the studios who are also owned by the same parent companies that control a 20% stake in spotify? unlikely im afraid. its rich people paying rich people while laughing at everyone else.
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I never heard ads on SoundCloud. I am on NextPro fyi.
I’ve been told that’s cheaper than the pub these days.
But as for your original point, I once had a friend who was in a band that started to get a bit of a local following. The handful of plays they got on the local indie station actually paid out some dollars in royalties, whereas S****** wouldn’t be giving them shit.
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Ha! Sad truth! In fairness, I haven’t been out to a venue in forever. I was second guessing that price!
Well there it is! We got the road map! Skip the streaming services, get a local following and make money that way.
If you’d like to expand your following then maybe accept the terms with streaming services and move along!
Unfortunately corporate will always be corporate!
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I got all my old cds and vinyl out of storage recently and bought a new cd player / turntable. I’m going back to buying and owning the music I love the most. Spotify is a ok way to discover new artists but I am fed up with them behaving badly/predatory - they aren’t the only game in town these days.
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Not sure if sarcasm or not. But some of the smaller local bands etc seem to have been doing alright with the local scene to bandcamp pipeline.
As an example, was talking to one fella who had somehow managed to build a decent following in Europe with their ear splitting offering of noise/punk/metal despite only playing shows around Brisbane or regional Australia and not being on the streaming services. All their merch was sold out and they were planning the next release on vinyl.
Might be a wee bit harder for people (such as myself) who prefer to stay at home and don’t really gel with drunk weirdos in public though.
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Not at all! Sorry if it came off that way. It’s the second time I said I like streaming on here and the second time I was met with what about the artist(not by you obv).
I understand streaming services may fuck you but as you pointed out, there are other ways to make money being an artist!
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No worries, can be a wee bit hard to tell when the internet is concerned sometimes.
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I am one of those Artists and I for shure care for wages in the grand scheme of the economy. I can not change each and everything but I try to be as vocal about the wages about other jobs that are paid unfair in my eyes as I try to be vocal in this case. Is it enough? maybe not. do I care. you bet!
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i personally dont trust any tech company’s self reported user numbers/stats. i think one of the main friction points is the idea that if 10,000 people listened to my song and i got paid minimum 1 cent per stream, that would be 1k in my pocket. but the only people who actually knows if those 10,000 streams came from 10,000 different real people, some combo of real or inflated, or primarily inflated. it seems like they have presented this idea of a financial possibility but every variable surrounding it is shrouded.
It’s not even a big conspiracy to be honest. Most of those streams are probably from the same echo chamber if they are released by a good to top tier label.
Not to mention the “curated” playlists. Guess who curates them and why? Is it good to be featured in these lists as a newcomer or independent? Sure!! But you just need to be aware of the odds…
I am assuming it’s worse now.
The study finds that over the last four years, major labels accounted for nearly 70% of the music featured in the ‘New Music Friday’ playlist on Spotify
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there’s one guy who has hundreds of alias artist accounts and has more streams than the beatles or anyone else on the platform.
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Admit it, streaming just doesn’t work for 99,99% of the artists and it never will. It’s too easy to create and publish music these days and the „market“ is drowning in it. Nobody can ever listen to all that stuff. The 0,01% who are the „winners“ in this misery have strong financial backing and/or are able to play the algorithm game right.
Spotify is not the problem. Streaming and its royalties is not the problem. As a consumer I’m actually glad that streaming services make it easier for me to discover new great artists. I also just couldn’t spend enough money on music to really help all my favorite artists survive.
Most artists couldn’t truly follow their passion for music without existential fears. A problem of which I believe is as old as art itself.
What it needs is a system which allows humans which are born into this world to exist FFS.
/rant
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Yesterday I asked Deezer (could have been Spotify I guess) how to upload a couple tracks, and was told I needed to use a third party service.
I told them I was good with international licensing and anything about computer science and would hate having to pay anyone to just have people listening to my tracks.
Got an answer like “we’ll see what we can do” but I was left with this question: why is this additional layer mandatory?
I mean, Bandcamp users throw $200M each year to music they could get for free, artists seem to do fine with outputting even physical discs and merch.
Why the f*** is it imposed to go through these unneeded leeches?
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It‘s a whole system of leeches that pretty much own the entire stuff from distribution to streaming to bla. So they can cash grab on as many spots in the chain as possible. DistroKid is absolutly obsolete. Small Artist could do it all by themselfs but no…
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I have no clue why they are on the path between the artist and the listener. I was not convinced by the support. That DZ/Spotify make them mandatory is a mystery to me. Not talking about money here, just technically. There must be a thing I’ve overlooked.
I wonder if it’s technical. I work in video streaming. I don’t understand why my employer hasn’t brought encoding/transcoding in-house. It would allow us so much more freedom to set up streaming the way we want, to engineer our own solutions for specialised products, and would probably cut costs scheduling…. But we don’t. It’s the most expensive part of the pipeline (I’m told), so it works out cheaper to use a 3rd party who can spread their costs over multiple clients.
I’m not saying that specifically Spotify/DZ are avoiding the encoding or file hosting step themselves, but maybe its something similar.
I completely agree. I still buy physical releases and pay for music on bandcamp but to listen to everything I want to in a month I’d be broke
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I see it also as a form of prelistening like in stores in the early days. I listen to a lot and if its a keeper I buy it uf not I probably don‘t listen to it again.
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