I think our perceptions of this can be distorted also - especially when you have millionaire musicians complaining about their royalties. Please.
But also, depends on your aims. I generally think being an artist with the intention of making money is a bit cynical to begin with. That should be a side-effect of success, not something any of us really aim for. Like a kid being determined that he’ll play for Manchester United it’s kind of down to more than your confidence.
Artists have never really made money selling their music - what an artist takes home from a CD sale will be less than an iTunes purchase - but artists like me and you would have never made any money making music. It would have been a fantasy even 30 years ago. I made $300 this year!
Nah, there was already plenty of ways to share music before spotify
Because artists allowed it.
Capitalism? Or crony capitalism/corporatism?
It really isn’t, especially in the case of spotify but also in a wider sphere. One of the features of capitalism is if you don’t like some company you do not have to give them your money.
Human greed and convenience is the problem, making things like spotify an easy sell.
I’m not trying to be preachy here BTW but that is how I see it, I don’t think I am being reductive, I just think that where better alternatives exist they should be used, and that is what I try to do, if it means me having less in my pocket and less “stuff” and a little less convenience I am ok with that.
Actually more that customers demanded it. That was the platform they chose. This is the challenge successful artists have when making moral choices about a platform like Spotify, they can punish their fans more than themselves by removing their music from certain platforms so it’s not the great self-sacrifice it can be framed as.
But it can also impact your success as an artist if you’re one of the few that choose not to be on a popular platform. I stopped listening to TOOL for years because they weren’t on the platforms I used. I’m not going to keep a HiFi just for them. They’re now on Spotify - I assume at some point they realised that whatever they were gaining from not being on the platform wasn’t worth it.
I don’t disagree that consumers should be choosy with where they spend their money - it’s something I practice frequently in life, as I’m privalaged enough to be able to.
I also don’t think Spotify is the boogeyman they’re being made out here anyway tbh, this is the music industry we’re talking about here it’s not like they’ve ever been generous towards artists.
If they were manufacturing arms then it would be a different story.
My wife’s hair salon banned staff from logging in to Spotify and gave up on Tidal, eventually switching to the far more pleasant, human-curated and advert-free FIP. Clients seem to prefer it and generally ask what it is (especially when the announcer starts speaking in French).
as long as we have bandcamp or soundcloud we can be really really happy… I mean it really could be better.
Soundcloud works ok for me, while bandcamp not even close… But it is what it is…
But I deceided to put my music down from spotify. I hate this shit. I dont use it, and I would never again put my music there. Maybe I lose some plays. I really dont give a f***…
Its kinda shitty, they pay way too less… blabla.
Benn Jordan has 20 albums there, 7m streams and got 25k for one year. So its pretty pretty low what they pay. He would have way more money if he worked in a regular job.
In germany spotify gets manipulated mostly by some rapdudes that buy plays. So the charts get manipulated as well. But I dont care about this crap. I only know for me that I dont want my music on the mainstream media music streaming site.
I always called it “music for people who don’t like music” But yeah. There is some universal soldier going on here. People have a responsibility to educate themselves and not be pap fed morons. Karen could pick something better to listen to.
Pretty sure in 1984 music was generated for pleb consumption. Spotify just playing their role in the dystopia. For any of it to work people have to favour convenience above all else. It is not enough to say “marketing made me do it”, free yourself.
Depending on how critical you want to be it goes back way further than that. Genres like Easy Listening come to mind.
But I don’t like the gatekeeping angle, personally - if one needs to ‘educate themselves’ to enjoy art then the fault is in the art not the audience. Art belongs to the masses, not the elite. It’s thinking like that leads people to listen to Jazz, and that’s just cruel.
Most of them listen to playlists on Spotify or whatever as their main method of musical consumption.
Most of them still refer to my music making as DJing, largely because they have no interest in it.
But most of their musical consumption has always been a treadmill of corporate bullshit, their listening habits are rarely encroached upon by anything you might regard as art and never really have been.
Spotify may host art, but that’s secondary to its primary purpose of pumping musical valium into the ears of people who don’t really want to think about it.
It’s a bit like if Merzbow decided to start stocking his records in Tesco, then started kicking off because no-one was buying them.
If you’re an artist and you want to make a bit of cash, use Bandcamp.
My music really isn’t very good in the scheme of things and I make zero effort to promote myself outside of here and I’ve made a few hundred quid on Bandcamp. I imagine if I put a bit of work in on both the quality of my output and promoting it, I could probably do alright.
I see absolutely no point in anyone being on Spotify unless they’re getting several million streams a month, unless you think being on there helps to reach more people or whatever.
