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So OP has posted this everywhere, even getting it flagged on Hacker News. Article is weak sauce:
I would agree with author that there are many problems with Spotify but concentrating on the artist revenue per stream and then publishing your top hits of the year as YouTube links? Really? Go and find out what the artist share per stream is on YouTube (regular YouTube video) for soundtracks. I’ll wait. Hint: there’s a reason that soundtracks using unauthorised copyrighted work get muted or taken down rather than revenue being redistributed.
Recommending a paid desktop MacOS music app for local content? There are hundreds of local music players but OK… but none of the criticisms of Spotify were about the client! Foobar2000 (mentioned for mobile playback) supports Spotify streaming…
Article seems to boil down to ‘I got tired of Spotify recommendations and I am an aspiring musician at an early stage in my professional career so I am recommending Bandcamp and soap boxing about artist revenue share’ . There’s a reason that people, some with local music libraries in the TeraByte range listen to Spotify. There’s also all the competing services - Apple Music; YouTube; Deezer; Tidal; Amazon; etc…
Recommendation to OP: If you are trying to persuade people on something, then decide what point you want to concentrate on, consider the pro’s and cons for your position, and make your point based/reinforced on that. Don’t meander around a bunch of inchoate personal gripes and affections that don’t really relate to one another or any particular point.
Adding our Boys Qobuz to the list of competing services Paying in 2018 13 times more than Spotify And yu get to own the musics you buy on Qobuz and can put it on your NAS for example
Not going to give substack any views, so I’ll pass on this one
What’s wrong with it? (I never heard about it, just asking)
They outright won’t ban Nazi content from their website. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011232/substack-nazi-moderation-demonetization-hamish-mckenzie
They commodity and profit from Nazis on their platform. When called out for it, they’re response was “We don’t like Nazis either, but we won’t do anything about them and we’ll continue to take our cut from their presence on our platform”
That sounds an awful lot like them quietly liking it
Turning a blind eye for profit is complicity.
Oh I remember hearing that quote. That was them? I had a conversation about it like a week ago. I read “substack” in the article but all tech names are pretty interchangeable to me. They all have the same groupings for the type of thing they are and substack sounded like image hosting or something to do with coding or some template bank for some kind of necessity like invoices or something. Point is, tech names are stupid and I didn’t even put the name to the site as I read it. Good to know, though.
If you’re so petty about it, use archive.org or archive.is to view the page
Fellas, is it petty to refuse to support Nazis?
If you have an adblocker, and you’re not visiting any of those nazi sites directly, but do derail a comment section about a totally unrelated article? I say it is, yeah.
Then again, I can be pretty petty about circlejerks.
If I’m going to travel to a certain city I’m not going to stay in the hotel that’s hosting the Nazi convention. Here you are saying “yeesh it’s not like the convention will be inside your room!” But there are other hotels - simple as that.
You act like a person needs some much better, really, really good reason not to read this article. If the site hosts Nazi content, that’s quite enough for me to just scroll to the next post. Why do any of us need to convince you or anyone else why this small act of conscience is valid?
You definitely don’t have to. But if you were actually trying to, let me assure you that equating the reading of a harmless blog post to paying a hotel would not have done the trick.
A while back I realized my phone has 256GB of internal storage and since I don’t take pictures or put anything else on it, I was running around with 256GB of free storage wherever I went.
And that’s pretty much when it clicked for me that I was paying Spotify for access to music I already have from the pre-spotify days for a convenience that no longer is valid.
I dove into my box of CD’s and DVDs and put the 30 something gigs of music I collected since the mid 90’s on my phone and haven’t used spotify since.
EDIT: and, yeah, I’ve re-instanced my music, movie and series downloaders and went back to sailing the high seas.
I switched to Netflix/Spotify, because of the convenience and timing of release they provided, they were also more reliable in terms of quality (“free” versions labeled ass 1080p often aren’t actually 1080p, etc).
But the sheer cost of Spotify, Paramount+, Disney+, Netflix, etc, etc, etc to listen to and watch what I want, has made the convenience/cost calculation move from being acceptable to being even more than what it used to be buying CD’s and DVD’s.
On top of that the audio and video quality have deteriorated over the years, availability has become spotty, at best (like certain services removing movies and shows, even some removing movies and shows you paid extra for), we’re also dealing with these services pushing ads on top of us already paying subscriptions and fragmenting their market to the extent everything has become entirely unaffordable.
I used to buy maybe 2-3 CD’s in a year and a boxset of a show and a movie once a year.
