Sometimes, I see some of the takes on here, and it’s hardly surprising that the fediverse isn’t particularly popular.
Spotify are somewhat responsible for their current position. They hired too many people, extended into markets they didn’t need to enter, and have a CEO that has blown money in places that didn’t need it. Let’s not forget that Spotify spent $300m on sponsoring FC Barcelona, which could have allowed Spotify to employ ALL of the employees it laid off for 1-2 years. Spotify had no need to give $200m to Joe Rogan, either! That’s half a billion spunked up the wall on decisions that have done nothing for the company but cause grief. Instead, they could have focused their efforts on paying more out to smaller artists that provide the long tail for their service, while also making deals to promote merch and tour dates where possible.
With that being said, if you think that Spotify didn’t play a huge part in making music streaming accessible you’re just being contrarian for no reason. They provided (at the time) a solid application, good connectivity with services like last.fm, and had the social connection sorted from the start. Once phones took off, Spotify removed the need for mp3’s for the majority of people, largely killing iTunes. Spotify was the winner of the music streaming wars.
Frankly, a lot of people were praising Spotify for their “good” severance package, but IMO shareholders should be livid, and should be calling for a new person at the helm.
removed the need for.mp3s
Im not sure this was a win
It didn’t buy the format and then cancelled it, it did it purely by providing a more convenient way of listening to music than downloading mp3s, so yes, it’s a win
I personally think mp3’s are more convinient. I don’t have to use multiple subscriptions to access to platforms exclusivities , i don’t need to worry about songs becoming unavailable. I have a big playlist on spotify with a lot of grayed out songs. Also, local music players are a lot better than any streaming service player.
Yeah, people often forget about the gray ones, even on yt music my music playlist that works fine on the video app, has some songs greyed out when I tried to listen to it inside yt music.
Win for Spotify? Well, of course. But I feel like the comment you were replying to was talking about a win for the consumer, which it’s definitely not. I will always prefer paying once versus a subscription service, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard.
(I apologize if it sounds like I’m attacking you, that is not my intent!)
Also it hasn’t, because having your actual collection on a streaming service is leagues less convenient than a bunch of mp3s on a hard drive.
Completely agreed. If they focused on their core business they would’ve already been in much better shape.
I doubt Joe Rogan and Barcelona has only caused grief. There’s a reason huge companies throw absurd amounts of money on advertising and right deals. It’s often lucrative and worth it.
As we don’t have the numbers we can only speculate in what return they got on those deals. But it was most definitely not 0.
Tour deals, merch and independent artists are great, but you do not reach critical mass when it comes to a general audience that way. It’s basically like trying to advertise on the Fediverse versus advertising on Reddit.
Marketing like that doesn’t have solid numbers. Did sponsoring FC Barcelona cause people to signup to Spotify? How many? How much revenue did they get from each one?
Even when people fill in the “where did you hear about us?” option during signup, the data there is murky, at best. You can try to do tracking like “we saw a 20% increase in signups during and immediately after FC Barcelona games”, but that’s still just a proxy measure. Maybe it isn’t 20%, but more like 2%, and that could easily be noise.
These deals tend to have an amorphous “increase in brand awareness” that has little hard data to back it up.
I can take your word for it, or I can consider the fact that basically every major company in the world does it. Somehow I don’t think it’s totally useless.
Yeah, that dude’s take reads just like climate science denial and flat earth conspiracies.
People who are good at marketing have convinced people with money to do it, yes.
Yeah spotify did wind up how most people listen to music, and podcasts. They had what people wanted and made it cheap. Then they also made a lot of decisions that wasted money. Dont know for certain but i doubt the exe there stopped geting big bonuses or pay cuts over those decisions
In it’s whole history, Spotify only made profits in two quarters and if I’m not wrong the other streaming services aren’t profitable either so it doesn’t looks to me that the problem is just over hiring but the nature of streaming business itself You also underestimate the power of sponsorship especially sponsoring sport. I’m sure a lot of people are using Spotify just for that. Investing in podcast make sense because it’s more profitable than music, Spotify need to diversify it’s revenues. You said that Spotify have good connectivity with lastfm but that’s not true. Most of issues lastfm users have with lastfm is related to Spotify.
