Sure, it’s different. Spotify, Google and Apple basically captured the whole market, which was mostly due to how god damn incompetent the big labels were. They essentially had a money printing machine that they’d built by decades of exploiting artists, and almost lost it all. So yeah, even less trickles down to the artist trying to build a career through the established path, meaning get signed to a label, record an album or tracks in an expensive studio, publish them & market, go on tour and then repeat the cycle. You can make as much money (which sadly often means no money at all) by completely sidestepping the industry. Spotify is only unfair to the small number of artists who, in a different era, would have made money from album sales. For the vast majority of bands and artists who never even had a chance, it’s a level playing field. Personally I have little to complain.
But it really is not. Getting playlist coverage is either cost- or relationship-intensive, both of which is a question of resources and access. The myth of “publishing on a level playing field” is simply not true, disappointingly so, because it COULD be true, but that’s not how these current models work. The playing field is on a slope and parts of it are brightly lit while others extend well into a dark basement.
You’d probably make more in the early 2000s burning your music onto CDs at home and selling them on the streets of your local town than most unsigned artists will make off Spotify with an album.
And just so I’ve said it, gigging dynamics have changed with this as well. Bookers often expect ARTISTS to carry a significant portion of the risk (or even all of it) now, which is ridiculous really. In a way, any artists other than the top 1% in this model are the ultimate pions of the industry.
Personally, I think that really sucks.
I think you’re misunderstanding my position: it’s a level playing field if you don’t expect to make any money at all, which is most bands and artists in the music industry since whenever the music industry started. It’s a level playing field for amateurs and artists who never had a chance of getting any real income from album sales, which is most of the artists, well, ever. It’s a free promotional channel, it costs peanuts to have your music on and it works reasonably well.
Here’s a Steve Albini essay on the matter, from 2014 but still extremely topical.
Yeah, but the thing is that’s always been the case. Always. Pay to play, it wasn’t invented yesterday or 10 years ago. That’s always been the case, when there’s any real money involved the middle men and gatekeepers take all they can. Music is a rotten business, it’s never been good. It’s better now from an artistic standpoint since thanks to the internet and cheap studio equipment you can record and release your music globally without any gatekeepers standing in your way. As for actually making money, you’ve never had a chance.
Thing is re Spotify is that it would be a fairly decent/good model if two things happened:
-
There was a general raise in the amount paid per stream to benefit all artists
-
If I listen exclusively to one artist for a month, I want whatever percentage of my subscription is left (after Spotify takes its cut) to go directly to that artist, not Ed fucking Sheeran or whoever the fuck
Number 2 is my biggest issue with them 
About time, will be interesting to see if anything comes of it:
I think for the general “music fan” where quantity and popularity is more important than actually finding new music, things like spotify are here to stay.
But for a music fan (without the airquotes) then spotify is just one (or not) other platform, and independent sources like bandcamp will be another, maybe physical media will be another. The fact that you can’t get everything on spotify is a good thing I think.
If artists told spotify to GFT they would not have a product, maybe more should do that.
YES!!! 
…ur point 2 IS the user centrified pay model…
…in test mode already on deezer and soundlcoud…
and even spotify can’t argue against it for soooo much longer…
it’s on it’s way to become the next new status quo…
first we had the liberation of production tools…
and at the end we will see the liberation of monetarisation of content creators…
no matter which size they can call their own…
u can’t raise the worth of a click…but u can make sure that click counts for real, finding it’s way back to the source…
what u dig 'n click…is where ur money goes…
and 50thousand plus monthly listeners will make U a living…
no need for mainstream candee middle of the road reinforcement artistic castration…
do ur thing…find ur niche…keep doing so…and all the rest will happen…
it’s nothing but evolution…also here…
Wouldnt be a fan of Spotify it’s regular debate I have with my step son.who uses it every day.i normally pick up a few records each month I try to aim for at least one album and a couple singles.my step son is also into records aswell which is great and handy for Christmas birthday etc.
Not considering the right or wrongs of it, but haven’t bigger artists generally always got the better deals, even though the end price for the consumer is the same?
I think people are always going to gravitate to the music distribution model they find most convenient, not necessarily the cheapest. Hell, someone probably made a packet selling combination fax machine/pianolo roll printers in the 80s.
Radiohead refused to go on Spotify, quite noisily, for a while. Then they caved in. It seems to have a lot of power.
…well…sweden is huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge in global music biz…
always decent, behind the curtain, god of understatement like…but never the less…
huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge…
just google daniel pop and max martin…and see for ur own… 
so, yeah…spotify is even bigger than apple music…and NO, that’s not such a bad thing…
quite the opposite…beyond all monocultural bad taste in ur mouth…
i’m totally fine with a future…where bandcamp IS THE record store…and spotify IS THE streamingfarm…and ALL SONIC ARTISTS dictate the rules how this has to play and pay out…cause in this case, no further need for competition anymore becomes an exceptionally a GOOD thing…for once…and finallee…
I think there’s a fine line between making a statement as a band against profiteering and pissing off the large section of your fanbase who use Spotify and don’t give a shit about how much you get paid.
