Soon we’ll have AI music generators and most people will be perfectly happy to only ever listen to what those churn out.
Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Gotta love all my friends who are really into music who happily use Spotify and don’t give a shit it is a weapon of class warfare being used on musicians disguised as a music player!
I basically lost all my drive to make something of my love of creating music seeing how little anyone in my society actually values music or musicians in terms of material support and reward, it is honestly pretty scary how broken music has become.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 1 month ago
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
I mean, we’ll see.
Maybe.
Maybe we will just look back at the period that is rapidly coming to a close as a golden era of music where the tools became sophisticated, affordable and distributed for music production but venture capital hadn’t yet destroyed any last vestiges of the monetary value of musician’s labor (audio engineer’s included) in recording contexts.
Of course, I am sure Spotify and other streaming services are coming around to the value of recorded music being unsustainably low, I mean everybody knows it deep down right? That is why they are going to continue to raise their prices. From the perspective of Spotify, the artists that actually do the work of making Spotify a valuable company aren’t in principle excluded from their share of the pie when the line starts to go back up and the company has a chance to reverse some of the belt tightening and sacrifices everybody had to make to keep the lights on… but every single one of these vapid losers believes deep down in their bones that the rules of the game say that it isn’t the responsibility of shareholders or upper management of Spotify to just hand the musicians their fare share of the increasing profits, or even alert them to the fact that profits are in fact increasing in the first place. Musicians are not the customers nor the shareholders of Spotify, they are the commodified, interchangeable contractors that aren’t much different than the day laborers who hang out outside of most Home Depots in the US looking for handyman work.
This is like when the English saw that the only crop Irish peasants could afford to grow on the side for subsistence farming to feed their families, potatoes, were getting destroyed by a potato blight, and decided that it would send the wrong message to let those Irish peasants have any of the rest of the crops that Irish farmers were growing to sell to foreign markets to simply pay the English rent for their farms … crops that were not significantly impacted by the potato blight because it would make the Irish reliant on handouts and encourage a problematic tendency towards apathy and entitlement stubbornly latent in the Irish population.
reev@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
jabathekek@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
All the streamers suck; plus Spotify definitely sucks the most and it has the most subscribers. So I do my best to support artists I love by buying their albums in some physical form (vinyl if possible because it encourages active listening), t-shirts when I need a t-shirt, fan clubs, etc. It’s all I can think to do.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
It’s all I can think to do.
I think you thought of a lot of good things to do!
I don’t mean to be overly cynical about people, this is a problem of systems and normalization of things that shouldn’t be normalized primarily, the people are mainly just trying to survive.
sigh
SmackemWittadic@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I say this a lot to people on Lemmy, but everyone here (including you) is honestly so much nicer and more emotionally intelligent than people on other places on the internet
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Many of us here might even be toxic in other contexts (I am certainly not perfect at keeping away from being overly negative or argumentative with people), but what matters is which version of someone we invite in the door to our community.
We can invite in any version of people we want, and I agree in general I think the fediverse invites in the better version of people and it is one of the primary reasons I love this weird, loosely connected blob of non-corporate social media.
mihies@kbin.social 1 month ago
The thing is, you're buying from their record labels, not directly from artists. And then it depends on their contract how much they actually get. But they are still getting more from it, I guess.
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
It helps when the band runs their own label.
thesmokingman@programming.dev 1 month ago
Walk me through this.
Before Spotify, I’d buy a record (physical or digital) and listen to that. I pay the artist once. After Spotify, I buy a record and listen to it on Spotify. I pay the artist the normal record price and there’s a long tail from stream payouts (unless they don’t reach the payout threshold).
Before Spotify, if someone heard a song and didn’t buy the record, they didn’t pay the artist. After Spotify, if they still don’t buy a record, the artist now earns from stream payouts.
Finally, before Spotify, if someone bought a record but stopped buying after Spotify, the artist loses that record purchase. This is definitely bad. Was Spotify the real reason? Would something other than Spotify have pulled them away? What levels of fame are materially affected by this?
Do artists have to pay to be on Spotify? Is that the issue?
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
the artist now earns from stream payouts.
Do artists have to pay to be on Spotify? Is that the issue?
The issue is that artists don’t make any actual money on Spotify, they are being forced to put their music on Spotify because that is where you have to put your stuff if you want to be a successful recording musician.
Meanwhile a couple of years ago the Spotify ceo said in defense of completely destroying any semblance of money making from recording music:
“There is a narrative fallacy here, combined with the fact that, obviously, some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough,” said Ek.
reddit.com/…/why_youre_9998_likely_to_never_make_…
Streaming is great, but the structural evisceration of musicians and the value of labor in composing and producing is basically negative at this point given the huge amount of time that must go into a track to get it 100% there and ready for listeners.
thesmokingman@programming.dev 1 month ago
The thread you linked says what I said.
I’ve been doing DIY music since I was a kid. The vast majority of bands are never going to make any money ever. Spotify didn’t change that. Streaming didn’t cause that. The reality of every kid with a guitar thinking music is about making money not having fun is what did that.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
I don’t subscribe to this cynical of a viewpoint, it isn’t inevitable that recording music is not valued labor, it is a cultural choice same as any other.
I live in the richest country on earth, it is a subjective choice to devalue the labor of musicians and decouple it from the profits of music companies.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
In my experience those kinds of people are Ice Spice fans.