Spotify has a lot of Blockbuster energy, but with a mixture of something far worse, since they did indeed stand by Rogen and profit off him.
IMO shareholders should be livid
Why? Shareholders gave Spotify billions of dollars - they expect the company to spend that money. Shareholders are quite capable of depositing their own money in a bank if they didn’t want it to be spent.
My take is Spotify hired over 5,000 employees over 2020 and 2021 when the economy looked great. Then Russia Invaded Ukraine in 2022 screwing the global economy and particularly Europe which is Spotify’s biggest market. They’ve laid off about half the people they hired, which is unfortunate… but it’s understandable. The couldn’t have foreseen the economic shift.
Spotify removed the need for mp3’s for the majority of people, largely killing iTunes
Huh? Apple’s music service has about a hundred million users. Up from eighty million a few years ago. Spotify has more than twice that, but iTunes is hardly dead.
Apple Music the music subscription service is different from iTunes the music purchasing store. When’s the last time you heard of anyone buying an individual song / album on iTunes?
I still buy music on iTunes. I prefer having my collection available on CD, but if I only want a single track or two, I just go to iTunes and buy the songs. This year, I think I bought 4 songs. It isn’t ton, but it is still in my mind.
When’s the last time you heard of anyone buying an individual song / album on iTunes?
I’m yet to hear a first time, and I remember when mp3s first became a thing.
You’ve never heard of someone buying music on iTunes?
Genuinely, never. It wasn’t that popular in my country.
I hear people buying music from Bandcamp everyday
R.I.P. Bandcamp
What happened to Bandcamp?
It was purchased by Epic Games a year ago, who recently sold it to Songtradr, a licensing platform for background/‘mood’ music. Songtradr only retained 50% of existing Bandcamp staff (the rest were laid off a few weeks after the sale AFAICT, with the worst affected departments including Bandcamp’s editorial team and customer support. Epic Games handled the severance package, for some reason.)
People are pretty upset about the editorial team being laid off because it provided exposure for smaller/niche artists in a weekly publication. I’ve never checked it out personally checked it out because I never knew it existed - wishing I had now
Such a large layoff so quickly by the new owner feels like a sign of darker times ahead for Bandcamp IMO, seeing that it’s apparently been profitable since 2012 (Wayback link, new owners have nuked this from the site?). No need to milk the cow even more when the bucket is full…
Yarrrrrr
This is the way
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Sometimes, I see some of the takes on here, and it’s hardly surprising that the fediverse isn’t particularly popular.
You genuinely think the reason the fediverse isn’t popular is because people have negative opinions of Spotify? As if these opinions wouldn’t also be prevalent on Reddit? As if having to see opinions you didn’t agree with was ever holding reddit back to begin with?
And yeah, Spotify made music streaming accessible, but the overall problem is they did what all tech companies at the time did: burned money to establish themselves hoping the profit would come later.
You’re praising them for killing iTunes, but maybe iTunes didn’t need to be killed. Maybe breaking markets with a type of streaming that wasn’t profitable and fucked over artists has given us a few years of good streaming, but the honeymoon is coming to an end, and we’ll all be worse off when the stockholders start demanding profit.
Same thing that happened with YouTube, basically. Company runs something at a loss for so long they’ve effectively broken the market and now that it’s time to make money, we’re all fucked over.
No it’s not because people here don’t like Spotify, but the stupid ass takes y’all have that lead to Spotify hate bleed through in half the other content on here that people don’t like either.
That fact that you thought ops comment was about disliking Spotify specifically reinforces it.
Exactly. The amount of insufferable people with absolute shit takes that wouldn’t stand in the real world is amazing here on lemmy
This problem existed on reddit too but it seems concentrated here, like all the people with shit takes who got ignored on reddit came here so there voice could be heard.
I wish the fediverse the best but at this point it feels like it’ll never progress past the few hundred thousand point due to the highschool level analysis of socioeconomic problems.
