Survive?
This is why more people need to move away from Spotify. They artists way too little.
I thought deezer paid a LOT better
0 . 0 0 3
Give me two years, and your dinner will be free
Gas station champagne is on me
Edgar cannot pay rent for me … 🎶
That figure is potentially misleading. You want to know how much of your subscription or ad revenue is paid out. The per stream royalty is diluted by non-paying users, or by users paying lower rates (in poorer countries, etc). If you move your subscription to a service that pays out a lower share, then you pay musicians less, even if the average payout per stream is higher.
If ads don’t make enough money to pay artists, then Spotify shouldn’t offer a free tier. Don’t support a company that is hurting artists.
This is the kind of thinking that usually gets mocked on lemmy.
This was a deciding factor in why I use Tidal.
Easy.
The average middle class income in Canada is $70,000. All I have to do is get 40.5 million streams per year to afford a small home 2 hours away from the city where I play music.
Honestly, you can be a full-time musician or you can have a comfortable life. You can’t have both.
You’re probably still right but the comparison to a job doesn’t make sense because the labor component isn’t continuous for streaming. The job would be live touring, streaming would be additional income on top.
I would agree, but shows on the road habitually pay close to nothing because musician compensation hasn’t really increased in the last half century. So generally you make money off of album sales and merch sales at shows, not really money to live off of either.
By making really short songs.
that got nerfed after a band put a 30 second white noise song on their page and asked fans to play it while they slept
noise artists ahead of the curve putting 500 songs on a cd
Less avocado toast.
Those goddamn machiatos.
You heard that new song by Avocado Toast and the Macchiatos?
Oh yeah, their seminal EP “I’ll never afford a house at this rate” sure is a banger.
Having a musical idea, and recording it, expressing it the way that you thought it… That required a lot of effort, from a lot of engineers, at a studio, with a lot of expensive equipment… As recently as the mid 90s.
Now we’ve got Jacob Collier, winning Grammys from his bedroom.
To assume you can live off streams today would be like a journalist thinking they could survive off of tweets 3 years ago. Getting well edited thoughts out to the masses via the press required a lot of effort from a lot of engineers, at a studio using lots of expensive equipment.
i mean, TBF, you could just rent studio time, so it’s not like it would’ve been a significant thing in the way of your goal.
Studio time is not expensive today.
It was cost prohibitive in the 69s, 70s, 80s, early 90s.
i mean, how cost prohibitive though. Instruments cost money, people still produce music with instruments these days.
Shit costs money. That’s just the name of the game.
Paper costs money, pens cost money
You’re thinking with yesterday’s figures.
i mean you’re speaking in absolutes here, im assuming you have data to back it up.
Try Google. Not going to entertain this with my time because it’s on a level of dumb that —
Try Google homie.
i mean i could. I’m not the one making the claim that it was prohibitive though.
You are right.
You get paid jack shit for streaming. You also got paid jack shit for radio play. The flip side to all this is It has never been easier for an artist to manage their own career.
Not that long ago if you didnt sign onto the multi-billion dollar a year label who took an obscene amount of the money (google a 360 deal if you want to get real mad) nobody heard your shit ever. But you can also form your own label, make your own merch, do your own socials, promo yourself and keep 100% of what you make.
This is a moot argument. You’re saying the system doesn’t support artists and that artists shouldn’t expect it to. Why not? Why can’t the system be changed? Streams should not be equivalent to tweets and it’s dumb to think they should be.
It’s not entirely moot because it means competition is increased many fold.
It doesn’t mitigate how Spotify behaves, but the market dynamic was changed by tech putting a serviceable studio is everyone’s bedroom.
sure, but why platforms get to be rich and the actual artists dont?
Because they have all the customers.
If you don’t like the rate the current major platforms give, you could choose to use one of the many alternatives that (presumably) exist.
And if they really don’t, I could build you one in a couple of weekends with all the open source resources and federation protocols available today.
But none of that matters because all the paying customers are on those major platforms. And until you convince users to move off those platforms, you’re basically their bitch. They’ll pay you whatever they happen to feel like paying you.
Actually while typing that out I thought more about the technical architecture of such distributed alternative streaming service that pays artists fairly, and it does sound like it could be fun to build.
But everyone in the fediverse already knows how difficult/impossible it is to get the average person to switch to open source software. It would most likely be a waste of time.
Here’s a person who knows way more about the music industry than all of us in this thread out together. And he’s thought a lot about this, too
Not so much the fediverse side of it, but the legal, and financial/jobs side of things.
They aren’t. The fees are supposed to benefit the streaming companies.
I hope the bill discussed in the article helps rectify that.
homie the only thing streaming benefits right now is music publishers, spotify and the artists are losing money like it’s oil being produced during the industrialization.
