E.g. App Store requires you to earn $100 equivalent to pay out earnings in Colombia. In many countries the threshold is currently $0.02, but it used to be much higher.

https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/reference...

Wouldn’t it be more desirable to pay artists for everything? The implied comparison is with the status quo, and both Spotify’s and your proposals frankly kinda suck

I don't think it's reasonable to expect to get "peanuts" paid out. Google AdSense is the same; you have to earn at least $100 to get it paid out, until then the earnings just accumulate in your account. Same goes for YouTube. I don't see it as unreasonable.

To be honest, I wouldn't care as a creator/a seller, unless the threshold is set high.

You're dealing with a bunch of people who will try to rip you off, so you need to have anti-fraud protections. Then you need to be able to override the anti-fraud protections because Alex, Alex and Bob, Alex, Bob, and Curt, etc. are all legit performers who want the payments to go to one common bank account even though you'd like one act == one bank account. Etc.

I'm not sure what's the problem here, to be honest. Alternativelly the platform could also charge withdrawal fees, making small withdrawals pointless.

Afaik this minimum withdrawal concept has been the standard way of doing business when reselling digital goods. See e.g. the aforementioned AdSense which has been set up this way for 20 years now. The same goes for Steam, once again you have to sell $100 worth of stuff to get paid.

There are no free payment transfer mechanisms. Whatever is free is a loss leader.

If you don’t know anything about payments, start by reading stripe.com’s documentation to understand how complex this is.

Pymnts.com is the industry blog if you want to go deep.

What would you change about contract legislation to prevent this?

If you give me a free taste of ice cream, that doesn't mean I'm stealing from the farmer.

I did end up seeing royalty checks, though not until the book was translated from English to Italian. For some reason, it sold comparatively well in Italian, pushing me over the threshold to earn royalities. The one actual royalty check I saw for my book was a grand total of $0.02. I never cashed the check and keep it in a desk drawer somewhere.

> manufacturer not being paid for the first 1,000 candy bars sold at a grocery store

This happens, in any case. People set up deals with grocery stores for 100k units. The store changes its mind. You're left with a huge inventory to either sell to them at a discount or find a new buyer.

I'm not a native speaker either, sometimes I re-read some of my own comments and realise I could have phrased them much better, corrected some grammar but I prefer that they sound like me.

Just found it funny, that even with text is often very easy to tell.

I use "akin" relatively frequently, and "perplexing" ocassionally, as well as other such "rare" (?) words. Is english vocabulary beyond the top-1000 most common words or anything above 2 syllables considered a sign of AI these days?

If anything marks it as AI, it's the overall tone and phrasing (too "mechanistic"), not the use of ";", "akin" or "perplexing".

For many of us our "normal online speech" is largely identical to our normal written speech except when writing somewhere where we either are not using a normal sized physical keyboard or where posts need to be severely limited in length.

Maybe that part did not get rephrased.

  > Has anyone else noticed that?

Now models could be trained adversarially against this GPTZero and you'd have a harder time..

Also, I use akin and perplexing quite often in my text. The semicolon much more rarely however. But when I write professional text, then yes, I use semicolons too.

A lot of generative content is becoming hard to differentiate from human created content and it's also becoming common to see people like yourself assign false positives. I think it's good to be skeptical but as a skeptic myself I know there's downsides to considering everything suspiciously. Unfortunately I don't think we'll ever find a good solution for wanting to know if what we're looking at is AI or not.

I listen to a lot of music on Spotify. And some of it is from smaller indie artists. Not a huge amount, but I’ve definitely listened to songs that are in that <1000 plays category, and for some undiscovered artists that’s a good amount of their library.

It surprises me how much of my Spotify library is no longer available. There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out. A lot of good songs too.

As much as I love Spotify and music streaming, it seems like the economics of it fundamentally doesn’t work and can’t work.

     500 Euros via Bandcamp (digital, physical and merch)
     300 Euros selling merch on gigs
    2000 Euros playing gigs
      20 Cents on Spotify

All the music I buy and pirate is in FLAC and funneled into my local library, where I can enjoy it without any streaming service taking it away from me.

And I usually end up contributing more to my favorite artists financials than fans who use streaming service, so that's a bonus.

a) Spotify doesn't charge enough for a subscription

b) Spotify takes too big of a cut right now from the subscription revenue

c) The model doesn't work as a lot of people from low-income (and low subscription cost) countries are "sucking out" the money that goes mainly from rich ones. So 1 listen from USA = 1 listen from India even though the USA listener pays around 7-8x times more and the subscription income gets divided equally by listens.