YouTube is fucking you over because they’re trying to get rid of freeloaders? How entitled.
I call bullshit. Yeah I’m sure they spend 2/3 of their income on rights holders, mainly Joe Rogan, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift.
The average musician isn’t making shit, and yet the spotify execs are sipping champagne.
The rights holders are the record labels. As much as artists want to complain about Spotify they should direct their criticism to their record labels.
Spotify is far from powerless in this arrangement too. Nobody is forcing them to be in this business.
Pretty sure Spotify is more powerless than you think. The record labels nearly burned their industry to the ground in the 2000s over digital piracy.
Netflix wouldn’t be around today if it wasn’t for their move into becoming their own movie studio thanks to just about every big Hollywood studio pulling out, arrogantly thinking that they can each run their own service for a bigger slice of the pie. Newsflash, it’s going really bad. Especially for Disney, who deserve everything coming to them.
I reckon if Spotify makes even a small move to undermine the big record labels, they would yank all the popular music. Spotify either wouldn’t last long or best case they down size into a niche music platform.
it’s going really bad. Especially for Disney, who deserve everything coming to them. <
I can’t like a statement hard enough. Amen.
Hold on, what’s going to happen to Disney? I got the impression they’re really eating into Netflix’ market share. They basically own a huge chunk of the content most people care about.
Basically the moral of the story is that Spotify should have followed in their footsteps and become their own record company.
Moral of the story is people should stop lowering their standards so those richer than them can be even richer.
What about independent artists?
If they were getting as many listens as Taylor Swift, I’m sure they’d be making bank. But they’re not. A listen ain’t worth a lot and never has been.
Not always. There are plenty of independent artists on Spotify making basically no money.
“not making profits”
Just massive salaries and equity
You know they don’t pay the artist directly? Like with physical the ones taking the biggest share are the labels… Also the average musician isn’t making shit cause compared to a very few bigger artists they represent an extremely low percentage of the overall streams on the platform.
Average musician probably makes more than you think https://youtu.be/qjb-pJIfQXI?si=Zbi54GvD3NqomIrv
Taylor Swift somehow being a hallmark of the times makes me wish the whole world would end in a giant ball of fire.
She’s not the worst role model we’ve ever seen, so at least the world isn’t completely mad. I think her music is mediocre, and don’t understand the fanfare, but to each their own.
I think as a person she’s fine. But as a branding machine… meh.
I’m glad bands I like aren’t big so I can afford to go to their shows :)
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I’m 30…and you? (kinda afraid to ask at this point lol)
Man, a lot of people here don’t understand how the music industry works. From the perspective of someone who’s been loosely following the music industry, what I’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter if Spotify gave up 2/3rds of their revenue, or 100% of it, the artists would still make fuck all.
Why?
The labels love taking their cuts and as a result, artists make very little. Instead of taking the blame for giving artists a <10% cut of the label’s revenue from their music (my understanding is that it’s pretty common for musicians to get <10%, sometimes <5% if you’re on a particularly shitty label), the labels are blaming platforms like Spotify.
Now, I’m not saying that Spotify is blameless, however I think there’s a lot of misdirection from the labels going on. I don’t remember anyone complaining about pre-spotify services like Pandora Radio for not paying out enough when they were largely ad-supported, which is another reason I’m not totally buying the, “it’s cause it’s free” argument either.
Fuck, remember Pandora?
Labels are an outdated concept that needs to die. Now that you can find any music from just a quick search artists shouldn’t have to rely on them, at least not as heavily, for advertising.
There was a very, very brief moment from about 2005 to 2011 or so where there was money to be made directly by artists on iTunes or the other music stores where the tracks were like 99 cents each.
But people stopped buying as soon as Spotify became popular, and now any artist that wants to release on Spotify without a label still doesn’t make much money.
Relatively “large” truly independent bands like KNOWER are starting to give true home recording a base of proof of functionality.
Power to bandcamp.
You’ve got my heart working overtime. Louis Cole is a monster.
