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.
Although it’s far from the best, Deezer has a much fairer royalties compensation method, which is more closely based on a per-user basis, rather than total amount of minutes listened (that Spotify currently employs).
This isn’t super related to OPs post but I thought it might be worth mentioning aswell.
I’ve been using Deezer for a while now. Not only is the streaming quality (FLAC) much better but also the artist compensation much fairer. Plus, they at least act as if they actually cared for the customer…
No matter what you think about Apple, Apple Music pays multiple times more than Spotify
And Tidal pays multiples more than Apple.
It’s up to you if you want to support artists or not.
I switched to Tidal after Spotify announced the price increase. The catalogue is basically identical, the apps are much more intuitive, and the audio quality is higher (they recently rolled their premium FLAC subscription into the basic one).
I had to retrain the algorithm for a bit, but that was not so difficult. There are services that can migrate/convert playlists which might actually work for favourites as well.
Also, it’s easy easier to download stuff from Tidal, which is very nice for listening to Audiobooks with a dedicated player.
I feel so bad for artists. They deserve to get paid for their hard work. Unfortunately, it’s been so hard for me to convince friends to move away from these predatory streaming platforms. A lot of people don’t want to lose having an unlimited catalogue at their fingertips.
Maybe I’m going to sound like a boomer here, but I don’t get why people need an unlimited catalogue at all. What’s wrong with paying artists directly to get their vinyls and CDs (or digital album)? What happened to curating your music library? What happened to the days where you’d buy CDs and listen to them over and over again, front to back? What happened to the days where playlists were manually curated for yourself, or even better, for your friends? Some of my fondest memories are music related, of my best friends painstakingly selecting a playlist of songs for me and burning them onto a CD for me to enjoy. What happened to the days where we didn’t need a constant stream of music pushed to us by an impersonal AI? What happened to developing your own unique and interesting personal taste?
I get that these streaming platforms are convenient, but it feels to me that we’re losing the ability to actively listen to music, to truly appreciate it, to understand the labor of love that it was for the artists, all for the sake of convenience. I don’t want music to be convenient, music is a fucking gift. I don’t want to be pushed AI generated recs, or AI generated music.
I’m rambling, lost my train of thought, and probably sound like a Luddite, but I have such strong feelings related to music and just hate these streaming platforms so much. I refuse to use them.
tldr please please please support your favorite artists by buying from them directly
What happened to curating your music library?
Nothing. Because that was never really a thing. What you’re describing was/is just a hobby. And, like most hobbies, it’s small and niche relative to the industry as a whole. Most people were listening to music for free through radio since forever. Then TV was added into the mix. Paying for music, unless it’s a concert, is just not really a concept humanity is familiar with.
I agree that many people listened to music for free via radio but I’m skeptical that it was just a hobby? What about the Zune/iPod days? People went through more efforts to curate a library, no? Whether it was with music downloaded illegally, or actually paid for via iTunes…
It was rarely curated. You just listen to the radio, hear some cool tunes, buy the albums of the artists, the end.
Capitalism!!! USA!! USA!! USA!! 🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲 You poor fucks don’t deserve music.
We don’t deserve music for other reasons too… like we don’t care what the lyrics are even about as long as it “sounds good.”
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.
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.
As a musician and composer it really took the life out of my identity as a composer 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 considering the amount of work music production is.
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 listeners won’t even give your song a chance 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. Doesn’t matter though, nobody is going to actually support you for the art you make.
🙃
It seems like https://resonate.coop/ is still around tho which seems like a cool idea (a coop owned streaming service where listeners can stream-to-own a song).
