[troupo]

Spotify pays 70% of revenue to rights holders.

Why don't you ask them where the money inteded for artists is going? You know? The small insignificant companies of Sony, Warner Music, EMI that own the vast majority of music and own all the contracts?

[lkramer]

They have also arbitrarily decided not to pay out if you fall below a certain threshold, which hits smaller artists as well. Of course part of the problem is that the pay out is so low, so if you don't have millions of streams it's not worth it.

[injidup]

That is the decision of artists to sign with a mega corp. Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not. You can take your 70% or whatever the exact number is with no.middle man if you like.

Unfortunately the number of people producing music and the quantity of it is much higher than the number of people able to consume it. And culture is simply network effects. You listen to what your friends or family listen to. Thus there are only a small number of artists who make it big in a cultural sense.

And one of the cheat codes for cracking the cultural barrier is to use a mega corp to advertise for you but if course the devil takes his cut.

Anyway AI is coming for all these mega corps. If you haven't tried SUNO and many of you have it's amazing how convincingly it can crack specific Genres and churn out quality music. Call it slop if you like but the trajectory is obvious.

As a consumer you will get you own custom music feed singing songs about YOUR life or desired life and you will share those on your social media account and some of those will go viral most will die.

Content creation as a career is probably dead.

[saaaaaam]

(a) you can’t directly upload to Spotify. You need an intermediary in the shape of a distributor. Whether that’s a label or a DIY platform like DistroKid.

(b) Spotify introduced a threshold of 1000 streams before they pay anything. This disincentivises low quality warbling autotuned ditties as they are unlikely to pass that threshold. (It’s more nuanced - you don’t just need 1000 streams from a handful of accounts as that could easily be gamed.)

(c) Suno and Udio have been forced into licensing deals with the major record companies. The real threat will be when we see an open sourced Qwen or DeepSeek style genAI for music creation.

[woctordho]

There is a pretty interesting open source music AI named ACE-Step. Currently its quality is at about the Stable Diffusion 1.0 level, and they'll release a new version soon (hopefully in January).

[saaaaaam]

That’s very interesting, thank you! Do you have any info on how it compares to Suno/Udio etc? I don’t know if you saw the news about Anna’s Archive having effectively scraped the majority of the Spotify library. It will be very interesting to see how this impacts on the next generation of generative models for music. Any thoughts there?

[troupo]

> Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not

No, you literally can't.