Continuing with Spotify?

The radio/MTV replacement thing seems so key to Spotify's success - capturing low-engagement listeners who just want to thoughtlessly put on playlists like "Cooking Music" or "Road Trip Jams" where previously they would have just thoughtlessly switched on the radio.

I would guess that the $120/year that I pay for Spotify premium is fairly comparable to the amount I used to pay for new CDs at a record store. At one point, I might have also spent about that much (if not more) in used CDs, but that's not money that an artist would have seen. So, although streaming generally pays less to artists than CDs did, I don't feel like I was really contributing all that much to artists' revenue streams in the CD era. And now I'm listening to vastly more music (or at least a much wider range of music) than I once did.

i've found the ability to pay artists more or less directly through bandcamp to be really empowering fwiw. kind of feels like you're a patron in a weird way. it's fun, especially for amazing music that's also really low-profile.

Does anyone remember the "anti-used CD store" crusade that certain artists embarked on, just a year or so before streaming became an issue? I remember both Garth Brooks and Bonnie Raitt complaining about not making money from used CD sales.

I do remember that, Garth Brooks in particular was super fired up about that. I don't really remember Raitt being involved, but could be.

If he hated used CDs, streaming must have made Garth's head explode like a balloon.

except technically he does get paid every single time someone engages with his song commodity

It's like the La Croix of getting paid for music -- they wave a few dollar bills around in the same room and the artist hopes to catch a little whiff.

'lightly essenced royalties'

Its ironic bc Garth was also the main innovator/offender in that era of bullshitty schemes to artifically goose sales numbers, like 3-for-1 packages & including CDs with concert tix, etc. Few artists put as much effort into filling peoples homes with discs they didnt want.

Garth has never been on Spotify iirc

would have been amazing if one of those free apple music albums you couldn't get rid of was garth brooks but i guess he wasn't cool enough

Garth had his own service, and eventually teamed up with Amazon.

i probably buy 100+ albums a year. if I stopped buying music for ten years, I might be able to create a $20,000 scholarship in ILX's name

What's nuts to me is how left-leaning b-list and c-list musicians are on average, and how left-leaning tech workers are compared to their bosses, and yet there's no real union with teeth for either of them. It seems like it would not be too late to parley some working class resentment to deal with some of these problems like "I work for a giant swedish tech corp that spent $100 million on this right wing alex jones loving covid misinformer" or "I think my music label's deals with streaming corporations is a joke when it comes to compensating me". In both cases the answer is work stoppage and collective bargaining and getting the public on your side, right? Not easy but not impossible.

Musicians have this problem that you can't easily demand a living wage/insurance in the tech era where reproduction and distribution of audio content is basically free once you build the software. And before the tech revolution it was given away basically for free on radio and Mtv. You'd need to create a new more radical organization with enough key membership and rights ownership to demand that for itself, causing the balkanization (netflix-hulu-hbo-amazoning) of the streaming services as prices would have to rise quite a bit. Clamping down on free video streams would help a lot too, if music labels took a real hard line against Youtube and sued the shit out of it every time a music track was posted and demanded proper royalties at a higher rate than the fraction-of-a-penny radio rate that youtube streams fetch.

Figuring out who to let in the union and who to keep out would be super ugly. Right now it's "are you on a major label, if so you are in the basically toothless US musician's or singer's union" that manages things like a silly retirement pension and does some basic rights negotiations. Probably union membership should be offered to anyone who streams enough to be something like in the top 30% of all artists with more than 1000 streams a month on average across platforms. But could it ever work? There are surely too many high profile artists who would be ideologically republican/anti-union or not want to deal with work stoppages or just enjoy complicating things.

This sort of thing needs to happen in journalism too before all online news becomes untrained speculation for free by influencers who attract an audience for the stylistic reasons and there's no more shoe leather reporting at all.

Amazon Music is featuring a curated section called (RE)DISCOVER Joni Mitchell and Neil Young at the top of its home page

Amazon, the ethical alternative

yeah, i'm pretty sure bet bezos would ♥ if amazon became the refuge for spotify deserters.

yeesh what have you done now, neil?

