Interesting, though I wonder what they propose as an alternative for allowing discoverability. Do they just want platforms that give artists better terms, like Bandcamp? Or are they proposing moving away from online platforms altogether, in which case I guess we would go back to radio to find new stuff?
As a consumer, my primary objection to streaming platforms is that you don't own any of the stuff you pay for. That's obviously different to these artists' main objection, but if the solution they propose (whether it's switching to Bandcamp or something else) also addresses that concern I could get on board with it (and will always have sympathy for artists who want a bigger cut vs the middle man).
I do still pay for Spotify despite that objection. I find it provides just enough value to justify the cost. I have found it good for discoverability and, unlike other streaming services, Spotify gives me access to pretty much any music I might like to listen to. (Others with more niche tastes might disagree.)
Not owning what I stream sucks but I listen to a lot of music that I absolutely could not afford to pay $10+ per album for, nor $1-$3 per single for. Fortunately I own Massive Attack from the pre-streaming era but now I really have to go out of my way to listen to King Giz. No hate on either party for dropping the platform and I appreciate the stance being taken, but now I just don’t listen to King Giz because it would involve hoops.
Apple Music gave me a 90 day trial as soon as this Spotify snafu started, and it imported all but maybe 50 of my 5000+ songs from Spotify without issue, including King Gizz. I haven't touched Spotify so far this month, and I think I'm going to cancel it. I would say the music discovery features on Music are worse, but I also haven't tried to use them much yet. (That, and Spotify had gone massively downhill, I'd be lucky to get one or two new songs a month I liked with their recommendation pipeline. Which is a shame, because it used to be one of the best for me.)
Last.fm and similar platforms provide intentional discoverability for people who care enough to put in the work. Only radio and Spotify have provided the unintentional discoverability that I crave.
Call me naive, but can't an artist just refuse to be listed on Spotify? No meetings, groups, boycotts necessary. If an artist feels like the payout isn't high enough, they can just exclude their catalog from the app. And if they don't own their own catalog, then that's a decision they made knowingly and they gave up their right to control where it gets hosted. If they got exploited or didn't know, then they should take it up with their agent, whoever was advising them or the person that owns the rights. They can also try to buy their rights back. Has nothing to do w/ Spotify.
This anger against Spotify and other streaming services just strikes me as misdirected. Spotify pays out ~70% of its revenue to music rights holders, which strikes me as reasonable, although I have nothing really to base this on. But I feel like the people behind this kind of movement expect a much bigger payout, so even if Spotify paid out 100% of their revenue to rights holders, they would still think its too low.
1. Saying "hey, you can just not list on Spotify" is naive. Unless you're a major artist, you don't have the market power to convince people not to use Spotify. Essentially every labor movement is about pooling the collective power of individuals to fight larger entrenched market owners, and that's what this boycott is about.
2. To me the main issue is not the payout percentage, but how it's divvied up. I believe this is still the case, but payouts are divvied up by averaging across all plays. But the total plays are dominated by large artists. A better deal for smaller artists is to allocate each individual subscriber's revenue based on what that subscriber listens to. For example, if I love Obscure Artist A, and 90% of my songs are Obscure Artist A, then Obscure Artist A should get 90% of my $15 or whatever subscription fee (minus Spotify's cut). But instead, Spotify says "Obscure Artist A only had .000001% of total plays, so they only get .000001% of total revenue" - it ends up being a better payout for the big names but a worse deal for all the smaller artists.
There was a study that looked at the economics of this [1]: user centric (UCPS) vs market centric (MCPS) payment system. In short: UCPS would transfer some revenue from the top artists to the middle rump of popular artists, but the small and obscure artists would not be affected much since they hardly make much in the first place.
My take on this: of course the top artists should not be taking a disproportionate cut at the expense of the less popular artists, a UCPS is not a panacea but it would be an improvement.
That revenue model makes no sense. How would paying an artist on the relative user plays make any sense? So basically there is no direct relationship with number of plays and revenue? You need to abstract that part out. Artists should be paid some amount per stream.
Is there a market that actually uses a system like that? It just seems convoluted. It sounds like just some idea someone made up to back into paying some artists more in favor of others. And I'm not even sure it would have the desired effects. I'm sure Swift is on a lot more playlists that Spotify pushes than Obscure Artist.
On a very very large average, and assuming that Spotify pays out now in precise proportion to the total plays (just as you wrote - if 0.1% of plays, then 0.1% of payouts), then changing to your proposed system would literally change nothing. Average number of plays in total versus average number of users listening to an artist would be exactly the same statistically, starting from several tens of thousands of users, and Spotify has millions of them.
> For example, if I love Obscure Artist A, and 90% of my songs are Obscure Artist A, then Obscure Artist A should get 90% of my $15 or whatever subscription fee (minus Spotify's cut). But instead, Spotify says "Obscure Artist A only had .000001% of total plays, so they only get .000001% of total revenue" - it ends up being a better payout for the big names but a worse deal for all the smaller artists.
Why would the former pay obscure artists more? Are non-paying users more likely to listen to mainstream artists? Or do fans of obscure artists just play fewer songs each? Is ad revenue shared in the same proportions, but just lower per user? Is revenue really shared on the basis of plays, rather then playing time? If so, and if obscure artists make longer songs, does that contribute to their lack of revenue?
I just want to understand this a bit more clearly.
So I have never even opened Swift’s page on Spotify — let alone played a song (if there are fans here, please don’t come after me). I pay for Spotify. So did you mean to say the largest portion of my monthly fee goes to Taylor Swift?
So someone needs to make a substack for music basically. That's what we are talking about here. Question is, do people think a certain artist or song is important enough to pay $5/month to individually? My sense is no, but perhaps...
If only it was that simple. Record labels own the whole pipeline and you're unlikely to make it if you don't submit to signing away your rights and the majority of your royalties [1]. Even the best selling artist on the entire planet at one point (Taylor Swift) had to put up a fight to regain control of her records [2].
Even if they could pull their music from the platform, it's like shooting yourself in the foot. You lose most of the exposure that will lead to actual revenue: physical albums and show tickets.
In edm most large artists now just have their own label. It’s easier than ever to do. Even a single individual can do it easily. There are a lot of decent distribution services that will get your music on all the services.
I’m sure the big labels are still valuable for advertising but after you’ve grown enough I can’t understand why you wouldn’t just have your own label.
"The goal, in short, was “down with algorithmic listening, down with royalty theft, down with AI-generated music”."
In the article they do mention Massive Attack, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Deerhoof and Hotline TNT delisting their music and then further speaking out in protest- removal being 1/3 parts of the listed "goal".
