1483
After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year
(www.billboard.com)
this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
1483 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
59605 readers
3175 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's probably more a case of artists acknowledging the fact that streaming services are one of, if not the, primary sources of music discovery and consumption for many these days. Even if they won't make money off it, by not being available on these platforms, they may as well not exist for most people. That's something that only huge, already established names can pull without feeling it.
you know what else streams your music? The fucking internet, that shits free! Literally just posting your shit on a torrent will give you tons of traction to work with. Especially if you already have a pretty significant listener base. Plus you also get the benefit of people like me who are significantly more inclined to buy physical releases of media.
Regardless, streaming is a good way of getting people to hear your shit, if you really want to use a streaming service, don't go through a publisher, or at the very least, a mainstream publisher. They tend to fuck you over.
Sure, but the barrier to entry is significant enough to still deter most people. Even assuming they aren't bothering with port forwarding and seeding, most people seem like they can't be bothered with any pattern of consumption more complicated than finding content on major streaming platforms, and the music streaming services haven't yet gotten annoying enough for most people. They'll take a peek, go "Do I want FLAC, V0 or 320? WTF is an APE?" and bail again.
We can disagree as to whether it should be that way or not, but I'd wager that the reach of streaming services for a new band far exceeds that of uploading a torrent to a random tracker and hoping it takes off. Unless people already know of you to look for your music, you need to hope a huge number of them are just auto-snatching anything new. On private trackers, sure, you'll get a bunch of people who auto-snatch any FLAC upload from the current year, but you're talking about <50,000 users in those cases, and a good chunk of the auto-snatchers are just people looking to build buffer who won't even listen to most of what they snatch. On the other hand, nobody is auto-snatching all the torrents going up on public trackers, they'd run out of space in no time at all.
This is all assuming that availability is the top priority for all artists. I think spotify has shown 99.999% of artists that their model of maximum availability at all costs simply doesn't work, either in terms of contacting an audience, making any money or valuing music. It just results in the vast majority of artists being insulted and demoralised and the remainder producing music of a relentlessly narrowing artistic scope. Are you more likely to get around 3500 plays on spotify or get £1 in donations off the back of giving your music away for free? It sounds absurd and that's because it is. Most artists will get the same out having their music on spotify for a year as walking out onto the street with an acoustic guitar for half an hour on a Saturday. At least out on the street you're not propping up a capitalist giant and a tiny 'elite' of ultra commercial music producers. For me spotify and it's ilk have been the final nail in the coffin for integrity and reward in releasing music and I would encourage the 99.999% to boycott it and forge ahead with alternatives. Nothing better will emerge until then and artistic culture will continue to become more and more bleak.