— Ross Grady, missing the point.
This has nothing to do with Spotify and everything to do with the market for streaming services.
It takes an unbelievable amount of money to operate a service like Spotify and consumers have not yet demonstrating a willingness to pay more than $10-15/mo for pretty much any mainstream digital subscription.
That leaves a very small amount for artists. Which is wrong. But what are you going to do?
Either customers pay more, which they won't.
Or artists leave Spotify for platforms that pay them more in hope the increased cut compensates for significantly lower volume, which is unlikely.
Or someone finds a way to run a global streaming service at such a reduced cost that some savings can be passed onto the artists, which would've happened already if possible.
When a Spotify exec called artists "entitled" for wanting payouts on the order of a penny a stream last summer [0], I went looking around to see if anyone was doing better and approaching that. Turned out Apple Music had gone there [1].
Maybe that's recently become possible with the economics of current digital distribution tech. Maybe Apple has an edge from leveraging infrastructure they need for other services anyway. Maybe they're subsidizing it. I don't know. But I do know that the economics of streaming services have to include substantial efforts to do right by media creators with audiences at multiple scales if they're to remain ethical.
[0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387453/apple-music-arti...
I mean, you could start by taking a glance at the billions of dollars amassed but Spotify’s owners as a starting point.
So what action does that leave?
I only listen to hundreds of musicians and Spotify gives me those hundreds for $15/mo.
Those hundreds change by 10% ~ 30% every month into other hundreds.
I don't feel any ethical need to compensate musicians I don't listen to. And the ones I do listen to I don't feel strongly enough attached to to pay more than $15/mo for recurring access.
There are perhaps 10 whose permanent media I would buy and replay, if they left Spotify.
So, I don't really care what someone from the New Yorker has to say about Joe Rogan, as they join the cancel crusade.
If anything, I may sign up for Spotify for standing up against cancel culture, and I won't be subscribing to the New Yorker at time soon.
Tidal https://tidal.com/
Deezer https://www.deezer.com/
Bandcamp https://bandcamp.com/
Jango https://www.jango.com/
Radio Paradise https://radioparadise.com/
Qobuz https://www.qobuz.com/
Pandora https://www.pandora.com/
I dislike the possibility, however remote, of being cut off from my music at the whim of a service provider or the government. I come from India, the current government is ever so trigger happy about cutting off the internet and/or web sites because someone said something that did not show them in the best of lights.
Just torrented the artist and put it in my own device.
I can just go on YouTube, turn an ad blocker on, and there we go. It's not curated, there's no playlist, there's no buffering on my phone when I go underground, the general experience is worse, etc. But that's literally free. Without the ad blocker, it's ad supported, okay, so it's like default spotify without paying.
But it's there and it has been for like, ten years now. In fact I find that YT has loads of stuff that's not on Spotify at all.
If you're disappointed that it turns out that most people ended up not paying for music once they had the choice, fine. But like, the idea that it's somehow unsustainable is obviously wrong, and calling it unethical is pretty opinionated (how is it unethical for me to click on a Beatles video when they're all either dead or fantastically wealthy?)
I've been considering cancelling Spotify for ages, I've been on and off. The only thing that keeps me using the platform is that it's more convenient - it's like buying a coffee at the motorway services instead of making one from a bag of coffee, a cafetiere, and a kettle in my car. I can do it, I just don't want to sometimes.
You're probably on the wrong track when your example happens to involve people whose level of success / compensation is so wildly outlier that they're not even representative of the top 10% (not to mention established under an entirely different distribution order). Of course marginal dollars don't matter as much in that case, let alone marginal pennies.
But they do matter quite a bit at the scale where people are within striking distance (above or below) of the transition point between making a living at music and not making a living at it. That's where ethics of supporting people whose work you apparently value would matter most.
There, YouTube's economics are also pretty unethical (from what I've heard their payouts are about half of Spotify and maybe adblockers make it worse). About the only saving grace is that everyone knows it's an essentially free show; no one is under the illusion they've participated in some kind of economically artist-supporting transaction when they watch a YouTube video, so those who feel some obligation on that front know they still need to do it. Spotify sometimes presents itself or is forwarded as a solution / alternative to piracy, giving it the veneer of an artist-supporting transaction when the more frequent reality is that its fractional nature pushes the point at which audience engagement can support artists economically up farther.
But how’s the audio quality? Is it as good as Spotify?
No need to abandon something I never bothered with in first place.
Wow! I'd like to see your collection of wax cylinders!
Good free-tier, amazing premium service and price, an unbelievably large collection of artists and music, strong privacy protection without the need to provide credit card details (for free tier) or mobile phone numbers, in a super-polished and easy to use package, without all the terrible data-collection.
They really have become the kings of music streaming.
That's not true. Check this out:
When it expires, if I haven't been paying attention, I live with free-tier for a day or two until I can go buy another card.
Are you kidding me? If you don’t like something about Spotify, switch to Amazon or Apple music, Pandora, Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, or a dozen others.
This seems like “As much as I dislike Bing, I cannot envision life without it!”
With Tidal or Amazon, can I just import my Spotify library in? How do I know they have all my music?
Search engines are not the right analogy here.
Pandora now offers on-demand streaming as a subscription service (Pandora Premium), just like Spotify. This has been available since 2017, after Pandora acquired the assets of Rdio.[1]
Pandora's music discovery features are best-in-class, but its maximum audio quality is lower than that of other services (192kbps vs. Spotify's 320kbps).[2] Pandora also pays artists less per stream than Spotify and most other services do,[3] probably because Pandora has a huge proportion of free users.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2017-03-13-pandora-premium-music-st...
[2] https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/how-much-speed-d...
[3] https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-roya...
YouTube Music is great – no DRM, one subscription for music and getting rid of YouTube ads (while supporting your favorite video creators far better than ads do).
The musician can add value to the albums by making it a beautiful package with lots of extra details and behind the scenes of the music.
For example: a box set
https://us-store.deutschegrammophon.com/products/hilary-hahn...
I also don't like the amount they payout to artists. I'm no saint, I used to be on napster and limewire, but now having a decent paying job, I buy albums again from services like Bleep. As I like a lot of indie stuff, I think it's important they get a decent cut because I don't think many of them are selling in the millions.
I still don't feel much guilt pirating the odd movie, especially as it's no longer possible to sign up for a single provider, I now have to sign up for multiple services. And twenty bucks is too damn much for a single VOD
But the media I use most, mostly video games and music, I really don't mind paying.
Another way to look at Spotify is actually trying to recover some of this money for artists.
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-threatened-researchers-who-...
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/epxxkn/musicians-are-draggin...
I heard that Spotify doesn't make a profit.
