they give it to Ed sheran
2 Likes
And the landlord of the one world trade center where the main office is
seems that they don’t want to be a platform for “underground music”, only for bigger labels/names or AI generated stuff which they can self-generate, promote and get all of the revenue.
btw I don’t think that’s necessarily correct statement, most people pay for the ease of use rather then music choice. I mean, sure there will be tracks missing, but what platform “has it all”?
Spotify provides huge library that is available on almost every device in existence and their app is pretty good, imo that’s what most of the users are paying for. if you look at the comparison of streaming services you can see that only handful are supported on all platforms, making it easy for the user to just listen to music regardless of what phone/computer/tv device they have.
Spotify sucks for the artist, but it’s one of the most accessible for the listener, and that why imo people pay for premium.
3 Likes
One way to frame what you’re saying here is this: Spotify is providing a service to musicians: it’s helping get their music into listeners ears using the best tools possible. In that model, Spotify is charging musicians a fee per track for using the service. The fee is higher for songs with <1000 plays than for songs with >1000 plays. For most other products and services, a fee is higher fee gets a better service. In Spotify’s model, the people with the highest fee get the worst service (they don’t get in curated playlists, they don’t get front-page icons, they probably get ranked lower in all the automated playlists etc etc).
3 Likes
well, yeah, but isn’t it same thing with radio / broadcasting? I mean, before streaming, how would you get any exposure?
it sucks that streaming went that way but it’s not that different then it was before streaming…
again, consider how it was before streaming, suppose you had to release your music, you’d have to compose, record, etc., and then you’d have to make some physical media of it, promote with paper, flyers, gigs, etc. etc., and no one would guarantee payback for that, so you’d invest a lot with no real guarantees of getting payed.
and how much royalties would you get once your music is played on radio/tv? if you had one or two plays on late night shows, would you get paid adequately?
it sucks that Spotify is taking that road, but I assume most of their money is coming from people that want to press play of their favorite songs with ease and without ads, so it’s easy corporate decision for them of limiting the platform payouts for less popular songs/artists…
1 Like
I think different users pay for different reasons.
in any case, it is obviously unfair that you pay for premium, spend all month listening to Merzbow and then Spotify give all your money to Universal to give to Taylor Swift.
I would expect that part of the motivation for Spotify is that hosting content that doesn’t even get 1000 plays is not profitable enough. They still have to host the files, but the tracks aren’t “deal breakers” for enough people to hit their bottom line. There must be millions of tracks with less than 10 plays which are all a massive drag on any profit margin.
it makes sense financially. I doubt Spotify’s bean counters care at all if music is underground, or white noise or whatever really, They just want the maximum number of premium subscribers whilst paying the minimum possible rights/running costs.
I imagine their ideal customer pays the monthly fee and doesn’t stream anything at all (or just some Spotify produced podcasts)
Which is why music is f’d. If the profits of the main music supplier don’t really rely on anyone listening to any music… I mean.
Totally agree that convienience is a massive driver for a lot of their premium subscribers, and also that a lot of them will not notice anything not-mainstream disappearing completely.
If I had to guess, I think in some ways the “mainstream” and “underground” music markets are kinda going to separate further… A bit like when the Premier League split from the Football League in the UK.
2 Likes
I’ve heard the same underground argument since the beginning of Spotify. There was no Ed Sheeran back then. It was probably Justin beaver or David guetta who got all your sub money at the time.
1 Like
This is where current Bandcamp model shines, it’s great model both for listener and the artist, but in reality no one I know, except people making music, listens to BC.
IMO unless there comes some sort of non-profit which plows the way with a good alternative to the current streaming platforms - you’ll always be in the hands of a corp that’s driven by profit. I wish there was something like Wikimedia but for music, that would be awesome.
3 Likes
tbh, this new policy makes no difference here - the way Spotify pays is to put all the users money in a big pot, then look at all the streams overall, and divide the money up, weighted towards the top streamers.
So your 10 Euro mostly went to Taylor Swift/Sheeran already.
It SHOULD be easy to administer your 10 Euro going to exactly who you streamed yourself… but there’s nothing in that for the Majors, and they own big chunks of Spotify, so you may be waiting a while.
(also there is then an issue if you listen to even more artists the money gets spread even thinner I guess.)
check this if interested:
Bandcamp still has little of the “stream anywhere” and “playlists made for you” convienience, and also… like, no major label content, so it is operating in the margins already right?
