 3y ago
I'm so happy with Tidal. Higher audio quality, more money to the artists and less b*hit overall.
- nmisko 3y ago
  Are you paying more for Tidal than Spotify, or why are you saying that artists get more money if you use Tidal?
peapicker 3y ago
The annoying thing is it is per track, not per album. This essentially demonetized all my bands albums since 1997 except for four tracks.
- bufferoverflow 3y ago
  I would pull everything except 4 tracks off the platform then. Spotify gets paid for that long tail, but you do not.
aaomidi 3y ago
I really wish my subscription to Spotify was just split to the artists I actually listen to, rather than going to a pool
lgrapenthin 3y ago
I recently demonitized Spotify and am very happy with Bandcamp and Newpipe.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
Here we go, Spotify coming in hot with it's own adpocalypse. There just isn't enough ad money to go around. What can you do? Targeted advertising is a bubble, at scale it provides little additional return and the industry is overvalued. The only thing that has been propping it up is startups looking for quick bucks to please investors, in the long run it was always going to collapse.
- kderbyma 3y ago
  yup. their API is a joke and they neutered it for cost savings....not a sign that their ads are successful.
SergeAx 3y ago
I think it would be fair if Spotify abstained from charging me for my subscription if I listened to less than 100 tracks in a given month.
rldjbpin 3y ago
i see the ethical arguments against this decision. at the same time, we got testimonials from up and coming artists saying that their current pay is literally a few cents per month for getting similar streams as the threshold. i am no artist but have been making youtube videos on and off for the past 5 years, with only one video breaking 6 figures in views. yet i never reached the threshold in the platform to monetize my content, while youtube is free to play ads on my hundreds of (non - spam/short) videos. if not receiving a couple dollars per month for my videos is what stops me from my passion, then i need to ask myself more pressing questions.
consf 3y ago
[dead]

357 points by buro9 3y ago

[flagged]

And the enshitification begins. Remember that you as users are next. Find a sustainable alternative now. I personally recommend bandcamp + youtube combo. Yt to explore and find new music, Bc to buy the music I enjoy and __own__ it.

deleted 3y ago
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paranoidrobot 3y ago
I find new music through YT fairly regularly - it's what got me into a whole bunch of artists I'd never seen/heard before. Unfortunately with YT I've had to cancel my Premium subscription on - they want $34/month, and I'm not paying that. I'll move to using third party apps/adblockers, and paying some of the creators I watch directly.
- dacryn 3y ago
  why do they want 34? I pay 12
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Probably some dark pattern where they hide the actual price for just youtube music and show you the subscription for a bundle of services you don't want...
  - paranoidrobot 3y ago
    Australia, and Family plan. Also, I got it wrong, it's $32.99/month. > To continue delivering great service and features, we're increasing your price to A$32.99/month.
baumschubser 3y ago
It is not exactly the new kid on the block, but I find tons of interesting music on the music blog aggregator Hype Machine. YMMV depending on your preferred genre.
wiz21c 3y ago
Owning the music is the thing.
Minor49er 3y ago
Discogs and RYM are great for discovery. Slsk is also still alive and well
- xlbuttplug2 3y ago
  sputnikmusic is my go-to.
Semaphor 3y ago
What works well for me is a metal discord community (run by writers of a review blog [0]). Tons of interesting recommendations, including sometimes non-metal stuff, my favorite album of the year so far is chamber folk / Americana [1]. For new music, I tend to at least give a few seconds to every new release that is of an even slightly interesting sub-genre, older stuff sometimes shows up in what people post they are listening to, but there are also listening pods (me and two others are currently doing a one album a day discography run of Necrophobic), and adopted months: March was Screamarch, where two people curated a list of Screamo and adjacent albums/eps for every day, now it’s Finlapril where a Finn curated 1-2 albums a day moving through the history of Finnish metal. Since joining, my monthly bandcamp purchases went pretty far up, though. And I’m only buying digital albums, there are quite a few who do vinyl purchases for even higher bills. [0] https://www.angrymetalguy.com/ https://www.angrymetalguy.com/ [1] Vera Sola - Peacemaker https://verasola.bandcamp.com/album/peacemaker https://verasola.bandcamp.com/album/peacemaker
- cageface 3y ago
  I hardly ever listen to metal any more but I still often check Angry Metal Guy just because it's such a well run independent music review and community site. Unfortunately such sites are increasingly rare these days.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    And no ads/payment whatsoever. Purely volunteer-run, for the fun of writing/reviewing.

paranoidrobot 3y ago

I think this is the wrong approach. If they have issues with people abusing the revenue model by publishing white noise and generating fake plays - go after that. However the 1K streams per track thing is going to negatively impact small artists who might have relatively large collections, but few over 1K annual streams. If it's a processing cost issue then make it so that payouts need to meet some reasonable minimum threshold. > between $1 and $2 will be added to monthly bills for customers in several territories, including the UK, Australia, and Pakistan, Bloomburg reports. This is said to cover the cost of audiobooks, added to the platform late-2023. More recently, video learning content was introduced to further diversify the offering. I don't want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app. They mention that there will be another tier added which doesn't have these -- great, so long as it keeps the audio quality for music at the same level, and doesn't have ads.

