I call bullshit. Yeah I’m sure they spend 2/3 of their income on rights holders, mainly Joe Rogan, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift.
The average musician isn’t making shit, and yet the spotify execs are sipping champagne.
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This is why I thought some of their recent actions that hurt the lowest played artists was strange, you want to encourage artists to NOT use the big publishers to help break their triopoly.
I think the most recent changes are fine in practice, but the optics are not great which probably matters a lot.
Even the smallest artists are making more than 1000 streams yearly. The only ones they are hurting are AI generated songs.
FYI it’s 1000 per track per year, not per artist.
I agree though, I went through my instrumental playlist which has loads of indi stuff and the smallest I found had 10,000 plays
Edit - looks like I got a notification for this 4 days late…
Man, a lot of people here don’t understand how the music industry works. From the perspective of someone who’s been loosely following the music industry, what I’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter if Spotify gave up 2/3rds of their revenue, or 100% of it, the artists would still make fuck all.
Why?
The labels love taking their cuts and as a result, artists make very little. Instead of taking the blame for giving artists a <10% cut of the label’s revenue from their music (my understanding is that it’s pretty common for musicians to get <10%, sometimes <5% if you’re on a particularly shitty label), the labels are blaming platforms like Spotify.
Now, I’m not saying that Spotify is blameless, however I think there’s a lot of misdirection from the labels going on. I don’t remember anyone complaining about pre-spotify services like Pandora Radio for not paying out enough when they were largely ad-supported, which is another reason I’m not totally buying the, “it’s cause it’s free” argument either.
Fuck, remember Pandora?
How is this news? The price you pay for media of any kind I can think of goes mostly to the rights holders, not the companies physically delivering it to you. You may object to the rights holders being shitty record labels, but that term also includes independent artists. And more to the point, rights holders are by definition the people who are entitled to profit from selling access to the media they own.
If you want to get pissed at someone, get pissed at the record labels sharing a ridiculously small part of their licensing fees with the artists who make their product.
Ugh, yes poor poor spotify, fuck that. Artists can’t even make a living making music anymore thanks to spotify. Fuck off blaming artists for trying to get paid. Fuck this article. Oh no it only gets a third of the revenue?! Abhorrent, no it should get ALL the revenue, for doing what, having a server with music on it. Amazing. Fuck spotify.
Wooh. 👀. This isn’t Spotify’s fault. They can’t pay artists if they don’t have money.
Haha. Don’t be shocked by the reaction. We live in a world where a certain portion of ‘people’ Believe every thing should be free and corporations don’t need money at all and should just be willed in to existence and live off of the ether.
Etc. Etc. Rich people bad
For a company that has revolutionized the music industry and changed the way we listen to music, one would expect Spotify to be making a lot of money.
How has spotify “revolutionized” the music industry? Are thy doing anything new? Streaming isn’t new, yearly reviews aren’t new, freemium isn’t new, discovery isn’t new… Is the revolution that it’s now a standard target for artists?
Spotify literally changed the way people listen to music by being popular enough that the general way of listening changed from a purchase, listen forever model. To a listen to anything you want and never not have anything new, way of listening (but you don’t own anything).
A song is no longer worth a purchase of a cd, or dollar at itunes. It’s worth the 3 minutes of listening that it gives you when Spotify recommends it to you.
Obviously I’m biased. And also, yes, there were streaming services before Spotify, but nobody that mattered and with the influence of Spotify.
Hmm… fair point.
CC BY-NC 4.0
And yet, they still aren’t even close to the highest paying service when it comes to musicians getting their cut.
https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-do-music-streaming-services-pay-musicians
It’s hilarious that Napster now tops the list. I use Tidal, myself, since it’s got great quality audio. Spotify is horrible quality for 2023.
