If your business can't pay it's workers (artists) fairly, your business doesn't deserve to exist.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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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.
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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
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“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’m a small label owner and I guarantee you that it’s a red herring. they set the price of the service, and you can either upload your music on spotify, or not upload it.
compared to the market before digital platforms, where YOU set the price according to several factors, Spotify is the judge and the jury. they choose what the subscription cost is. they choose what your music is worth. they choose the amount of payout you’re gonna get. this is completely backwards! WE should be the ones, labels and artists, to tell spotify what our cost is, and THEY should be the ones setting their subscriptions on the according price for them to be able to cover all their running costs.
but they put themselves in the dominating position on the market, and contributed to the destruction of the physical market. we got left with no choice but to upload our music on their service and eat shit.
we passed from earning thousands of euro per year in physical and digital sales, to getting 100€ every three months for royalties on spotify. this is unsustainable whatever the way you look at it.
they’re the pirates, and ruined the market much more than what pirate bay ever did.
All of these complaints are nearly identical to the complaints about major labels prior to streaming. It's almost like the core issue is still the same, but the scapegoat is changing.
ah, you got to the main issue of the question. the problem is not different from before, and Spotify has just been used as a tool from the majors. if you read a comment below, I wrote that it’s true that Spotify pays their 70% to the artists… but they don’t tell how that money is redistributed. what we earn as independent is absolutely not the same of what a Warner or Sony artist earn. Spotify made under-the-table agreements with the majors in order to grab their catalogue and avoid getting shut off.
the majors saw spotify as a great tool to get themselves out of the hole they dug themselves into during the post 2000s, and kept doing their same shady kind of business.
so well spotted, you’re absolutely right.
The physical market was long gone before Spotify happened, don't make your legitimate complaints look silly by blaming Spotify for it. The music industry simply had no good answer to deal with digital media.
Spotify did seem to force their hand and some artists improved and adapted. And it's never had a true monopoly with many different services coexesting and competing with it.
sure thing, I’m not saying it’s not true. but we had two models to choose from: the bandcamp model, which is a marketplace where the artist can set their own price, the spotify model, where the distributor sets the price, and an in-between that was itunes, where the artist would suggest the price and the distributor could modify it.
for some reason we went to the nuclear solution, and chose the terrible spotify business model, where three companies make money while killing everybody else.
I'm curious if you know how this works for other streaming services?
Presumably there's a market rate that users are currently willing to pay and as such an increase of pay from Spotify to artists would mean they need to increase the fee to their users. This would make them less competitive and possibly lose subscriptions.
I've already jumped ship from Spotify over to YouTube music for example because in my country it was a better deal.
of course it’s a better deal, Youtube Music barely pays anything. it’s even worse than Spotify, and most of their streamings come for free, which is enraging to say the least.
anyways they have two paths: they either suck the costs in and increase the subscriptions (and lose customers in the meanwhile, so they’ll earn less in order to give more money to the small artists) or they cut the share they’re giving to the majors, which is the biggest percentage of the pie. but majors will simply boycott spotify and create their own platform, just as it happened with netflix.
what do you recommend a listener do to support the artists they love? I assume buying the music directly instead of streaming is the best, but I want to do what I can as a consumer
of course a direct purchase from bandcamp, either an album or a shirt/merchandise is the best. avoid amazon at all costs. purchasing from itunes is decent. if you want to stream, pay for an account on tidal, it’s the one that pays best of all the streaming services. the very worst is spotify and right under spotify youtube/youtube music. it’s better if you just grab the album from piratebay at that point, since youtube is the only one making money.
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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.
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they don’t. spotify says they’re paying 70%, but they don’t tell how they redistribute that revenue. they have under-the-table deals with the 3 majors who grabs most of that money, and leave the crumbs to everybody else.
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.
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Damming = behaving like a dam
Damning is what you mean I imagine!
No, no, let him cook, the water is money and Spotify holding it back.
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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 [email protected]
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.
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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.
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