HenryBemis 3y ago
> I don't want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app. Regarding Spotify, which I use daily, I also dislike their updates. I remember some months back I could disable/hide "Recommendations". Now in all my (personal & private) playlists I get a list of Recommendations. It's an annoyance because when I scroll fast to reach the bottom "to listen to that one song" it end up surfing the Recommendations (did I mention I dislike them?). So, it makes me want to go to apkpure, find an apk from 2020 and use THAT (slim chance it'll work) because most updates are "to increase engagement" (pester you/me/all) with 'new and exciting content!!!' (bleh) Sidenote: for podcasts I am using a 2021 version of the Podcast Addict (the one displaying the full screen ad)(which you can block with NoRoot Firewall)
- snailmailman 3y ago
  My Spotify app almost daily shows me a full screen advertisement for some new album when I open the app. It is clearly labeled sponsored content. I can then click a tiny 3 dots menu, click “stop showing me this” and “I don’t want to see sponsored content” and it will say “sure thing! We will no longer show you these” and the next day it will show me a new advertisement and I repeat the process. So annoying. The whole premise of premium is that there are no ads! But now I’m constantly getting visual ads in the app. Every artists page has ads for their merch. Spotify notifies me about exclusive merch for artists I listen to. And is constantly trying to get me to go to concerts of artists I listen to.

rightbyte 3y ago

"Additionally, Spotify now requires a minimum number of unique listeners for royalties to apply. This attempt to stop "further manipulation by bad actors"" What a load of manure. The only reason manipulation of royalties even works is that they pool the streams such that the consumer wont pay the artist he listens too. Just tie the royalties to what each user listens to and what they pay. Solved. No abuse possible. But no. Have to have an opaque algorithm and do hacks upon hacks to obscure its funamental flaws.

loctal 3y ago
If this is true, I demand that I only pay Spotify if I listen to more than 1000 songs a month
estomagordo 3y ago
Wait, what. Are you saying that the costs of using the service should be tied to how much listening one does? Because if you're not, then what you are saying should have no bearing at all on how much royalties anyone gets.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  Assuming a fixed fee, it's a tradeoff. Do you let the people with more plays steer everyone else's money, or do you let plays from different people be worth different amounts? I think the first option is worse. Neither option pays a fixed amount per play, so that factor doesn't favor either choice.
- hmry 3y ago
  I read this as splitting each user's monthly payment only across the artists they themselves listened to (like how YouTube premium works) instead of pooling everything together. So artists with more paying listeners would get more, while artists who only get listened to by free bot accounts wouldn't get anything.
  - rain_iwakura 3y ago
    how would this work if i listen to 1000 bands? the split would be miniscule.

VS1999 3y ago

How much of an issue is this? Does it work like ad revenue on youtube? If something has under 1k streams I have to assume that was only a few dollars hobbyists get occasionally, if even that.

ojosilva 3y ago
As a side-gig musician and composer - my wife and I as a matter of fact - this is a non-issue. It's a few bucks a year, maybe $5 to $15, depending if we release some new album. It's symbolic, not even a tip, and we can't cash it until it reaches I think $60 or more iirc. Spotify is not (or barely) making money out of our work, but we otoh are "making money" by using its platform and visibility as means to reaching to our small fan base that will finance our work through concerts. For Spotify otoh, these few bucks add up to a long-tail loss of an increasing and disturbing magnitude. Additionally, bad actors are in fact exploiting it, ruining the experience for me as a musician and as a user. The issue, if any, is that in all fairness we should all be making money, proportionally, from the platform. But under 1000 streams, as an artist, you are probably getting more value from having your work uploaded and streamable.
- basisword 3y ago
  >> we can't cash it until it reaches I think $60 or more iirc This is highly dependent on your distributor. It can be as little as $10. >> Spotify is not (or barely) making money out of our work, but we otoh are "making money" by using its platform and visibility as means to reaching to our small fan base that will finance our work through concerts. This is an odd way to look at it. Without music, Spotify doesn’t exist. People subscribe to Spotify and listen to their ads in exchange for unlimited music access. So Spotify is making money from your music.
  - ojosilva 3y ago
    > This is an odd way to look at it. Without music, Spotify doesn’t exist. People subscribe to Spotify and listen to their ads in exchange for unlimited music access. So Spotify is making money from your music. Spotify has expenses too and is hosting and streaming our music, distributing and maintaining an app and api for access, all basically for free for the musician. So "making money from your music" from my 800 streams a year is a very optimistic view of how the whole thing works out, I'd say we are cooperating fairly.

easyThrowaway 3y ago

This should be renamed to "Spotify admits demonetizing all tracks under 1k streams with no previous contractual agreements". Next step would be explaining why artists with the same amount of streams (but different labels) have wildly different payouts.