But really it seems like the discourse on Spotify is making waves again with the recent reveal of Ek's Helsing investment. Given this is the same dude who said that "the cost of making content is close to zero", it's understandable that people are speaking out.
If an artist has full control of their IP, yes they can just take their music down.
Dissatisfaction with the payout is only one aspect of why some artists are leaving Spotify. I personally find it super weird how much Spotify profit is getting funnelled into arm manufacturing. Like why should listening to music help new AI drone tech to get developed? Tf?
Spotify's profit is not being funneled into arms manufacturing though, only by stretching that the money Daniel Ek made by being the founder of Spotify is "Spotify's profits" which he then used to make an investment into Helsing. Even though Spotify wasn't profitable at all for most of the almost ~20 years of existence.
>Call me naive, but can't an artist just refuse to be listed on Spotify? No meetings, groups, boycotts necessary.
They want the listeners to change their habits away from Spotify and engage with music differently -- on another platform -- e.g. maybe like Bandcamp. The listeners would discover music at Bandcamp and make purchases there where the artists get more money.
But only a minority of hardcore fans will buy music à la carte like that. Most other mainstream listeners would prefer to have ~100 million songs for a flat monthly subscrption. The tiny 0.04 cents per stream is not a concern of the subscribers. That's why it's an uphill battle.
Nothing has really changed in this regard. When I was younger, most people didn't have huge collections of tapes or CDs, most just turned on the radio and had one or two CDs that they really only listened to one song of. Spotify giving _any_ money to artists improves this scheme (not to make a judgement on "fair").
The vast majority of music listeners aren't music collectors. Those people mostly want to listen to what others are listening to in order to share something in common. It's a very different approach to music than the collector who's looking for new music they've never heard of.
Artists typically fall into the latter category and want everyone else to also. They fail to understand that music, for most people, is a cultural touchstone, not a hobby.
> Call me naive, but can't an artist just refuse to be listed on Spotify? No meetings, groups, boycotts necessary. If an artist feels like the payout isn't high enough, they can just exclude their catalog from the app.
Actually no. Or at least not completely. Radio-style play has mechanical licensing with statuatory royalties. Users wouldn't be able to request specific songs, but they could request a similar songs or similar artists station and likely hear your music.
It's not naive, it's literally what the artists did in the article.
The trade you make
is reach, you can't benefit from being discovered on Spotify, it's harder for prospective fans to become fans when they can't listen to your music. You could upload your music to other places but they seem to largely be against "uploading it online and giving it away for free."
This is indeed naive. Spotify is part of any contract an artist signs with distributors. They will simply not work with an artist if they don’t agree to it, because their business model is based on it.
> “I find it pretty lame that we put our heart and soul into something and then just put it online for free,” Rose says.
How absolutely entitled. Almost 20 years ago I would have killed for a distribution platform as slick as what there is today. Is it a generational thing maybe? I don't know, but just because you create doesn't obligate people to consume.
You're grossly misquoting Rose, as harvey9 also pointed out. Noone suggested "just because [musicians] create [doesn't] obligate people to consume". They're criticizing the compensation rate for lesser-known artists on streaming.
How is this that much different to criticizing the cut that a dominant distributor takes from vendors in e-commerce or video games?
It's also dismissive of a million different types of art and expression that don't have the benefit of this type of platform. Art and its value is always intertwined with artist. Is art diminished when it's known that the artist did it only to get paid?
I want universal basic income just so the most artistic and interesting of us can go and try cool innovative stuff without fear of death.
Indeed, very strong "One fish turns to another and asks, What is water?" vibes.
Even if you exclude all the discoverability functionality, just the pure distribution aspect, at this scale, makes the Spotify system impressive. Why should that system and all the work that went into it, be free?
I don't think there are any legal barriers for someone to go ahead and build their own music distribution system that is more fair than Spotify. It's just a matter of putting in the time, no?
Before that, it said:
"Others such as pop-rock songwriter Caroline Rose are experimenting too. Her album Year of the Slug came out only on vinyl and Bandcamp, inspired by Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, which was initially available only on YouTube and the filesharing site Mega."
So her inspiration was someone distributing for free online. The whole article has the feel of an anarcho get together with half the participants stoned.
I like Spotify but it has got a bit bloated with audiobooks, podcasts and features like videos that I do not care for. I also find Spotify makes finding and listening to albums less intuitive, it feels like everything is setup for passive listening to algorithmically generated playlists. That's fine and it is how I listen to music sometimes, particularly for music discovery. But I use other services and means to have a library because Spotify's UI for it isn't great. I can't help but think that's intentional for some reason.
I will also throw some points Spotify's way for having half decent support for API clients, decent hardware support (that is for consumers, not sure what the experience is like for a developer). I have an NFC card system setup for albums and playlists so I can have a limited physical library. This uses Spotify's libraries because the support is good.
For no fuss music Tidal has been good, but it certainly has fewer artists.
I have no trouble ignoring the auto-generated playlists and finding the album. In my experience their recommendations pretty terrible, always a step behind my current taste.
The "song radio" playlists are useful though, you get a decent list of songs in a similar style when you are in that mood.
My new music discovery is almost entirely outside of Spotify, mostly online radio.
I have listened to Audiobooks so no issue with that myself, it was a sweetener when they started ramping the price after COVID. Handy for young kids as an TV alternative as well.
The desktop client UX has gotten much better over the last ~2 years. Nice compact layout options and really responsive scrolling artists with massive catalogues like in classical. It's the first time I've felt it matches their pre-Electron native UI client from 2012-ish.
As a counter-point to streaming services and to try and provide an alternative, I'm busy building https://jam.coop - the intention is to be a music store owned collectively by artists and the people who build it. I think it's really important to explore alternatives in this space.
My favourite band (king gizzard) removed all their music from Spotify. I took the opportunity to switch to navidrome with tailscale and started obtaining music via bandcamp and ripping old CDs. It works much better than I expected, even transcoding from flac to mp3 on the fly from my phone app.
Investing the Spotify fee every month into my own music collection is a great investment, and it has meant that I am actually listening to the music and not just playing the same songs off a Spotify playlist every now and then again
If you want to migrate off Spotify but are worried you’ll lose your library, feel free to checkout my tool Libx (libx.stream). It’s a tool to export your entire Spotify library to a nice and neat CSV file
I like minimalistic websites, but I feel like that's too far. No information what so ever about anything at all, just a "Login with Spotify" button. What happens once you're logged in? No one knows.