And after Taylor Swift’s “boycott” it’s easy for people to get the wrong idea and think you’re trying to hold Spotify to ransom for a bigger cut for yourselves. If artists don’t deal with Spotify collectively, nothing will change.
I think a lot of the bigger artists have come to see Spotify in the same way they used to see Napster. You’re not going to make any money off it, but at least people are still listening to your records and it might lead to sales elsewhere.
but what would Russ do?
A couple of weeks ago I cancelled my distrokid account. Which put my music up on spotify and all the others.
It did not benefit me at all over the period my account was active. I did not reach more listeners, it did not lead to sales on my bandcamp page.
About a week ago I put up an album on bandcamp and shared a link here and privately with a few friends. Since release that album has sold more copies than anything I have released in the last 6 years, and has had more plays than the most popular release that has been there for 6 years. I’ve gained a few more followers on my bandcamp as well.
Absolutley incredible response. From just bandcamp and zero social media.
Bandcamp is free, it costs you money to get your stuff up on the other streaming sites. So yeah, spotify can get bent.
But did share your Spotify link here?
There is a floor and a ceiling to Bandcamp and Spotify. Bandcamp and Spotify both have a $0 floor. But Bandcamp’s ceiling is going to be much lower than Spotify based on users alone.
That being said, I think you do see a lot of smaller artists making a few hundred bucks per release on Bandcamp vs streaming sites like Spotify where they may not even make $50.
Also, another big draw is the control you have with releasing your music on Bandcamp. You name the price. You can upload music with samples (and likely get away with it). You can upload extra files and give those away with your music.
The only thing Spotify has going for it is the size of it’s user base.
Sure did. Plenty.
I would say people dont use Spotify, they turn it on an let an algorithm do the rest.
Dont get me wrong, I’m not whinging. I think for many people, spotify is great.
But many other people, it is totally evil. Utter scum, a plague on the music world.
And I reckon @darenager is right. Its up to us the artists, to tell spotify to fuck off. Until then, spotify wins.
It could also be that the folks on here would rather support you through Bandcamp knowing you’d make more than if they just streamed your albums a few times.
To each their own is the only way. Artists have a choice to be part of it or not. And that’s a great thing.
Absolutely! I applaud your actions 100%!
The rest of my response is not directed at you, @Microtribe, but are more general thoughts on the topic. So many artists complain about Spotify and get absolutely nothing from the incredibly arrogant leadership of that company but they don’t have the balls to say ‘I refuse to play your game’.
That’s why I started that Spotify hate-thread:
And as a side point. There’s something like 60,000 tracks released a day – whatever the actual number is, it’s a fuckton. No one has time for all that shit. I’m quite happy discovering the more underground stuff on Bandcamp, thank you.
Maybe I’m just a over opinionated salty old dinosaur but I think that the cost of things also gives them their worth, I’m not just talking about monetary value either.
I also think that the number of things you have is directly related to overall contentment, too much stuff is overhead and stressful, it could be argued that digital media and streaming is a solution here, but I personally don’t agree with that, inbox0 being a good analogy.
Instant gratification is rarely long lasting, effort, scarcity and labour are often more fulfilling, because you invested something into them, IMHO.
Back in the day (and it staggers my younger self to say this) the music industry was less efficient at screwing artists out of royalties, of course it still happened but it was not as accepted and easy.
Now on the other side of the coin, streaming offers convenience for casual music listeners to discover and listen to music they would not normally buy, great in theory but without being in the right algorithm your average “nobody” artist has little chance of being discovered, regardless of talent or musical merit.
Eventually DJ’s will be redundant too, some cynics might say that is a good thing, but I don’t think it is, there will be no more John Peels, or Electrifying Mojo’s, or Frankie Knuckles etc.
Oh well, thats progress I guess. I feel fortunate to have lived in both the pre internet and internet era’s, it would be easy to say the pre internet era was better, and indeed in many ways it was, but not in all ways, I think that it does sadden me though that the internet is a false democracy in many ways, but then the same could be said of actual democracy too.
Just a bit of tangent comment from my side, but whatever.
I didn’t like what I was being fed in spotify for the month that I tried it, but I feel like youtube does a pretty good job in my case for recommending me stuff I’m actually interested in. Never any big shot names coming up, sometimes I even get some videos/tracks with barely a hundred views and sometimes I even like those, haha.
Although maybe that’s because I’ve been grooming (?) my youtube recommendations for a much longer time than I did with spotify. 