snailmailman 3y ago

I don’t know much about how music licensing works. But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify? I listen to a lot of music on Spotify. And some of it is from smaller indie artists. Not a huge amount, but I’ve definitely listened to songs that are in that <1000 plays category, and for some undiscovered artists that’s a good amount of their library. It surprises me how much of my Spotify library is no longer available. There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out. A lot of good songs too. As much as I love Spotify and music streaming, it seems like the economics of it fundamentally doesn’t work and can’t work.

cranberryturkey 3y ago
Back to torrenting I guess. If I’m not mistaken snoop said he made 45k off 1 billion plays. Thats ridiculous
- reliablereason 3y ago
  That was apparently a track that was not his own, he was only a partial co author of that track.
- ansc 3y ago
  To be fair, that's because the label siphons the rest. Spotify pays $4 per 1000 streams.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - djxfade 3y ago
    Where do you get those numbers from? I'm a self published artist. I had 150k streams on Spotify last year. I only earned roughly $450. There's no label or other middleman here taking a cut. Spotify is just cheap.
    - 3y ago

estomagordo 3y ago

This change quite obviously can't negatively impact small artists in any meaningful way. When googling for how much Spotify pay artists per stream, ranges vary a bit. But it seems like a high number is $0.005 per stream, or 200 streams to the dollar. Even if a very prolific artist has 200 songs, averaging 500 plays per year, this would only ever amount to $500 per year. It is not peanuts for a hobby musician, but it would represent an unusually productive artist who happens to be just under this limit with most (or all) their songs, and also who manages to somehow get paid in the upper parts of the span.

Shrezzing 3y ago
The change in isolation from Spotify may not impact individual bands. However if this is adopted across all the seven major streaming services, then artists can in theory have 7,006 streams per track without generating a penny of income, even though the streaming vendors have generated revenues. If YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Deezer, Soundcloud, and Amazon all adopt this practice, taking your edge-case artist, they're out of pocket for $3,500 per year. That makes a situation where the more highly concentrated Spotify's monopoly is, and the less productive an artist is, the fairer the outcome for that small artist. Meanwhile the $3,500 is distributed between the monopolist, and the very large artists on the service. That's a quite uniquely perverse set of economic outcomes.
polski-g 3y ago
Kind of crazy that we used to spend $20 for a CD with 12 songs on twenty years ago.

qnleigh 3y ago

When I read the headline, I assumed this was to disincentivise uploading thousands of cheap AI-generated songs. There's tons of this on the platform, and it looks like it was generated automatically in bulk. But the article makes it sound like this was not a factor?

supernes 3y ago
I'm inclined to believe that filling the service with an endless stream of generated garbage is their ultimate endgame - why bother with unreliable and costly human creators when you can just emulate them well enough for undiscerning listeners. No substance, just vibes.
- whstl 3y ago
  Even Spotify is smart enough to know that people will leave them if this ever happens.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    No, that's the end game here. People already mostly have parasocial relationships with artists. There's already famous AI personality Instagrams and Vtubers. With the advent of Generative AI video like Sora and Generative AI music like Suno, people will find their perfect generative AI niche and follow an artist story/interaction that they can't even tell is real or not. Generative AI will create millions of niches, it will hit that spot.
    - fuzzfactor 3y ago
      You might just be spot-on. Some generative stuff will be more discernible than others. The ones that don't even try to emulate the full experience of having a real artist involved will have a lot less friction. And it's not like you're going to have a small niche audience that settles for artificial music, no there will be a niche that prefers it. The size of that niche right now has nowhere to go but up.
    - 3y ago

AtNightWeCode 3y ago

The 1k streams limit will probably only financially effect "artists" that spams the platform with new tracks. It is not like it will make any difference for real artists.

wokkel 3y ago
So by your definition a real artist should have more than 1000 plays. I listen to small artist from my country which will probably never reach a global audience and they definitely do not get 1.000 plays but are verified artists according to spotify. This policy basically drives more drivel music and leaves out alternative and indie bands. It's a bad policy that needs an investigation by the authorities to force Spotify not to discriminate smaller artists.
- AtNightWeCode 3y ago
  No small artists cares about this at all. Grow up.

cjk2 3y ago

I suspect the truth around this is that it contributes to their eternal losses actually paying artists so they worked out another way of not doing it for their balance sheet. I was at a gig for a moderately successful band recently and they said rather loudly they were bastards and buy one of their CDs instead even if you never play it because they need to eat.

Hendrikto 3y ago
> they said rather loudly […] buy one of their CDs instead even if you never play it because they need to eat They could try making music people actually want to listen to. If they can‘t, that career may not be for them.
- cjk2 3y ago
  I don't think you know how the music industry works

basisword 3y ago

This shouldn’t be legal. It’s a massive abuse of power. Small artists need to be on Spotify (pulling their music in protest is not viable and not going to lead to change anyway). What gives Spotify the right to arbitrarily decide “you make so little money it’s not worth our time paying you”? There’s no other business you could get away with this in. Scum.

