Don't spread this nonsense. Spotify is an excellent way for independent artists to get free promotion and make money in 2020. Spotify pays about 3$ per 1000 plays, which is quite a bit more than YT will for music.
We're long past the 1990s, where only a very select number of major label artists made it big and sold millions of copies. We need to stop using these numbers as a benchmark for todays music landscape -- so much has changed and most of it for the better.
Music creation and distribution has been heavily democratized. Where you needed connections and thousands of dollars to even get something released (outside of niche DIY tape style releases) you can now basically do it for free from your room or band practice space. The amount of money per working musician has gone down significantly but there are more of them in 2020 than has ever before.
We can certainly argue about what kind of value art should have in society. Should there be more money going around? What industries should this money be taken out of? Suffice to say independent artists are better off than they have been, creating music and making money has never been easier and Spotify/digital music distribution in general have been great enablers.
Its interesting to me that for most of modern history, the value of performing arts like music was in the performance. Then recorded media were invented and there was a fleeting moment in the 20th century when distribution was controlled, and the value of that invention was captured by a small group. And now it seems things have equilibrated so that the value of recording is distributed more broadly again. I don't know if there are other examples like this in different parts of the economy (obviously it's the same in video), but it feels like a good study in how technology disrupts an industry and then disrupts is again.
It matches most other arts, where the value is in the physical artwork. Writing is the interesting one, as it didn't even exist as a paying art form until technology allowed for relatively cheap duplication (and education for popular consumption!). And then a second disruption is the same for writing as it is for Music, that will be playing out for the next decade or so; Authors being able to distribute directly to Consumers rather than requiring Publishers.
This is partially Spotify’s fault for what allocations they do pay, it’s the labels and record companies fault for then skimming marketing and promotions and admin fees from that leaving the artist with 15% at best.
> The amount of money per working musician has gone down significantly but there are more of them in 2020 than has ever before.
Which is a point: Quantity != Quality. This argument makes it seem like anyone can go and earn a living from music and that simply isn’t true. Anyone can make money with music with a little investment in a copyright and BMI id... To make it a career, to live off of, as your sole income source has a lot of musicians having to diversify how, where, they release music.
Artists with indie labels are fighting for air time with other artists with indie labels for $3/1000 plays.
I’m not blaming Spotify outside of the fact that my $9.99/mo subscription (minus 10%) should be allocated based on play time to the artists I listen to. This doesn’t seem to be the case.
Granted, it’s been over 15 years since I released music. I never “made it” in the traditional pre-diy era. Punk Rock is dead based on listenership. I went into tech.
Spotify pays 70% of revenue to the copyright holder. The fact is that record labels take a much bigger bite before giving it to the artist, and then blame it on Spotify.
Years ago when I read about this, the issue was that the remaining 70% was split between all copyright holders proportional to the number of plays. So if I listen to artist X for 10 minutes, and you listen to artist Y for 60 minutes, then artist X gets 10% of the total money and artist Y gets 60%. It would make more sense if each subscriber's money were split between the artists they listen to.
Is this that bad? I'm not saying your way is bad -- but both seem reasonable. Are some artists heavily benefited or harmed because their listeners listen to much less or much more total music than the average?
I'd guess that Spotify's model benefits artists that make radio-friendly or ambient music because some people will listen to them 8h a day while at work. Nobody listens to the same amount of intricate and challenging music, which is probably more expensive to produce in the first place.
I believe it's bad. It's making all of music more generic.
There's composers and producers with quite high production values, very complex and intricate music, the kind you want to pay attention to, in order to get the most out of it.
But I don't listen to that music all day. I got other music for background.
In my view the latter is not more valuable because I listen to it for more minutes.
When it was CDs I'd pay roughly the same for my Autechre as my Kruder & Dorfmeister.
That seems orthogonal to my point that what spotify achieved, for me at least, was being a better value for money than copyright infringement. It's worth $10 a month to have all the music accessible in one place.
The licensing agreements that spotify negotiates are between them and the artists, and if artists are unhappy they can take it up with Spotify. But hopefully artists realize that for recorded performances, there is a sweet spot where the convenience of a subscription has a higher value than trivially accessing pirated recordings.
Never the artists, always the labels or distribution company (not always the same).
But to your point. Pre-Spotify I think the overall music market sales volumes and profits, offset by piracy and copyright infringement, ended up around the same overall total market value that Spotify based their subscription and payments off of (that and economics of scale).
I’ve been a Spotify subscriber for a long time so I get it. I just wish Spotify would do more to support artists, not labels, or help fix the system for indies to self-distribute.
It’s obviously way more complicated. I dream of a utopia where a platform exists not for profits sake but for the art’s sake.
We're long past the 1990s, where only a very select number of major label artists made it big and sold millions of copies. We need to stop using these numbers as a benchmark for todays music landscape -- so much has changed and most of it for the better.
Music creation and distribution has been heavily democratized. Where you needed connections and thousands of dollars to even get something released (outside of niche DIY tape style releases) you can now basically do it for free from your room or band practice space. The amount of money per working musician has gone down significantly but there are more of them in 2020 than has ever before.
We can certainly argue about what kind of value art should have in society. Should there be more money going around? What industries should this money be taken out of? Suffice to say independent artists are better off than they have been, creating music and making money has never been easier and Spotify/digital music distribution in general have been great enablers.