The last update that I saw was that Spotify would be in the green if it didn’t have to give severance pay to a large number of employees, and also some real estate expenses that seem pretty unusual for a streaming service to have…? They should just ask Wisconsin to build them a place for free, those idiots will do anything for industry.
they would be in the green if they didn’t outsource music publishing, ironically.
I’m more concerned that streaming platform algorithms prioritise passive listening (maybe not more concerned… I’m not sure how concern is quantified). It goes against their business model to risk serving users music that might actually push, and thus potentially expand, their taste. Music that is challenging may cause a user to stop listening. Better for the auto play algorithm to serve up safe bets, homogenising the general popular music gene pool. Like serving endless Big Macs incase tom yum is too spicy or lamb shoulder is too rich. As a result, the way to find success in the era of streaming platforms is to play G-D-Em-C and sing about the boy/girl you like/liked. This causes a feedback loop where bland music leads to bland tastes, which leads to bland music…
btw, if you want to broaden your taste in music, go listen to an entire album with a few or just one song you like from a particular artist a couple of times.
You like one album they’ve done, go listen to the other work they’ve made. Trust me, it’s very worthwhile.
Yeah I almost exclusively listen to full albums. Definitely helps give context to the music and understand the artist better. I also agree that you should give it a few listens. Some great albums need you to dial in before you really fall in love with them. It’s a more active process than just listening to an unending algorithmic recommendation stream, but the effort is rewarded!
the flow between songs is sometimes better than the individual songs. Bonus points for artists that use transitory tracks between the main ones. Those are always weird.
A personal example of mine was morcheeba, had listened to their early albums, never the later ones, got a hold of a discog, that band is one of my top favorites now.
Ah Morcheba! Now that’s a band I’ve not heard in a while!
Another album feature I enjoy is the “bonus” track at the end after an absurd length of silence. 1977 by Ash comes to mind. Nothing like going to sleep with an album on to be suddenly woken up by drunk people puking.
As well as transitional tracks, I love it when tracks genuinely feel like they exist as part of something larger. Whether through transitions within the tracks (Nonegon Infinity by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard takes this to the extreme) or by essentially turning the album into one long almost operatic piece (like Colours by Between the Buried and Me).
massive attack i believe, has a track that has a “hidden track” which is just like 8 minutes of ambient noise. After an immediate banger as well, so it just gaslights you. It’s great.
i’ve always been intrigued by bands and artists that meld songs between the album, it’s an interesting experience. Boards of canada does it somewhat. It’s pretty hard to distinguish which makes it really interesting to listen to. It’s all one thing, but a collection of many different things also. Very interesting.
Sometimes it takes decades. I bought Stiff Little Fingers “Nobody’s Heros” back in the early 80’s and only listened to it a couple of times. When I was digitizing my vinyl collection some 20 or 30 years later, I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t one of my favorite albums. Pretty quickly bought everything in the catalog and am still listening to their new records.
This was how it worked until about 15 years ago. I got far more deeply into music and artists back then than now. I always feel I’m skating the surface with streaming, and the suggestions bore me.
idk about you, but i almost always have some of artist thats teetering on the edge of my hypothetical taste. Usually a song or two. If you have any just go listen to their collective works. Otherwise, try and explore genres you like, specifically ones with lots of variety, electronic music in particular is highly variable. Which is one of the reasons i really like it.
One thing i find that helps bring more music to the forefront is weird/abstract media. A lot of times people working on visual art, will back something with music they enjoy, especially if it’s something more niche, the music is very likely to be a reflection of their personal taste, which is always a good strat. Sometimes that’s movie soundtracks, other times it’s just weird shit like an ARG that throws boards of canada in there for no reason.
You could tell how good the album was by where they placed the banger. If it was the last song on Side A, then you knew the album was going to be solid. If they put the hit song on A1, that meant it was probably going to be trash because they don’t trust you to make it through 3-4 more songs before getting to the one you bought the album for. There are always notable exceptions – they put the hit song on the end of Record 2 side B and then it wasn’t even credited on the album (Train in Vain). But that album is 2 records of excellent songs with the possible exception of Jimmy Jazz.
To put that in perspective… If you listened to 30+ songs a day, a thousand a month. And you only listened to ONE artist. That artist’s label company would get $1.73 for the month, and of that, the artist would probably pick up like 50c.
Ok, not defending the record and streaming companies but this is nothing new. In the past if you bought an album the artist would see around 1.50$. At an average of 13 tracks on an album you would have to listen to the full album 133 times to equal 3$. That would be close to the band getting 1.50 depending on their contract. This math makes a lot of assumptions about royalties that are varied and complex but I listen to many albums more than that on streaming.
Bands never made tons of money off record sales, there are lots of better ways to support bands you like. Royalties are often paid to the band in merch, so buy a CD or vinyl directly from the band. Same for anything they sell directly at concerts or on their site.