silisili 3y ago
It depends on the amount here, which I'm still not actually sure of. Lots of companies today only pay you out once you reach $X, usually some nominal amount. It sounds like that could be the case here. Why deal with payment processors, billing disputes, etc for a customer only earning pennies?
- basisword 3y ago
  >> Why deal with payment processors, billing disputes, etc for a customer only earning pennies? Spotify doesn’t have to deal with these things. Artists work with distributors who then deal with Spotify on their behalf. The distributor pays the artist. For me the issue here is they’ve changed the deal to the detriment of the littlest of the little guys. A company that just signed a non-exclusive $250m deal for Joe Rogans podcast, can’t afford to pay $10 a year to a whole bunch of independent artists. That’s outrageous. For me it’s the ethics of it rather than the amount.
- whstl 3y ago
  > Lots of companies today only pay you out once you reach $X, usually some nominal amount. It sounds like that could be the case here. This seems to already be the case, in practice. Spotify claims that there's about 40 million in unpaid royalties for people who can't withdrawal yet. https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-system https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-...
fundatus 3y ago
Seriously, if you're a small artist with less than 1,000 streams per YEAR on your tracks, Spotify (or any streaming service for that matter) is already today not a relevant income stream at all.

rain_iwakura 3y ago

I think they should basically turn it into Twitch, where I can "sub" to an artist and maybe get their tracks earlier than others or some other additional content that costs artist $0 to produce for the most part (podcast, making of, e.g. a la Patreon). In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash. It's a shame that these hacks (streamers) become multimillionaires while real talents make pennies off actual art.

rnestler 3y ago
> In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash. There are donation buttons for some artist on Spotify. I guess the artist need to enable it? ("Signum Regis" is an artist that has a Donate button for example)
usrusr 3y ago
And/or something like Amazon Prime Video and how it aggregates its main subscription, ad-driven licensing, VOD and, that's what I'm getting at, hosted third party subscriptions into one UI. I actually hate that in Prime, because discovery for shows and movies is never a positive experience but a setup chore separate from consumption, and advertising stuff that isn't already paid for always makes it worse. But for music I think it could actually be enjoyable, because you can consume and browse at the same time is actually a thing. Like diving into discogs.com while listening. I could easily see myself listening to some artist's main albums as part of some standard subscription (that pays as badly as spotify?) and then shell out a single digit payment on one hundred pay-per-listen tokens for obscure B-sides from the label that the artist is signed on, or something like that. Or reimplenent radio, by offering a licensing model where what would have been single releases in the olden days are part of the ad based subscription, but album content is only available through purchase or (various?) subscriptions. Make it a marketplace of monetization models! Perhaps the right company to try this would be someone completely unexpected like cloudflare? Being a blank slate from both consumer and licensor perspective could almost be considered a prerequisite for a project like that...

lawgimenez 3y ago

So which platform pays the highest royalty?

nicholassmith 3y ago
I did some research on this recently and it's a bit tricky to pin down as some of the information is out of date or doesn't include certain services, but the three that appear to be the best on payouts are: Tidal, Quobuz and Napster.
- nmisko 3y ago
  Can you explain how these platforms pay more royalties if the subscription cost is the same?
Mashimo 3y ago
Bandcamp :)

ulrikrasmussen 3y ago

Even if this doesn't really impact the small artists, Spotify is not even profitable for shareholders yet AND still doesn't pay a meaningful amount to most artists. It is only going to get worse from here. I do not believe that their business model will ever do anything but fuck over the artists. It's also deeply disturbing to me that there are only a few options left for people to actually own their music and the rest is rent-seeking platforms.

Helmut10001 3y ago
Self-host Funkwhale [1] * (or something else). Curate your own music library. This is the only way forward. * I self-host this internally, for my family and me, since 2019. One of the best designed interfaces / UX you can find. [1]: https://www.funkwhale.audio/ https://www.funkwhale.audio/

dclowd9901 3y ago

How is Spotify not the loser here? Isn’t it more important to say “we have basically every song ever made” than save a few bucks over small fish streaming?

kkarpkkarp 3y ago

Clickbait song titles enters the scene...

ykonstant 3y ago
You won't believe believing is without you you won't believe anymore~

scary-size 3y ago

Kristin Graziani wrote a comprehensive explainer on this in November: https://consequence.net/2023/11/spotify-royalty-model-op-ed/ https://consequence.net/2023/11/spotify-royalty-model-op-ed/

truegoric 3y ago

Streaming services will be regulated in the coming months in EU https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/17/24041343/eu-music-streaming-platform-artist-pay-europe-regulation https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/17/24041343/eu-music-streami... EDIT: as it’s been pointed out, the article doesn’t mention a time, which is a speculation on my part

code_runner 3y ago
That’s not quite what the article linked says. If anything is done it could be years. It’s also unclear if they have any price per stream in mind and how they even think it should be calculated on an ongoing basis. Sounds pretty early stage

andrewstuart 3y ago

It's THEIR money.

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

What is the going rate for a service that "organically" plays a track / album 1000 times? To misquote Bezos: Your silly policy is my buisness oppertunity.

geraldhh 3y ago
the going rate is probably what spotify pays for that 1000 plays, minus tax

mfashby 3y ago

Does anyone know of a service where I can feed in my Spotify playlists, and it tells me where I can buy those tracks?

geraldhh 3y ago
idk but this seems usefull https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader

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chgs 3y ago

I spend £17 a month on Spotify. If all I do is listen to “Bob Bobson sings Bob Bob Bob”, then my £17, minus commission (1%, 5%, 30%, whatever), should go entirely to Bob Bobson That’s not how Spotify works. Instead a lot of it goes to Taylor Swift, who I don’t listen to.