Sort of the divergence of major label and independent I suggested…
I wonder if a workable model would be:
consumer pays per play (so your ten quid gets you 1000 plays or whatever)
Spotify pays artists per play (still going to be tiny, but at least to the right people)
If consumer goes over their tenner, they can buy more plays.
At least then if you listen to your favourite artist 1000 times you are supporting your favourite artist.
What’s in this for the major labels… very little I guess, so won’t happen without some serious effort and collaboration and protest.
slightly irrelevant to the topic of the thread but my mom has Spotify account, she only listens to classical music, her favorite composers all are long dead, where the money goes? should she pay per play as well?
so is my uncle, who listens to old jazz, 60s/70s rock and blues, most of the artists in his playlist are also gone. this is where the major labels come in.
2 Likes
The point beeng is, spotify could hold balance back untill streams reached 50usd revenue. If you have 10 tracks making 2 eur a year (yeah!!) it would take 2 to 3 years to get that 50usd payout. It would be more fair than just get nothing.
I‘m really interested in a statemend of Gema and other collecting societies. Spotify can‘t pay nothing to gema etc for tracks under 1k plays, simply because they are using it so spotify has to pay for it (may it be a little little). Thats urheberrecht in Germany
1 Like
Your distributor still gets paid though, so what difference is that dollar to Spotify when they probably pay huge amounts every month to distributors? They don’t pay musicians directly, so the argument of “ difficult to pay cents to thousands of artists” is so dumb. That’s the distributor’s job, and they aren’t complaining about anything as far as I can tell.
1 Like
I think whether GEMA (or PRS here) are especially effective at distributing rights payments at that level would be another question tbh.
the entire situation is… interesting anyway though, as they’re (maybe) paying one mechanical publishing royalty for the copy on their servers, and (maybe?) one performance royalty when someone streams it (in theory) BUT I would not be surprised at all to find that that performance royalty is a percentage of the overall payout - so if they set the track’s payout to zero then…
that sort of thing is definitely possible anyway!
someone owns the recording rights to those classical performances.
But yes, the publishing rights might well be 100% public domain at this point (unless it’s been rearranged)
so it’s cheaper for Spotify to stream Classical at that point I guess.
The GEMA distribution model also unfairly favors the larger copyright holders over the smaller ones. However, they might still have to act here, simply because Spotify knows who the copyright holders are, but simply chooses not to pay them. So if you are a member of Gema with less than 1000 plays on any of your tracks, it might be fun to poke them about that.
In the end, as @insect pointed out it’s a question of German copyright law, and whether the market share of Spotify is large enough so that they can’t simply force a change like this upon the artists and say agree with it or leave the platform. Might even be a matter for EU courts, which would not end well for Spotify.
1 Like
I’m not sure about this. If everyone has, say, an extra 1000 per month, I can see most of that getting swallowed by rent increases and asset price inflation.
Possibly - you have to get EU courts into (expensive) action for musicians with less than 1000 streams, which might be difficult.
Also, I’d say the likely result will be Spotify putting a barrier to entry up rather than suddenly changing their mind on this. Also… why can’t their submission terms just say “I waive my right to royalties under 1000 streams.”
In fact, I bet it will.
Then your choice is live with it or take your music down.
If everyone has an extra 1000 per month, a couple has 2000 and family of 5 has 5000. Also there is a variety of models for how an UBI might be implemented, some of the more viable ideas include other changes, like abolishing income tax or similar radical changes. And for an UBI to be an UBI, it would habe to be enought so that you can not only fulfil your most basic needs, but also participate in society. So when prices are inflated, the UBI would simply go up.
Why would that have to be expensive? In this case cost is not determined by value of litigation. And in a single case, that value is $4 anyway 
Or it will happen as class action, like the one Max Schrems initiated to (successfully) bring down the safe harbour agreement.
As I said, the market share of Spotify might be just large enough so that they can’t simply dictate terms to their users, because they would effectively exclude them from that market. This is what tech platforms fear the most.
Then buy the musicians album from bandcamp. That’ll score them more money than a year’s worth of your streaming, probably
Edit: if you want something done, the most effective way is to do it yourself rather than getting angry that some other organization isn’t doing it.
2 Likes