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.
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.