When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 6 months 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.
fpslem@lemmy.world 6 months 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 6 months 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.
🙃
jennwiththesea@lemmy.world 6 months 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.)
Resonosity@lemmy.world 6 months 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.
CandleTiger@programming.dev 6 months ago
Is Pandora any better than Spotify at paying artists?
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Qobuz
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Soon we’ll have AI music generators and most people will be perfectly happy to only ever listen to what those churn out.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 6 months 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 6 months ago
It has already started.
jabathekek@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
…and now here’s… Human Music
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months 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 6 months ago
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
mihies@kbin.social 6 months 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.
thesmokingman@programming.dev 6 months 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 6 months ago
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:
Image
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.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 6 months 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 6 months ago
Wut
can@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
There’d a lot to unpack here
blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 6 months ago
… Class warfare?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify
can@sh.itjust.works 6 months 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 6 months 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…