Why isn’t there some kind of genre music search for all artists without a label, Foss of course. From what I understand, when you’re starting out in music, getting people to hear it is the hardest part.
Artists aren’t forced to sign a contract with a label. They do it because they want to.
They do it because the label will often invest a million dollars in the artist upfront before the songs are even available for the public to stream.
Good recording studios are expensive to hire. And if you want a video track to go with it… those are even worse.
Uhhhh, dunno about that one. Pretty sure it’s public knowledge labels will go to almost any lengths to ensure artists cannot be independent, especially when they’re small. Good recording quality is quite readily available in many large cities, either as a paid service (which sometimes is still outbid by labels), or through a public library. Many of the issues of “labels investing in artists” loop back around to “labels have made it physically impractical or impossible for the artist to invest in themselves”.
Ehh, you’ve got a different but similar problem these days. Before, it was hard to get the word out so even finding new bands was difficult. Now, there are so many artists that you’ve got to find a way to stand out. Still need marketing. That’s what labels provide.
You don’t need to give up the rights to your music to a third party for them to do marketing or handling legal matters for you. You just need to pay them for their services. And you should be able to choose from several competitors in the market, based on what they offer and what you want/need/can afford. So yeah, record labels shouldn’t exist anymore.
It’s not needed, but for some reason artists keep signing, so there is probably something they provide that makes it worth it
It’s because it’s the only game in town.
Indies are on sporify too. Spotify pays them shit too. Label or not.
They just changed the rules so that if smaller artists don’t get a certain number of plays they don’t even get a payout.
With less than 1000 streams per year.
This is solely to kick out the AI generated music, which is already taking a significant share of the payout from the musicians.
This change is not against smaller artists, but for them.
I kind of call bullshit on that take.
There’s definitely AI generated music that can surpass 1000 streams per year and many real bands that cannot.
Less than 1000 streams is like a band being unable to fill up a 100-person venue for a 10-song set once in a year (for the kind of band that plays live gigs). Opening acts for obscure bands play more than that. If you’re that unpopular, you’re hardly a band at all.
They didn’t say all AI generated music gets less than 1000 streams; they implied most of it does.
But then are you implying that those bands that are that unpopular are undeserving of getting paid even a little? Because they’re not a “real” band?
Stuff that nobody wants to listen to just takes up space and clutters up searches, making it harder for people to find the stuff they actually want. It had negative value for the platform and for users. That’s why they went the AI stuff gone. If a few actual bands miss out on a few dollars of revenue as a result of Spotify getting rid of the outright junk, I’m not gonna shed a tear over it.
I thought it was 2,000?
Pandora didn’t replace buying music. They did not add the “on demand streaming” option until after Spotify was prevalent.
I still use pandora free daily!
Lots of people still use, and even pay for, Pandora.
Do you know how the merch shops works? Spotify seems to be a reseller of some kind. How many % of the money is going to the artist usually?
Not talking about Spotify merch, didn’t even know that was a thing. I was talking about buying merch from the artist themselves.
I’ll take “Unethical accounting” for 500, Alex
And the artists still don’t really make shit from it.
It was them or Joe Rogan
How is this news? The price you pay for media of any kind I can think of goes mostly to the rights holders, not the companies physically delivering it to you. You may object to the rights holders being shitty record labels, but that term also includes independent artists. And more to the point, rights holders are by definition the people who are entitled to profit from selling access to the media they own.
If you want to get pissed at someone, get pissed at the record labels sharing a ridiculously small part of their licensing fees with the artists who make their product.
Equity.
In total, at the close of last year, SEC documents show that exactly 65 percent of Spotify was owned by just six parties: the firm’s co- founders, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon (30.6 percent of ordinary shares between them); Tencent Holdings Ltd. (9.1 percent); and a run of three asset-management specialists: Baillie Gifford (11.8 percent), Morgan Stanley (7.3 percent), and T.Rowe Price Associates (6.2 percent). These three investment powerhouses owned more than 25 percent of Spotify between them — a fact worth remembering next time there’s an argument about whose interests Spotify is acting in when it makes controversial moves (for example, SPOT’s ongoing legal appeal against a royalty pay rise for songwriters in the United States).