Spotify is horrible quality for 2023
To my surprise, even Spotify’s standard (not high or very high) is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible for the average consumer to differentiate from lossless (on better than consumer grade hardware). Upon hearing this, me and several friends decided to test it for ourselves by taking lossless files for several songs and resampling them to the same codec and bitrates that Spotify’s standard quality uses, then ABX testing the before and after with Foobar’s ABX and exclusive mode plugins (also tried the popular comparison website, but that’s apparently less accurate). One of my friends had access to a college studio, I have a dac and sennheiser, and the third had sony wxm4s. To our surprise, none of us could consistently differentiate the two. Its not perfect considering we didn’t grab the outputs directly from the streaming platforms, but that would’ve added extra variables like volume normalizing (louder sounds better).
Our conclusion is that the quality “difference” is likely placebo and probably a waste of bandwidth.
I wholeheartedly disagree. I have more trained ears then most (worked in video production), but not by much, and when i got my AirPods Max, I thought they sounded awful at first. They were crunchy and dithered sounding in this weird way. I was gonna return them, but I did some testing, and discovered that I was hearing Spotify compression. I turned up the quality as high as it would go in the settings, and that made it a little bit better, but I could still hear it, and can to this day. I did some further testing by signing up for a tidal free trial, in addition to Apple Music. Listening in lossless was an entirely different experience, I could definitely tell the two apart blindly, without even specifically looking for sound quality. There were like 2 to 3 instruments in a given song that I wouldn’t be able to pick out in the lower quality audio, that I could easily pick out in the lossless audio. You have to have a pretty decent pair of headphones to be able to hear it, but some of the higher and consumer stuff can definitely hit that level, and when you do, it’s not something you have to go looking for, it sounds very obvious.
Do you realize AirPods Max/iPhone is capped at AAC/256 kbps over BT, and needs DAC -> ADC -> DAC to use a wired connection?
There may be other factors at play, Apple quite likes to compress stream data between their own devices, even on “standard” protocols (just look at their monitor collaboration with LG where they did the same thing to exceed the max resolution of an existing display signal). Regardless, there is a difference, and it is not a small one. It was immediately obvious to me after listening to a single song. Something about the pipeline is crunching audio to the level where it’s obviously degraded. This isn’t audiophile grade splitting hairs and “I think it sounds ever so slightly better with these gold cables” it was like the difference between 480p and 1080p video to me, enough to be actually annoying during normal listening, even if I was actively trying to forget about it.
Ok it sounds like what you experienced was caused by something completely different than detecting an audible difference between Spotify’s 320 kbps AAC encoding and lossless encoding, encoded over a 256 kbps AAC BT codec, but if you actually want to do a true A/B blind test of 320 kbps vs. lossless on your setup, here’s the place to do it:
https://abx.digitalfeed.net/ (select the first link - “The statistically valid Tidal test to make”)
Honestly, Spotify is only half bad compared to the real scumbags of this industry, and that’s the “rights holders”.
It’s not the artists who created the music I’m talking about. It’s the record companies taking the largest piece for themselves.
They are the ones earning on other people’s talent and success.
But…but…muh “discovery”
I’ll die on that hill. 90% of the artists I listen to, I found through spotify’s algorithms.
Ok, but why not find a human that curates the kind of music you like? They are called DJs.
I don’t understand why we need to get rid of human DJs that seems like the last job we need to replace.
edit why do y’all think I am talking about radio DJs? You…. know there are wayyyyyyy more DJs out there than just radio DJs right?..…right?
….like y’all know mixes exist right? Like mixcloud or whatever?
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What does a record company even do? Why do they have rights?
Basically they fund artists to record and then handle things like promotion.
Yo. I can be a record label. Come hang out in my apartment while I pay the bills and BAM! I get all the royalties!
Sounds like stealing with extra steps. Actually it sounds like just being rewarded for having money to begin with.
Actually it sounds like just being rewarded for having money to begin with.
That’s most of the economy.
To determine if this company is actually a poor widdle guy or just trying to look like their hands are tied with respect to paying artists, look up how much Daniel Ek is worth, and then look up what he does with his money
