We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB). It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.
Yes, sure, but if those don’t get paid, artists don’t get paid. And artists are not forced to pick a label, they are free to go solo, but they still prefer labels, so it’s not that black and white labels bad, artists good
Well if you genuinely care about seeing artists get paid the ones who need it most tend to make their conent available already for free on bandcamp or similar services, and have physical albums and merch you can buy.
Last night i spent $10 on 3 albums on bandcamp, those artists each made more on that single purchase then they would from thousands of streams.
Spotify making less (or more) money does not trickle down to artists on a per stream basis.
Dont be a corporate bootlicker. Say it with me now, "If buying isnt owning Piracy is not stealing. "
It is really refreshing how this thread spins in “we know what’s best for the artists, certainly not paying for listening to their streams, that’s exactly what they want”. If you don’t want to use Spotify, that’s fine, I don’t want to either because they are an awful company. But that doesn’t make you the person who create the rules for artists nor does it give you the permission to listen to illegal content.
I dont think its a huge leap to think artists would rather you be able to buy their music once and make a $ instead of stream it from a sevice that pays them next to nothing.
What is stopping them? But it seems that general consensus here is that artists would like you to listen for free and here and there buy something from them.
I’m not sure how you think Spotify compensation works, but it is not a “one stream and you get paid”-deal, but rather a revenue share model where artists are compensated from a large pool by total streams. The main share of your Spotify monthly subscription that goes to compensating artists goes to Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny etc. Being a top listener to your favorite, but underground band contributes negligibly to what they actually get paid.
If you care about their compensation, buy the album as directly from them as possible, or buy merch/go to concerts, and recommend their msuic to other people so they might end up paying customers. Subscribing to Spotify and thinking they get a fair deal out of that is not the way, and increasingly not the way (with their GenAI-shenanigans).
First, what am I using is beyond the point and I’m not using Spotify because of their payment method and their politics. And again, if albums are on streaming services, they are voluntarily there, are they not?
How voluntary is it when these platforms have a monopolistic grasp on how consumers access music these days? And the more people believe that the artists are actually fairly compensated from this model, the firmer this grasp becomes. What choice do they have of being there if they want to have any kind of reach?
A Spotify Premium subscriptions will cost someone 156€ a year. If that person instead spent that entire music budget on purchasing albums from select musicians according to the enjoyment they derive from their works, or buy concert tickets or merch, and decides to pirate the rest of their music listening, what changes? For the consumer, they are now left with actual, irrevocable access (legal and illegal) to the same music you had rented access to before, and have spent the same amount of money. For the musicians, the ones who received the purchases are left with much more of your dedicated music spend, and the rest will have marginally less (their share based on total streams of your monthly subscription x12). For Spotify and Taylor Swift, they receive marginally less money (but more than the artists you actually listen to) of which they should probably not have received to begin with.