Now simply subscribing to every service that has something I want for just 1 month costs more than what I spent per year previously.
Gabe Newels words are still right on the money.
Piracy is a service problem and the service provided these days makes Piracy the better option, again.
And in 2024, Spotify will stop paying out songs which get less than 1000 streams in a year. Which means for me, as an artist in the early stages of my career, I am going to get paid nothing. I could get over 1000 streams on all my songs in total, but still get paid nothing. I could get 999 streams on a song one year and 999 streams on it the next year… and still get paid nothing.
As the author states in the previous paragraph, Spotify pays 0.003c per stream. I don’t think the author has done the maths. 1000 streams equals 3c. He’s complaining over not getting paid 3c as if that will fund his career
It’s not 0.003¢ per steam, it’s $0.003. (Actually £0.003, per that article.)
So 1000 streams should pay $3.
stop paying out
Spotify refuses to pay for content it earns money from, is another way of saying this. Stealing, is another way. YouTube does the same if it decides you’re not a ““party””.
Give me my 3c or pay with your blood.
You (or your label who represents you) voluntarily put your music on spotify and can always pull your content if you want.
Equating this to theft makes zero sense. And your post is universally upvoted. Wtf?
Have you considered the power imbalance when you describe them as voluntarily putting it on Spotify? What are your views on “paying people in exposure” or unpaid internships?
I would be open to hearing an argument as to why Spotify should pay no matter what. I could get behind that.
However, if you voluntarily put your music on spotify, and can remove it any time you want, and you are claiming spotify is committing theft against you. . .well, that just doesn’t hold any water. I mean, you hold all the power in this case: it’s your music that you fully control.
What are your views on “paying people in exposure” or unpaid internships?
I can see both being beneficial, but most of the time lame. The latter is something that benefits the wealthy, so I think it should be discouraged. But if you voluntarily did either of these things and then tried to claim theft, I would meet it with the same argument.
Spotify can’t tell big fish to go unpaid but they can target small creators as they’re likely the ones who most need to be paid for their work. “Work for me for free and maybe I’ll pay you in the future” is lame but consider the small print says “we may stop paying you in the future if you fall below a change in threshold in the future”.
People say “internet piracy” is theft and that doesn’t even deprive the person of a thing they had, merely a strongly assumed “lost sale”. We know the creators had a sale because Spotify do this to make money earned by the works.
If I said I will donate money you give me to charity but I instead keep the money did you give it to me “voluntarily”? Probably not because you were deceived.
they’re likely the ones who most need to be paid for their work
IIRC, we are talking about if you don’t break the 3-5 dollar threshold. If you’re banking on that money you’ve got way bigger problems than Spotify not buying you a cup of coffee.
People say “internet piracy” is theft and that doesn’t even deprive the person of a thing they had, merely a strongly assumed “lost sale”
The question is…do you think piracy is theft? If not, then I don’t see why you would even bring up this point.
If I said I will donate money you give me to charity but I instead keep the money did you give it to me “voluntarily”?
No, of course not, because you committed fraud by lying to me what the money would be used for.
If Spotify gave no warning and did it retroactively, then you have a point that it was deceptive and fraudulent, but this sounds like they have announced in advance that they are changing the policy. So this isn’t them saying one thing and then doing another.
Is it safe to assume a significant portion of creators are in that threshold? 3-5 dolors from a lot of people for the biggest company in music streaming. I think Spoity nickel and diming a bunch of smaller creators is the real financial problem.
To determine where you draw the line I make small steps towards Spoity. If a Mafia gang member spells it out that you need to pay X every month or else while you live in this town, is it theft? You can just move away, do you have the power?
I believe my comment above was removed for the Oblivion guard line where if you are caught stealing you must pay a fine go to jail and if you refuse then you will be struck down. He does this even if you take something of little value. We all start earning at a low threshold for our creative works, those 3-5 dolors may be more important to them than you appear to value them. To me it’s more important than taking 1000 from a big creator…
My current rules are that I’m gonna spend £10 a month on music (what I’d be paying Spotify) and try to buy directly from artists. I’ll allow myself listening to stuff on Youtube so I can gauge whether or not I wanna then go ahead and buy a song or an album if I’ve listened to it enough times and want it in my library.
So … it’s okay to listen to it for free on YouTube and maybe buy it directly, but not to pay a Spotify subscription and listen to it there (and also maybe buy it directly)? The whole rant about “Spotify doesn’t pay musicians very much” comes off as disingenuous.
