How would that benefit Spotify if they are the ones paying the royalties to themselves? Wouldn’t that be net zero?
bruhsoulz@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Fyi Spotify has been doing stuff like this for years, hire dirt cheap artists, make up a fake artist/band name, upload generic jingles and implant them on every single category playlist they can. Prime example are playlists for things that don’t have too much complexity like lo-fi, calm piano, stuff like that. Disgusting.
lewdian69@lemmy.world 1 week ago
bruhsoulz@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Take it this way, if 1 person pays 10$ a month for Spotify and gets about 50 hours of music out of it, it’s more beneficial for Spotify if a significant portion of that time is spent on music they pump into the playlists themselves, which costed them pennies to make, instead of having that user listen to real artists, that will ask for actual pay in exchange for their streams. They’re not paying a little bit to make alot, they’re paying a little bit to avoid paying even more.
Plopp@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They don’t pay equally to everyone. They benefit large artists more than smaller ones. If you only listen to your totally unknown friend’s music on Spotify, most of your money will still go to popular artists you don’t listen to, and your friend will get nothing because they’re below the threshold of getting a payment. It’s basically theft. Now if some of those popular artists are Spotify themselves behind the scenes, guess where your money is being funneled.
nul@programming.dev 1 week ago
Probably they find net zero (minus cost of hiring musicians) preferred over paying out a moderate income to actual artists. Capitalism at its finest.
KellysNokia@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Not that it justifies what Spotify are doing, but the terms they have with the big record companies make it virtually impossible for them to increase their margins through other means. They lose $500m a year as it is.
bruhsoulz@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
i understand entirely, it just felt like a good opportunity to say how spotify is trying to enlarge their size of the moneypie by eating out of hardworking musician’s cut and simultaneously filling user’s playlists with bloat
dyc3@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I don’t think it’s Spotify. Spotify already gets their cut, they have no reason to put out “fake music”. This is a very well known “passive income” scheme. It’s obviously real people doing it
overload@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
I didn’t even know about this but I think you’re right. I just scrolled through the Calm Piano playlist and the third song down was by an artist with millions of streams, but absolutely zero online presence outside of Spotify and Apple Music. Their about section was just a generic sentence.
I hate this. So the idea is that the cost of creating this music is less than the payout of streaming royalties if they push the songs on their official generic playlists, effectively keeping the money in-house rather than paying to an external artist…