Arkhaine_kupo 3y ago
Even worse like 90% of the money comes from paid users, but most of the streams comes from free users with ads. Some some barber shop is playing drake 24/7 having ads and 16£ of you 17£ are going to drake because you only listened to Bob bobson 20 minutes today instead of 23 hours:59 minutes like the barber shop. The pay model is ridiculous, every update is terrible and there is no mechanism to let the company know they are running the product into the ground. It used to be heaven for power users,now if they simplify it any more the app will just pick what it thinks you should listen to, give the money to ed sheeran regardless of what you end up listening to and not even let you pause cause an extra button might be too complicated for you.
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noirscape 3y ago

IMO the problem is that Spotify is fundamentally breaking the "spirit" of the deal that allowed them to get in the position they are right now. Spotify's entire promise was "we solve the music inequality problem by just pooling all subscriber money together and then we do an equal(-ish, record labels iirc got slightly different deals) split depending on how many people listen to your music." It kinda sells the idea that if you're just popular enough, you can make it big on Spotify. Of course practically that's been a lie for ages (numbers showcased that only the top 0.1% could afford to live off of Spotify alone, and all those songs are owned by the established record companies anyway), so you could say this is just dispensing with the charade to avoid transaction costs. I do wonder about the ripple effect this could cause for indie artists; Spotify just told them to go fuck themselves and there's pretty much no incentive to use Spotify anymore now that they pulled this stunt. If you want to support artists directly, it's still always better to just buy the albums. Most of them have Bandcamp pages and for now, Bandcamp provides a good deal (and as a customer you can just download the FLAC files).

quitit 3y ago
Essentially Spotify now pays small artists in “exposure”. Looks a lot like abuse of market position.
thirdsun 3y ago
Did anyone really expect 10 dollars a month to be enough to be sustainable? That's the price we used to pay for a single album and it seems way too low for a sustainable flatrate music service.

dcb_lu 3y ago

I hope this doesn't affect Matt Farley[1] too badly, as it seems like he relies on having many songs with only a few streams each as his main strategy for generating income from Spotify. I once commissioned a Mother's Day song from him -- sent him 10 facts about my Mom and our family and he came back a few days later with a funny and charming little tune. Best $30 I've ever spent. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/magazine/spotify-matt-farley.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/magazine/spotify-matt-far...

megalomanu 3y ago

I highly recommend trying Qobuz! Artists are paid more, the catalog is rich and comprehensive (I recommend to early users who might have felt a lack of content to give it another try, as it's now much richer), most albums are available in Hi-Res Audio, the UI is nice, there is no fluff (just music, nothing more), and most importantly, content is curated, with many articles written by critics and journalists, artist interviews, and, for each album, a small review or a piece of text informing about the album's significance. Compared to the awesome but "industrial" recommendation system of Spotify, this is something more personal and curated which, in my opinion, better helps to understand some music genres.

SushiHippie 3y ago
Seconded! See my comment about Qobuz on another post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39428327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39428327
nmisko 3y ago
Could you explain how artists are paid more? The subscription fee is roughly the same.
- thek3nger 3y ago
  Any service without a free tier pays more than Spotify because only premium users contribute to the number of streaming that will be payed. In some sense, premium Spotify users pay also for the free users and, therefore, the average is lower (yes, there is ads income but I bet is negligible).

nottorp 3y ago

Can you see how many streams an artist has? I'm generally happy to let Spotify stream whatever for background noise, but it looks like I should play some local bands manually once in a while.

max_ 3y ago

The market is hungry for a well-done music streaming service. I don't know why there is no venture backed competitor.

geraldhh 3y ago
i guess the economics are not favorable because the music industry is already well positioned to extract wealth from populism and will give a hell of a legal/drm battle if threatened. the long-tail of indy artists doing essentially nothing for the bottom line doesn't help either.
lotsofpulp 3y ago
Because after 18 years, Spotify’s net income looks like this: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-technology/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn... And their market cap looks like this: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-technology/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn... And your competitors are Apple/Amazon/Alphabet. And your vendors with whom you have zero negotiating power are Universal/Warner/Sony, and their whole interest in supporting a music streaming business like Spotify is to maintain leverage against Apple/Amazon/Alphabet, so music sellers only need to keep the streaming business limping along. There is no play here without reform to copyright laws that limit copyright to 10 years.

cynicalsecurity 3y ago

Why use Spotify at all when it's so much more helpful to subscribe to patreon of new and promising artist?

logro 3y ago

I think "theft" closer describes this rather than "demonetization"

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Nah; the artists entered an agreement with Spotify, it's legally on board. If the artist believes Spotify breached contract they can either end it one-sidedly, or try and sue but I'm confident Spotify's side is rock solid.