Furthermore, according to MBW estimates, which my sources suggest are still solid, two major record companies — Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group — continue to jointly own between six percent and seven percent of Spotify (Sony around 2.35 percent and Universal around 3.5). With Sony and UMG added into the mix, then, the names mentioned here comfortably own more than 70 percent of Spotify.
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/who-really-owns-spotify-955388/>And yet, they still aren’t even close to the highest paying service when it comes to musicians getting their cut.
https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-do-music-streaming-services-pay-musicians
It’s hilarious that Napster now tops the list. I use Tidal, myself, since it’s got great quality audio. Spotify is horrible quality for 2023.
Spotify is horrible quality for 2023
To my surprise, even Spotify’s standard (not high or very high) is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible for the average consumer to differentiate from lossless (on better than consumer grade hardware). Upon hearing this, me and several friends decided to test it for ourselves by taking lossless files for several songs and resampling them to the same codec and bitrates that Spotify’s standard quality uses, then ABX testing the before and after with Foobar’s ABX and exclusive mode plugins (also tried the popular comparison website, but that’s apparently less accurate). One of my friends had access to a college studio, I have a dac and sennheiser, and the third had sony wxm4s. To our surprise, none of us could consistently differentiate the two. Its not perfect considering we didn’t grab the outputs directly from the streaming platforms, but that would’ve added extra variables like volume normalizing (louder sounds better).
Our conclusion is that the quality “difference” is likely placebo and probably a waste of bandwidth.
i figured having volume normalizer off would be the best quality
i think a lot of people that complain about the “bad” quality simply have the volume normalizer on, which makes the quality worse for some songs
I wholeheartedly disagree. I have more trained ears then most (worked in video production), but not by much, and when i got my AirPods Max, I thought they sounded awful at first. They were crunchy and dithered sounding in this weird way. I was gonna return them, but I did some testing, and discovered that I was hearing Spotify compression. I turned up the quality as high as it would go in the settings, and that made it a little bit better, but I could still hear it, and can to this day. I did some further testing by signing up for a tidal free trial, in addition to Apple Music. Listening in lossless was an entirely different experience, I could definitely tell the two apart blindly, without even specifically looking for sound quality. There were like 2 to 3 instruments in a given song that I wouldn’t be able to pick out in the lower quality audio, that I could easily pick out in the lossless audio. You have to have a pretty decent pair of headphones to be able to hear it, but some of the higher and consumer stuff can definitely hit that level, and when you do, it’s not something you have to go looking for, it sounds very obvious.
Do you realize AirPods Max/iPhone is capped at AAC/256 kbps over BT, and needs DAC -> ADC -> DAC to use a wired connection?
Yep, absolutely this.
You cannot listen to music losslessly with AirPods Max, cabled or not.
From Apple’s own site: “The Lightning to 3.5 mm Audio Cable was designed to allow AirPods Max to connect to analog sources for listening to movies and music. AirPods Max can be connected to devices playing Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless recordings with exceptional audio quality. However, given the analog-to-digital conversion in the cable, the playback will not be completely lossless.”
If someone thinks AirPods Max sound amazing, they’re agreeing how good compressed audio can sound, whether they realise it or not.
If someone thinks AirPods Max sound amazing, they’re agreeing how good compressed audio can sound, whether they realize it or not.
Yes! (Kinda) I’m not saying lossless music is the end all be all, and honestly in normal life I prefer non-lossless, because its SOO much less data, and you can hardly tell the difference in normal listening anyway. What I was trying to express was how bad badly done compression can sound. Good compression exists, and it can sound nearly identical anecdotally, but there is a limit to how low you can go before you start hearing it, and I’m trying to say that I think Spotify has chosen a rate below that level by default. I switched to a higher profile and the problem is mostly gone.
