When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
Please, people, for the love of the gods, stop using Spotify. There are numerous other services that are so much better value for your money and don’t treat artists (as much) like trash.
And that being said, try to support your beloved artists directly as much as you can. Buying digital downloads or physical media will give them more money than a lifetime of streaming ever would. Plus you get to keep the higher-quality music even if the platform or artist goes tits-up.
It’s too convenient. Most people just want easy access and don’t even think of the downstream impacts. If a song or two goes unavailable, probably won’t notice. There is gonna need to be an alternative that is cheap and feature rich along with Spotify missing some steps. It’s here for awhile.
You are not wrong, but there are other services that are just as convenient and for less money. Spotify knows they are the “default” music streaming platform and they are exploiting that.
A quick Google puts the top two at Apple and Amazon. So that is a big no for me boss. I am pretty sure the next ones listed are just torrent front ends. I have a life now so no time for that…spotify it is.
What is a better alternative, aside from just buying the media directly?
I’m enjoying Tidal
Could you give me some examples of alternative services? I’m paying spotify right now, but i’ll love to ditch it.
It’s not really just Spotify. I’m a hobbyist music producer. I uploaded my entire catalog through Distrokid about two years ago. Distrokid serves just about every streaming service. It costs $20 a year for the most basic package. I’ve got ~8 million listens according to Distrokid, and that nets me about $40 US. So, I made my money back. Not bad for 20 years of work. Haha!
I don’t really care about the numbers, like I said, I’m a hobbyist. I make music because I enjoy making music. It would never be my career unless I dropped everything and struck out touring trying to make it in an industry that traditionally chews up and spits out hopefuls. I’m not exactly the age or attractiveness that most people expect in a touring musician, either.
not exactly the age or attractiveness that most people expect
What gets me is that, for the right style of music, age or attractiveness shouldn’t matter as much as it does. You should be able to create your art, whatever kind of art it is, and have the art itself be judged on its merits. Instead we’ve got a bunch of our culture still somehow wrapped up in these veneers of attractiveness. It’s kind of maddening, to be honest. If you’re in your 50’s and making 90’s style Acid House or 2000’s style Trance it shouldn’t matter what you look like. If you’re a DJ it shouldn’t matter if you look like Shirley Temple or Shirley Manson. And yet here we are.
8 million listens netting you only 40 bucks really is insane, isn’t it? I used to think radio royalties were bad: I remember Sting talking about how every time Roxanne got played on the radio someone somewhere got 3 cents. He didn’t say who got the 3 cents, nor did he say how much of that 3 cents went to him. I’m not 100% sure about those numbers (“my memory is muddy, what’s this river that I’m in?”) but they’re a damn sight more impressive than whatever crumbs the streaming companies are paying, somehow a thousand times less than the radio. Spotify’s announcement last year that they weren’t even going to bother paying for songs with less than 1000 streams per month was a shocker - what stops them from making it 2000, or 10,000?
Still, being a hobbyist isn’t all bad. I’ve been releasing jazz cover-versions of pop songs for about 2.5 years now, and have netted about 25 bucks so far :) Who knew jazz versions of Toxic or Rusted From The Rain could be so popular?
If I made 3 cents a stream, I’d have a quarter of a million…
I appreciate this. Can I have a listen? I also make music… Sometimes.
I release everything as “Underwaterbob” - my username. You can find me just about everywhere. If you don’t have a subscription, it’s all on YouTube, too: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ_MZ9yX0STsY1l2Ml2zBFw
I make a wide variety of music.
I’m in a similar boat, but I never feel fully satisfied to release a song (probably cuz I am a hobbyist and I suck lol).
But regardless, I think there is an element of selling your soul to Hollywood to really make it big, and I just don’t have that kind of commitment at this point in my life. I like relaxing and anonymity.
I’m in a similar boat, but I never feel fully satisfied to release a song (probably cuz I am a hobbyist and I suck lol).
There’s never a better time to put yourself out there! I resisted it for twenty years. My most “successful” release is one of my least polished tracks. I recorded it just out of university on a Pentium with a stolen microphone, pirated software, a freebie guitar, and a ZOOM 505. It’s got 4 million listens and is responsible for half my income. By comparison, I’ve released stuff that I think sounds like it was professionally recorded in a studio that no one listens to.
I’m not exactly the age or attractiveness that most people expect in a touring musician, either.
Just start making IDM. Looking weird and/or unattractive seems to be a requirement (and, don’t get me wrong, I’m here for it)
I’m not exactly the age or attractiveness that most people expect in a touring musician, either
Idk. I was happy to pay to hear Mic Jagger live and he looks like shit.
Worst case scenario, just become the new Gorillas
Not sure I’d use one of the most iconic sexy lead singers in history as an example. No matter much how much he looks like shit now.
“Let’s throw away all of our physical media! All digital streaming music, movies and books will be so much better! Everything we want, always available, anywhere!!!”
