Aaarrrr, looks like I’ll setup something for music too and dump Spotify. Once that’s done, I’ll happily make monthly payments to some service (or charity?) that sends money directly to artists
I just use Spotify with a hacked API. I like costing them money.
Awesome!
How… Teach us
If you’re on android search for xManager. It can install… special APKs that are more pleasant for us cheapskate to use.
Teach me the ways
If you’re on android search for xManager. It can install… special APKs that are more pleasant for us cheapskate to use.
Grayjay?
Teach us, master!
If you’re on android search for xManager. It can install… special APKs that are more pleasant for us cheapskate to use.
Buy shit from the Artists on Band camp. I have no affiliations other than 1000s of albums
No fucking shit Sherlock. He’s a founder of a multi-billion dollar company that has achieved close to a global monopoly for music streaming.
The only reason he’s not american Scrooge McDuck level of rich is because he still pays Swedish luxury taxes.
According to Forbes he has about seven billion dollars. That is definitely Scrooge McDuck rich. Turns out people can pay more in taxes and still be disgustingly wealthy.
I compare that to the wealth of American billionaires whose singular worth soon breaks into trillions…
You can be a second rate businessman and end up a millionaire.
You can be a third rate politician and end up as President.
You can be the greatest musician who ever lived and end up dead in the gutter.
Carl Hiaasen
27 Club rules say you pretty much have to end up dead in the gutter if you’re the world’s greatest musician.
Honestly, I’m kinda sick of the artists payouts argument. The music industry is incredibly saturated. Like more saturated than anything else we consume daily by far. Having a few million streams sounds really impressive until you realize that the top 1,000 streamed artists all have more than 2 billion streams, and you’ve probably only even heard of a quarter of them. Some generic singer songwriter dude I went to high school with has a couple million streams, but in the broad scope he’s absolutely nobody compared to the big dogs.
It’s a competitive field. Physical albums can still sell to collectors, but not like they used to. So if you want to make a living as a band, you have to get creative and find other ways to profit. My personal favorite band realized touring is where they get paid the most, so they do well over 100 gigs a year, all over the world, and they’ve been doing it for 30 years.
The biggest reason I use Spotify personally is for music discovery. I’ve discovered countless bands because their algorithm is great and knows what I like. The amount of money I’ve spent on concert tickets, t-shirts, beers at venues etc all because I heard your song a couple times thanks to an algorithm is lost on folks making the streaming payout argument. If your music is good, it will get me to come see you live. If your live show is good, I’ll come back and bring a friend.
Recorded music in my opinion should be an entry point, your argument for why I should come see you instead of the literal 9.8 million other artists on Spotify. Again, it’s a competitive ass field. Not to be confused with a ‘competitive ass’ field which sounds fun.
I don’t think anyone misses that. That’s all pretty obvious stuff. The issues are one step further. Why should this Spotify CEO be making that much off of the backs of the actual content creators? That’s the rub. Why is that money going there, to someone who is completely invisible to the people paying the money, rather than to the people making the content they create? Or the people making the platform they use (Spotify devs)? This is ALWAYS the problem when people say X CEO made so much compared to Y service worker.
All this broadening what you have to do to attract a fan base is diluting the point of the art. I listen to music because I like the music. The artists should get compensated for their music. Encouraging them to do other things to make their money dilutes their time and effort. That is to say, if someone’s talent is making music, let’s give them money for that, not for striking a contract with some merch vendors or whatever other hoops we want them to jump through for their food.
The biggest reason I use Spotify personally is for music discovery.
YES! This is the single biggest reason to use any streaming service. DISCOVERY! I’ve been heavily using Jellyfin and Navidrome for media recently. Acquiring media is easy (especially if you speak English), managing media has never been easier.
But the reason I can’t convince my wife to drop her subscriptions is due to discovery. And I get it. I feel it too. I have to put in extra effort. What do I download? IDK. I have to spend time to research now without Spotify and then commit to downloading, adding, managing the media. On Spotify/Netflix, etc I don’t have to think.
So… paid in exposure?
