Hot Take/ Musical Confession Thread!

Lee Newman said:
So all the talk about Spotify recently got me thinking… is the royalty per stream really that crappy (I mean I know it is in comparison to other platforms) but If you think about it pay per stream is different than radio play. Radio play you were getting x amount for every play that reached a variable amount of people… Spotify is paying for each time a song is played…. Many of the folks getting these itty bitty checks probably weren’t getting any checks in the past…. Just a thought. Feel free to rip me a new one.
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Indymisanthrope said:
MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger tweeted about this the other day. Neil Young's personal position on Spotify is fine, but he also has absolutely no financial dependency on streaming in the first place. Mike's point is that there might be more meaningful ways for somebody like Neil Young to make his views known (like publicly earmarking his Spotify revenue for vaccination efforts) than potentially creating a 'movement' in which artists feel pressure to remove their catalogues from a service that provides them with critical exposure/revenue (minuscule as the latter may be).

Neil's in an interesting situation as someone with the privilege & influence to be able to make this move without any fear of the repercussions, but none of this hurts his bottom line, either. Is it still noble to do something like this when the stakes for those who follow are much higher than they are for you? Also, is that nobility diluted at all by the narrowness of the argument (aligning with Amazon Music is a move of dubious virtue on its own merits, even if Amazon isn't directly paying for anti-vax propaganda)?

(Not to mention that guys like Rogan paradoxically thrive on efforts to "silence" them. I think he's garbage too, but I'm concerned that giving any oxygen to spurious 'censorship' arguments is effectively feeding the troll.)
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I’m reading Dave Grohl’s book and It’s sounds like with Scream (a somewhat influential punk band) and early days with Nirvana (Bleach was pretty big for a punk record and set them up for shopping the next album around)… Dave pretty much lived the life these guys are talking about. I think the machine got too big and some of this is right sizing. Even with that, we have folks like Billie Eilish coming out of nowhere and doing well for themselves. It’s just a different hustle.

I personally have been chewing over Spotify, but most of the other options aren’t much better. I think streaming is great for discovery and for throwing my faves a few cents when I’m at work or whatever. I think there are bigger fish to fry than Spotify. I also think the Rogan angle is just whack, there’s plenty of positive Spotify exclusive podcasts too. Neil makes his position even more whack because he’s made his alternative of choice Amazon. Really, dude?
 
Lee Newman said:
So all the talk about Spotify recently got me thinking… is the royalty per stream really that crappy (I mean I know it is in comparison to other platforms) but If you think about it pay per stream is different than radio play. Radio play you were getting x amount for every play that reached a variable amount of people… Spotify is paying for each time a song is played…. Many of the folks getting these itty bitty checks probably weren’t getting any checks in the past…. Just a thought. Feel free to rip me a new one.
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It’s way less that radio play royalty. Sportily are by far the stingiest of the better known steaming providers (4x less than Apple; 8x less than Tidal and I think it’s 40x less than Qobuz). But even the best paying is streaming platform is substantially below radio play royalties. In fact the campaign led by UK artists is to have a minimum stream royalty that mirrors that from a radio play.
 
Joe Mac said:
It’s way less that radio play royalty. Sportily are by far the stingiest of the steaming providers (4x less than Apple; 8x less than Tidal and I think it’s 40x less than Qobuz). But even the best paying is streaming platform is substantially below radio play royalties. In fact the campaign led by UK artists is to have a minimum stream royalty that mirrors that from a radio play.
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Again it isn’t apples to apples though. Radio royalties weren’t per listener per listen. They were per play. 1 play might reach 5 million listeners (makes even Spotify look like a windfall) or 1 listener (clearly radio wins)
 
Lee Newman said:
If we really wanted to stick it to Spotify, we would just leave it running all the time on completely random shit or our favorite smaller artists.
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Equally radio royalties are considered a potential and viable income stream whereas spotify royalty payment received by even established indie artists are oft considered comical and a bit of an insult. I don’t necessarily always buy the exposure angle either because I’ve never been able to pay my rent or buy food from exposure. The other white elephant in the room is the cancer that is YouTube.

amp.theguardian.com

MPs call for ‘complete reset’ of music streaming to protect artists

Committee calls for investigation into whether competition in the recorded music market is being distorted
amp.theguardian.com amp.theguardian.com
 
BjorgenFjorgen said:
That would marginally increase the payout to smaller artists and in no way stick it to Spotify. The only way to stick it to Spotify is to unsubscribe.
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Yes because Spotify currently pays a proportion of a part of the streaming fees based on the percentage of overall streams. So what you’d basically be doing is boosting the couple of cents that the artists you are streaming constantly gets by taking a few cents away from another artist.

Edit: this is, as far as I’m aware the model that all the streaming services use just that the others are setting aside a larger proportion of their incomings to royalties.
 
Joe Mac said:
Yes because Spotify currently pays a proportion of a part of the streaming fees based on the percentage of overall streams. So what you’d basically be doing is boosting the couple of cents that the artists you are streaming constantly gets by taking a few cents away from another artist.