*it's a pretty sure bet

sry

I don't blame anyone who chooses to avoid Amazon for other issues, but "I bet they'd sponsor Rogan if they could" is a goalpost move.

yeah, bezos wants to implant chips in people for real and little joey ro don't play that schitt.

i was just saying that bezos will gladly take money from anywhere.

Young has a discount code promo going with Amazon.

gross

Any of the major outlets for streaming are "bad", but the impulse to go "people cancelled Spotify but still use other corporations therefore it was a futile gesture CHECKMATE" is lame imho

to spotify users - my humble 0.002 cent (or however much it is they pay artists):

1. the music industry & the average consumer's semi-migration from physical music retail to music streaming platforms as a primary listening choice is not the fault of either party. it's an inevitable technological advancement, moore's law in effect. it's difficult to devolve from a centralized network, but we still have plenty of choices where our money goes

2. the convenience-centric infrastructure/UX of platforms like spotify and soundcloud reduces artistic value of media by incorporating advertisements, revoking consumer ownership, and subversively promoting interactions such as amassing 'likes' & other stats, browsing other media while simultaneously consuming

3. instantaneous access affects your consumption and perception of music - i.e. your patience in listening to stuff for the first time, revisiting albums, skipping tracks

4. having a universal library of media under one banner that both artists & consumers are expected to conform to in order to achieve degrees of success creates a seriously unhealthy dependency and diverts us away from true community.

5. there is no ethical consumption under capitalism (!)

6. filesharing is not the same as piracy and is arguably better for music communities... just maybe.

our stupid band gets close to a million monthly streams on spotify. spotify pays out .003 cents per stream. 100% of that goes to our former label sony who is a part owner of spotify. this is why i’m mad

— nigh eve6 (@Eve6) January 31, 2022

honestly if you seriously think filesharing leaves artists, music and community worse off than spotify you need to give your head a wobble

just want to register that i appreciated mig's post. you don't see too much of that around here. i hope they stick around.

to some of maelin's points, we see recorded music as this inert 'thing' that is the same no matter how we access it, but i believe the reality is that the music is actually our experience of listening to it, which is undeniably different be it via a streaming media library ux or the car xm station or our own cd collection or w/e.

i gave up streaming years ago and i'm happy i did, what i hear seems to have more impact now. i do use youtube to screen stuff. i buy through bandcamp and beatport and 7digital, sometimes i get lossless versions of things i can't find through slsk. it's a messy melange but it feels more exciting and spontaneous to not have discovery ironed out in this giant black box that makes everything seamless but strangely wearying.

xp I'm happy to follow artists' lead... if you follow some who invite you to fileshare their music rather than stream or buy it, go for it

Does that Eve6 person mean "$0.003" or are they seriously getting some 1/100 of the widely cited average? No one seemed to challenge it so I'm legitimately unsure.

I see Sadie Dupuis talking and posting about the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers but there doesn't seem to be much progress with it.

As ShariVari noted upthread, there's really not a way for Spotify to pay more under their current business model (which is entirely their fault for trying to use the freebie lure to become a monopoly) but I don't know that solutions really exist.

https://www.radicalartreview.org/post/263-streams-per-dollar-the-union-of-musicians-and-allied-workers-interview

for all the music we can listen to Spotify should be like $100/month imo

Given that even Tidal -- with (traditionally) no free option -- still only gets the rate up to around 1 full cent per stream, it's getting hard to argue against users paying at least a little more.

Guess what isn't going to happen though

Science Vs editor @blytheterrell and I just sent this email to the CEO of Spotify. pic.twitter.com/aAmZnkA1uU

— Wendy Zukerman (@wendyzuk) January 31, 2022

Gimlet was a dumpster of a podcast network even before they ran themselves into the ground and had to be saved by spotify, but when they started slipping shows into spotify-exclusive territory I had to stop listening to a couple I actually love. One is Every Little Thing, which has so far remained silent. The other is Science VS, which made the above announcement tonight. (dgaf about Reply All anymore, but I don't expect them to take a stand in any way about anything ever.)

Reply All is currently on a hiatus, but hasn't yet made the jump to Spotify-exclusive. Heavyweight did, and my only issue with it is that I don't know about new episodes when they're released because I like keeping a separate (non-Spotify) podcast app. Just give me a 10-second episode in my feed that says "Go listen to the new episode on Spotify."