There may be other factors at play, Apple quite likes to compress stream data between their own devices, even on “standard” protocols (just look at their monitor collaboration with LG where they did the same thing to exceed the max resolution of an existing display signal). Regardless, there is a difference, and it is not a small one. It was immediately obvious to me after listening to a single song. Something about the pipeline is crunching audio to the level where it’s obviously degraded. This isn’t audiophile grade splitting hairs and “I think it sounds ever so slightly better with these gold cables” it was like the difference between 480p and 1080p video to me, enough to be actually annoying during normal listening, even if I was actively trying to forget about it.
Ok it sounds like what you experienced was caused by something completely different than detecting an audible difference between Spotify’s 320 kbps AAC encoding and lossless encoding, encoded over a 256 kbps AAC BT codec, but if you actually want to do a true A/B blind test of 320 kbps vs. lossless on your setup, here’s the place to do it:
https://abx.digitalfeed.net/ (select the first link - “The statistically valid Tidal test to make”)
I’m not trained in anything useful but I had a similar experience. It was like upgrading from a 720 screen to a 4k screen.
as a young 20 year old i doubt those services have new music. Spotify has albums SAME day
im sure that works great for oldies like blink182 tho
They do
If you want to support an artist pirate their music and see them in concert.
This is outdated and bad information. Most small artists lose money touring. Bigger artists might break even.
If you can buy merch, do that, if you can buy physically do that. Spotify is gonna pay pennies for thousands of streams, so nothing you do on spotify is going to benefit an artist. But “pirate and see live” is probably gonna result in a negative bank balance for artists.
Nothing short of handing them cash in person is truly a guarantee. Really depressing how it’s turned out.
Bandcamp is a decent platform… for now
Faircamp might be a good avenue in the future.
Has anything really happened since they were acquired by Epic last year?
Epic sold it to a company called Songtradr, who shortly laid off a good chunk of the staff. They haven’t done too much so far, but it could easily go south from here.
That’s not a guarantee either unless you know how much they spent getting in a position for you to hand them cash.
I think Taylor Swift just about broke even, mostly thanks to my wife and her friends.
Nice try ticket Master!
Some artists that people like may never come to their city
Buy merch
It’s rare for me to find merch worth buying, I prefer buying the music.
Maybe buying it directly from their website might be the better option in this case? 🤔
It’s about the effort artists make for merch, I don’t want to buy a t-shirt with a simplistic design or just a sentence on it
I meant buying the CD/music on their website
Physical albums are merch.
Unless it’s a ticketmaster concert because fuck them.
Lol. Yes, ticket service fees, venue fees, and reseller makerts is totally the best way to support an artist, especially if you live no where near a tour location.
“Support”
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Honnestly Deezer Student has “HIFI” file on in so it’s great for me But I’m quite certain when Spotify HIFI will be launched I’ll already pass on to Quobuz because I wont be a student anymore
I will be ready to pay for Spotify again if they bring that.
I mostly listen to smaller bands and buy their stuff on Bandcamp. It sucks that Bandcamp was sold (twice now) and will probably go down the shitter, but that seemed like a more sustainable model. Also buying music is nicer than renting it for me.
Team Bandcamp as well. I’ll be sad if it degrades. My hope is it survives long enough to be discovered by everyone as they get sick of the shit music streams on Spotify, Pandora and their ilk
How much money would they want to skim to distribute the music? 33-66 split doesn’t sound so bad considered that they don’t produce the music, sign artist, promote them, etc
They can always start their own label if they believe that vertical integration will be more profitable for them.
They tried that with podcasts and it didn’t go as planned
33% is a massive amount for effectively just being a download service. massive
For reference, the Steam store of the gaming distributor Valve charges 30% of each sale, however the Steam service provides quite a bit of incentive. Having community and discussions easily accessible, cloud storage that links to screenshots and saves, branches, I’m sure there’s more.
Meanwhile Spotify gives you, what, playlist creations?
Because servers and traffic are free. Totally forgot how you don’t have to pay the people keeping the service alive either. A steam game you download once? Maybe once a year? Music gets streamed (downloaded) every single time unless you decide to download it. Can we maybe not pretend like Spotify does fucking nothing?
servers and traffic are basically free, it’s very low cost - their expenses are salaries not servers.