It's great that BC still does BC Fridays... but if fans only buy music from BC on BC Fridays, BC will lose all revenue and will fold or resort to shitty tactics. BC are one of the few "good" businesses in this space, and have reached an impressive scale. I'd hate to see them fold. I reckon it's worth buying some music on normal days as well as BC Fridays.

Same goes for live recordings, remixes and radio sessions. P2P has had this for 20+ years, Spotify doesn't and never will.

Being in print or not makes no difference

Where do you get these FLACs? Do you have a pipeline/automated system or it’s done manually? Asking for a friend.

a1) on my computer, in folders. I manage it using iTunes/Music, but could just as well use anything else, or do it manually. I also have Serato for DJing, which imports my iTunes/Music library xml to share the same collection.

a2) to be fair, in the past year, I've gotten lazy and started streaming from the band camp app for more recent purchases. I'm not DJing much these days.

b) I buy phones with a lot of storage and don't upgrade very often

I don’t know if YouTube is any better, but I have switched all of my music consumption to youtube music app with the premium subscription.

But it's not for everyone ig...

What's better for music as a whole? Boosting Spotify's share price and Taylor Swift's private jet habit? Or putting that $11/month towards some gigs for an artist you really like?

Not exactly what I have in mind. I am working with the model where all songs are always available (like Spotify) and people simply choose how (a) how much they want to give per month and (b) how to split this amount among their preferred artists.

In effect, it's the same as a "pay as you want", but there is no overhead of thinking about which songs to "buy".

Even people who have Spotify end up buying stuff in Bandcamp, anyway. I never had merch but had CDs, and sometimes people would buy two physical copies, one to gift.

For me there was never any difference between Spotify and piracy.

I also buy the music I listen to a fair bit on Bandcamp or at concerts.

As an example, last fall a song from a band came up in the randomized post-album "radio" on Spotify as I was driving, and I added the band to my favorites. A month ago Spotify notified me the band was playing in town, so I went and ended up buying several CDs, including from the warmup band as well.

That said, I agree that Spotify should pay more to small artists. I really dislike that my money goes to Talor Swift and similar artists who have more than enough and that neither I nor my SO listen to.

I think I should have said that Spotify is the same as piracy from an artists POV.

It's definitely not illegal for users, and it definitely helps with "exposure", but it's not really a platform for making real money with your music, except when it's listened to in massive quantities.

For me, it's no different than putting a free album link in Instagram, or when Nine Inch Nails put it on PirateBay as a stunt...

1. They saw our sticker/poster and thought the name is interesting

2. They checked the venue/festival-site and thought it sounded interesting

3. They knew us from social media

Exactly zero times I had someone tell me the found us on spotify and came because of that. Of course that doesn't mean no such people exist, my sample size might be too small. There might also be people who find us on spotify and then buy on bandcamp, no way to check on that.

But my feeling right now is that our more traditional boots on the ground marketing does a lot more than the online stuff. That doesn't mean that dynamic can be totally different for other bands or other genres tho.

People don't go to indie concerts because of a spotify track. Nor to big name concerts. And 20 cents corresponds to around 50 to 100 plays according to the numbers mentioned here.

Spotify can't give you these experiences no matter how hard they try so this claim doesn't make much sense to me. A concert isn't exactly competing with streaming services or anything.

Do you have numbers behind this claim?

I definitely got aware of some unknown artists thanks to Spotify and YouTube, some of them had low hundreds views/listens.

Ended up supporting them, going to concerts and buying merch.

Unfortunately more like 5000+ plays. People tend go to concerts of music they listen to and for a lot of people that means hearing it on Spotify

While it does, note that paying or doing stuff free "for exposure" is exactly how many artists got big and huge hits were made, from payola to DJs (starting way earlier than Alan Freed with radio DJs, and going all the way to EDM DJs being paid to break a track), all the way to paying for artist ads or record shop placement, buying fake streams, followers, and views to appear more popular and drive exposure, or doing for free (or, often, paying for) the support spot on a bigger band's concert.

> People don't go to indie concerts because of a spotify track.

Yes they do.

The first requires committing time and effort to get 50 people to see you, 20 of which are your personal friends. The second is making the music you have already produced available to millions of people around the world, with virtually no effort.

Surely Spotify should improve on compensating artists, but all-in-all it is still a better deal for the artist than the "for exposure" gig at the local bar.