That said I would love to see better shares for the artists, but it’s unlikely going to get better because screwing artists goes back decades.
The access to Spotify is also super easy. I was in bands and unless you were already popular or had a record deal, getting your CD in stores was almost impossible. I managed to get my bands CD into all the hot topic stores in my state but it was a huge undertaking for a 20 year old kid that just wanted to play music and knew nothing about getting upc codes and negotiating margin and managing inventory.
When Spotify came around I was able to put my music up with about an hours worth of work which was mostly entering banking details, uploading the songs and artwork, and writing a blurb.
I honestly want to start a record label just to put all the local bands I used to play with up on Spotify. Most of them broke up just before the barriers to entry fell down and now the music is lost forever.
Thats why RTJ drop their albums for free. The money is in fans buying merch, buying limited edition vinyl pressings, appearance fees, licencing the songs to tv and movies touring and concert appearances.
On their own label, they have absolute control of how the money is spent.
RTJ.
Man so many acronyms. Cant know em all.
TIAFPMWAA
Presumably not run the jewels as it seems they charge for theirs?
Return of The Jedi.
Yeah thats my bad. Run The Jewels.
Considering there are 10s of millions of users that doesn’t seem too bad tbh.
You’re looking at the mega successes. It’ll be nice for musicians with thousands or tens of thousands of listeners to be able to feed themselves
To give an alternative perspective.
Dua Lipa “Levitating” has made 3.4 Million dollars on streaming revenue. Blinding Lights by The Weeknd is over double that.
Then the real success stories are the Indies. Run the Jewels only have 1.2 Billion streams but that 2 million dollars is their 2 million dollars.
Its peanuts per stream but anyone anywhere in the world can be a fan and show their support by ordering an overpriced Tshirt from the website.
Oh ya know just simply get a billion streams per song
They don’t need money to survive, they just need exposure which is what Spotify provides them. Musicians can survive indefinitely on nothing but praise cocaine and exposure.
/J
Meanwhile… Last year, Taylor Swift received over $100 million for streaming from Spotify alone, making her a billionaire.
Clearly, (some) musicians are doing better than ever. And, judging by this dishonest, manipulative screed, they are determined to do better still.
Because there’s a fuckload of people streaming and because they’ve already paid for it, they do it for hours every day.
There’s artists on tens of billions of streams. That’s enough to live on for anyone.
Of course if you’ve got only a few thousand streams then you’re going to make fuck all, but you probably weren’t going to make anything anyway. You might get a few fans from discovering things on Spotify who might turn up to your gigs or buy that T-shirt or whatever, but with that number of listeners you probably wouldn’t even have got any radio play in the old days, let alone make money from albums.
Most people never make money on art, no matter which art it is, or what business model they use. It’s just life. If you never hit that mainstream vein, you’re going to need a proper job.
Cooking is a form of art.
That’ll be a 25% tip for your server.
I love how in this scenario cooking is the art but the guy walking your food to you feels like the star.
Record companies have been stealing artist record sales for 70 years. This is nothing new to musical artists. The motivation to get on a streaming service is so sell tickets to your tour shows. Inflated album prices of the 90s made very few artists any money.
Streaming was never going to be profitable, it was the only option the music industry had to make any kind of money over piracy.
Most artists are happy to be making nothing on streaming, because giving access to your recorded music sells tickets. Tour tickets sales and merch has been the bread and butter for the musical artist for decades and remains the primary source of income.
Most artists are happy to be making nothing on streaming
Which artists have said they’re happy with no income on streaming?
How many minor artists are doing big tours?
I feel like people are starting themselves blind on per-stream revenue in a bad way - no one is actually paying per stream. Not the customers, not the streaming companies, not the labels. This is the deal when it comes to streaming platforms - you get to listen to as much as you want for a fixed amount of money per month.
It’s a little bit like saying someone who bought a CD in the 90s for $10 and listened to every song 100 times is a 10 times worse customer than someone who bought the same CD and listened to every song just 10 times. Yes, the person who listened to the CD 100 times paid 10 times less on a per-song listen basis, but that’s quite simply not relevant.
they’re exactly the same customer, the difference between those two is actually negligible, ignoring the new middle man and VC funded tech company in the way.
Both someone who streams, and someone who buys the CD are paying the same amount of money, the difference is that the person streaming gets a MUCH broader wealth of music, and much more music to listen to, for the same amount of money. Which means, on average, you would expect someone who uses streaming to pay less than someone who buys physical media.
I think the latest issue now is how Spotify for example is changing their revenue sharing model in a way that big artists (i.e. Taylor Swift) get a bigger chunk from the pie and smaller artists get close to nothing in % from streaming income. So the value of a single stream for a song is different depending on who you’re listening to.
What change is this in reference to? I’m not familiar with it.
This article can probably explain it better than I can: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2024/01/06/spotify-royalty-model-ramifications/