I didn’t mention servers because that is their only cost next to employees.
If they aren’t paying artists well, well what’s the point of having servers.
Maybe can we not pretend like Spotify is some up and coming startup that barely breaks even because of their benevolence?
Because apparently these servers cost enough that even with 400mil users they aren’t making profit? The point of Spotify is giving paying customers what they want so that hopefully Spotify can make a profit. Unsure why that’s so unacceptable for you? And small artists have been paid like shit long before Spotify was an idea. Take that up with the actual music industry. Or maybe accept that turning your hobby (making music) into a job just doesn’t pay the bills for everybody that tries. I have no idea how you can blame Spotify for payouts bigger than on YouTube or Twitch when it’s the music industry fucking with the numbers.
Many of their executives make over $300,000 and the CEO is a billionaire. I don’t know how you can’t blame Spotify for payouts.
Servers and employees. Nothing else. Got it. No office space, no advertising, no royalties.
What a genius business plan. No wonder they’re so successful.
Then I’m sure their executives would be happy to take a pay cut to make the business profitable.
Meanwhile Spotify gives you, what, playlist creations?
Distribution is hardly free. There are massive overheads - do you know all the details of sales tax law in your own country? What about in hundreds of other countries? They’re all different. And what about refund laws? That’s also different in each country. If someone writes you an email in a language you don’t even recognise… do you just ignore it? To give one example in my country if a customer asks for a tax receipt after a purchase, you are required by law to give it to them. That’s hard to comply if you don’t speak the same language as the customer. Spotify handles all those headaches for you.
What if your bank tells you they have refunded the payment someone made to buy your album, pending an investigation into wether or not the cardholder actually authorised the payment and received what was advertised. Can you prove it wasn’t a stolen card? Can you prove the album was delivered to the customer? The bank isn’t going to do that for you - they’re happy to just refund the payment (and might charge the seller a $50 processing fee…). Spotify is able to provide proof and will fight people who demand unreasonable refunds. You probably can’t prove it, which means anyone who wants a free album can just buy it and complain to their bank. And trust me, it will happen. Might not even be your customers asking for refunds - it might be a rival band that wants you to suffer. If there are too many refunds, the bank will just take way your ability to sell stuff.
Spotify takes 30 %, too. The ‘one third’ in the headline is just rounding.
And the question should be if digital markets and platforms should take 30 % or not. Because every platform does so from Steam to Apple App Store to Spotify.
Besides that Spotify offers more than Steam imho. Playlist creation, discovery algorithms, individualized playlist generation, AI DJs and if you consider Steam to also be a social platform, Spotify is too.
the actual article we are commenting under thinks its outrageous that Spotify only gets 30% and things artists should get less. so it’s not “should they take 30% or not”, the question posed is “why are the greedy labels not letting spotify take even more” for some reason, madness
Distributing the music is basically free these days - at least for the artist/label anyway. Artists can pay about ten bucks (per album) to various cloud services which will handle distribution - and that includes global physical CD distribution (via an online store, not retail stores). That cost is often $4 per disc and paid by the purchaser.
Recording an album and music video can cost a fortune, and marketing the album can cost an infinite amount of money. That’s where the record label spends most of their money and it’s not a fixed figure - it gets negotiated for each album. AFAIK the split between the artist and label usually varies depending on wether the label’s investment has been paid for yet. And marketing is an ongoing expense, the label can keep spending money on that indefinitely (and the artist probably wants them to keep spending money on marketing).
Profit can be distorted based on how much you’re paying your employees.
In this case royalties paid out to imaginary property holders means spotify is functioning exactly how it should. Those people are profiting, spotify’s employees are being paid. Everyone directly involved has more money than they need.
except tht artists, which is more the fault of the rights holders in this case really…
Poor Spotify. Here’s a Link to a documentary about the dark side of Spotify, by Slightly Sociable. Their illegal business, extortion of artists and support for scamming.
Still not paying for it.
Amen! Ownership counts!
