[winternett]

Just one minor tweak of what plays next can totally rip off independent artists on the platform. We have reached an era where algorithms aren't transparent, so artists like me are bewildered that for all the promoting we do on our own music, we rarely get any views and listens unless we literally spend thousands of dollars on advertising to break the visibility barrier...

For example, if I tweet a link to my own song (hosted on spotify) not only will Twitter potentially block people from seeing the link, their URL shortener may break the link to Spotify (Because the CEO doesn't want traffic leaving Twitter) and then even if the link goes to Spotify, they do a ton of things to siphon listeners that came for my music away from listening to my music, including NOT playing more of my music after the intended song plays. The net result is that hours of promotion as an artist only generates a few leads that often get ushered away from your content... It happens in many other ways for creators, artists, and even businesses without anyone being able to know that it's happening.

The future of being an independent entrepreneur is totally disrupted by social media as it slowly creates a stranglehold on the Internet. If we all don't start acknowledging this and calling out anti competitive practices and platform scams, we'll all be weeded out from being able to make our own living and we'll be forced to work for employers for minimum wages... The Future of the Internet looks grim from where I see it.

[idiotsecant]

This is a problem inherent with walled garden social media. Their garden, their rules. Instead of trying to police behavior we don't like in those walled gardens (which is mostly like trying to walk in quicksand) we should be supporting open protocols and systems that don't require a walled garden at all, like the internet used to be.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

An open garden cannot compete with Facebook, Twitter or Spotify. We need regulation and legislation which clearly outlines what is and is not okay, while creating black box behaviours that is impossible to navigate.

[berkes]

Oh, but it can. And already does.

Maybe not for your exact use-case. But "open" doesn't need large numbers, market saturation or a monopoly: those are traits that come from investor-fueled business-models.

A mastodon account that has great communication with seven other accounts is a 100% success! It doesn't need access to billions of people, it just needs to fulfill a need: talk to several fine people. And it often does this just fine with a very small social graph, even.

A musician doesn't need a million streams, they need enough revenue to be an income. On spotify (or youtube, etc.) that, indeed, means "millions of streams". But it could just as well be five tshirts sold, twenty-eight .zip files @ €9.88 sold, and three vinyl shipped in a month.

The "numbers" that mark "competing with" faang, really don't matter. We don't need to make billions, we just need to make a good income.

[mikeryan]

Mastodon is not an “open garden” and can easily, if not more easily, be as arbitrarily administered as any of the social media platforms you’ve mentioned. Each servers admin can and have cut off access to other nodes.

See what’s happening with journa.host as an example.

[berkes]

Why is that a problem, and how does it contradict my point?

[smoldesu]

What's wrong with what happened to journa.host?

[seanw444]

I would have to agree with your sentiment. But for most people, good enough just isn't good enough.

[berkes]

I don't understand what you mean.

If it has to be "better" then it must improve. But improvement doesn't mean "competing with FAANG". It just means being good enough today, and keep improving from there.

My income 35 years ago was vastly different from today. I needed far less, but it also grew over time. But that doesn't mean I must make millions today to consider my life a success. I'm happy today. Isn't that "successful"?

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Thanks. Exactly zero of my friends use mastodon.

[marcus_holmes]

This. You can always host your own music on your own site. Of course then you need to deal with monetisation and how you actually get paid. But you have control!

Sincerely, as Spotify (and the rest of the streaming services) are forced to make more and more user-hostile decisions to keep their revenue growth curve going up and to the right, it might make sense to jump ship early.

[winternett]

Even if you run your own site, search engines and SEO work against you in many similar ways. Music has been run on a "pay for play" basis for many years now, it's creeping into aspects of pretty much every kind of entrepreneurial business.

If you don't participate in promotion on social media for your art or business, there is absolutely no contact with new customers unless you run a brick and mortar or maybe rent billboards.

In order to monetize streams on your own personal web site you'd likely need to run ads, charge for user accounts, and/or generate paid memberships, which is harder than pulling teeth even as a well known musician.

[nigamanth]

One of the best entrepreneurial decisions to make in early start ups is to take control of your customers. This is regardless of the business, if someone is selling their products on Etsy or Amazon, part of the money goes to the company Etsy or Amazon.

While, on the other hand the business could sell their products on their website and therefore get 100% of the money on their website. Many companies sell on their website for this reason.

[ytygg775]

> While, on the other hand the business could sell their products on their website and therefore get 100% of the money on their website

And then they also need to deal with all the crap that this entails.

[jeroenhd]

> Their garden, their rules.

Actually, the EU has passed the DMA which will prevent exactly that for very large (i.e. Facebook/Twitter scale) providers.

I suspect some companies/features may not be available in the EU because of this, but I hardly lament this if it means the garden walls are being torn down.

[cortesoft]

How would you make any money as an artist with open protocols?

[idiotsecant]

If your money making model depends on hoping real hard that a giant megacorp throws you a few pennies once in a while I would argue your whole premise needs a rethink.