It’s almost as if musicians expect they will become rich from streaming… the real money is absolutely in touring and merch sales… like bfd you got streamed
2M times; what does YouTube give for 2M views? Even if it’s 1¢ per stream, that’s only a 20K payout which is a nice payout, but only really half of a single person’s salary for a year. Imagine having to split that 4 ways with bandmates.In my personal opinion which everyone will probably hate, any athlete or musician or actor (“entertainment” celebrity) is way overpaid once they hit the top 1%. There is absolutely no way any of them should be billionaires (e.g. Taylor Swift), and probably not even make more than a few million in their lifetime.
On the other hand no CEO should either. Everyone is replaceable, no one should be earning that amount of money. They didn’t earn the place from talent and hard work, that someone else didn’t put in just as much or be just as talented. They were simply lucky.
Don’t even get me started on influencers.
Would anybody pay $200+ to see U2?
sigh apparently…
A bunch of my friends were stoked for the warped tour revival crap and I’m over here like “some of those bands haven’t practiced in five years… Go see someone currently good.”
It ain’t like there’s a shortage, but hype and name recognition is all some people care about.
“yeah, they sucked”
Wouldn’t they…?
I literally can’t get my wife to consider the idea of going to see a band we dont know. Theres apparently a lot of social expectation to going to shows.
I dunno, man. I just like music.
Yeah I was just adding why some might look for those popular names when going to concerts.
They are all far too expensive, so we just dont go to any shows! Anyone have a spare 1000$ so two people near a major city can see a show this year?
“It’s not who you’re seeing, it’s who you’re seen with.”
I loathe those kinds of people.
They have as much substance as gear oil. Gotta find a celebrity to appear relevant!
Ugh.
deleted by creator
This argument makes me so mad because you obviously have zero idea how any of it works. The only thing you had right was that it’s a competitive and saturated market.
Artists didnt “figure out” touring pays the bills. That is the only way a performing artist can pay the bills. Artists who you would think “oh they made it, and are now setup for life” is just not true. The only ones that are like that are mega ultra pop/rock stars.
I can go on for days but honestly I don’t have the bandwidth. Merry Christmas and happy holidays my guy.
To be fair, I worked in the music industry for over a decade booking and promoting shows. I’ve also worked for two different festivals as well as 5 years managing a radio station, so I have some idea how this all works. It being oversaturated is the point. Just the top 50 artists on Spotify have received over 3,000,000,000,000 streams combined.
I’d love for every talented musician to be able to make a living doing what they love, but people are sheep and will listen to what they’re sold and in a crowded space I don’t see how that’s tenable. When someone comes up with a better system, I’ll be on board, but until then I’m gonna keep supporting the bands I love by seeing them live, telling my friends, buying their t-shirts, and encouraging them.
Hope you had a good Christmas too man, cheers
And you now even less… do you think the music producers just handed out money to struggling artists back in the day? What do you think is so much worse for artists today?
Dude you don’t even know the difference between a producer and a label.
But I do. Not sure what makes you think I don’t…
Because you said the producer is the one that pays the artist
You could release an album without a label but not without a producer. Often, the label and the producer were one and the same. The producer absolutely handled the payment, not always.
That’s like saying visual artists shouldnt make enough money off their prints because people should go to a gallery to buy the originals as their primary income. So they’re supposed to not profit off their work, take time off their other job to travel all over just so they can FINALLY maybe make money?
That’s unreasonable to ask of musicians and artists.
You can use Spotify without needing to justify it to yourself. It’s okay. You can hate what they do and still use their product because it works for you. I bought something off Amazon the other day because I couldnt find it in the store. We all do it. It doesn’t absolve those companies of shitty behavior though.
We dont all do it. The whole crux of it all is people knowingly giving business to people and companies that are doing immoral things.
“We all do it” is a bullshit excuse and you should know that.
I promise you there’s a line you hold to, but nudge across from time to time when it’s clearly the best choice for you. We do, quite literally, all do it.
Make the effort to recognize it, do it consciously, and look for alternatives when you can. Extend the empathy and humility to those also trying their best. The world we’ve crafted has a way of forcing you to bend your principles and ideals.