The amazing mental gymnastics that these people go through to justify their piracy and inane behaviors.
Musician’s pay is just the excuse of the day for them to feel okay about what they’re doing. Honestly, if you are gonna pirate then just pirate, stop pretending that it’s for a good cause or higher purpose, other than to keep your own wallets stacked.
Honestly? No, while I do still pirate, I am slowly buying all the music I can buy in form of vynils records and CDs, other than digital downloads from bandacamp.
Watching for free on YouTube is not piracy, and laughably, I’d say it is better than using Spotify that quite literally exploits artists for cents.
No, while I do still pirate, I am slowly buying all the music I can buy in form of vynils records and CDs, other than digital downloads from bandacamp.
Good on you, the act of buying is what makes the difference.
Watching for free on YouTube is not piracy, and laughably, I’d say it is better than using Spotify that quite literally exploits artists for cents.
My comment is in the wrong thread as the other commentor pointed out, it was directed at the Robin Hood wannabes who thinks somehow ripping off artists and creators is okay, because they have a shitty deal with distributors / media companies.
Hey all, I’d like to distance myself from Spotify, but I really enjoy their discovery features. I’ve learned about a lot of bands both new and old that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Do you have any suggestions for a service that could replace this aspect of it?
I’ve used Spotify, Apple music, YT music and nothing beats SoundCloud stations for discovering new music based on a song.
and their “More of What you Like” playlists are just stations based on your recently most played songs and they just don’t miss.
for someone like me that has songs from a lot of different genres in my regular rotation of 10-15 songs every month or so, it’s perfect for discovering music.
Bandcamp is pretty good. They do writeups that I think are written by real people. When you look at a band you like, it tells you about stuff other people who like them have. I’ve found a lot of stuff there.
It is more about buying music than renting it, however. Most albums it will ask you to buy after a certain number of plays. I think the band can configure those details
Bandcamp was bought out by Epic Games, fired half of it’s staff to make the bottom line look better, and is now owned by some private corporate music licensing company. I wouldn’t recommend supporting them anymore.
This all happened in September btw so any enshittification of the service has yet to come to fruition.
How about FM radio waves?
So you can hear the same 5 songs on repeat interspersed with tons of commercials?
I discover more ads than music that way
Ah yeah I love hearing the same 30 songs over and over again with 60% ads, great idea
Ugh, spotify soot again?
At least according to spotify (it would probably be illegal for them to lie anyways), Spotify pays almost 70% of revenue to rights-holders (whoever distributes the thing, e.g. record labels), which means they take about the same cut as Steam. Good luck complaining about that.
You often see people citing the $.003 per stream for rights-holders figure for Spotify. That’s not exactly what Spotify decides! Spotify pays rights-holders share of the 70% of the revenue based on how much they were streamed. TL;DR: Spotify pays rights-holders slices of pie based on how much their artists help bake. So, if artists aren’t getting payed enough, Spotify simply isn’t getting enough revenue despite reinventing radio for its free tier!
Not to mention how certain rights-holders (fortunately not DistroKid) gobble royalties away from artists. And, the author’s solution to (insert @Nougat’s comment here)?
(On a side note: I hate Tidal free, because it “doesn’t” have ads! Every single interruption I’ve encountered so far is the generic Tidal announcer telling me to subscribe to premium. Sometimes I even get a freaking video ad on cellular data telling me the same thing, and there are only 4 ads in today! There’s no variety! It’s just repeating! Aaaaaaaaa (dw just yelling me name
This person really brags about paying $25 for a proprietary music player that’s exclusive to Mac OSX.
Spotify has always been a pain in the ass. For the longest time you couldn’t listen to a single song someone shared because they forced you to create an account.
Companies that force you to create an account to do the simplest action are assholes.
To enlighten our android-using brothers and sisters… https://xmanager.app/ is a good way to enjoy spotify if you insist on using it.
I use Spotube, which avoids their app entirely. not super stable, tho
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I only used Spotify for podcasts when I used to be on the road all the time. For music, I’ve had a free Pandora account for years now. Does what I need it too. And with wireguard+pihole I don’t get ads either.
I only used Spotify for podcasts
This is funny because I remember the days people HATED Spotify for adding podcast and only listen to podcast on their own separated app (I use PocketCasts)
I like being able to queue an episode of something to listen to, and then going back to listening to music again. If it wasn’t for that, it’s kind of a crappy podcast player, yeah.
Since Spotify serves lossy audio files still…I don’t care about them.
I never got into Spotify. Soulseek is all I need.