I suppose there's a lesson in there that they could write an explanation of what happens when you log in on the page but you'd still have no actual knowledge of what happens. No explanation is honest.
Always tilted by the megastars that pretend to be part of the protest when in fact their asymmetrical comp is a large part of why small musicians get such as a low payout
It’s almost like they’re funneling wealth from masses to a few superstars.
One might be a paid subscriber and only listen a few small musicians, and yet majority of their money would go to the superstars and almost none to the musicians they listen to.
What you are describing is not a subscription service, but the "label/artist" relationship. If you remove streaming services from the equation, this exact same system crops up with precisely the same RIAA middlemen. It's why we call it "the music industry" now; rightsholders get the ultimate say.
I'm old enough to remember physical media, mp3s, Napster and Spotify. As a consumer, I'm very happy with it. Low monthly price, everything I could ever want. Im sure it's not ideal, but considering the evolution, it's pretty amazing.
Is blockchain the next evolution for tracking media ownership, access rights, and consumption? I hate "blockchain" being the fix for everything, but seems logical.
I remember when Sony wanted to launch their own music streaming service. Naturally only with their catalogue. They're large in Japan, but really small elsewhere. Didn't go well.
This has been coming up every other year. The problem is that everyone trying to build a platform wants $10. I'm not paying for two such services, because the marginal benefit over the first is maybe $2. Perhaps the solution is regulation, I dunno. But keeping marginal costs down needs to be part of the solution. Or it'll be Netflix all over where movie studios started doing the Sony thing, and (some) customers went back to pirating.
I mean, I have three services now. Spotify, Amazon Music (comes with prime), and YouTube Music (comes with YouTube Prime ad free streaming). If either Amazon or YouTube improved the experience, developed dedicated Music apps, and added Tesla integration I'd dump Spotify tomorrow.
Tidal is using a revenue share model, just like Spotify. A higher per-steam payout just means users on Tidal are listening to less music than Spotify users.
Yeah I've used TIDAL for 8 years now and I've loved it. The fact that they pay artists better and even have a system for paying the artist you listened to the most each month is pretty neat.
Yeah, sure, I get it, Spotify==Big Tech==Bad, self-hosting is nirvana, et cetera.
But, one simple question: how are the Creators (especially those not signed with a Big Bad Label) expecting to be paid in this marvelous post-Spotify era? Because, fact: like 80% of revenue (if not more, and the rest is pretty much evenly divided between YouTube, the remains of iTunes, and some niche portals like Beatport) flows through them these days.
And, for all Spotify's flaws, that revenue stream might be something to have a pretty good plan to replace, and I don't see any hints at that in the linked article?
Distribution and discovery existed in the before times, it’s just that they didn’t take such an obscene slice of the pie. Bandcamp and iTunes at least give you the option to purchase music outright. The artist gets a more substantial cut and that music is yours to keep.
To your point though, streaming allows people to listen to a greater variety of music for little cost, and I’ve discovered music through other peoples playlists that have been really enjoyable. I think most people want to have a larger library without paying more and that’s a significant part of the problem.
Are non big label musicians even making any money on Spotify given the notoriously low per stream rate that Spotify pays out ?
Even if 80%[1] of all money is going through large platforms like Spotify and YouTube, the real question is how much % of indie money is going through them.
The best bet for semi professional or indie today is to do live performances, sell merch or have fans on Patreon or get viral on TikTok and so on, nobody is living on Spotify money.
Platforms are more used to grow audiences and improve discoverability than make any real money as an indie artist.
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[1] Big platforms combined may very well be 80%, however I doubt Spotify alone is 80% of the even the English market, let alone global where it is just many times pretty much only YouTube or some regional player bundling services.
[2] iTunes may not be significant, Apple Music and Amazon Music are. They have enormous distribution due to install base and Prime, and they sell a ton of bundled deals with telecom and other packages.
Then there is TikTok which is huge for music too
There are other players in streaming like Satellite with Sirius XM or traditional FM/AM Radio who also pay for streaming music.
The organized music market is pretty vast, Spotify hardly controls 80% of anything.
This seems like a good time for musicians to start doing their own distribution. Not sure about the technical aspect; but I guess it's still possible to sell albums in iTunes? Or some other app?
The problem with Spotify, Apple Music's streaming and YouTube music's algorithm is that it wants you to keep listening and it will feed you whatever it guesses you will like. Which means they will feed listeners AI-generated slop if they can get away with it. So I guess it's time for independent musicians who can prove their humanity to just put a damn ad for their music in front of potential listeners and try the direct sales routes. Mind-you, a non-AI generated ad, created by actual human filmmakers with AI-free tools and workflows.
Of course, there may be a second problem, and that's the youth who can enjoy happy music are broke. Middle-agers are too busy caring for kids and for the elderly, and thus naturally depressed and running in coping mechanisms, and that's before coming to our ossified musical tastes. And anybody older than that must use their running-out time wisely and only shop for funerary tunes. Woe if the arts should depend on our patronage.
If the boycott was actually about artist payouts it would have happened a lot sooner. The real reason for the boycott is Daniel Ek being on the board of Helsing, a company developing AI military strike drones (AI murder drones, to put it emotionally). This is the man that become a billionaire off the backs of hard-working musicians and used that money to invest in a company furthering the militarization of AI. Morally unconscionable for a lot of people.
I'm pretty sure all the people claiming moral superiority will be begging for more AI drones (and blaming their government for not having them) when an enemy starts targeting where they live.
It is also disingenuous for millionaire artists to take this stand while they have the means to sit a war out in their mates bunker in New Zealand, and we die for them.
As we all know, the bloody Russo-Ukrainian war remains ongoing, and Ukrainian civilians are targeted by hundreds of Russian drones on a weekly basis. Helsing is a defense contractor working for the Ukrainian and European defense sector. So let me flip this argument on its head:
Americans! Do you want to help defeat fascism in Europe? Are you tired of your tech companies capitulating to Trump? Do you really want your music to support the IDF in Gaza?
There is something very easy you can do: simply switch to Spotify. Cancel your Apple, Amazon and Google subscriptions. Pull your music from their platforms.
This is so stupid. Spotify pays out over 50% of its revenue to small artists, at a much higher rate than radio did. They dont have much pricing power or margin either.
Artists are underpaid because subscription fees are too low to provide adequate payouts. There just isn't enough money to go around. Everybody wants artists to get better payouts but nobody would pay the $200 a month subscription fee it would require.