I’m fresh back from a difficult Xmas with the Republican family, now checking Lemmy to relax, and gotta say your simply sane perspective is my biggest smile of the day. Appreciated.
Dude, whatever, but this rent seeking asshole certainly does not deserve this money more than the artists.
But also, I don’t care if music is saturated. People can have very niche music tastes. We don’t need to all listed to billboard music. I mostly prefer indie stuff and would like they to earn a fair share of my subscription.
I also don’t go to any concerts or festivals. It’s just not a way I’m interested in listening to music. And I don’t need to buy more crap so not gonna buy merch from the hundreds of artists in my favourites.
We’re probably on the same page of billionaires should not exist. The argument gets convoluted all the time though and reduced down to rich guy makes more than starving artists, which is misleading in my opinion.
The CEO of Spotify hasn’t taken a salary in 7 years. In 2024, he sold $320 million of stock which is only a fraction of his $7.5 billion net worth. Realistically, much of his net worth has likely come from investing his payouts into other things that have nothing to do with Spotify.
The Spotify market cap is $100 billion. Which means investors, retail included, keep pumping money into the company because clearly users keep using it. So is the real issue one guy? Or all of us who want a lot for a little, whether it be unlimited music access, or for our $200 on Robinhood to become $300.
To my original point, in a crowded field of nearly 10 million bands/artists streaming their music on these services, if you care about their success as a consumer the best way to support them currently is live shows and merch. It’s okay that you’re not into either of those, but even if you could choose which artists your monthly $10 is allocated to, it wouldn’t be enough for everyone to get fed with all the competition out there.
Tidal, which is currently the ‘best’ in terms of streaming payouts pays 3x higher to artists than Spotify. The problem is likely scalability though. If people left Spotify en masse and went to Tidal, their server costs go up, they need to hire more staff etc. They’d end up probably very similar to Spotify on the long run.
And I’m not trying to give you sass or argue, but I feel like your comment supported my point. You said you have hundreds of artists in your favorites, that you don’t prefer to go to shows, or want to buy merch, all of which is fine and your choice. But when you extrapolate your hundreds, against my hundreds, against the 9.8 million other bands/artists on these streaming services, $10 a month minus the operating costs of the company that provides that service to us, of course it’s not enough. So again, yeah, fuck billionaires, but like, one dude is not the end all be all problem and all I was saying was it’s a reduction argument that is overused.
when people criticize the system arguments about how the system works and that we all participate in the system aren’t useful arguments.
You can criticize capitalism and own stocks, you’d be an idiot to disadvantage yourself in the game just because you don’t like the rules, but you can still suggest a different game
sure but why should the CEO and shareholders keep so much of the generated wealth?
Probably a good time to mention that you can unsub from Spotify, use it through the Brave browser, and you won’t get any ads.
:)
This project is also nice. (and it’s written in Rust) https://github.com/abba23/spotify-adblock
I thought Spotify started banning users that did that? Also, I do use other features a lot, like offline play.
That’s okay. My suggestion won’t work for everyone.
I spent last June backing up my music collection and then unsubbed. I think it’s a genuinely good app and algorithm, but the theft of labor from artists on top of raising prices twice in one year just was too much for me. I’d rather just play my MP3 files on a FOSS music player.
For those who don’t know, there are online tools out there you can use to rip MP3 files from YouTube videos, and it’s a really good option for backing up your music if you want to cut the cord on Spotify. Just takes some effort and a little legwork.
I kinda really want to do this but keep procrastinating. Maybe I should make it my NYs resolution to finally cut the cord.
Do it! I did it some time ago and havent had any regrets. The new flow of finding and dl’ing music will set in naturally. I also noticed that I listen less music, but when I do, I enjoy it much more.
Yes I know. It’s just the first step of downloading all the hundreds of songs from my favourites first that’s seems insurmountable.
:O
Can you give more info on this?
It’s pretty simple. Brave is a freeware internet browser with exceedingly good ad block, and you can listen using Spotify’s web player and it’ll play your music seamlessly with no ads. Also seemlessly blocks ads on YT and other services.