But to answer your question directly, artists make money the same way they always did - making art for rich people that appeals to their tastes.

[jamespo]

Strange, artists have made money in lots of different ways other than that

[seanw444]

Most artists make more money from merch and branding, anyways.

[ilyt]

Open protocols don't make for open platforms. Mastodon is "open" yet big server admins are free to block anyone else they don't want, going back to the closed garden model. It is for good reason of course, there always be bad actors, but open or not it's all to easy for organization to use same tools to further their own goals

[cdmckay]

Couldn't you make the same argument about email? It's an open protocol but anyone can block you.

Even though that's the case, I think email is much more open than WhatsApp or Signal, and a big part of that is the fact that it's a federated open protocol.

[ytygg775]

> they do a ton of things to siphon listeners that came for my music away from listening to my music, including NOT playing more of my music after the intended song plays.

I understand the criticism that it's hard for you to get an audience to notice you. But once somebody has listened to a tune of yours and then doesn't actively seek out more of it ... could it be that they just prefer to listen to something else instead? Competition is toughand it may feel easy to blame it on big tech, but sometimes peoples taste is just not something you can legislate..

[manholio]

I think listening to an entire song of some unknown artist is a great sign that more tracks should be queued up.

Essentially, that artist generated traffic for Spotify, and Spotify channels that traffic to more known tracks that are more likely to generate conversions to paying customers.

[halflings]

> even if the link goes to Spotify, they do a ton of things to siphon listeners that came for my music away from listening to my music, including NOT playing more of my music after the intended song plays

If always playing songs from the same artists is what people wanted (e.g. lead to more overall listening time), Spotify would 100% do that. You can't pick what a radio station plays next after starting one of your songs, likewise Spotify gets to pick what their users prefer (visibly: not always songs from the exact same artist).

[Timshel]

I think what people want and what Spotify wants is probably not the same.

I don't have specific knowledge but they probably try to optimize for retention. As such if they concluded that for example discovery is an important part of retention then switching artists might bring less listening time (which is not issue as long as you don't cancel) but more attachment to the platform.

Additionally the way they distribute royalties (as I understand it it's tied to the total of stream not your usage) might have some strange optimization. Like maybe they need to guarantee a minimum for the big player otherwise they might leave or in the opposite maybe they try to drive content away to pay them less and lower their influence.

Note: all of this is random speculation, I have no idea what happens just tried to think of possible use case where what user and Spotify want is not aligned.

[vineyardmike]

> If always playing songs from the same artists is what people wanted (e.g. lead to more overall listening time), Spotify would 100% do that.

1. This assumes someone has actually A/B tested to see if this works. I would believe no one at Spotify has tried this.

2. What about if other music had lower royalty rates? Doesn't Spotify lose money, so wouldn't they want to pick cheap music?

[robbiep]

Users don’t know what they want. This is hugely true of the on-play from spotify or any other service. They’re delivering something that works, but who is to say there aren’t 50 other algorithms that work as well?

[datadata]

Users have lots of wants, but the product(s) that they will like is not necessarily the same thing that they want.

[rdtwo]

I don’t think more listening time is the objective. Spotify is like a gym. They want you to subscribe but then never show up, or only show up for promoted content

[rashkov]

Radio royalties cost far less than direct plays, FYI

[plasticeagle]

I feel like promoting your own music has always been a massively uphill struggle, and the successful ones still got there by playing hundreds upon hundreds of shows.

There's a huge element of luck too, who happens to hear you, whether or not you strike some chord with the public in some way. But mainly, it's just hard work. Many artists took a very long time, playing shows in small venues for years, building up local fanbases... and then eventually saw some small measure of success. Many more saw nothing.

I'm hesitant to blame the internet for this. Sure there are some artists who seemed to get plucked from nowhere, and were catapulted to international success overnight. But most, most just worked hard, and got there eventually.

[ohthehugemanate]

> the successful ones still got there by playing hundreds upon hundreds of shows... it's just hard work.

This is the vision of the music industry we all would like to have. Hard work, pluckiness, some element of luck and "striking a chord" with the public and you, too, can be a success! It is a dangerous fallacy that drives many musicians into the trap the top comment is complaining about.

The reality is a lot uglier.

Ever since large music conglomerates conquered (integrated) the entire promotion/publishing/distribution/sales stack in the 70s/80s, becoming successful in music has been about fighting giants on their home turf. That's AFTER you beat the odds by getting a label A&R person (or the contemporary equivalent) to like you. The markets, gatekeepers, processes, and legal agreements are all set up to screw you, hard, because every one of those is run by a different face of the same multi-billion dollar company with serious lawyer and lobbying budgets, and you're a small entity with no legal budget (and probably no experience).

This was the very successful industry profit model for decades before the Internet, and the generations of executives since then have been focused on regaining that regulatory and legal positioning in the "new industry".

