> Ek claimed that a "narrative fallacy" had been created and caused music fans to believe that Spotify doesn't pay musicians enough for streams of their music.
Fallacy? Scores of well-known musicians, from Bette Midler to Taylor Swift, have talked about how little they make through Spotify and other streaming platforms. IIRC Swift only joined the platform after cutting a special deal. Not everyone can do this. Quoting the guitarist for Mastodon, which has a much smaller following (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/07/05/mastodon-guitari...):
I could live a thousand years, and Spotify plays [our music] all day long, and maybe I’ll just make a couple of thousand dollars.
Ek also said this:
> "Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape," Ek said, "where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.”
This quote reminded me of Joni Mitchell, who would take years-long breaks earlier in her career to escape from the business, work on songwriting, and recharge. Many other musicians can't, as Ek puts it, "create a continuous engagement with their fans" for reasons related to privacy, family life, finances, or mental health.
It's bad enough Spotify pays artists peanuts. But if Ek is tuning his platform to benefit only those artists who are willing to jump through Spotify's algorithmically generated hoops, and sideline everyone else, then the future of the music industry looks very dim.
How little they make, compared to what? Streaming has basically saved the music industry, finally getting revenues to go up after about 15 years of decline. Spotify pays out 70% of its revenue to labels and artists. I wonder what percentage would satisfy people.
I'm not sure how Spotify is to blame for bad label deals, which are nothing new. Artists also have lots of ways to get onto Spotify and other services without a label if they wish.
Bandcamp takes only a 15% cut, which is better than Spotify's 30%, but the way people talk about it you would think there's a 10x difference or something.
> Bandcamp takes only a 15% cut, which is better than Spotify's 30%, but the way people talk about it you would think there's a 10x difference or something.
It's not about the relative cut of the services, but the absolute value of the payouts. On one platform you earn fractions of a cent per stream while the other allows you to collect whatever price you set for your release directly. I'm sure the latter approach is significantly better for smaller, niche artists, if not all but the most popular ones.
Or put differently: The number of plays on Spotify required to match the payout of a handful of album sales on Bandcamp is probably out of reach for most artists.
It's difficult to square that idea with the fact that streaming has caused both industry revenue to increase as well as independent share of the overall pie to increase.
The problem with Spotify is that they pool all payments, and then portion it out based on how big of a part of the total amount of plays per month that artist gets.
That means basically all of my $10 subscription would go to huge popular artists, instead of to the artists I actually listen to.
By buying on Bandcamp, I make sure my money goes to the artists I actually listen to.
Yes, most of your $10 goes to popular artists. But people that only listen to popular artists, some of their money goes to the artists you listen to as well. Meanwhile, the fact that it's free to the user to play unknown artists on Spotify lowers the bar to discovery. The net effect is that independent share of total revenue is rising.
She wanted a lot of money, just like in the good old record label days. And BTW - her deal screwed indie bands even more...
> Joni Mitchell
Who TF is this person?
> only those artists who are willing to jump through Spotify's algorithmically generated hoops
Since when is general audience and human attention span a result of Spotify's engineering? Do you think that Taylor Swift doesn't have people earning 6 figures to make sure that she stays relevant?
Fallacy? Scores of well-known musicians, from Bette Midler to Taylor Swift, have talked about how little they make through Spotify and other streaming platforms. IIRC Swift only joined the platform after cutting a special deal. Not everyone can do this. Quoting the guitarist for Mastodon, which has a much smaller following (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/07/05/mastodon-guitari...):
I could live a thousand years, and Spotify plays [our music] all day long, and maybe I’ll just make a couple of thousand dollars.
Ek also said this:
> "Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape," Ek said, "where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.”
This quote reminded me of Joni Mitchell, who would take years-long breaks earlier in her career to escape from the business, work on songwriting, and recharge. Many other musicians can't, as Ek puts it, "create a continuous engagement with their fans" for reasons related to privacy, family life, finances, or mental health.
It's bad enough Spotify pays artists peanuts. But if Ek is tuning his platform to benefit only those artists who are willing to jump through Spotify's algorithmically generated hoops, and sideline everyone else, then the future of the music industry looks very dim.