This isn't an excuse for Spotify not paying much for plays, but I bet having music on spotify helps the gig revenue though.

In some ways this is also true for Taylor Swift et al - they also make thousands times the amount from playing gigs than 'selling' albums, streaming, and radio plays but that drives ticket sales.

While some artists are so big that governments compete to have you come to their country (and NOT to your neighbours), the vast majority has trouble even getting to play free gigs.

Bandcamp isn't perfect, but it fits well with my listening habits and I'm glad it earns _some_ money for you in the grand scheme of things.

I might not "enjoy" it as one would traditionally enjoy listening to music, but I enjoy that it exists and the uniqueness of the experience it provides.

If you can handle LAMC by Tool, you can handle this.

'kabelbrand' is giving me flashbacks to Providence by King Crimson, just a bit more raw and industrial. All build-up without the instruments actually synchronising together for the payoff as per Providence.

The band name is great; apt.

I listen to most music on yt music (although their client sucks) and buy stuff on bandcamp whenever i love some band and it's available there. I've never seen a value in spotify - limited library with no ability to fill the gaps with custom files (like you can do on YT music), client is meh, additional cost or ads are meh too.

My understanding is they’re playing a cat-and-mouse game with auto generated content, that syphons away some percentage of the royalties.

Changing it to splitting out a users monthly payment to what they're actually listening to, would make the abuse they're trying to stop easier and not harder (as it would mean all the money they're trying to launder will go to the correct artist instead of just some of it)

Not saying that that's a good argument for the current system, but it wouldn't fix the issue they're trying to solve

I don't think any subscriber (i.e. people giving them money) would prefer current model over where your money goes directly to who you listen.

Also, what is Spotify going to do with these 50$? What if it happens twice, 100$... do they pay you back eventually? Perpetually free access to all their premium services?

And if you have made 200 songs (so loss of $100), all streaming less than 1K each, maybe your current production is not marketable on Spotify, and yeah, maybe you should find another venue. Eventually there will be a marketplace for this type of production, and hopefully willing users to pay for it.

Not to mention people can set up labels themselves, it's just a company like any other.

I'm sure we don't want big labels being gatekeepers. They have their own set of problems, and make streaming even more difficult for everyone but very large artists/groups (and sometimes even for those, as they eat a big chunk of royalties).

This probably has more to do with publishers and licensing contracts than artists pulling their music off from platforms. Sometimes even bigger artists' albums disappear when publisher is sold or goes out from the business. Or the licensing contract's period runs out. As sad it is, many artists don't own the rights to their music, and if the rights owner is defunct, then there are missing albums or even discographies.

I do have YouTube Music for listening to stuff I don't own yet, but primarily I use Jellyfin these days for music.

definitely possible to avoid this, but given it would be a follow-up cost from the failing core business, it probably could not be done. hell, they didn't even get around to making basic meta-data reliably present.

I remember this being particularly infuriating with movie soundtracks or other compilations, where individual tracks would often evaporate one day for bogus (licensing) reasons.

> And some artists, like Neil Young, actually pulled most of their content.

Yeah, I actually left Spotify with Neil. Apparently though he and other artists like Joni Mitchell that left at the time are now back on the service as of a few weeks ago.

This is an artefact of the industry and not something they have much control over. Labels for larger artists just don't just sell global streaming rights in perpetuity. They will carve it up by region and time in order to try and maximize profit.

Spotify for instance had some Spotify exclusive “DJ mixes” that were all an hour of well-mixed playlists. Spotify got artists to curate them and would have “XYZ’s DJ Mix”. They were perfect for seamless music listening at the gym. No breaks between songs. Non stop music. I listened to them all the time.

But one day a few months ago they all just vanished. Every one. I had added several to my Spotify library. For a bit they were playlists of grayed out songs. And then the playlists themselves vanished too. This content was all Spotify exclusive- the music is just gone now. It’s not available elsewhere.

It was all “mixed” versions of songs with smooth transitions in an out. Luckily I had added most of the original songs to other Spotify playlists that I had. But still, the mixes themselves are gone.

If you had pirated or ripped those mixes off Spotify, you'd still have them. And you probably paid enough months of subscription to feel okay with that.

Because in the end https://xkcd.com/488/

Just looked into deleting my Spotify account through the app and appears that’s not an (obvious?) option. Ugh

Spotify doesn't have an answer for this. Just don't listen to things outside the Spotify library. Apple Music (and GPM before it) lets me upload my own tracks and sync them between my devices.