Who think that SSSniperwolf arriving at another person’s house live on Insta and doxxing them during a manic episode is ‘slay’.
phoneymouse@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Wut
can@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
There’d a lot to unpack here
blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 1 month ago
… Class warfare?
can@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
How much do they really care? I’m not usually a quality snob, especially since I frequently use gear of varying quality making it moot, but wouldn’t most people who are really into music at least consider the competition that offers higher quality files at similar if not the same price?
Or are they the type to only have local FLAC with their DAC? Because I like my collection but streaming is still worth the convenience for jumping into a new album.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
I have spent a lotttt of time messing around with music production and learning what is pseudo-science (a whole fuckton of it) and what is real science. In all of the ABx testing I have done, read about, and seen demonstrated in person myself a quality MP3 with a decent bitrate encoding (idk 128kps or so?) using a decent algorithm and hell even a sampling rate of 41khz will produce an audio recording that when played back on a hifi audio system and level matched (EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, it is well known in mastering and mixing that a louder mix always sounds better at first glance) is indistinguishable from the source .wav file to the human ear (I don’t care how super human you claim your ear is).
People make this silly mistake of thinking that digitization introduces these sharp staircase edges into audio waveforms, which is actually kind of a hilarious misconception (which I completely understand, not trying to insult people’s intelligence) because the entire idea of digitizing a waveform into a bandwidth-limited digital waveform is utterly reliant on every the analog reproduction of a digital square wave/stair step function with a voicecoil and diaphragm, physical hardware components with shape, size and crucially mass, must necessarily create a smooth analog waveform because physical hardware components have mass and momentum, they aren’t theoretical ideas. It is better to think of a bandwith limited digital waveform as a series of movement commands for an RTS unit in Starcraft 2. The unit will naturally path between discrete points in a way that creates fluid movement, fundamentally it wouldn’t make any sense for the unit to just teleport directly to where you click and then teleport directly to where you click next etc…
can@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Believe I’ve gone down a similar path. I agree, but I assumed the layman dedicated music fan would at least be curious.
And on another note we need more discussion music and audio production around Lemmy.
fpslem@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I really wish there was a better alternative to push my friends to. I do use Bandcamp, so at least I know more of my $$$ are going to the artists and I can take the music with me, but I’m not sure about the platform long-term.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
As a musician and composer it really took the life out of me as a musician was seeing an alternative to bandcamp never really form and then one day waking up to it bought by Epic.
I didn’t cry that day, but I might as well have, it made me extraordinarily sad to see that headline and I imagine there are actually countless talented musicians out there who will never actuate on their creative vision because the environment for music production is at this point, downright hostile towards artists and musicians.
It takes an obscene amount of work to take a song from something that has promise to being as polished as listeners demand nowadays, and they won’t even give your song a change on actual speakers. You have to twist and warp your music so it sounds good on essentially monophonic phone speakers with shitty frequency coverage or otherwise nobody will give it a try on speakers for actually listening to music.
🙃
LarryTheMatador@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Ah yes, and unsanctioned art will be classified as a form of terrorism.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And most people will be perfectly happy to consume that and nothing else ever.
GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
100% where we are headed with this backwards capitalist approach to ai. Make bots churn out art, films, music, anything creative really, so the proles have more time for mindless manual labor
deranger@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Not sure if this is exactly good news, but Epic Games doesn’t own it anymore, it was sold to Songtradr.
can@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Doesn’t sound too good to me. Bandcamp used to be where I could get music from smaller artists who couldn’t afford clearing samples (as they weren’t making money) and I worry a lot of that will be lost.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
🤷♂️ not really, none of these corporations are real in any sense that matters other than sucking up actual companies that actually make the world a better place and mining the goodwill out of them until they are cynical, worthless husks that corporations to bamboozle consumers into buying products from before they get the memo and realize their favorite company/brand is dead now.
ozymandias117@lemmy.world 1 month ago
As bad as Epic is, probably worse…
Even though Bandcamp was profitable the new CEO said this after buying it
So they’re probably looking for any way to cut costs. They fired half of the staff on day 1, including anyone who tried to unionize
SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
How about qobuz.com ? I’ve bought some flac files from them.
best_username_ever@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
You can’t use Qobuz if you’re behind a VPN. It makes me sad because I wanted to try this.
kiku123@feddit.de 1 month ago
It seems that ampwall.com may come sometime as an alternative to Bandcamp? Time will tell…
jennwiththesea@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I use Napster. I choose it was back when Spotify paid for the Rogan podcast, from a list of platforms that pay artists more. I’m not sure if that’s true any longer, but look out up! I’ve been really happy with their service. (And it’s really full circle for me, since I used there original service decades ago.)
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 1 month ago
How does this compare to Tidal?
jennwiththesea@lemmy.world 1 month ago
According to that site, Napster pays more. Here’s the info on TIDAL: Image
Resonosity@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I just downloaded Bandcamp, and after searching for my favorite artists, almost none are on the platform aside from 1-2. Did a search on like 20-25. This is why I use Spotify. Maybe if artists started acknowledging Bandcamp as a legitimate alternative to Spotify, then of course I’d listen there. But right now most stuff by my favorite bands are either covers or remixes.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Chicken and the egg, be the change you want to be, but also I am not absolutist about using Spotify.
I just think Spotify and other streaming services are vehicles of class warfare against musicians that also happen to play music. I understand if you like the playing music part!
CandleTiger@programming.dev 1 month ago
Is Pandora any better than Spotify at paying artists?
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Qobuz