Buy directly from the band to support them because streaming services pay pennies. That’s my excuse to buy merch from artists I love. Concert ticket sales don’t have very high margins, either.
Duder, you are not wrong. But I also am a) lazy b) busy with a tiny kid c) unlikely to fairly apportion my patronage if left to my own devices.
I hear you. I agree with you. But, in a perfect world, I need to find a service that at least ostensibly aligns with my ideals and allows me centralize my expenses in this area.
Edit: on second thought, my uneducated position is that I’d rather pay cents to everyone whose music I enjoy than 20 bucks to one band whose shirt I wanna wear. I haven’t thought this position through deeply, but this is my first impression of the sitch atm.
I’d rather pay cents to everyone whose music I enjoy
I listen to a lot of music. a lot a lot. a few years ago, according to Spotify, I listened more than 99.5% users in my country. and when out of curiosity, I took my listening stats and used the publicly available info on Spotify’s payouts to estimate how much I contributed, it turned out that my most listened artist barely got a dollar from me during that year.
If your are talking about Spotify, my understanding is that you are not directly contributing cents to each artist you listen to based on plays, but rather based on overall popularity pool. Your subscription money then mainly goes to Taylor Swift. You do increase the popularity of the artist, but if you for instance like some hard-to-digest music you listen to once in a while, that does not really do much.
The payment model is described in the book Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Corey Doctorow, which is where I have it from. Then the small caveat that I might be misremembering something or that I misunderstood something.
I might be in the wrong place for this sentiment, but I also seriously want to pay for my music.
Buy directly from the band to support them because streaming services pay pennies. That’s my excuse to buy merch from artists I love. Concert ticket sales don’t have very high margins, either.
Duder, you are not wrong. But I also am a) lazy b) busy with a tiny kid c) unlikely to fairly apportion my patronage if left to my own devices.
I hear you. I agree with you. But, in a perfect world, I need to find a service that at least ostensibly aligns with my ideals and allows me centralize my expenses in this area.
Edit: on second thought, my uneducated position is that I’d rather pay cents to everyone whose music I enjoy than 20 bucks to one band whose shirt I wanna wear. I haven’t thought this position through deeply, but this is my first impression of the sitch atm.
I listen to a lot of music. a lot a lot. a few years ago, according to Spotify, I listened more than 99.5% users in my country. and when out of curiosity, I took my listening stats and used the publicly available info on Spotify’s payouts to estimate how much I contributed, it turned out that my most listened artist barely got a dollar from me during that year.
This person speaks wisdom.
If your are talking about Spotify, my understanding is that you are not directly contributing cents to each artist you listen to based on plays, but rather based on overall popularity pool. Your subscription money then mainly goes to Taylor Swift. You do increase the popularity of the artist, but if you for instance like some hard-to-digest music you listen to once in a while, that does not really do much.
I’m going to look into this. You come bearing dark news if this is true. Thank you for typing this out.
The payment model is described in the book Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Corey Doctorow, which is where I have it from. Then the small caveat that I might be misremembering something or that I misunderstood something.
Not based.
I try to make up for it other ways 🤣