Obligatory Firefox + Ublock better
I’ve been on Firefox since it was Netscape, with no serious complaints. Tried Brave for a few months, and it’s certainly workable, but came back to Firefox because it’s the most customizable, privacy, and ad-block friendly browser (in my opinion).
Of course. There always has to be a circle-jerk anytime someone mentions Brave.
Download Brave
Visit https://brave.com. Windows/macOS: Click “Download.” Linux: Follow the terminal commands from Brave’s site. Install Brave
Windows/macOS: Run the installer. Linux: Follow your package manager’s installation. Enable Shields
Open Brave, go to Settings > Shields, and set Trackers & Ads Blocking to “Aggressive.” Log Into Spotify
Visit https://open.spotify.com. Log in with your Spotify credentials. Block Ads on Spotify
Ensure Brave Shields are Up for Spotify. Adjust blocking settings as needed. Optional: Use uBlock Origin extension for stricter blocking.
Simple lol
Hmm Spotify didn’t like the play on the name of their year-end feature (Spotify Wrapped), I’m guessing?
Is it 0.3 cents or 0.003 cents per play? I thought it was the latter, but the image above seems to show the former.
If it’s 0.3 cents (and google seems to agree it is) then it’s really not spotify’s fault, other than they could increase their prices or you could consider their business model bad.
I’d estimate I listen to around 80 songs a day on average (through youtube music in my case), which comes out to 2400 songs a month. 0.3 cents per song would then be around 7 bucks total. Dunno how much it is in the US but a spotify premium subscription is 11€/month here. If I’m around average (which I would guess I am) that would leave around 4,50€/month for spotify to pay for everything else that the users existence costs.
They seem to currently be making around 10% of their revenue in profits (after being in the red for years afaik). So i guess around 3,40€ of those pay for costs, 1,10€ is profit. If we throw all of that back to the artists, we’re not even rounding to the next fraction of a cent.
And even though the ceo makes obscene amounts of money, giving all of that to the artists also won’t make a dent.
Voluntary support of creators, through bandcamp or patreon or kofi or whatever (or more classically merch), seems to work for many (and i spend more on that than my yt music subscription). And honestly it will have to be the future (though afaik small artists never made a lot from record sales anyway bc the publisher took most of it). If music streaming gets much more expensive, people will probably just go back to pirating.
Spotify has its issues but paying the artists more is simply not feasible as it stands. Unless it’s actually 0.003 cents in which case thats a joke.
The solution is to run your music streaming yourself -> https://www.navidrome.org/
One click install for those running Proxmox OS ->
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=navidrome
The site you expose has no abilities to write or destroy any data, only read the music data from a harddrive so this is generally very safe to run from as far a cybersecurity perspective (but some general knowledge about port forward risks is recommended)
I just have a (decentralized) synchronized music folder on all my devices (encoded with OPUS currently).
This is what I’m about to do.
I’m done expanding my music library at this point. I finished that shit like 10 years ago.
Oh, is that the solution?
Context and perspective matter of course but yes if people just stopped relying and paying for services which can be easily and cheaply hosted the subscription streaming model would just collaps.
There used to be excuses. A spare computer is expensive, they demand power, you need to know how. But times have changed. A discarded laptop can often be aquired for free. The software is all FOSS. (Free)
Preferences are of course personal but in mine the self hosted apps are often of a higher quality then the paid stuff.
Someone let our Italian friend out of prison.
There was never a good reason ti subscribe to the service and know there is another to don’t subscribe it ever.
Oligarch through and through.
Of all the people to be angry at for being wealthy…
Guy grew up in one of the most downtrodden areas of Sweden, single parent household and founded the single largest music service in the world.
Yeah, that deserves more pay than any one musician ever is worth.
Oh, and he pays taxes, in Sweden. Our taxes are insane.
Sure, it’s debatable whether any one person should be that rich. Sure, he could probably do more for the artists. Sure, there’s probably other stuff he messes up too.
However, the main problem is likely the record labels who own the majority of the shares after essentially forcing the founders to give up the company they built. Especially considering that he worked at µTorrent before going off to do Spotify, and was inspired by napster - the idea that music should be free and available to everyone.