I find Spotify relatively expensive in comparison to say Netflix. It takes far more capital to record a movie then it takes to record music. The same is true for storage and streaming. Yet, Netflix subscriptions are much cheaper than Spotify and Netflix is far more profitable. Spotify's business model is simply broken.
As a very casual music listener, I have spent ~5x more on music through subscription services than I have before they existed.
If they went away tomorrow, that spend would not magically be transferred to a more artist-friendly form or platform. I'd just not pay for new music. There's already more than enough old music I own/free music than I would ever need.
This is kind of moot. If the artists literally can't afford to make music, they have no incentive to maintain relationships with any kind of distribution platform. So everyone will be listening to a lot more "old music", not just you.
Is this actually happening though? I don’t have actual numbers and would be open to be proven wrong, but my impression is that there are more people making music than ever (barriers to entry have been lowered) and more people making a living off their music and related enterprises such as touring and merch than ever (markets are globalized and contain more people with more disposable income)
I’m not sure why people believe that artists selling copies of their music being a viable source of income in itself is something that’s necessarily critical and/or a moral imperative to preserve. Humans made music for thousands of years before technology made that possible, and after some decades technology has now made that particular business model less lucrative (it’s now very easy and basically free to share essentially unlimited copies of a piece of music, which has tanked the monetary value of such copies)
As long as music is being made, I don’t think it’s a disaster for society that some artists’ preferred way of making money isn’t so viable anymore (if it ever was - what percentage of acts were ever making real bank selling albums?)
Yes, and to extend this line of thinking: Spotify pioneered this model as a solution to rampant music piracy and consequently very low and diminishing revenues for recorded music. For the music consumer it's a beautiful proposition to have this enormous catalog for $10 or so a month. The music industry now has record revenues, and the streaming platforms can, and often do, turbo charge a new artist's career.
When I browse Spotify randomly I'm frequently surprised by coming across artists that I've never heard of with 1 million, 3 million, 15 million, etc monthly listeners, and then finding good, interesting, historically significant but obscure artists with just a few hundred or thousand listeners.
My friend, a recording artist, recently broke the 1 million monthly listeners barrier on Spotify, he's dead chuffed of course, but this is more listeners than innumerable great, classic artists. I don't see this discrepancy as a failure of the streaming system, but as a success: my friend is a young artist making money and getting good exposure.
Just saying: yes Spotify has it's faults, but it's also great too.
Something I’ve heard said within the last 5 years and I find true in practice:
Nobody (not enough) pays for music, and streaming made that even more true.
Most of the music I don’t intentionally listen to, I instead hear is often out in public (or outside my control): grocery store, restaurant, hotel lobby, subway station, park, neighbors speaker, person on a bike, etc.
A lot of this music is often either the radio or ad-based streaming platforms.
The only people who pay for music are either die hard fans or people who have been guilted into paying for a streaming subscription. Often times even die hard fans/enthusiasts will purchase an vinyl LP or only use the streaming purchase to offset the pirating they do for high quality formats or rarity reasons.
Most listeners of music are not paying for it; if you are…you’re a sucker.*
I feel that the algorithmic listeners problem will not be solved with this. Nothing to solve there actualy. That's how some paople are, and that is all fine. They will not become more engaged in conscious music listening. And those paying attention can use it the way they need, seek out music they like, not leaning into the lukewarm stream of suggestions.
I used Spotify a lot until I quit many years ago not because of not having my freedom to listen (their approach of lossless drove me away). I use Tidal, it is a piece of sh*t, the player is made by unattentive stupid children with no clue, the single worst piece of software I had the unfortune to use, but the access to the catalogue and the reasonable price I got keeps me there still. I can browse, discover, build up my own beautiful playlists that I listen to for months so the individual palylists become the sound of an era in my life.
If there was a different service from musicians themselves with rich database - must contain lukewarm lemonade too! as sometimes it is lukewarm lemonade day, also oldies and goldies - and not too high prices but a better player (not hard to do), I'd switch in an instant never looking back.
Just like I did with Spotify (for a different reason).
putting the energy into LIVE music
and getting a few bucks, and a case of beer to split back stage is going to be a bigger pay day than what many ,many thoudands ever get
from shitif6, oops,spottyfeh, sorry
guitarer here,clumsy without strings attached, anyway the web is chock full of tunes so good it's a job to give some small percentage of that a proper listen, and it seems that most of it is stashed somewhere that it just plays when you hit the button, click, music, click music, oh! look a guitar
Interesting, though I wonder what they propose as an alternative for allowing discoverability. Do they just want platforms that give artists better terms, like Bandcamp? Or are they proposing moving away from online platforms altogether, in which case I guess we would go back to radio to find new stuff?
As a consumer, my primary objection to streaming platforms is that you don't own any of the stuff you pay for. That's obviously different to these artists' main objection, but if the solution they propose (whether it's switching to Bandcamp or something else) also addresses that concern I could get on board with it (and will always have sympathy for artists who want a bigger cut vs the middle man).
I do still pay for Spotify despite that objection. I find it provides just enough value to justify the cost. I have found it good for discoverability and, unlike other streaming services, Spotify gives me access to pretty much any music I might like to listen to. (Others with more niche tastes might disagree.)
Not owning what I stream sucks but I listen to a lot of music that I absolutely could not afford to pay $10+ per album for, nor $1-$3 per single for. Fortunately I own Massive Attack from the pre-streaming era but now I really have to go out of my way to listen to King Giz. No hate on either party for dropping the platform and I appreciate the stance being taken, but now I just don’t listen to King Giz because it would involve hoops.
Apple Music gave me a 90 day trial as soon as this Spotify snafu started, and it imported all but maybe 50 of my 5000+ songs from Spotify without issue, including King Gizz. I haven't touched Spotify so far this month, and I think I'm going to cancel it. I would say the music discovery features on Music are worse, but I also haven't tried to use them much yet. (That, and Spotify had gone massively downhill, I'd be lucky to get one or two new songs a month I liked with their recommendation pipeline. Which is a shame, because it used to be one of the best for me.)
Yeah I'm not going back either.
I'm happy to stream, ownership or not, if my song isn't on a service, I just listen to others.
The convenience and discovery is just too good for me to ever want to pay per album or song.
we used to have very good discoverability platforms, e.g. https://last.fm . then streaming came along and destroyed everything.
Last.fm and similar platforms provide intentional discoverability for people who care enough to put in the work. Only radio and Spotify have provided the unintentional discoverability that I crave.
Still discovering good songs through Spotify's algorithm, like Release Radar and such. And last.fm still exists and works.
Last.fm still works though. You can still connect Spotify to it.