These two famous articles explain the structure of the pre/early internet music indistry very clearly: Steve Albini (famous music producer) wrote "the problem with music" in 1993[1], and Courtney Love "did the math" [2] of how an impossibly good record deal would work out for the artist in 2000. They're enetertaining and interesting reads. Every step along that journey, think of the modern music industry equivalent, and you'll find it is facing (or has already lost) exactly the battle the top comment is bemoaning with Spotify. The large players are working hard to achieve the vertical integration and control they once had, and it is working.

[1] https://mpg.org.uk/knowledge-bank/the-problem-with-music-by-...

[2] https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

I should note: there is no board of shadowy figures out to screw artists. This is natural dynamics of any labor market with a persistent glut. The buyer controls the price, and if it's a market where the sellers are passionate and driven to sell because they believe "it just takes hard work and luck", they will lower the price indefinitely... until they are even taking on predatory debt just to get their product out there.

Please stop spreading the myth that "it just takes hard work." It convinces too many good people to walk into an exploitative industry and thank their exploiters for the screwing. What it actually takes, is relentlessly beating giant megacorps at their own game. Most of the famous ones are actively getting screwed for the privilege of riding on a tour bus. There is a lot that music fans can do to help the musicians they love, and it starts with understanding the musician's fight.

[Moru]

When I realized this about 1990-ish after reading some contracts that they had to sign, I completely stopped buying music from stores. The only music I bought since then was directly from the (small) artists.

[plasticeagle]

> There is a lot that music fans can do to help the musicians they love, and it starts with understanding the musician's fight.

For my part here, I go to (a lot) of local shows, and buy their merch/vinyl/tapes whatever. I tell everyone I know about them, and urge them to go along too (they mostly don't, but it's always worth a try).

I've read both those articles, they're quite well-known, and I'm sure they were on the money at the time. However, the fact remains, that playing gigs is the way. It doesn't guarantee success, a significant part of it is luck. But if you can't pull a crowd, you're not going to get anywhere.

This is somewhat orthogonal to exploitative music contracts - which perhaps have got a little better? Those articles are 22 and 29 years old, surely things have changed in the interim.

Of the local musicians I know, only a handful are professional. And they play in covers bands mostly. However, those that have made it overseas (Aldous Harding and Marlon Williams) are doing great. I don't think they're trapped in unfair record deals, but I suppose I could be wrong. They both got there playing shows, not by putting links on twitter and complaining that nobody listened to their music.

Sorry, but if you can't fill local venues, what chance do you stand internationally?

[nigamanth]

With the use of easy websites and services to create a song, everyone can create a song. Ultimately, there are 2 factors which make a song "successful":

1. market desire: What are people listening to today? What genres of music are in "demand" right now? 2. experience: If someone who has been learning music theory for the past 7 years and then works on a song, the likely outcome is that the song will sound better than someone creating a song with no experience.

[ilyt]

> that came for my music away from listening to my music, including NOT playing more of my music after the intended song plays.

To be entirely fair at least for me in lot of cases I end up adding maybe 2 songs of an artist total to my playlist. Assuming random passerby is going to like rest of your stuff just because they liked one song is a stretch.

[fearface]

What if you link it to a playlist that starts with your song?

[winternett]

The platforms always counter your moves. At times I've found that shared links simply don't work, or they divert to a 404 page. It's often hard to figure out what is happening unless you have several different workstations over several different IP addresses.

It would be wild if a YouTuber did some documented video tests on this issue at some point.

[Mogzol]

I work with Spotify links and the Spotify API regularly for work and have never seen a link to a playlist or track randomly 404 or not work. Spotify share links are really basic, they're just an ID and type of link, like "/track/{id}" or "/playlist/{id}".

Not saying you're wrong, I've just personally never had issues with them, and I work with lots of share links from a variety of artists.

[dotancohen]

Why specifically a YouTuber?

I think that you are a bit too hung up about what happens where on the internet, especially considering that your complaint is about bad faith actions of the large platforms.

[kovezd]

I agree with the problem (getting distribution is not easy), but not necessarily with the solution (calling out anti-competitive practices).

If the problem is serious enough, the capitalist solution would be to develop a platform that solves the problem for independent artists. However, as others have pointed out, the real customers for Spotify are not indie artists but rather paying users, and established artists.

While it is tempting to blame platforms for commercial failure. One has two recognize the truth of the business: making music follows a long-tailed distribution, and ultimately the listeners decide who rips those benefits.

[zephyr9]

Do you not remember high school? Nerds hate artists.

[thatguy0900]

I've never heard of such a thing, to be honest. Many in my nerd group painted minis and made their own cosplays. It's not like theater kids were in the popular group looking down on us so I'm really not sure what other kinds of artists there would have been in high school

[switchbak]

These tired stereotypes aren't true now, weren't true decades ago when I was in school, and were likely never true.

But they work well on sitcoms, is that where you get your perspective on the world?