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If your business can’t pay it’s workers (artists) fairly, your business doesn’t deserve to exist.
Tell that to American restaurants.
We have been
Not trying to glaze, but Trudeau had the same idea here in Canada, and Google and Facebook and most of the internet crucified him for it.
The internet doesn’t tend to like to pay the actual cost for things. You’ll find very little sympathy for paid services, especially here on Lemmy.
Yes but we do agree with fair pay
Tidal has the highest artist payouts typically, besides YouTube I believe.
Make your choices ppl.
those choices of the minority won’t matter in the long run when the other service is cheaper and has the fatter marketing budget.
just look at the refusal of normies to adopt something like mastodon just because you need a couple extra steps.
Is that for youtube videos not youtube music? Pretty sure YT music pays less than spotify by a wide margin.
Found a handy little Music Streaming Royalties Calculator thing in this article. It’s not 100% accurate because none of the services pay the same rate for every song, but it shows how huge the payout discrepancies are.
Is there objective way to define what is fair? Otherwise words “fair pay” make 0 sense
True it’s probably going to become an outdated concept and what is really needed would be an universal basic income
Can get fair pay if the customers aren’t paying
Not really the same, this was more large Canadian companies trying to extort money from Google whilst google still gives them their traffic.
Not trying to defend gogle, that company can burn to the ground as far as I care, but it wasn’t the same
The artists aren’t going to get more money. Just that the consumer won’t have their music now.
its* workers
“Spotify already pays nearly 70% of every dollar it generates from music to the record labels and publishers
Sounds like the issue might be with the record labels…
I work for a label and need to press that no artist would get actually big without their label. Nit because the artist isn’t good, but because if you can’t get deals with radio stations, deals with streaming services to get on curated playlists, interviews with Graham Norton/other shows, nomination/performances at award shows, promotions on tick tok, commercial/movie soundtrack deals, world tours, tradional advertising. Etc etc. Then you’re never going to be making good money in the industry.
And music is infamously not very lucrative in terms of entertainment. Film, TV and video games companies are actually ordered of magnitude more profitable.
It’s clear that labels are acting as gatekeepers, but are they productive gatekeepers? Or just skimming off of the top — that is, rent seeking, profiting even when they provide little value themselves. It seems like there’s a lot of the latter going on.
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Well that’s damning
In a letter sent to Uruguay’s Minister of Education Pablo Da Silveira, a spokesperson for Spotify said: “If the proposed reform became law in its current form, Spotify’s business in Uruguay could become unfeasible, to the detriment of Uruguayan music and its fans,” claiming that the amendment would force it to “pay twice” the amount of royalties.
Spotify currently pays out at 70%. Doubling royalties would cause them to pay out more than they make in subscription and ad revenue. This is why they’re shutting down.
70% of what?
If that’s subscription revenue in Uruguay then the business model is just not feasible, unless they up the subscription fees to adequately cover costs.
This is the risk when the revenue model doesn’t scale with th cost model.
70% per dollar apparently. It’s mostly large record labels taking the lion share though I think, independent artists make pennies.
95% of the royalty pool goes to 200000 artists who generate 15% of the content. Sounding less fair the more you look at it.
Depends doesn’t it? If I make a song that is listened to zero times, I wouldn’t expect to get a payout that equals Spotify subscriber income split by amount of songs. Disregarding the popularity.
The entertainment business, is a one-to-many business and money follows whomever sits at the top of the pyramid. And it was the exactly the same before the streaming era.
If you make a great song, and Dua Lipa makes a crap song, which one would be featured and added into playlists by Spotify’s algorithms? It’s not a level playing field. It doesn’t promote content that isn’t already popular.
I’m sure that songs that tend to become popular are probably promoted first. And I think we agree that you can always do more work to showcase lesser known artists.
But with that said, it has never been easier to get your music published. And any idiot can make their music globally available. Which is a win for smaller artists.
And the songs that Spotify put in my Discover Weekly list, often has less than 10.000 plays. So in that regard their algorithm work in the unknown artists favour.
On a platform like Spotify I don’t really see the issue here.
Have you ever looked through the other 85% of the content? Excluding finding some obscure hits, most of it is trash.
Unless we want to argue that any art in our current economical system should be of equal value no matter what.
There’s too much music out there…
But it’s based almost entirely on actually streams. So they only get the majority of royalties because they get the majority of streams.
Which is mostly due to Spotify’s playlist and algorithms. Which fall victim to the positive feedback loop issue. Those popular artists are suggested, promoted, and played more frequently so more people hear them and thus play them more. It’s not a level playing ground. It’s a self generating walled garden of artists.
Doubling means rising the price and not shutting down or giving less to some and more to others. The new price may be too expensive for the customer. In this case, the service or the business model is the issue.
An other regulation may be to pay egally all artists per listen with this point regulated as well.
Spotify didn’t turn a profit yet. I would be pessimistic on the business model knowing the Majors take the majority of the 70%. Spotify is de facto a monopoly and so the Majors. With a fair price, the issue is to see the Majors quit the service and launch their own service. Spotify would be useless with only the indep (this is sad). They are protecting their money and the Majors. They don’t care about the smaller artists.
Spotify is hardly a monopoly by any standards. I agree that they have a large market share and in some countries Spotify is synonymous with music. But there’s plenty of options
Damming = behaving like a dam
Damning is what you mean I imagine!
Thanks! Gotta love autocucumber!