They send me a monthly email detailing the number of plays I received as an artist, and it averages around 300.

So each track is getting around 10 plays per month.

So none of them come anywhere close to the minimum threshold.

I made around $10/year from Spotify plays, it's a pittance, but over all the streaming platforms I would get enough for a new plugin each year, this makes it "worthwhile".

I absolutely will not allow Spotify to have content on their platform without reimbursement.

The only people losing from this are the handful of fans who like my music.

On the other hand, that would make it pretty trivial for garbage/AI content distributors to circumvent.

It might, but then there's this:

(1) they're not making money already anyway (they'd be getting like $3 for 1000 streams before)

(2) that's were the listeners are (not the listeners they have, since they don't have many to begin with, but the ones they wish to attract)

(3) most of such a low number as 1000 streams are usually themselves, band members, friends, and family, plus whoever they sent a link to and gave it a short listen before moving on.

A lot of smaller artists don't have a say regarding licensing and distribution. They're usually managed by a local minor label, which in turn has specific agreements with bigger players (Columbia, UMG) once your music sells more than, let's say 50.000 copies and they need a partner to publish a release on more territories. A few artists also get their own label.

For example, Peggy Gou tracks are usually released trough Dudu Records (Her own label) -> Ninja Tune -> XL Recordings, which is basically the same label that nowadays publishes Adele and Radiohead. Adele went even a step further, and her music is handled by Columbia Records for the US market.

Until you reach this level of clout, you have very little direct control over your syncs and streaming rights in the "regular", Billboard-tracked, market.

Most bands can't do this. They're not full time musicians, many have a day job. The ones that can are likely to come from rich families where they get time and money to pursue their passions, insteas of going to college and getting a job.

Lana Del Ray, Grimes and Billy Eilish are some of the biggest artists of the 2010s, all of them grew up rich and connected.

It's already happening. Even some artists which are above the limit pull out to show their support for smaller artists.

As infuriating as this is, it's the reason I still use Spotify. A music service that hides their catalog changes by subtly modifying my playlists is a no-go. Having the songs still appear lets me know, as it gives me the opportunity to find those songs elsewhere.

These days there's a lot of worth in that, the bars been set quite low.

It's the same dynamic companies use against ununionized labor.

You say: $450 / 150,000 = $0.003 per streamed track.

The two sets of numbers don't seem so far apart that the discrepancy cannot be explained by rounding errors.

ansc's number was $4 per thousand plays.

Your number is $3 per thousand plays.

It sounds like you basically agree with ansc. While Spotify might be cheap, that cheapness is not the problem Snoop is having.

A very rough global average per-stream payout is often estimated at around $0.003 to $0.005. That brings the payout for 1 billion streams between $3,000,000 and $5,000,000. Let's go with the lower end. This is actual money paid out by Spotify for 1 billion streams, as in, a bank transfer of $3,000,000.

How do you get from there to $45,000?

- As with any legacy artist, the record label gets most (maybe 70%). Why that is, oh well. It's less shocking if you think of the label as an employer and how little an average employee gets compared to what they produce. Do you need an employer? Absolutely not. Do you need a record label? Absolutely not. Anyway, a 70% cut would leave the artist with $900,000.

- Expenses: There are various costs associated with producing, distributing, and promoting music, hotel costs. Let your imagination run wild. Safe to say: This is a black hole, depending on how you want the process to look. If Snoop wants to sit in a big studio for months, he pays prices, for month, but that's not required to make music. Renting a high end studio on end is lifestyle. Sure, it's an expense, but it's like complaining about your profit while driving a Porsche. Awkward. Let's assume a 20% deduction here, reducing the revenue to $720,000.

- Focus on Publishing Royalties: Publishing royalties are just one part of the total royalties an artist earns. So there's quite a bit of double accounting going on if you want to pretend that the above costs are all deducted from your Spotify income.

If we assume publishing royalties make up only 10% of the total, that brings the figure down to $72,000.

- tldr: Snoop is living the big life, confused about money, and then proceeds to confuse others about money.

[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/s...

The business has changed since streaming and self publishing but the labels took bets on artists and gave them expensive recording studios and marketing dollars, gave them some basic money, and in return took the majority of rights to the first few albums.

They also knew that if the artist truly made it big they would likely go to a different label where they could get better terms or start their own where they’d keep all the money after the initial contract which drove their side higher.

The record label model clearly doesn’t work as well in modern days but it was successful for good reasons at the time it really flourished.