kypro 3y ago

This seems quite reasonable. I have quite an uncommon taste in music so I tend to listen to artists with very small followings. I know most songs I listen to only have a few thousand views in total on YouTube, so I was initially worried that it would be similar on Spotify so just took a look... Spotify seems to be about x10 whatever the stats are on YouTube so almost all of the songs I listen to qualify for monetisation. The only exceptions are tiny self-recording artists I've randomly stubbled on from browsing Soundcloud or other corners of the internet. I find it hard to see how this decision would impact small artists to be honest. Maybe if an artist had thousands of tracks all with ~500 streams then it might impact them, but I'm guessing small artists who are currently monetised are making almost nothing anyway from their handful of songs with under <1,000 streams – assuming they only have 2-3 albums worth of music. Supporting monetisation on all songs is probably more headache than it's worth when you're dealing with paying out a few cents. Honestly the best thing you can do to support small artists isn't stream their music, but share it with your friends, donate to them and buy their merch (assuming they have merch because many won't).

geraldhh 3y ago

acceptable as a reaction to the cost of tracking engagement and paying the long-tail of artists. then again this could probably be fixed with a minimum payout policy and a donation button in the app.

ctenb 3y ago

Are there any other comparable (but more ethical) platforms out there that I can switch to?

geraldhh 3y ago
just pirate and donate directly if you really mean it.
milesjag 3y ago
bandcamp is a bit more of a level playing field - the artists can decide whether they want to use the platform to stream or sell their music, while being given some control over the number of streams per listener before a song will be unavailable to stream (although this does lean on cookies, I think, so not difficult to get around...)

epolanski 3y ago

I'm not understanding the harsh criticism here. Pretty much all platforms have some kind of soft threshold before paying. This is actually very common in real world as well, e.g. in sales you don't get commissions if you don't meet certain thresholds too.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
No same, I don't get it; 1000 streams a year is not an unrealistic goal, and Spotify is flooded with low-effort garbage - and this will get worse with AI generated stuff.
konschubert 3y ago
I think it makes sense to have a lower threshold on "plays per artist", since it involves billing overhead etc. But plays per song? Why? Are they trying to fight spam? And even so, it's so little money and little overhead, just do it for the goodwill.

anentropic 3y ago

> Since going public on the stock market in 2018, the company has lost money every year they don't even have a business model the whole thing is a massive scam that devalues music just to earn some VCs a big payout it's like if I said I was going to "disrupt the supermarket industry" by giving away free food

worble 3y ago
> it's like if I said I was going to "disrupt the supermarket industry" by giving away free food Please don't give investors any ideas...
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  Too late. There's a current TV commercial showing real customers' reactions to a promotional pop-up sample-tasting booth set up in a grocery store with all the little half-ounce cups for customers to try for themselves and see if they like it. These are sometimes like a marketing study for new products or variations. Now in each little cup is a toothpick sticking up from a rolled-up dollar bill, like it was a piece of artisan cheese or something. It's a commercial that candidly filmed a live promotion for a cashback app. Even then the customers were mostly hesitant.
rchaud 3y ago
They made losses every single year, not just from 2018 on. Financialization of businesses has unmoored it even further from capitalism. You can be a billionnaire without ever turning a profit, as long as you can convince investors that the real money in a music streaming is acshually going to come from podcasts.

fimdomeio 3y ago

"You wouldn't stream a car for free would you?" This is just playing with meanings but for most musicians having their music on Spotify or on torrents is pretty much the same. the only difference is that only in one case there's a company profiting in the process.

maxcoder4 3y ago
Musicians put their music on Spotify out of their own will. If they don't like it they can withdraw. Unless they sold the rights to a music label, but that's also their decision.

baxtr 3y ago

I find it funny/interesting/annoying that Spotify plays the hero when it comes to condemning Apple for its App Store policies yet has no issues to be the villain when they have a chance to show how to handle such issues better.

fifticon 3y ago

isn't this partly to combat people who commit search listing flooding by abusing the upload ability to upload 100.000 variations of the same thing?

LightHugger 3y ago

When they say demonetize, are they saying they aren't playing any ads on them or are they just not giving creators a cut of the ads? Those are very different things. These platforms have every incentive in the world to continue monetizing them but just cut the creator out of that monetization their work earned.

RCitronsBroker 3y ago

that’s BS and in no way solving their very real bot problem. This wasn’t reported on worldwide, but here in Germany, it got some press due to local hip-hop labels being involved. Malicious labels use click farms to push up the numbers on their artists, either by manipulating all platforms or locking their artist into Spotify. This, in addition to other forms of manipulation such as playlists-aaS, isn’t just a ploy to promote their music. As long as farming clicks is cheaper that the payout rate, they can get paid for laundering illicit gains that way.

usrusr 3y ago
But would those cases remain in the sub-monetization bracket? If their goal is to get the double benefit, laundered gift card or identity theft money and taking popularity, then they'd surely want to focus farmed streams on fewer songs, not spread them. Or are Spotify popularity heuristics really so laughably bad that they consider a bazillion plays on a bazillion separate "tracks" as good (or better?) a signal for popularity as a less unnatural pattern?
- RCitronsBroker 3y ago
  you are absolutely right, that’s exactly my point in favor of Spotify being dishonest here. They are just looking for reasons to buy for less and sell for more, thats it.