Lol autocucumber
They were obviously trying to write anticoncubine.
No, no, let him cook, the water is money and Spotify holding it back.
I dig it
Well I’ll be dammed!
This is at least the second time Spotify has refused to be decent.
Yeah they would cease to exist.
And then nobody gets anything, not even the guys just running a white noise playlist, and making money off of it.
I would love to go back to an artist release model and purchase model where non superstars (with big label circulation) can be successful again.
As is, the same corps own the radio and the venues and the ads. Spotify harms Mariah Carey for example by undervaluing her songs on streaming, but at a fraction of the harm it inflicts to smaller artists.
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Oh I’m sure no one on the multi billion dollar a week music industry would get anything
…from Spotify going bankrupt, they definitely would stop getting money from Spotify, though, which is clearly what we’re talking about.
It would be nice if they provided a link to the text of the bill.
more reasons to join Funkwhale
This is really neat. Never heard of it till now. As both an artist and developer I always felt that a decentralized and federated option for audio was the future.
I hope you’ll check it out. I have an account on funkwhale.it as it allows up to 5GB of storage free of charge, which is the best I’ve seen for open registration instances (it also happens to be the first I learned of as I use several of the other features of the devol.it who operates that instance, simply because their cryptpad instance was the fisrt thing that showed up when I did a DDG search for Free and Federated Online Documents).
Guess I should finally try Tidal…
Or just stop giving these shitty corporations money altogether and start pirating.
Take a look at these amazing guides:
https://ripped.guide/Audio/Music/
And join !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Personally, I use deemix with Deezer Premium ARLs to download my Music in full 320kbps. Works like a dream. You can accomplish the same thing on Android with Murglar. This section of the Firehawk52 guide explains it pretty well.
Not sure how that solves paying the artists a fair share.
It kinda does in a way. A Harvard study from 2004 showed that most artists actually get a profit from piracy (when they broke it down pretty much all but the 25% most popular artists sold more records and had more concert attendance).
Basically most legitimate music streaming services have ways of screwing over artists. Most services use a pro rata model that will screw over most artists.
As it stands for right now one of the biggest things hurting artists are the streaming services.
Things that help are services switching over to a fan centric model (SoundCloud is the only service I know of that has done this and I haven’t actually seen too much info on how it’s actually affected artists) and organizations like MAC and ARA that can affect policies and regulations in the music industry.
Media corporations won’t solve that either. They will simply take your money and put it in their pockets while pretending that they care about artists.
I buy their albums on vinyl 😄 Often comes with a code to download the album digitally too if you wanna skip the pirating, but sometimes it’s just easier and less effort to pirate
Implying corporations pay their artists.
Tidal has some pseudo quality (MQA) which they claim to better than lossless but isn’t at all and just costs more. If you want a streaming service, maybe take a look at something like qubuz where you can buy the tracks to download drm free. Might also wanna take a look at Bandcamp.
Is this actually that Spotify doesn’t want to have to qualify value? Remuneration equal across regions? Oof being equitable could get expensive!
Is this actually that Spotify doesn’t want to have to qualify value?
They’d rather pay 200 mil to people like Joe Rogan. It doesn’t matter how you look at that deal, he’s not worth that much, and there would be 0% chance of getting that money back (thats a lot of additional subscriptions)
Free market… always look for more ethical options that still fit your music. An ideal platform would be Audius. It’s built on blockchain technology but is limited with music content. It would be the perfect way to allow artists to make a living and get rid of the record label kingpins and Spotify pimps forever!
Fuck Spotify. If you don’t want to be a 40 year old and buy albums, Deezer and Tidal pay much larger royalties than Spotify.
As a 40 year old I have no idea what you’re on about lol
Broadly speaking, people aged 40+ still sometimes buy albums, but most young people mostly just stream.
Mid 40s person here, people my age hardly ever buy albums.
SAME
ALSO I HAVE YROUBLE WITH CAPS LOCK
HAVE YOU TRIED CALLING INTERNET EXPLORER ABOUT IT? BY THE WAY YOUR UNCLE JEFF PASSED AWAY.
40 year old here, I only buy CDs.
🏴☠️
I actually hate to say it, but I switched to Apple Music the moment Spotify paid joe rogan 200 million dollars.
Obviously Spotify has money to pay artists, but they’re choosing to screw them. They’ve really high-balled a nobody
Alternately, one could just not listen to music. Life is already too expensive.
But life is boring without music. Anyway I try to buy my music through Bandcamp whenever I can, and stream it from my own server.
What’s the point of living without music? Anyway, check out qobuz.
A life without music is a life not worth living. How about listening to the thousands of artists releasing 100% free, high quality works instead?
Most underrated comment 😂
literally
Success! I mean I just found the comment funny. You need at least one sarcastic comment in a thread where everyone is super serious, more might be a bit too much.
As a collectice we really have to pull together to solve things like this, but it’s often a problem of gaining traction, chicken-and-egg. I mean if everyone using Lemmy decides to switch over from Spotify to something else it will hardly make a dent, but it we could enable mass mobilization through offering free migration to a service undercutting Spotify we might make a dent, but even this is not ideal because it’s centralisation again.
We need an effective mechanism to give big organization’s flak. One (somewhat impractical) technical solution might be to build a wrapper around all these platforms and then choose to play music through whomever is more aligned with the right goal(s), such as customer satisfaction and fair artist payouts.
The idea of a DAO type organization comes to mind where our collective moral beliefs can be codified