Call me naive, but can't an artist just refuse to be listed on Spotify? No meetings, groups, boycotts necessary. If an artist feels like the payout isn't high enough, they can just exclude their catalog from the app. And if they don't own their own catalog, then that's a decision they made knowingly and they gave up their right to control where it gets hosted. If they got exploited or didn't know, then they should take it up with their agent, whoever was advising them or the person that owns the rights. They can also try to buy their rights back. Has nothing to do w/ Spotify.
This anger against Spotify and other streaming services just strikes me as misdirected. Spotify pays out ~70% of its revenue to music rights holders, which strikes me as reasonable, although I have nothing really to base this on. But I feel like the people behind this kind of movement expect a much bigger payout, so even if Spotify paid out 100% of their revenue to rights holders, they would still think its too low.
2 things:
1. Saying "hey, you can just not list on Spotify" is naive. Unless you're a major artist, you don't have the market power to convince people not to use Spotify. Essentially every labor movement is about pooling the collective power of individuals to fight larger entrenched market owners, and that's what this boycott is about.
2. To me the main issue is not the payout percentage, but how it's divvied up. I believe this is still the case, but payouts are divvied up by averaging across all plays. But the total plays are dominated by large artists. A better deal for smaller artists is to allocate each individual subscriber's revenue based on what that subscriber listens to. For example, if I love Obscure Artist A, and 90% of my songs are Obscure Artist A, then Obscure Artist A should get 90% of my $15 or whatever subscription fee (minus Spotify's cut). But instead, Spotify says "Obscure Artist A only had .000001% of total plays, so they only get .000001% of total revenue" - it ends up being a better payout for the big names but a worse deal for all the smaller artists.
There was a study that looked at the economics of this [1]: user centric (UCPS) vs market centric (MCPS) payment system. In short: UCPS would transfer some revenue from the top artists to the middle rump of popular artists, but the small and obscure artists would not be affected much since they hardly make much in the first place.
My take on this: of course the top artists should not be taking a disproportionate cut at the expense of the less popular artists, a UCPS is not a panacea but it would be an improvement.
[1] https://legrandnetwork.blogspot.com/2021/02/user-centric-mod...
That revenue model makes no sense. How would paying an artist on the relative user plays make any sense? So basically there is no direct relationship with number of plays and revenue? You need to abstract that part out. Artists should be paid some amount per stream.
Is there a market that actually uses a system like that? It just seems convoluted. It sounds like just some idea someone made up to back into paying some artists more in favor of others. And I'm not even sure it would have the desired effects. I'm sure Swift is on a lot more playlists that Spotify pushes than Obscure Artist.
On a very very large average, and assuming that Spotify pays out now in precise proportion to the total plays (just as you wrote - if 0.1% of plays, then 0.1% of payouts), then changing to your proposed system would literally change nothing. Average number of plays in total versus average number of users listening to an artist would be exactly the same statistically, starting from several tens of thousands of users, and Spotify has millions of them.
> For example, if I love Obscure Artist A, and 90% of my songs are Obscure Artist A, then Obscure Artist A should get 90% of my $15 or whatever subscription fee (minus Spotify's cut). But instead, Spotify says "Obscure Artist A only had .000001% of total plays, so they only get .000001% of total revenue" - it ends up being a better payout for the big names but a worse deal for all the smaller artists.
Why would the former pay obscure artists more? Are non-paying users more likely to listen to mainstream artists? Or do fans of obscure artists just play fewer songs each? Is ad revenue shared in the same proportions, but just lower per user? Is revenue really shared on the basis of plays, rather then playing time? If so, and if obscure artists make longer songs, does that contribute to their lack of revenue?
I just want to understand this a bit more clearly.
So I have never even opened Swift’s page on Spotify — let alone played a song (if there are fans here, please don’t come after me). I pay for Spotify. So did you mean to say the largest portion of my monthly fee goes to Taylor Swift?
The only difference is that you bet that your audience listens to less music than the average Spotify user.
Some will make less. Some will make more. In the end the pie stays the same: ~70% of Spotify’s revenue.
So someone needs to make a substack for music basically. That's what we are talking about here. Question is, do people think a certain artist or song is important enough to pay $5/month to individually? My sense is no, but perhaps...
If only it was that simple. Record labels own the whole pipeline and you're unlikely to make it if you don't submit to signing away your rights and the majority of your royalties [1]. Even the best selling artist on the entire planet at one point (Taylor Swift) had to put up a fight to regain control of her records [2].
Even if they could pull their music from the platform, it's like shooting yourself in the foot. You lose most of the exposure that will lead to actual revenue: physical albums and show tickets.
[1] https://informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-ar...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift_masters_dispute
In edm most large artists now just have their own label. It’s easier than ever to do. Even a single individual can do it easily. There are a lot of decent distribution services that will get your music on all the services.
I’m sure the big labels are still valuable for advertising but after you’ve grown enough I can’t understand why you wouldn’t just have your own label.
"The goal, in short, was “down with algorithmic listening, down with royalty theft, down with AI-generated music”."
In the article they do mention Massive Attack, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Deerhoof and Hotline TNT delisting their music and then further speaking out in protest- removal being 1/3 parts of the listed "goal".
But really it seems like the discourse on Spotify is making waves again with the recent reveal of Ek's Helsing investment. Given this is the same dude who said that "the cost of making content is close to zero", it's understandable that people are speaking out.
Spotify in the UK has all the Massive Attack albums I remember, so doesn't seem like they tried very hard to "pull" them.
Never heard of the others, but only King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard seems to be totally gone.
If an artist has full control of their IP, yes they can just take their music down.
Dissatisfaction with the payout is only one aspect of why some artists are leaving Spotify. I personally find it super weird how much Spotify profit is getting funnelled into arm manufacturing. Like why should listening to music help new AI drone tech to get developed? Tf?
Spotify's profit is not being funneled into arms manufacturing though, only by stretching that the money Daniel Ek made by being the founder of Spotify is "Spotify's profits" which he then used to make an investment into Helsing. Even though Spotify wasn't profitable at all for most of the almost ~20 years of existence.
Because people who recognize a good investment see both Spotify and arms as good investments.
Assuming you pay taxes, your money is probably being funneled to arms manufacturing anyway.
Is it? Sounds to me like it's the Spotify's owner, not Spotify, that's plowing his money into military spending regardless of the source.
>Call me naive, but can't an artist just refuse to be listed on Spotify? No meetings, groups, boycotts necessary.
They want the listeners to change their habits away from Spotify and engage with music differently -- on another platform -- e.g. maybe like Bandcamp. The listeners would discover music at Bandcamp and make purchases there where the artists get more money.