Somewhat true if you’re a seasoned sailor of the high seas, not so much if not…
I’m fighting this fight with phone and sd cards. It’s part of the reason they are killing sd card slots to get people to put everything in the cloud.
Sadly most people are morons and are doing exactly that.
You don’t need to be a “seasoned sailor”. It’s incredibly easy IMO to get what you want if you’re willing to put forth a tiny amount of effort.
The seasoning helps to know where it’s safe to put into port though.
Just cancelled, have been a customer since 2015 or so.
I’ve said many times I would gladly pay more, if it were an elective extra cost that goes 100% to the artists you listen to.
So $11/mo to Spotify, then I could elect to pay another amount of my choosing that gets split up based on what I’m listening to and goes 100% to the artists. I don’t love it but it would be an acceptable solution to me.
A better solution would be for Spotify to be fair and pay artists accordingly from the start… buttttt Capitalism, and Spotify is publicly traded so no chance of that ever happening. I’m out.
I cancelled too. they were resetting my password and forcing me to create a new one once or twice a week. all because i would use spotify on my desktop and my phone.
they only help they would offer was “you password is not secure”. yes, my 16character random generated password is not secure. fuck em.
Definitely thinking about cancelling with this. I’ve used Spotify as long as I can remember, after finally switching over from pandora radio.
Their shuffle and discovery algorithms suck so much now that it’s nearly impossible to listen to more than 20-30 songs they just keep repeating.
Add on the extra, inserted ads in podcasts, there’s really no reason to continue to use their platform.
Then again, I’m probably going to YT music, which is only marginally better, but since I pay for YT premium already there’s no additional cost
More money for the executives and less for everyone else. People need to start standing up to this shit.
I fucked off Spotify after the Jo Rogan debacle.
Joe Rogan debacle?
There’s plenty of info if you google your comment.
https://www.salon.com/2022/02/07/spotify-joe-rogan-artists-subscribers/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/arts/joe-rogan-spotify.html
Etc etc
I love how no one mentions that the great success business Spotify got all their starting music from the mp3 warez scene.
Early Spotify songs still had the meta data from those files, including misspelled song names and years of issue.
Because don’t most people know their history by now?
I would imagine that the vast majority of Spotify’s listeners, and even critics, don’t care about where they got their initial music from
Spotify could charge ten times their current price - indeed, should have been, for nearly the entire catalogue of western music? even at $100/mo it would have been a steal - and even so, they wouldn’t be paying artists significantly more, or even at a reasonable rate.
The model is the problem. The middleman is the problem. The service itself is the problem. It can never work in a way that pays artists fairly as long as it requires human oversight, administration and intervention, let alone all the wasteful shit like advertising and legal overhead/payola for politicians.
Get an AI to do it right, though… puffpuff, pass
thank you. the fact that we aren’t rioting to have more automated services that pass the cost benefit on to the people is something i’ll never understand. we have the tools to build utopia but they can;t figure out how to make enough money from it.
The problem is, they’re all thinking that utopia will have money. Silly noobs
exactly
And 99.99999 percent of musicians lament being humiliated and poor.
Stop releasing your music on Spotify. They depend on you for their reputation as having all the music and will give you nothing in return except ever-broadening inequality and ever-narrowing artistic culture. People have mocked boomers for claiming that music is dying but that’s exactly what is happening.
No matter what you think about Apple, Apple Music pays multiple times more than Spotify
And Tidal pays multiples more than Apple.
It’s up to you if you want to support artists or not.
Does YouTube music pay its artists? I prefer an Android platform. A lot of the stuff I want isn’t on Apple Music for classical is also why.
They suck ass. Stop paying them money.
Doesn’t make me feel guilty using Soulseek. Artists get next to nothing but I’m refusing to give any money to Spotify. If there was a better way to buy and own music digitally from popular artists I would
Bandcamp
I mean high end artists not indie
high end artists don’t need your money, they’re funded already and corporate productions in the first place. So i guess you’re in the clear! ;)
Unironically iTunes
15 hours of audiobooks per month is a joke. That’s not even one longer book.
And it’s not every member of the plan, it’s only the primary user. Also the “buy more hours” of an audiobook is such a crappy idea to get us to buy an audiobook, and gosh it’s not even all audiobooks it’s only the first of the series. Even if you add more hours, you can’t listen to the 2nd book. This is half the reason why they had to raise prices. It costs them a bit for those 15 hours and the music lovers and creators are paying the price for their misunderstanding
I didn’t think it could be worse… I just bought one Dell mini PC and I will turn it into server and I will start self host a lot of my services. Audiobookshelf is going to be one of them
I switched from streaming back to my old ipod. Moding this old player was one of the best decisions in my career as music listner. The best thing about it is that my phone can run low on battery but i am still able to listen to chumbawamba.
Decentrelize your hardware!