Edit: this is, as far as I’m aware the model that all the streaming services use just that the others are setting aside a larger proportion of their incomings to royalties.
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I always see .0003 being thrown out, are you saying it is more complicated than that? Are there people effectively making no money?
 
Lee Newman said:
I agree with your first counter. However, if everyone did it…. It would indeed have a financial impact.
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Definitely. And basically all streaming services are shit and destroying the livelihoods of our favourite musicians. But spending our dollars elsewhere is the only way to change it here. The onus is on subscribers to make a stand here, not on the small artists competing fractions of our pennies.
 
It's like the lottery, in a factual way. Take in $X. Arbitrarily divide up $Y. Profit $Z (also arbitrarily decided depending on where the execs want to vacation that quarter). Adjusting who is being streamed just redistributes $Y.
 
Yeah I don’t think comparing a radio station to spotify is a fair comparison. Spotify also has to cover the costs just for hosting all of that content for so many artists that may get less than a thousand streams in a year and making it available for billions of people around the world to access. Radio stations don’t shoulder that kind of a burden (or provide that benefit) and they play a lot more ads unless you pay at least $10 a month for sirius xm. Spotify probably loses money on the massive volume of artists who have uploaded their music for free just to get that visibility and give their fans that access, but don’t get streamed frequently.

The reason why most artists put their music on spotify is not because of the revenue but because of the exposure and access to new listeners who wouldn’t blind-buy their albums but may be interested in streaming to check them out (which may lead to purchasing concert tickets and/or LPs). At the end of the day, artists and labels know the terms and get to choose whether their music goes on Spotify. As @Indymisanthrope already said, Neil Young doesn’t need the exposure to get folks to buy his albums or concert tickets so there’s less value for him.

If people weren’t awful, Spotify could probably raise their per stream royalty payments, but they’ve already had issues with people trying to game the system by just endlessly looping streams of their own songs to generate revenue
(Sleepify - Wikipedia). Spotify can’t control how often billions of people will stream songs in a given month or year, whereas a radio station has total control over how many songs they play.

I feel like the fact that they don’t have high-res streaming actually works to the artists’ benefit because it encourages people to buy their physical media if they want better sound quality.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger tweeted about this the other day. Neil Young's personal position on Spotify is fine, but he also has absolutely no financial dependency on streaming in the first place. Mike's point is that there might be more meaningful ways for somebody like Neil Young to make his views known (like publicly earmarking his Spotify revenue for vaccination efforts) than potentially creating a 'movement' in which artists feel pressure to remove their catalogues from a service that provides them with critical exposure/revenue (minuscule as the latter may be).

Neil's in an interesting situation as someone with the privilege & influence to be able to make this move without any fear of the repercussions, but none of this hurts his bottom line, either. Is it still noble to do something like this when the stakes for those who follow are much higher than they are for you? Also, is that nobility diluted at all by the narrowness of the argument (aligning with Amazon Music is a move of dubious virtue on its own merits, even if Amazon isn't directly paying for anti-vax propaganda)?

(Not to mention that guys like Rogan paradoxically thrive on efforts to "silence" them. I think he's garbage too, but I'm concerned that giving any oxygen to spurious 'censorship' arguments is effectively feeding the troll.)
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I consider Neil's action as a singular counter-action of free speech which has the intention of impacting Spotify's bottom line. Because he doesn't rely on streaming and because of his outsized influence - he can have a significant impact on a company as big as Spotify.

Doing this also helps open a dialogue for each person to examine their own thought process about all of this (as astutely done here in this thread). E.G. I want to stream or explore Neil Young - but why cant I do that on Spotify? Because he disagrees with their content? Really, what content? Well what do I think about that? Do I agree?

This, in and of itself, is a good reason to pull his music. And Neil only needs to be concerned with Neil. Same as you or me.

Where is all gets twisted is when anyone else tries to put all the square pegs into the round hole Neil fits into. Value shaming any other artist for not doing what Neil has done is where, IMO, this all goes off the rails.

To your point, smaller artists may need the eyeballs/streams to eek out a living. They should not be vilified or diminished because they don't have the power to drive dollars away from or to create a critical mass of people thinking critically about Spotify, their business practices and what Spotify supports.

Also: I have no thoughts on JR. Never listened to him, I don't know enough about the content at issue or the context of the statements to have a value added comment or opinion.

Edit: Meanwhile - Jeff Bezos can fuck RIGHT Off.
gizmodo.com

Historic Bridge May Be Dismantled for Jeff Bezos' Big, Beautiful Boat

The ship's three massive masts are too tall for the nearly century-old bridge's 40-meter clearance.
gizmodo.com gizmodo.com
 
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moohoohahaha said:
I wonder how many artists go to bed each night with their latest album on Spotify set to play on repeat. If not many, they should...and on multiple devices. :)
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If they all did that they’d get approximately the same amount of money given they get a percentage of a pie dependsnt on the percentage of overall streams that are their own rather than an actual set amount per stream.
 
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