egeozcan 3y ago

Can someone ELI5: Why is it so hard to just split my monthly subscription money on all the artists that I listened to, proportional to their air time to the total listening time? I really don't get it

fundatus 3y ago
Because that would be extremely complex and expensive to do for a negligible effect.
- orangesite 3y ago
  I'd argue this would be a lot simpler and cheaper to setup than the byzantine distribution system we currently have in place. It would also make the economics of streaming viable for the majority of artists rather than the small pool of folk raking in the bulk of the money.
  - fundatus 3y ago
    How? The current system is super simple: revenue * 0.7 = total payout total payout / no. of streams = payout per stream payout per stream * streams of an artist = payout for artist In the proposed system you'd have to calculate the payout per stream on a per-account basis and have additional complexities like how to handle family accounts etc.
    - alexcannan 3y ago
      Computers are very good at doing these calculations
      - fundatus 3y ago
        Obviously, but as I said it's much more complex and therefore more expensive to do. With a negligible effect.
        3y ago

schainks 3y ago

Seems like a second order effect: Google cloud is squeezing them, and now they are squeezing artists.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

According to this artist [0] Spotify will be irrelevant soon because infinitely streaming generative AI music will cater to all your "ever changing" desires. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39967745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39967745

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Cool prediction, but false; AI generated music will be added to the pile of genres. Honestly there's an existing factory of low effort music being churned out already, AI will become part of that existing pipeline. There will be more music produced, but it won't become mainstream. Music isn't only about music, it's about the creators and their stories as well. Anyone claiming AI will replace traditional music creation is but a functional consumer. It's the same type that exclusively drinks soylent and wears black turtlenecks to avoid having to think about things or taste anything.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > It's the same type that exclusively drinks soylent and wears black turtlenecks to avoid having to think about things or taste anything. Nice. "Technology is a way of not having to experience the world" -- Max Frisch

Manheim 3y ago

Paying a nominal amount for each stream is one matter; however, compensating nothing for smaller quantities while you pay for larger amounts presents a fundamentally different issue. This scenario is akin to an author not receiving royalties for the first 1,000 books sold in a bookstore, or a manufacturer not being paid for the first 1,000 candy bars sold at a grocery store. Such practices can be equated with theft. It's perplexing how current legislation permits this.

poszlem 3y ago
[flagged]
- arter 3y ago
  Weird for me the phrasing "presents a fundamentally different issue" is so hackernews-like. "Can be equated with theft" also. I feel like I have seen them a thousand times on here from regular old people. Maybe that part did not get rephrased.
- soapdog 3y ago
  Eer… I write like that all the time; specially if the subject is something important to me.
- ornornor 3y ago
  Or maybe it’s written by someone who has a larger vocabulary and knows when to use a semicolon? Trying to guess whether something was written by AI or not is, to me, akin to reading tea leaves. Furthermore, I don’t think there is a reliably consistent way to tell if a piece of text is AI generated or not so if you can tell better than randomly, you’ll make a fortune.
  - breakfastduck 3y ago
    author has already responded saying they wrote it then fed it through GPT because they're not native English speaker. So they were right on the money.

ThinkBeat 3y ago

I think one of the main benefits for more obscure bands to be on streaming services is discoverability. In the Discovery weekly and Release Radar you often get bands I have never heard of. Also, if someone says "Oh I like this new band xxxxx" then you can find them on Spotify and see if you like them or not. Fron that perspective Spotify is a free service for bands to be discovered and generate more fans. Yes I do agree that bands should get a bigger piece of the profit pile, as long as there is a profile pile Personally, I like bying physical media. I am not cool enough to buy vinyl, I prefer cds. Finding places to buy cds is increasingly impossible The best used to be going to shows and buying cds at the merch desk or the bands website, but more and more new bands do not even produce cds anymore. There seems to be more bands doing vinyl. I guess with the prices they charge that the markup is a lot better. For now I try to buy digital music and burn it to cd myself. I would vastly prefer buying physical media directly.

pvorb 3y ago

It really amazes me how tech companies like Spotify manage to disrupt an entire industry, but fail to find a sustainable business model that makes them profitable. This is far from sustainable and it makes the world worse. There really should be laws that limit how much losses a company may generate during their "disruption" of existing markets. Yes, I'm aware that I'm commenting this on HN.

fuzzfactor 3y ago
Disruption, or even fully destructive complete tear-downs are a lot easier than building value. May not be quicker, but definitely easier for the less-skilled to pull off. One requires a demolition mindset, the other an engineering mindset. In some capitalist cultures there has been a tendency to value disruption as if it was the thing that added value, just because it was a noticeable component of a few high-profile bonanzas. It's like a prevailing superstition can take hold, and a belief spreads where "if it's not disruptive, it can't be good". The less-recognized builders who don't divert energy to disruption do have to operate with much less visibility, since there's not some established structure crumbling (usually under its own weight) that looks like a result of their efforts. The engineering-focused creative builder that can make something out of nothing, without having to tear down anything at all, ended up hopelessly outnumbered by weaker-performing substitutes having far-less-unique qualities. Imagine what it would be like if something capable of applying that kind of leverage to resources had access to scaling capital. Among some classes of performers, anybody can build a viable business if they started with $1 Million, and barring undue disaster, all will grow & prosper. Even without any failures, each one will obviously have differing performance. I guess you could say that one who ends up with a $1 Billion operation would be so rare, might as well be a unicorn. That's about a 1000x return one way or another. How does that compare to someone who can build anything viable at all from basically nothing to start with? Makes 1000x look like a small number.