But only a minority of hardcore fans will buy music à la carte like that. Most other mainstream listeners would prefer to have ~100 million songs for a flat monthly subscrption. The tiny 0.04 cents per stream is not a concern of the subscribers. That's why it's an uphill battle.
Seems that it may be at least partially a discounted cash flows/time value of money and a risk shifting issue for the artist.
Nothing has really changed in this regard. When I was younger, most people didn't have huge collections of tapes or CDs, most just turned on the radio and had one or two CDs that they really only listened to one song of. Spotify giving _any_ money to artists improves this scheme (not to make a judgement on "fair").
The vast majority of music listeners aren't music collectors. Those people mostly want to listen to what others are listening to in order to share something in common. It's a very different approach to music than the collector who's looking for new music they've never heard of.
Artists typically fall into the latter category and want everyone else to also. They fail to understand that music, for most people, is a cultural touchstone, not a hobby.
> Call me naive, but can't an artist just refuse to be listed on Spotify? No meetings, groups, boycotts necessary. If an artist feels like the payout isn't high enough, they can just exclude their catalog from the app.
Actually no. Or at least not completely. Radio-style play has mechanical licensing with statuatory royalties. Users wouldn't be able to request specific songs, but they could request a similar songs or similar artists station and likely hear your music.
It's not naive, it's literally what the artists did in the article.
The trade you make is reach, you can't benefit from being discovered on Spotify, it's harder for prospective fans to become fans when they can't listen to your music. You could upload your music to other places but they seem to largely be against "uploading it online and giving it away for free."
This is indeed naive. Spotify is part of any contract an artist signs with distributors. They will simply not work with an artist if they don’t agree to it, because their business model is based on it.
> “I find it pretty lame that we put our heart and soul into something and then just put it online for free,” Rose says.
How absolutely entitled. Almost 20 years ago I would have killed for a distribution platform as slick as what there is today. Is it a generational thing maybe? I don't know, but just because you create doesn't obligate people to consume.
You're grossly misquoting Rose, as harvey9 also pointed out. Noone suggested "just because [musicians] create [doesn't] obligate people to consume". They're criticizing the compensation rate for lesser-known artists on streaming.
How is this that much different to criticizing the cut that a dominant distributor takes from vendors in e-commerce or video games?
It's also kind of dismissive of the entire FOSS ecosystem which basically runs on hearts and souls you can git clone for free.
But I think that's more about lack of knowledge rather than anything else.
It's also dismissive of a million different types of art and expression that don't have the benefit of this type of platform. Art and its value is always intertwined with artist. Is art diminished when it's known that the artist did it only to get paid?
I want universal basic income just so the most artistic and interesting of us can go and try cool innovative stuff without fear of death.
Indeed, very strong "One fish turns to another and asks, What is water?" vibes.
Even if you exclude all the discoverability functionality, just the pure distribution aspect, at this scale, makes the Spotify system impressive. Why should that system and all the work that went into it, be free?
I don't think there are any legal barriers for someone to go ahead and build their own music distribution system that is more fair than Spotify. It's just a matter of putting in the time, no?
Before that, it said: "Others such as pop-rock songwriter Caroline Rose are experimenting too. Her album Year of the Slug came out only on vinyl and Bandcamp, inspired by Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, which was initially available only on YouTube and the filesharing site Mega." So her inspiration was someone distributing for free online. The whole article has the feel of an anarcho get together with half the participants stoned.
lol - wouldn't be surprised.
I like Spotify but it has got a bit bloated with audiobooks, podcasts and features like videos that I do not care for. I also find Spotify makes finding and listening to albums less intuitive, it feels like everything is setup for passive listening to algorithmically generated playlists. That's fine and it is how I listen to music sometimes, particularly for music discovery. But I use other services and means to have a library because Spotify's UI for it isn't great. I can't help but think that's intentional for some reason.
I will also throw some points Spotify's way for having half decent support for API clients, decent hardware support (that is for consumers, not sure what the experience is like for a developer). I have an NFC card system setup for albums and playlists so I can have a limited physical library. This uses Spotify's libraries because the support is good.
For no fuss music Tidal has been good, but it certainly has fewer artists.
I have no trouble ignoring the auto-generated playlists and finding the album. In my experience their recommendations pretty terrible, always a step behind my current taste.
The "song radio" playlists are useful though, you get a decent list of songs in a similar style when you are in that mood.
My new music discovery is almost entirely outside of Spotify, mostly online radio.
I have listened to Audiobooks so no issue with that myself, it was a sweetener when they started ramping the price after COVID. Handy for young kids as an TV alternative as well.
The desktop client UX has gotten much better over the last ~2 years. Nice compact layout options and really responsive scrolling artists with massive catalogues like in classical. It's the first time I've felt it matches their pre-Electron native UI client from 2012-ish.
> I use other services and means to have a library because Spotify's UI for it isn't great. I can't help but think that's intentional for some reason
It is intentional. That kind of poor UX takes _designing_.
> it feels like everything is setup for passive listening to algorithmically generated playlists
Even worse, algorithmically generated playlists of algorithmically generated music
What do you mean? I can search for an artist, get to the artist page and see all their albums listed by type (album, single, EP, compilations, etc.).
I don't see what is not intuitive about it, how could it be better?
As a counter-point to streaming services and to try and provide an alternative, I'm busy building https://jam.coop - the intention is to be a music store owned collectively by artists and the people who build it. I think it's really important to explore alternatives in this space.
My favourite band (king gizzard) removed all their music from Spotify. I took the opportunity to switch to navidrome with tailscale and started obtaining music via bandcamp and ripping old CDs. It works much better than I expected, even transcoding from flac to mp3 on the fly from my phone app.
Investing the Spotify fee every month into my own music collection is a great investment, and it has meant that I am actually listening to the music and not just playing the same songs off a Spotify playlist every now and then again
If you want to migrate off Spotify but are worried you’ll lose your library, feel free to checkout my tool Libx (libx.stream). It’s a tool to export your entire Spotify library to a nice and neat CSV file
I like minimalistic websites, but I feel like that's too far. No information what so ever about anything at all, just a "Login with Spotify" button. What happens once you're logged in? No one knows.
I suppose there's a lesson in there that they could write an explanation of what happens when you log in on the page but you'd still have no actual knowledge of what happens. No explanation is honest.
This doesn't appear to work. It exports a csv with only headers.
Always tilted by the megastars that pretend to be part of the protest when in fact their asymmetrical comp is a large part of why small musicians get such as a low payout
It’s almost like they’re funneling wealth from masses to a few superstars.
