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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
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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.
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.
What are your thoughts around generating traction with a torrent? I have two friends who are both sitting on their albums and thinking about how best to release them. I hope to release something one day too and refuse to use the likes of spotify on principle.
These are some decent suggestions, I'ma try this with our old albums. aside from tpb what are good options, sitewise, for this? no links just names pls, if you'd be so kind
So many pro tips, thanks m8, time to put together some supplementary materials!
by the way, you should play Hades II if you're not already. Its end boss is your username ;)
To add to this, buy their merch and physical copies of their albums. Also, go to shows! Lots of small bands would love a bigger crowd and can be seen for cheap or free.
Spotify negotiated shit deals when they were a startup and they’ll basically forever be not profitable because of it.
Seriously. They had a completely open market, then essentially signed a perpetual deal where something like 40% of gross income is paid out to the labels. It’s absolutely insane how poorly run they were in the beginning.
If they had become a publisher, distributor and/or a label, they’d be on top of the world now.
Their strategy was probably the classic startup strategy. Grow at all costs and figure out profitability later. These days it’s rather obvious that this strategy sucks and is doomed to fail (for most cases).
I always wonder how the hell don't make money, it must be some kind of “smart” accounting.
Ahhh yes, future enshitification!
Higher prices, worse quality, intrusive recommendations, ad filled basic tier?
It all depends on how much people are willing to put up with.
I 100% agree with everything you said. It’s just that I thought people wouldn’t put up with the stuff Netflix has been pulling but I was wrong.
Music is different though…
It's because they are 100% reliant on the record labels, and the record labels know that. So the record labels can charge Spotify whatever they want, because what is Spotify going to do?
That's why Spotify tried to hard to move into Podcasts and now Audio books, so that they are less reliant on the record labels.