I spent some time yesterday looking at my Spotify library and comparing it to Apple Music. Everything I listen to even remotely regularly is on Apple Music. Canceled my Spotify subscription this morning. Starting fresh and searching for music again will honestly be nice. I didn’t listen to 3/4 of my created playlists anyway, I’m an album guy when it comes down to it.
Yeah, starting over can be liberating. The only reason I started streaming was because my iPod got stolen.
savages. but at least they have good taste.
They got a lot of black metal, doom, and crust. Haha!
This is becoming a thing now
Video title is clickbait, and Weaver likes trolling, but topic in video is interesting
Never used it, never will. Soundcloud seems to be un-fashionable enough for me. Ive got a student subscription so I don’t have adverts.
It seems that you either never had to deal with a record label, or are full of the so modern virtue signalling that allows to label people as this or that. I didn’t mention any specific streaming platform, by the way.
Honestly, saying you don’t care about the economics just because it works for you is part of the problem. That attitude reinforces a system where only the privileged get to create freely while everyone else burns out or quits. You might not mean it that way, but ignoring the damage doesn’t make it go away.
Don’t you think we should at least question why it’s become normal for artists to accept that reality — and whether we’re okay with that?
Looking at a recent BMI statement, Spotify accounts for 75% of my streaming royalties, Apple is 16%, Youtube Music is 5%, Tidal 3%, Amazon 2%. Even ignoring money, it kind of makes it hard to boycott if you want your music to be where the most listeners are.
Edit: Actually I should have looked at streaming numbers instead of money. My most popular song had 207,027 Spotify plays and only 11,826 Apple Music plays. That’s a pretty drastic difference.
I’ve not used Spotify or hosted my music there for well over 3 years now. It was a moral decision, my audience has dissappeared, but my soul feels clean. I by CDs and put my music out on Newgrounds.com
I see your point. What I mean is I don’t care about the company economics, I do care about the benefit we get as users compared to the cost, as with everything else. From that point of view, I think it is relatively inexpensive to put your music out there these days, on all platforms at once. However, as it always was, you need a huge budget to stand out. But it was similarly difficult in the old days, as far as I can remember. Sometimes you got lucky and got extraordinary promotion. Most of the time, it was a pain to deal with indie record labels. Major record labels were just out of reach, and even more oppressing. Since like forever.
But the bottom line of my message was that conflating moral considerations with economics is a bit confusing. One thing is that the deal is bad, and another that you hate a specific person. One is free to like a company or not on any grounds really. But if I had to stop buying depending on the owner/CEO thoughts, principles or habits (not to mention investments), I’d be in a shed in the woods (and probably starving).
Do I like Spotify? No. Do I like any other better? Not really. I just want to make music and share it through whatever means are available. Not especially brave nor idealistic, which I accept.
I get that you’re talking more about company economics than about the broader economy of the music scene. And I do see where you’re coming from, especially regarding the historical difficulty of standing out, then and now.
That said, I still think there’s a deeper issue here. When you say you don’t care about the economics, even just at the platform level, it sends a message — intentional or not — that you’re okay benefiting from a system that’s widely acknowledged to be broken, without questioning it.
I’m not specifically talking about boycotting CEOs (although in a case like Spotify, do we really need to bring more arguments on the table?) or tracking down every company’s ethics report. I’m talking about acknowledging that, as artists, as customers or users, our choices — even passive ones — shape the ecosystem we work and live in. If most of us shrug and say “it is what it is,” the system stays exactly the same.
You don’t have to be an activist to see that. Just recognizing the problem and staying open to questioning it — even while using the tools — already makes a difference.
So yeah, I’m not asking you to be brave or idealistic. Just not too comfortable with things as they are. FWIW I never used Spotify neither as an artists nor as a consumer for ethical reasons and life seems quite acceptable like that
Anyone else use Nina
I understand, you make some very valid points. I guess I’m just a bit tired of this constant sense of indirect ‘guilt’ that we face from all directions for every little thing we do as ordinary humans.
I didn’t demand music streaming, in the same way that I didn’t request the advent of CDs. I did resist it for a while, I come from a culture where there was an A side and a B side, and you could actually read the lyrics, but then they came up with all those extra songs and I caved in. Nowadays, I buy CDs more than I stream, but there’s an undeniable advantage in having complete discographies at your fingertips. And, as an artist, I can release whatever I want whenever I want at relatively low cost. So that’s the upside. Then there’s a lot of downsides as we all know. But those are not specific to Spotify.
I’d be more interested in ways of cracking their algorithms, or if we want to go deeper, how to counter the decay of education that has erased a taste for music as a cultural asset and left us with single rapid consumption songs that sound the same (although some would argue that the radio was doing the same thing back then). These billionaires are just taking advantage of that, maybe even promoting it in various ways. But the underlying tone of the debate was “Spotify bad, Tidal (or even Apple!) good, both as consumer and artist”, which I thought was moot and sounds a bit like the usual slogan-based cancel culture. I care about the artist, not the instrument they use to share their artistry as widely as they can. Because ‘boycotting Spotify’ turns into ‘boycotting Spotify artists’ before you know, then users, etc. as if we are all responsible of shady business practices and morals of one multimillionaire. People were keying other people’s Teslas, ffs.
That said, if someone feels that getting paid 0.0005 vs 0.05 makes a difference, they will choose the platform they prefer, of course, and if that bankrupts Spotify I won’t shed a tear. Some have argued about compression algorithms and sound quality, which I see as better arguments. But what these companies or individuals do or don’t in the grand scheme of things (which I guess is what really lies behind the ‘boycott’ call) is beyond my knowledge or desire to know, really. Otherwise, buying a smartphone starts to be equivalent to me personally directing child labour in lithium mines somewhere in Africa and I’ll have to go to the shed in the woods again.
i am really not convinced that this is the future, as they show no plan how they actually will make money. the fear the sell off later, once popular enough, is real.
Has anyone had any interaction with AC55ID?
Scuba’s plugging it a lot on his podcast so I assume he has some kind of stake in it
This thread is making me want a Spotify subscription.
Fuck it.
Yous have just gained them a new customer.
But Macca wrote the best ones.