If they have issues with people abusing the revenue model by publishing white noise and generating fake plays - go after that.

However the 1K streams per track thing is going to negatively impact small artists who might have relatively large collections, but few over 1K annual streams.

If it's a processing cost issue then make it so that payouts need to meet some reasonable minimum threshold.

> between $1 and $2 will be added to monthly bills for customers in several territories, including the UK, Australia, and Pakistan, Bloomburg reports. This is said to cover the cost of audiobooks, added to the platform late-2023. More recently, video learning content was introduced to further diversify the offering.

I don't want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app.

They mention that there will be another tier added which doesn't have these -- great, so long as it keeps the audio quality for music at the same level, and doesn't have ads.

Edit: Actually I see now, you're replying to where I said they bought services and raised prices without the customer consent. If we're using a restaurant comparison, it'd be like your local burger shop raising prices because your meal comes bundled with discounted carwashes. Consumers generally don't want bundles, they want to buy the thing they're interested in.

Ever gotten a car wash from a gas pump?

If you don’t like it there’s plenty of restaurants that don’t do combos. And plenty of gas stations that don’t have car washing.

A company offering an entertainment service is hardly forcing anyone to do anything.

Building podcasts or audiobooks or even other services is just a business decision. It’s like cable/satellite TV used to be. The market will figure out where to settle.

I have a much better listening and discovery experience through Roon and artists get paid more with Tidal.

All the others don't have clients for my OS and I don't have DRM in my browser which they require.

Regarding Spotify, which I use daily, I also dislike their updates. I remember some months back I could disable/hide "Recommendations". Now in all my (personal & private) playlists I get a list of Recommendations. It's an annoyance because when I scroll fast to reach the bottom "to listen to that one song" it end up surfing the Recommendations (did I mention I dislike them?).

So, it makes me want to go to apkpure, find an apk from 2020 and use THAT (slim chance it'll work) because most updates are "to increase engagement" (pester you/me/all) with 'new and exciting content!!!' (bleh)

Sidenote: for podcasts I am using a 2021 version of the Podcast Addict (the one displaying the full screen ad)(which you can block with NoRoot Firewall)

I can then click a tiny 3 dots menu, click “stop showing me this” and “I don’t want to see sponsored content” and it will say “sure thing! We will no longer show you these” and the next day it will show me a new advertisement and I repeat the process.

So annoying. The whole premise of premium is that there are no ads! But now I’m constantly getting visual ads in the app. Every artists page has ads for their merch. Spotify notifies me about exclusive merch for artists I listen to. And is constantly trying to get me to go to concerts of artists I listen to.

I believe that using an Android phone without a Firewall must be a horrible experience/it increases the positive experience by A LOT.

It also helps to see which apps are sneaky and run on their own - even if you disable the 'background run' (e.g. TuneIn Radio starts itself bypassing battery/power settings)

The worst is Facebook (I have friends and family who don't use any other mode for regular contact), where it often behaves as if the ideal way to engage me is, in order of appearance on the timeline:

• "People you may know" (usually devoid of people I've ever even met, and when I do know them they're not people I'm going to add)

• One real post

• A suggestion of a corporation or group to follow

• An advert for something I'm not even capable of getting ("Are you an American living in the UK who wants to renounce their citizenship for tax purposes?" — no on all counts)

• Three more suggestions of a corporation or group to follow

• More ads for things even less relevant than the email spam I got in 1998

--

Even YouTube, where I can recognise the value by comparing what I see when I'm logged in to not logged in, the recommendations are still only 50% useful and 50% dross. (Not logged in it's 98% dross, and yes I did just count 50 items before finding one video I might watch in order to not be a statistic made up on the spot).

Spotify's entire promise was "we solve the music inequality problem by just pooling all subscriber money together and then we do an equal(-ish, record labels iirc got slightly different deals) split depending on how many people listen to your music." It kinda sells the idea that if you're just popular enough, you can make it big on Spotify. Of course practically that's been a lie for ages (numbers showcased that only the top 0.1% could afford to live off of Spotify alone, and all those songs are owned by the established record companies anyway), so you could say this is just dispensing with the charade to avoid transaction costs.

I do wonder about the ripple effect this could cause for indie artists; Spotify just told them to go fuck themselves and there's pretty much no incentive to use Spotify anymore now that they pulled this stunt.

If you want to support artists directly, it's still always better to just buy the albums. Most of them have Bandcamp pages and for now, Bandcamp provides a good deal (and as a customer you can just download the FLAC files).