One might be a paid subscriber and only listen a few small musicians, and yet majority of their money would go to the superstars and almost none to the musicians they listen to.
What you are describing is not a subscription service, but the "label/artist" relationship. If you remove streaming services from the equation, this exact same system crops up with precisely the same RIAA middlemen. It's why we call it "the music industry" now; rightsholders get the ultimate say.
It’s not like superstars are responsible for other artists not becoming one.
The whole system follows a brutal power law induced by network effects and engagement feedback loops.
Superstars demanding a greater share of revenue than their share of playtime is directly responsible for lower payouts, however.
I'm old enough to remember physical media, mp3s, Napster and Spotify. As a consumer, I'm very happy with it. Low monthly price, everything I could ever want. Im sure it's not ideal, but considering the evolution, it's pretty amazing.
Is blockchain the next evolution for tracking media ownership, access rights, and consumption? I hate "blockchain" being the fix for everything, but seems logical.
I remember when Sony wanted to launch their own music streaming service. Naturally only with their catalogue. They're large in Japan, but really small elsewhere. Didn't go well.
This has been coming up every other year. The problem is that everyone trying to build a platform wants $10. I'm not paying for two such services, because the marginal benefit over the first is maybe $2. Perhaps the solution is regulation, I dunno. But keeping marginal costs down needs to be part of the solution. Or it'll be Netflix all over where movie studios started doing the Sony thing, and (some) customers went back to pirating.
I mean, I have three services now. Spotify, Amazon Music (comes with prime), and YouTube Music (comes with YouTube Prime ad free streaming). If either Amazon or YouTube improved the experience, developed dedicated Music apps, and added Tesla integration I'd dump Spotify tomorrow.
They do have dedicated apps don't they?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.mp3...
I recently switched to TIDAL and got off Spotify. Better music quality. Better payouts to the artists. Great playlists. I don't miss Spotify at all.
Tidal is using a revenue share model, just like Spotify. A higher per-steam payout just means users on Tidal are listening to less music than Spotify users.
Tidal doesn't have free users though.
Yeah I've used TIDAL for 8 years now and I've loved it. The fact that they pay artists better and even have a system for paying the artist you listened to the most each month is pretty neat.
> Better music quality
Doesn't Spotify do lossless now? How can it get better than lossless?
> Great playlists
That sounds like a skill issue if I've ever heard one.
It's literally brand new for lossless to come to Spotify.
Also that's a really rude comment. Curated playlists are great for those of us who aren't regularly exposed to new music in any other way.
What does lossless really mean. Sounds like an amorphous buzz word. It's only lossless from the master/copy they receive.
Yeah, sure, I get it, Spotify==Big Tech==Bad, self-hosting is nirvana, et cetera.
But, one simple question: how are the Creators (especially those not signed with a Big Bad Label) expecting to be paid in this marvelous post-Spotify era? Because, fact: like 80% of revenue (if not more, and the rest is pretty much evenly divided between YouTube, the remains of iTunes, and some niche portals like Beatport) flows through them these days.
And, for all Spotify's flaws, that revenue stream might be something to have a pretty good plan to replace, and I don't see any hints at that in the linked article?
Distribution and discovery existed in the before times, it’s just that they didn’t take such an obscene slice of the pie. Bandcamp and iTunes at least give you the option to purchase music outright. The artist gets a more substantial cut and that music is yours to keep.
To your point though, streaming allows people to listen to a greater variety of music for little cost, and I’ve discovered music through other peoples playlists that have been really enjoyable. I think most people want to have a larger library without paying more and that’s a significant part of the problem.
Are non big label musicians even making any money on Spotify given the notoriously low per stream rate that Spotify pays out ?
Even if 80%[1] of all money is going through large platforms like Spotify and YouTube, the real question is how much % of indie money is going through them.
The best bet for semi professional or indie today is to do live performances, sell merch or have fans on Patreon or get viral on TikTok and so on, nobody is living on Spotify money.
Platforms are more used to grow audiences and improve discoverability than make any real money as an indie artist.
---
[1] Big platforms combined may very well be 80%, however I doubt Spotify alone is 80% of the even the English market, let alone global where it is just many times pretty much only YouTube or some regional player bundling services.
[2] iTunes may not be significant, Apple Music and Amazon Music are. They have enormous distribution due to install base and Prime, and they sell a ton of bundled deals with telecom and other packages.
Then there is TikTok which is huge for music too
There are other players in streaming like Satellite with Sirius XM or traditional FM/AM Radio who also pay for streaming music.
The organized music market is pretty vast, Spotify hardly controls 80% of anything.
Yes, they're absolutely making money there and probably more than they did in the era of CDs.
I've moved back to MP3 + piracy because I've realized I simply listen to the same set of songs over and over again anyway.
Now nobody including the billionaires will get my money out of me!
The RIAA might
This seems like a good time for musicians to start doing their own distribution. Not sure about the technical aspect; but I guess it's still possible to sell albums in iTunes? Or some other app?
The problem with Spotify, Apple Music's streaming and YouTube music's algorithm is that it wants you to keep listening and it will feed you whatever it guesses you will like. Which means they will feed listeners AI-generated slop if they can get away with it. So I guess it's time for independent musicians who can prove their humanity to just put a damn ad for their music in front of potential listeners and try the direct sales routes. Mind-you, a non-AI generated ad, created by actual human filmmakers with AI-free tools and workflows.
Of course, there may be a second problem, and that's the youth who can enjoy happy music are broke. Middle-agers are too busy caring for kids and for the elderly, and thus naturally depressed and running in coping mechanisms, and that's before coming to our ossified musical tastes. And anybody older than that must use their running-out time wisely and only shop for funerary tunes. Woe if the arts should depend on our patronage.
If the boycott was actually about artist payouts it would have happened a lot sooner. The real reason for the boycott is Daniel Ek being on the board of Helsing, a company developing AI military strike drones (AI murder drones, to put it emotionally). This is the man that become a billionaire off the backs of hard-working musicians and used that money to invest in a company furthering the militarization of AI. Morally unconscionable for a lot of people.
I'm pretty sure all the people claiming moral superiority will be begging for more AI drones (and blaming their government for not having them) when an enemy starts targeting where they live.
It is also disingenuous for millionaire artists to take this stand while they have the means to sit a war out in their mates bunker in New Zealand, and we die for them.