GuB-42 3y ago

Considering that according to what I can see online, artists get around $4 per 1000 streams, it doesn't look significant and it probably saves on processing fees. One would need to be an artist with a lot of songs just under 1k to make it more than enough for a cup of coffee. The kind of money it isn't even worth the time putting songs on Spotify (it may be worth it for promotion though). The general issue with underpaid artists remains but this particular case doesn't seem to matter much, in fact, if what they imply is true, it is arguably an improvement since what they save in processing fees will go to artists instead of banks.

ioulaum 3y ago

I'm not sure the technical overhead is high enough to bother to do this... Unless the money made for it comes out to be too small to be worth bothering with after transfer fees. It may be as someone else said, that there should just be a minimum threshold for payouts. Like, you get your money after it's at least reached $10 or $100. Demonetizing the first 1000 streams is probably not a big deal, but it still sounds a little wrong.

Shorel 3y ago

Let's demonetize Spotify. Cancel our accounts and campaign to others to do the same. I cancelled my Spotify account, and now I am using Tidal, which pays the artists a higher percent.

fuzzfactor 3y ago
No reason to get in a hurry. With greedy record companies as part of the structure from the beginning, looks like they are fairly consistently demonetizing themselves. When a business depends on a resource that's so well-heeled it can truly afford to waste substantial amounts, you really hope that resource will not run out. If the balance tips toward dependence on consumers who can not afford much waste if any, that portion could very well be subject to collapse under the strain. As for demon-ization, looks like that's already in progress quite a bit too.
nmisko 3y ago
What percentage do Tidal and Spotify each pay?
- Shorel 3y ago
  Tidal pays artists between $0.0125 and $0.015 per stream, with the potential to earn $1,250-$1,500 for every 100,000 streams. Spotify pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream, with a 70/30 split in favour of the rights holders, which could include the artist, the label, or others depending on the artist's contract. The actual amount artists earn per stream on Spotify is often less than these figures due to the distribution of payments to the rights holder and the artist's agreement with them. https://www.lalal.ai/blog/music-streaming-payouts-2023/ https://www.lalal.ai/blog/music-streaming-payouts-2023/ https://virpp.com/hello/music-streaming-payouts-comparison-a-guide-for-musicians/ https://virpp.com/hello/music-streaming-payouts-comparison-a...

Draiken 3y ago

I get that people just want to save money but I absolutely cannot understand how we keep screwing over artists like this. We pay a small amount, the middlemen gets all the money, 0.01% of the artists get more than a few hundred bucks, everyone else gets nothing. Piracy is entirely justified. We should pay the artists and stop paying these leeches. The only real value created is from the artists themselves.

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icar 3y ago

I'm so happy with Tidal. Higher audio quality, more money to the artists and less b*hit overall.

nmisko 3y ago
Are you paying more for Tidal than Spotify, or why are you saying that artists get more money if you use Tidal?

peapicker 3y ago

The annoying thing is it is per track, not per album. This essentially demonetized all my bands albums since 1997 except for four tracks.

bufferoverflow 3y ago
I would pull everything except 4 tracks off the platform then. Spotify gets paid for that long tail, but you do not.

aaomidi 3y ago

I really wish my subscription to Spotify was just split to the artists I actually listen to, rather than going to a pool

lgrapenthin 3y ago

I recently demonitized Spotify and am very happy with Bandcamp and Newpipe.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

Here we go, Spotify coming in hot with it's own adpocalypse. There just isn't enough ad money to go around. What can you do? Targeted advertising is a bubble, at scale it provides little additional return and the industry is overvalued. The only thing that has been propping it up is startups looking for quick bucks to please investors, in the long run it was always going to collapse.

kderbyma 3y ago
yup. their API is a joke and they neutered it for cost savings....not a sign that their ads are successful.

SergeAx 3y ago

I think it would be fair if Spotify abstained from charging me for my subscription if I listened to less than 100 tracks in a given month.

rldjbpin 3y ago

i see the ethical arguments against this decision. at the same time, we got testimonials from up and coming artists saying that their current pay is literally a few cents per month for getting similar streams as the threshold. i am no artist but have been making youtube videos on and off for the past 5 years, with only one video breaking 6 figures in views. yet i never reached the threshold in the platform to monetize my content, while youtube is free to play ads on my hundreds of (non - spam/short) videos. if not receiving a couple dollars per month for my videos is what stops me from my passion, then i need to ask myself more pressing questions.

consf 3y ago

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