We should all abandon Spotify

I genuinely think we should all abandon Spotify. I know you won’t and I know lots of you are gonna say but you ‘have’ to be on it nowadays, ‘exposure’ is good and ‘you might get featured on a hot playlist’. But I’m a man of principal and Spotify does next to nothing for most artists out there. So, I’m in the process of moving everything over to Bandcamp ASAP. I’m leaving Spotify et al for good.

Let the debate begin! :slight_smile:

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Well my two cents.
Literally every single person that I have spoken to ever, unless they upload their own music to bandcamp says

“Bandcamp? Whats that?”

Where as, literally every same single person has asked me, are you on spotify?

I resisted Streaming sites for years. I despise them. For all the reasons and more. But the fact is, if I want people to hear my music, they wont hear it on bandcamp, because they dont know bandcamp.

Flip side of course is, I’ve been putting my stuff on bandcamp for almost ten years. I love it. Have I made much money? No. Do I care? No, not any more.

So rather than choose one or the other. I now do both. Bandcamp, by my own hand, and all streaming sites like spotify via distrokid. Why do I do this? Well mostly because I’m tired of slack net labels not doing what they said they would do. And also because I live some where very remote, reaching a live audience is extremely rare (covid irrelevant).

Its been the same for decades, if you want to make money, be a DJ, play pleb music anywhere they will book you.

Anyway. Do both. Thats my 2 cents.

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I won’t do Spotify

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For me all online hosting platforms are only digital archives. I use Routenotes free version when uploading to Spotify. For all I care they could have taken 50% of the revenue.

But then again, i’m not the one you’re looking to debate with here. I have no intentions of ever making considerable amounts of money out of streams. It’s simply a “nice-to-have” to have my creations available digitally.

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I would totally switch to Bandcamp. But their app is just not as good as the competition. If it were like Spotify / Apple Music -> instant switch. Also to listen to better music. I am tired of getting recommended mainstream music. I have to admit that once you have trained the Spotify algo it works pretty well.

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Yeah I do both pretty much purely because I have had people request me put it on spotify… I probably make roughly 1 dollar from streaming services for every 100 I make on Bandcamp. Bandcamp also feels like you actually are building an audience, and being able to sell physical goods is great. That said I don’t think you really loose out on sales by putting something on spotify but it is still kinda of a bummer to help the rich get richer… but at the end of the day if even a few of my fans would rather listen to it on spotify I figure why not.

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The number of people that actually want to purchase their own copy (hard or digital) is extremely small these days. Your average person nowadays just uses streaming sites, or worse, streaming apps on their mobile phone, bluetoothed to some godawful mini speaker.

Yep I’m a jaded old git, with a record player and no TV, no radio.

So the way I see it is, do both. Streaming sites for reach, bandcamp for people that still actively go looking for new music without an algorithm holding their hand.

Forget money.

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I’m not an artist . I make music for fun and will never get near release standard so I haven’t got skin in the game here to a degree some of you might have . Massive respect for the OP’s views on this and contribution to the board here.

I am however a consumer of music. I use Spotify, soundcloud, YouTube And Mixcloud all the time. It’s an absolutely liberating experience for someone living in a rural area without regular acccess to underground record shops.

But… I use this as my way of scouting out music and the stuff I really like I buy either through Bandcamp, discogs , direct from labels , online record shops…

Very so often I’ll make a trip to the city to go record shopping and spend some cash on a days digging. Often led by research from Spotify and other platforms. These are great tools to have for this.

I love bandcamp and in many ways I like the UI and the selections. The follow label function often triggers a a quick buy when something comes out.

I don’t think we can put the genie back in the lamp on this one rightly or wrongly.

End note. I have some not so sunny memories of spending my paper round money on an album because of a single release and having that awful feeling of spending good money on 9 additional tracks of filler jammed in to make some money for the record company , not the good old days…

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What’s you bandcamp link Craig, interested to check it out mate

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Not on there yet! Won’t be for a couple of months. I need to finalise things.

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So far none of the replies (as great and interesting as they are) have mentioned how criminal it is that Spotify pays $0.00318 per stream. That’s why I’m taking a stand. I don’t care about the money or fame or whatnot, just the fact that the C-level staff are making millions and they don’t give a shit about supporting artists. If I can’t lead by example when I think something is wrong and broken, then what hope do I have? Keep the replies coming, though, I love reading all of your different opinions. I just might not be able to reply til later - it’s 9am and I’ve been up all night! :slight_smile:

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I don’t use spotify, last album i bought was daniel avery, song for alpha album , and from bandcamp.
I am not interested in what spotify offers. They are parasites.

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From the consumer perspective I am planning to switch from Spotify to Tidal due to the (reportedly) nearly 10x difference in payout to artists. I don’t see any convincing reason to keep paying Spotify.

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Spotify is just another symptom of the same „disease“/problem: people who distribute art make more money off of it than the artists themselves and this not exclusive for music. As long as this is happening the platforms are interchangable. If Spotify goes down for whatever reason the next platform will come up and follow the same business model. This has been going on for centuries already I guess and now with the digital infrastructure artists could cut out the middle men entirely and distribute their art themselves but again some sleazy business/marketing guys were the first to profit from this and once it turns into a habit (like all these social media platforms) it’s very hard to get rid off it.
Bandcamp is the only exception I know of that does it differently and I hope they will stay afloat even though the majority doesn’t care about any of this. But maybe it’s also just due to the fact that the majority doesn’t even know about the exploitation of artists and the platforms are good in covering it up with shiny marketing bullshit.

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Don’t use spotify but do have music on there. It’s the wild west and lack of regulation regarding appropriate backend payments per stream is not good to politely say the very least.

We live in a world with the likes of Besoz and many other mini Besoz’s. The streaming sites, Ad revenue money for the platforms… thats what the business model is ‘we give you our platform, we take the money, Throw you the peasants some crumbs’

Music industry…hustlers, charlatans, Many sensitive good people, some just there to be parasites. Always been this way. Technology just changes the dynamic.

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So true.

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I’ve never used Spotify or I tunes because i think everything on the internet should be free. If you want to donate to the artist i think it should be voluntary. But im old skool CD physical in your hand stuff.

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CD, tape, Dvd, vinyl. All physical formats with a copy of the works you puchased the 'right to listen to or watch. All you own is the ‘right to listen to or watch it for your own pleasure’. We don’t own the song or film

A computer or smartphone playing an internet stream from apple, spotify etc is the 'vinyl, DVD, tape…The physical format. There is no difference apart from pressings.paper and ink. All thats gone is manufacturing.

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To change this, musicians have to become business people as well.

At least to a degree where they understand that there is little hope to be discoverd and then pushed by well-meaning scouts, managers, or lables, and getting a fair treatment. They have to learn to keep control of their intellectual property rights in the first place.

There is a huge list of great artists, who were litteraly slaves of their management and labels. This can be changed, if artists don’t accept unfair conditions and change to alternatives. The audience will follow … after a while … but it takes many artists to make this happen.

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if you try to get reach
better be on every damn existing platform

If you try to get rich

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