As we all know, the bloody Russo-Ukrainian war remains ongoing, and Ukrainian civilians are targeted by hundreds of Russian drones on a weekly basis. Helsing is a defense contractor working for the Ukrainian and European defense sector. So let me flip this argument on its head:
Americans! Do you want to help defeat fascism in Europe? Are you tired of your tech companies capitulating to Trump? Do you really want your music to support the IDF in Gaza?
There is something very easy you can do: simply switch to Spotify. Cancel your Apple, Amazon and Google subscriptions. Pull your music from their platforms.
Ya no, not gonna work. Even I, a dyed in the wool pirate at heart, pays for Spotify. They are simply too convenient, too functional, too well priced.
Like 99.98% of the music I've ever looked up is there, even pirate sites don't have that much coverage.
yep same, and have family plan, everyone loves it
This is so stupid. Spotify pays out over 50% of its revenue to small artists, at a much higher rate than radio did. They dont have much pricing power or margin either.
Artists are underpaid because subscription fees are too low to provide adequate payouts. There just isn't enough money to go around. Everybody wants artists to get better payouts but nobody would pay the $200 a month subscription fee it would require.
But then again, Qobuz pays much better: https://community.qobuz.com/press-en/qobuz-unveils-its-avera...
> Everybody wants artists to get better payouts but nobody would pay the $200 a month subscription fee it would require
This sounds very much like everyone does not want artists to get better payouts. (At least not all artists.)
> $200 a month subscription fee
Where did you get this arbitrary number from?
And no, it doesn’t look like everyone wants artists to be paid more. What everyone wants is cheap access to a large catalog.
I find Spotify relatively expensive in comparison to say Netflix. It takes far more capital to record a movie then it takes to record music. The same is true for storage and streaming. Yet, Netflix subscriptions are much cheaper than Spotify and Netflix is far more profitable. Spotify's business model is simply broken.
Radio wasn't a substitution for buying albums, streaming is. Arrogant wrongness is the worst kind.
If this is true, I agree with you. I have never used Spotify, do users get to choose their favorites on that platform ?
As a very casual music listener, I have spent ~5x more on music through subscription services than I have before they existed.
If they went away tomorrow, that spend would not magically be transferred to a more artist-friendly form or platform. I'd just not pay for new music. There's already more than enough old music I own/free music than I would ever need.
I can't imagine I'm an outlier.
This is kind of moot. If the artists literally can't afford to make music, they have no incentive to maintain relationships with any kind of distribution platform. So everyone will be listening to a lot more "old music", not just you.
Is this actually happening though? I don’t have actual numbers and would be open to be proven wrong, but my impression is that there are more people making music than ever (barriers to entry have been lowered) and more people making a living off their music and related enterprises such as touring and merch than ever (markets are globalized and contain more people with more disposable income)
I’m not sure why people believe that artists selling copies of their music being a viable source of income in itself is something that’s necessarily critical and/or a moral imperative to preserve. Humans made music for thousands of years before technology made that possible, and after some decades technology has now made that particular business model less lucrative (it’s now very easy and basically free to share essentially unlimited copies of a piece of music, which has tanked the monetary value of such copies)
As long as music is being made, I don’t think it’s a disaster for society that some artists’ preferred way of making money isn’t so viable anymore (if it ever was - what percentage of acts were ever making real bank selling albums?)
If they can't afford to make music maybe they should change their profession or get a "real" j o b.
Yes, and to extend this line of thinking: Spotify pioneered this model as a solution to rampant music piracy and consequently very low and diminishing revenues for recorded music. For the music consumer it's a beautiful proposition to have this enormous catalog for $10 or so a month. The music industry now has record revenues, and the streaming platforms can, and often do, turbo charge a new artist's career.
When I browse Spotify randomly I'm frequently surprised by coming across artists that I've never heard of with 1 million, 3 million, 15 million, etc monthly listeners, and then finding good, interesting, historically significant but obscure artists with just a few hundred or thousand listeners.
My friend, a recording artist, recently broke the 1 million monthly listeners barrier on Spotify, he's dead chuffed of course, but this is more listeners than innumerable great, classic artists. I don't see this discrepancy as a failure of the streaming system, but as a success: my friend is a young artist making money and getting good exposure.
Just saying: yes Spotify has it's faults, but it's also great too.
Something I’ve heard said within the last 5 years and I find true in practice:
Nobody (not enough) pays for music, and streaming made that even more true.
Most of the music I don’t intentionally listen to, I instead hear is often out in public (or outside my control): grocery store, restaurant, hotel lobby, subway station, park, neighbors speaker, person on a bike, etc.
A lot of this music is often either the radio or ad-based streaming platforms.
The only people who pay for music are either die hard fans or people who have been guilted into paying for a streaming subscription. Often times even die hard fans/enthusiasts will purchase an vinyl LP or only use the streaming purchase to offset the pirating they do for high quality formats or rarity reasons.
Most listeners of music are not paying for it; if you are…you’re a sucker.*
* I have a Tidal subscription
I feel that the algorithmic listeners problem will not be solved with this. Nothing to solve there actualy. That's how some paople are, and that is all fine. They will not become more engaged in conscious music listening. And those paying attention can use it the way they need, seek out music they like, not leaning into the lukewarm stream of suggestions.
I used Spotify a lot until I quit many years ago not because of not having my freedom to listen (their approach of lossless drove me away). I use Tidal, it is a piece of sh*t, the player is made by unattentive stupid children with no clue, the single worst piece of software I had the unfortune to use, but the access to the catalogue and the reasonable price I got keeps me there still. I can browse, discover, build up my own beautiful playlists that I listen to for months so the individual palylists become the sound of an era in my life.
If there was a different service from musicians themselves with rich database - must contain lukewarm lemonade too! as sometimes it is lukewarm lemonade day, also oldies and goldies - and not too high prices but a better player (not hard to do), I'd switch in an instant never looking back.
Just like I did with Spotify (for a different reason).
I love Spotify.
I use the free version and put up with the ads. I make playlists of my favorite songs, sometimes Spotify suggests great music I didn’t know about.
It’s superior to any other way of listening to music, for me. I’ll keep using it ‘till something better comes along. Hooray for progress!
“Death to Spotify”? Really? That’s the phrasing these people are going with?
gigging
putting the energy into LIVE music and getting a few bucks, and a case of beer to split back stage is going to be a bigger pay day than what many ,many thoudands ever get from shitif6, oops,spottyfeh, sorry guitarer here,clumsy without strings attached, anyway the web is chock full of tunes so good it's a job to give some small percentage of that a proper listen, and it seems that most of it is stashed somewhere that it just plays when you hit the button, click, music, click music, oh! look a guitar