Tyler Cowen:

Some see the musician as an intellectual hero for taking a stand. Yet Young’s own record in this area is far from pristine. For years, he has spread scientific misinformation about GMO foods. While experts have consistently judged GMO foods to be both safe and useful, Young in one song referred to them as poison. As a guest on the “Late Show With Stephen Colbert” in 2016, Young suggested that GMO foods caused “terrible diseases.” It is hard not to wonder to what degree anti-biotech sentiments like these, ironically, might have fed the current skepticism of Covid vaccines.

thanks, no doubt there are many more bad takes out there

Does that Eve6 person mean "$0.003" or are they seriously getting some 1/100 of the widely cited average?

[citation needed] but they almost certainly mean $0.003.

here's steve albini with the old but true chestnut that the major labels are as complicit as spotify, life isn't some bad for (some) bands on (some) independent labels:

1/ There's an important thread of continuity over time about the exploitation of bands by record labels that deserves a closer look, re the current Spotify debate. https://t.co/jLfPLpjKj8

— steve albini (@electricalWSOP) January 31, 2022

If my label was getting 30 USD for a million streams on the music I wrote, I wouldn't even bother opening Twitter to complain, I think it's 3000 USD.

This is also the crux of Four Tet’s legal case against Domino - treating streams as sales, for which he gets 18%, and not licensing, for which he’d get 50%.

honestly if you seriously think filesharing leaves artists, music and community worse off than spotify you need to give your head a wobble
otm

but i believe the reality is that the music is actually our experience of listening to it, which is undeniably different be it via a streaming media library ux or the car xm station or our own cd collection or w/e.

This mirrors my experience

I can’t believe Albini is still checking under his bed at night for the wicked major labels. Talk about your old men yelling at clouds. Like it or not, major labels had been for decades providing new artists with the ability to build careers and make living, at least, even if the terms were often predatory and fucked up. They’re also the reason it was possible in the 90s for suburban Nirvana fans to find Melvins, Dinosaur Jr, Jesus Lizard and Mudhoney albums at the mall. Most of the so-called legacy acts who are still selling records and concert tickets today are doing so largely due to the actions of these evil gatekeepers

i’m loving more and more of this scheme the more i hear abt it mr ponzi!

To be clear, I'm not saying the major label system was great, or even ethical. I'm just saying give me A&R bottom liners who at least knew something about music over craven tech bros any day

I remember iirc David Lowery writing a long piece on how badly Spotify screws his bands. And that was years ago. And wasn't there something about how even Pharrell was barely paid for a billion streams of his "Happy" song?

My kids have pushed back on the suggestion we switch from Spotify to something else, for some of the same reasons you all have discussed upthread, and tbh I've had a hard time convincing them that anything else is better, practically or ethically.

Personally, I'd be fine if Spotify was put out to pasture. Ek, like Zuckerberg, is so high on his own supply that he's confused convenience with necessity. Sure, Spotify makes streaming easy, but of course they're not the only ones, and I don't think most would miss Spotify specifically if it were supplanted. Just as Facebook (the platform) doesn't really provide some unique experience, either. A lot of the other tech companies, like Amazon or Google, actually provide services that people need (shopping or server hosting or search engines and email, production suites, storage and so on). Spotify and Facebook, companies like that, have done a bit of cynical black magic to convince people (like my kids) that they need their services, too, but I think it's all a hustle. Spotify is itself a disposable product built on the backs of other people's labor that devalues its own product by making it seem as disposable as Spotify itself.

honestly if you seriously think filesharing leaves artists, music and community worse off than spotify you need to give your head a wobble

I'm going to push back on this a little bit. While I don't think it leaves things "worse off", I'd be really curious to see how folks think filesharing in lieu of our current streaming model leaves artists, music and community better off. I mean, I know the danger of Spotify's $9.99 model sets an unrealistic bar that screws every artist. But I'm not sure how replacing that with a zero revenue generating option helps in the days of little touring and crumbling physical media pressing/distribution issues.

but did you give your head a wobble before posting that?

I did, still didn't shake loose a compelling reason why filesharing is better.