After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year
After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year
Spotify will potentially pay songwriters about $150 million less in U.S. mechanical royalties next year after bundling its plans with audiobooks.
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.
Gotta love all my friends who are really into music who happily use Spotify and don’t give a shit it is a weapon of class warfare being used on musicians disguised as a music player!
I basically lost all my drive to make something of my love of creating music seeing how little anyone in my society actually values music or musicians in terms of material support and reward, it is honestly pretty scary how broken music has become.
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 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.
weekly PSA that spotify is a dumb company who makes no money because they're stupid.
To put it bluntly, between the artists, and the musicians, there is the publisher (the traditional music company) the money pretty much only goes to the publisher, because spotify doesn't want to make money, nor do they want artists to make money. And the artists put their shit on spotify because people believe that spending 15 dollars a month on a service that doesnt pay artists, apparently pays artists.
Go support your local musical artists.
Yeah I'm done with spotify.
Back when it was a fiver, I could get the appeal and had a subscription myself.
At 11 bucks it comes at the price of a CD per month, every month. I didn't buy that much music annually, ever. So right now we are entering a territory where streaming is exceeding the price of my regular music consumption patterns. I'll go back to buying physical media and torrenting whatever old stuff is no longer available and can't be found on ebay.
Fuck 'em with a cactus.
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 mean, Spotify is a great service for the consumer. One reasonable monthly fee for most of the music in the world.
If a similar video streaming service existed for 40€/month, I'd pay for it in a heartbeat. Now I have a plethora of arr apps and a vpn, and Plex. But it's a hassle sometimes.
We're all aware of the issues it created for the artists, and I'd be willing to double the fee if that money directly went to the artists, but this is where the capitalist model fails, as that won't maximize the profits for shareholders.
If we ever come up with a way to fix the underlying greed models that come with publicly traded companies, that would be great.
As it stands, it is what it is, but I'm glad we have this, instead of a "different Spotify per music publisher".
I already commented somewhere else in this thread, but I've been just buying music via bandcamp and I feel pretty good about it. If I buy about one new album a month for $8, it's cheaper than spotify and after a couple years I have a large library of music I own outright.
This works with my listening habits, which are something like "I have like one new (-to me) album on heavy rotation every couple of weeks". Someone who's more of a "i never listen to the same song twice" extreme wouldn't have as good a time.
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
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.
I feel so bad for artists. They deserve to get paid for their hard work. Unfortunately, it’s been so hard for me to convince friends to move away from these predatory streaming platforms. A lot of people don’t want to lose having an unlimited catalogue at their fingertips.
Maybe I’m going to sound like a boomer here, but I don’t get why people need an unlimited catalogue at all. What’s wrong with paying artists directly to get their vinyls and CDs (or digital album)? What happened to curating your music library? What happened to the days where you’d buy CDs and listen to them over and over again, front to back? What happened to the days where playlists were manually curated for yourself, or even better, for your friends? Some of my fondest memories are music related, of my best friends painstakingly selecting a playlist of songs for me and burning them onto a CD for me to enjoy. What happened to the days where we didn’t need a constant stream of music pushed to us by an impersonal AI? What happened to developing your own unique and interesting personal taste?
I get that these streaming platforms are convenient, but it feels to me that we’re losing the ability to actively listen to music, to truly appreciate it, to understand the labor of love that it was for the artists, all for the sake of convenience. I don’t want music to be convenient, music is a fucking gift. I don’t want to be pushed AI generated recs, or AI generated music.
I’m rambling, lost my train of thought, and probably sound like a Luddite, but I have such strong feelings related to music and just hate these streaming platforms so much. I refuse to use them.
tldr please please please support your favorite artists by buying from them directly
They suck ass. Stop paying them money.
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!
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
Spotify seems to be trying to transition to podcasts anyway - it’s harder to get it to recommend music. My guess is that eventually the Spotify and the record labels will have more disagreements about royalties, and that Spotify will pivot more towards podcasting - independent folks who have far less power in negotiations.
Patch your spotify install to get free premium. If they're gonna raise prices and lower what they pay musicians, there's no valid reason not to.
I've ditched Spotify last year when their app has suddenly started draining battery on my phone (and also because of them being so eager to give Rogan a platform). I've switched to Deezer, but I've ran into the same issue I've had with Spotify for a while - even if I download a playlist for offline usage, it'll still try to connect to the internet, so if I was somewhere with poor reception, it'd get stuck on a spinning circle for a minute before giving up and showing me the songs I've wanted to play. I ended my Deezer subscription, rebuilt the library on my laptop, and just manually transfer files to my phone. I get instant access to my music with no delays, with music players that offer much better experience and handle shuffle and queues the way I want to, and aren't a glorified Chrome tab on desktop. and if I really like an album, I'll just straight up buy one. I listen to music a fucking lot (two years ago i was in top 0.2% of my country's Spotify users), and according to some screenshots of my Spotify Wrapped, I've played my artists songs for 1200 minutes, which translates to 300-400 plays at best (probably less than that, given that many of their songs are around 6 to 8 minutes long). given that, from what I've found online, 1000 plays gives artists 4 bucks, I could just buy two of their songs on Bandcamp and pirate the rest of their music, and they'll still get more money in a year from me.
I do miss seamless playback switching between devices, though. it was a really nice Spotify feature... when it worked, that is.
I already canceled with the last price increase, because it went from €9,99 to €12,99 for me they don't need to convince me that i made the right decision.
Gotta fund Barcelona's €240 million sponsor deal somehow
15 hours hardly covers a single book
Metallica, Dr Dre, et al were not wrong in suing Napster. We're seeing the fruits of the evolution of that format. I guess at least people aren't downloading "Get Back ft Stevie Wonder - Oasis.wma" anymore, and somebody is making money off of it. Just (mostly) not the artists that make the music.
Low cost, distributed digital distribution is absolutely a thing. Phones have enormous storage anymore, so much so most people could have their entire music collections available on their phones or tablets - not everyone - but most people.
A distributed streaming platform would really be the way to do this and make it cost effective for everybody. An app that could stream from a list of sources (remember playlists? M3U files that could play from multiple Internet locations - yeah, that already exists and has since before 2000) would enable people to stream the music they haven't found yet or are searching for.
Seems like an interesting open source software project, to be honest. Funkwhale is probably a good basis for extension, and could be run by the artists (or provided to then via a simple click to setup platform) for low overhead.
the music i get access to for the price i pay is worth far more than the money i don't get for the music i wrote.
dibbidens
The very great and very funny singer Neko Case made a playlist on Spotify and entitled it "PAY FOR IT YOU CHEAP PRICKS!!!!" I howled.
Alexa, play John Mellencamp - Ain't That America
Although it's far from the best, Deezer has a much fairer royalties compensation method, which is more closely based on a per-user basis, rather than total amount of minutes listened (that Spotify currently employs).
This isn't super related to OPs post but I thought it might be worth mentioning aswell.
I've been using Deezer for a while now. Not only is the streaming quality (FLAC) much better but also the artist compensation much fairer. Plus, they at least act as if they actually cared for the customer...
Napster exists but people just ignore it
Sounds about right. I remember when it was the RIAA. This is just more proof that time is a hamster wheel.
I miss Resonate.
Just download music from 3rd party sites. Not that hard, don't understand why you are complaining so much.
Never heard of it.